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RELIGION AND SELF-DECEPTION
average is not mentally healthy. Interesting comparisons are
made in psychological writings between the mental life of the
insane and the behaviour of religious people. Here again
similarities are confused with identities and the conclusion is
reached that religion is a form of insanity.
Proofs by analogy are offered most frequently in the literature
of the analytical schools of psychology. Here comparisons are
made between religious ceremonies and acts of ritual and the
mysteriously patterned behaviour of the mentally obsessed who,
when undressing, for instance, often go through certain
stereotyped motions and ritualistic sequences of action. Theodor
Reik,? for example, compares the systematising urge of the
obsessional person with the religious tendency to form dogmas.
Reik even claims to be able to show not only a general
resemblance between dogma and obsession, but a clear parallel
between the phases through which a neurosis passes and the
development of faith from vagueness to dogma and thence to
theological systematisation.
Even in the more exact sciences the danger of argument by
analogy is sometimes overlooked. A Danish scientist has, for
example, recently pointed out that the so-called fundamental
law of Dbio-genetics can be traced back to ‘the most
dangerous of all analogies of development: the analogy
between the development of the individual from the fertile
ovum to adult life and the development of the race through the
ages’.
An argument is built on very shaky foundations, too, when
value judgments are derived from historical origins. Psychology
has subjected to analysis records of the lives of many well-known
religious personalities and spiritual geniuses. Interesting
discoveries have been made of unhealthy traits and emotional
instabilities in certain saints and heroes of the faith. It is
unnecessary to give examples, for hardly anyone of eminence
has been spared. In general, those who have undertaken this
form of psychological work have been moved by purely scientific
motives; but the results of their researches have been used by
others as material for attacks upon the religious movements
founded by those whose lives have been under psychological
examination. Few people have noticed that all these attacks
1 Dogma und Zwangsidee, Wien, 1927.
1 129
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