The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in
which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of
course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They
are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an
unreal life before he can be born into the real life. In my next
lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychological
conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now onward we
shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which
we have recently been dwelling on.
Lecture VIII
THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION
The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil
as a pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of
it we were brought into full view of the contrast between the two
ways of looking at life which are characteristic respectively of
what we called the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once,
and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be
happy. The result is two different conceptions of the universe
of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the world is
a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are
kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which
naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic
sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth.
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