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ABSTRACT
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Great Britain, a group of scientists decided to challenge the intellectual authority of theologians and clergymen. Because of the recently discovered law of conservation of energy, they considered any so-called ‘divine’ intervention on Nature as scientifically impossible and thus as being pure storytelling. In this context of a global tension between some scientists and some theologians for cultural and intellectual leadership, a famous psychiatrist of his time, Henry Maudsley, decided to provide his readers with a psychological approach of religion. His main objective was to inquire on the human intellectual or passional tendencies leading to the creation and diffusion of different types of religion. By doing this, he showed how religion is deeply rooted in human nature, but not in one of the greatest aspects of our nature.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Danziger, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology,” 135.
2. Dawson and Lightman (eds.), Victorian Scientific Naturalism.
3. Turner, Between Science and Religion.
4. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 186.
5. Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 220.
6. Helmstadter and Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. Huxley, Essays upon Some Controverted Questions, 3–4. My italics.
9. Turner, “Rainfall, Plagues and the Prince of Wales.”
10. Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1–2. My italics.
11. Ibid., 7–8.
12. Ibid., 19–20.
13. Ibid., 31.
14. Ibid., 119–120. My italics.
15. Ibid., 24.
16. Ibid., 37.
17. Ibid., 75.
18. Ibid., 53.
19. Ibid., 85.
20. Ibid., 55.
21. Ibid., 184.
22. Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 359.
23. Ibid., p.368.
24. See the works by E. Thomas Lawson, Robert McCauley or Justin L. Barrett.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hortense de Villaine
Hortense de Villaine is a PHD Student at Université Paris Nanterre. Her thesis is dedicated to the debates concerning the mind-problem in Victorian Great-Britain. She wrote a book on Epiphenomenalism, in which there is the first French translation of Thomas Huxley’s major conference: ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History’. She also translated into French the answer of William James to Huxley, namely the text ‘Are we automata?’ Her main purpose is to introduce in France some little known British scientists and philosophers such as Huxley, Maudsley, Clifford, Lewes and so on.