But unless hysterical effects can be shown to be ultimately due, not to mind, but to matter acting on matter, according to methods approved by materialism, hysteria remains a word-cause and no more, like the meat-cooking quality of the roasting-jack.

This hysteria of the uncurbed feelings is the only blasphemy, and if there were a personal God, He surely would be grieved to see that we have so absurd an idea of Him, as to imagine He would be pleased with our deporting the divine gift of reason into the hell-box.