A diseased organ does not prove an exclusive cure by faith
it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased
The physiological premise had a substantial contemporary counterpart. William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter I, describes brain injury, intoxicants and pathological changes as conditions that alter consciousness. He requires both spiritualist and associationist psychologists to acknowledge cerebral conditions of mental life. Thus recognizing a bodily disorder need not settle the dispute between religious and materialist accounts of mind. James, Principles, I, pp. 3–5, York University electronic transcription.
But James's passage does not establish Chesterton's next claim that salvation can come ‘only’ through will or faith, still less the later image of stopping thought altogether. It explains why psychological inquiry must include physiology; it offers no such exclusive therapeutic conclusion. Chesterton moves from a plausible objection to treating illness as an abstract debating error into an emphatic analogy between recovery and conversion. Separating those steps matters: the paragraph's appeal to ‘modern science’ is broader than the evidence furnished by this contemporary comparison. James is a witness to the period's conceptual setting, not an identified target or demonstrated source for Chesterton.
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