In approaching the psychological study of miracles of healing one can scarcely be expected to define the term miracle in any narrow sense, for one must study every form of the so called miraculous from the most elemental form of naturism to the highest type of scientific or pseudo-scientific psychotherapy.

The term may cover now one and now another class of phenomena as we deal with a low or a high type of belief or practice.

For the purpose of this study it is even, to a large degree, immaterial whether the miraculous occurrences, or supposed occurrences, passed in review be accepted as facts or viewed as mere superstitions. We may thus, perhaps, largely escape entanglement in the discussion of a phase of the subject which has elicited a wider divergence of view, been productive of more superstition and the basis of more heresies than almost any other discussion relating to human thought. Whether based upon accepted facts or not the miracle psychosis is the result of the mind's reaction to a phenomenal world which constantly baffles satisfactory explanation.

The everywhere prevalent belief in miracles of healing as facts presents problems of the origin, nature, causes, and significance of the beliefs as such. It is in short the miracle psychosis that we are most interested in. This we still have with us if we reject all the physical phenomena connected with it as untrue or as falsely interpreted. It has become a canon among modern anthropologists that while the reactions of the human mind under the same set of circumstances may be strikingly different among different races, mental organization is in all fundamental points the same for all humanity. All are capable of abstraction, inhibition, and choice though of very different types.

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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)

Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius