The Varieties of Religious Experience E-Book

William James

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Title: The Varieties of Religious Experience

Author: William James

Release Date: October 17, 2014 [Ebook #621]

Language: English

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE***

                  The Varieties of Religious Experience

                         A Study in Human Nature

 Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in

                                1901-1902

                                    By

                              William James

                         Longmans, Green, And Co,

              New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

                                   1917

CONTENTS

Preface.

Lecture I. Religion And Neurology.

Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.

Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen.

Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy-Mindedness.

Lectures VI And VII. The Sick Soul.

Lecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification.

Lecture IX. Conversion.

Lecture X. Conversion--Concluded.

Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness.

Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness.

Lectures XVI And XVII. Mysticism.

Lecture XVIII. Philosophy.

Lecture XIX. Other Characteristics.

Lecture XX. Conclusions.

Postscript.

Index.

Footnotes

                               [Title Page]

To

C. P. G.

IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE

PREFACE.

This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an

appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of

Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten

lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that

the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's Religious

Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction

through Philosophy." But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter

as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being

postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution

now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than

stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires

immediately to know them should turn to pages 511-519, and to the

"Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express

them in more explicit form.

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us

wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have

loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among

the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I

may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to

offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will

say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the

end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I

there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense

which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual

reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.

My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck,

of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of

manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend

unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore

Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague

Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to

my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late

of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations

with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at

Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well

express.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

March, 1902.

LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this

desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of

receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of

European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not

a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from

Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or

literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to

cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were

visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the

Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans

listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure

it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.

Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American

imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of

this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.

Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the

first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe-

struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's

class-room therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first

philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was

immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of

reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self

promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official

here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries

with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that

it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic

obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say

only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to

run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go

by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the

Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the

United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher

matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,

as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English

speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.

                  -------------------------------------

As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this

lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the

history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch

of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the

religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other

of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,

therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to

invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.

If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather

religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must

confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in

literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works

of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of

a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full

significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and

perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most

concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the

religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their

ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern

writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The

_documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be

sought for in the haunts of special erudition--they lie along the beaten

highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the

character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of

special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and

paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some

time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no

detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more

adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth

from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable

and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he

will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material,

get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What

is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of

question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize

this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point

a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have

referred.

In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of

inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it

come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,

What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once

here? The answer to the one question is given in an _existential judgment_

or proposition. The answer to the other is a _proposition of value_, what

the Germans call a _Werthurtheil_, or what we may, if we like, denominate

a _spiritual judgment_. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from

the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the

mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding

them together.

In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two

orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its

derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher

criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential

point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what

biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various

contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their

several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are

manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the

answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use

should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined,

be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other

question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as

to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for

purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called

a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might

indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if

our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess

it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of

the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and

express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill

at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a

book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and

deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner

experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their

fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the

existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the

value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never

confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same

conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of

the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment

as to the foundation of values differs.

                  -------------------------------------

I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because

there are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly, are

among them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who

may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential

point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of

religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically

and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual

history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,

and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of

deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.

Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since

such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of

much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the

point.

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,

exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and

eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who

follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be

Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by

others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by

imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this

second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original

experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested

feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in

individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute

fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line;

and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective

enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious

geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more

perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to

abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of

exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner

life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no

measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they

have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all

sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.

Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped

to give them their religious authority and influence.

If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is

furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he

founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of

shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a

return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever

known in England. So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into

liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox

and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment

that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound.

Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to

county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior

power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a

psychopath or _détraqué_ of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in

entries of this sort:--

    "As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and

    saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I

    asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately

    the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being

    come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk

    into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As

    soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge

    and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a

    great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I

    commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it

    was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I

    put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor

    shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a

    mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the

    Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of

    Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud

    voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I

    went into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of

    it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of

    Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying

    through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood

    running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a

    pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt

    myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to

    the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them

    again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over

    me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a

    stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so

    to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.

    After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I

    should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody

    city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and

    the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during

    the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen

    many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in

    the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand Christians were martyr'd

    in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the

    channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the

    market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of

    those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,

    and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon

    me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord."

Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot

possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject. We must

describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It

is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our

emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any

other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object

is to class it along with something else. But any object that is

infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if

it must be _sui generis_ and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with

a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or

apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it

would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone."

                  -------------------------------------

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the

thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites

of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And

elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their

properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural

things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature

with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that

its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine,

in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:

"Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have

their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as

there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue

are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such proclamations of

the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely

everything, we feel--quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the

somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors

are actually able to perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our

innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to

undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed

in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their

significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than

the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value

is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which

unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental

acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his

temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is

merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the

universe is due to bad digestion--probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's

delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter

would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in

the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of

reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of

criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them

and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence.

The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only

instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the

hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary

substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.(1)

We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of

discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it

to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as

overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-

flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic

disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our

organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value

as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical

materialism could be made to hold its tongue.

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-

minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism

finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a

discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It

snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an

hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age,

and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a

disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a

gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when

you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-

intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various

glands which physiology will yet discover.

And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all

such personages is successfully undermined.(2)

Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern

psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good,

assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states

upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt

the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be

true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had

once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an

hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some

organ or other, no matter which,--and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can

such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way

or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general

postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our

states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic

process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned

just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts

intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the

dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the

Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one

way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another

way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our

drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are

equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious

content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in

refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite

illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance

some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with

determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts

and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our

_dis_-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for

every one of them without exception flows from the state of their

possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no

such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man

is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and

reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary

spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of

these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt

to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them

with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily

affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves

and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to

others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic

antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is

either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because

we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we

speak disparagingly of "feverish fancies," surely the fever-process as

such is not the ground of our disesteem--for aught we know to the contrary,

103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for

truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97

or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or

their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we

praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical

metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in

fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner

happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their

consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our

needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.

Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always

hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree.

What immediately feels most "good" is not always most "true," when

measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between

Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If

merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely

valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at

the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them

out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two

criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our

spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical

experience--we shall hereafter hear much of them--that carry an enormous

sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But

they come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life

makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more

than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in

these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the

sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a

discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these

lectures end.

                  -------------------------------------

It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely

medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to

the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of

genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but

one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr.

Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid

variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes

Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with

sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably

falls into the morbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a

rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness."(3)

Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own

satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently

proceed thereupon to impugn the _value_ of the fruits? Do they deduce a

new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions?

Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now

onwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new

truth?

No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and

hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical

consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One

disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works

of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as

he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical

arguments.(4) But for the most part the masterpieces are left

unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to

such secular productions as every one admits to be intrinsically

eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious

manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations have

been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or

spiritual grounds.

In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to

try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution.

Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter

what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise

with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual

judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate

feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their

experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold

as true.

_Immediate luminousness_, in short, _philosophical reasonableness_, and

_moral helpfulness_ are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might

have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now

save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests

should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can

stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or

nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us

here below.

                  -------------------------------------

You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by

which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided

in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for

truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct

mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now

and forever, against all mistake--such has been the darling dream of

philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the _origin_ of the truth would

be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could

be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history

of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test.

Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in

supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable

impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing

itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance

generally,--these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one

opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The

medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly

turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin

in a destructive instead of an accreditive way.

They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as

supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the

argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has

seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley

is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on

grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:--

"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work

by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more

suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done,

and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of

moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in

other qualities of character he was singularly defective--if indeed he were

hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home we come again, then,

to the old and last resort of certitude,--namely the common assent of

mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among

mankind."(5)

In other words, not its origin, but _the way in which it works on the

whole_, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own

empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on

supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the

visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the

trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct

and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as

divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to

discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine

miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to

counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of

hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all

the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the

end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall

know them, not by their roots, Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious

Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The _roots_ of a

man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are

infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even

to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.

    "In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, "we

    should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will

    chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last

    day.... There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the

    existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian

    practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which

    our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which

    our experience is spiritual and divine."

Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a

vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are

the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of

the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:--

    "Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to

    the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere

    operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead

    of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust:

    whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of

    ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily

    strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my

    visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of

    my imagination.... I showed them the jewels which the divine hand

    had left with me:--they were my actual dispositions. All those who

    knew me saw that I was changed; my confessor bore witness to the

    fact; this improvement, palpable in all respects, far from being

    hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. As for myself, it was

    impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he could

    have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient

    so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices,

    and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead,

    for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to

    enrich me with all that wealth."(6)

I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that

fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen

among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any rate

you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results

exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will

scandalize your piety no more.

Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final

spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all with

so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave

pathological questions out?

To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity

imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a

better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its

exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest

relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the

wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather

that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits

consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of

corruption it may also be exposed.

Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors

of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more

usual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which the scalpel

and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To understand a thing

rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to

have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations. The study of

hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key to their

comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been the key to

the right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses and imperative

conceptions, "fixed ideas," so called, have thrown a flood of light on the

psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions have performed

the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief.

Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of

which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena.

Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental

balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by

which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities

which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an

individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect

his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no

special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,(7) for

most psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more

commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament,

whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings

with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has

extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and

obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and

action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it,

or in some way "works it off." "What shall I think of it?" a common person

says to himself about a vexed question; but in a "cranky" mind "What must

I do about it?" is the form the question tends to take. In the

autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the

following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very

few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk

anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?' is

the ever reëchoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some one ought to do

it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly

forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences

lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these

two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard

and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a

psychopathic temperament coalesce--as in the endless permutations and

combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough--in

the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of

effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do

not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their

ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their

companions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs Lombroso,

Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox.

To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall

see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious

evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.

Take the trance-like states of insight into truth which all religious

mystics report.(8) These are each and all of them special cases of kinds

of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever

peculiarities it may have _quâ_ religious, is at any rate melancholy.

Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the

moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon

as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree

to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of

values,--who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive

significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious

trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with

other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to

consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if

they were outside of nature's order altogether?

I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this

supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious

phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting,

even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the most precious of

human experiences. No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the

whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even

diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the

psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the _sine quâ

non_ of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis

which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of

metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface

of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this

temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners

of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system,

forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking

Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be

sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might

well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of

the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may

let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop.

                  -------------------------------------

The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the

various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understand them

better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed "the apperceiving

mass" by which we comprehend them. The only novelty that I can imagine

this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving

mass. I may succeed in discussing religious experiences in a wider context

than has been usual in university courses.

LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise

definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be

definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,

and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.

Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one

another is enough to prove that the word "religion" cannot stand for any

single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The

theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials.

This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which

both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall

immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit

freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many

characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we

should inquire for the essence of "government," for example, one man might

tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an

army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it

would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these

things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at

another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles

himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying

an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would

naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a

thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a

conception equally complex?(9)

                  -------------------------------------

Consider also the "religious sentiment" which we see referred to in so

many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.

In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the

authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to

the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others

connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling

of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of

themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific

thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term "religious

sentiment" as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious

objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains

nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious

fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But

religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a

religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so

to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion

of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic

thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only

this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;

and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play

in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of

a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course

are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but

there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract "religious emotion" to

exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in

every religious experience without exception.

As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a

common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so

there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential

kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of

religious act.

                  -------------------------------------

The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible

that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a

fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set

up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to

defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me

from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in _for the

purpose of these lectures_, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from

choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and

proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say "religion" I mean _that_. This, in

fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the

field I choose.

One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we

leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which

divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on

the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of

religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and

sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity,

theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials

of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it,

we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning

the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on

the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre

of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his

incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained,

is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital

part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are

personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself

alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and

sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.

The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between

man and his maker.

Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch

entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider

as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods

themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion

pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly

considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general

name. "It is a part of religion," you will say, "but only its unorganized

rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's

conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be

reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and

institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so

called, is but a fractional element."

But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the

question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than

prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the

personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or

morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion--under either name it

will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove

to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain,

and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself

continue to apply the word "religion" to it; and in the last lecture of

all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say

something of its relation to them.

In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more

fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once

established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the _founders_ of

every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct

personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the

Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects

have been in this case;--so personal religion should still seem the

primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.

There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more

primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and

magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically--at least our records

of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be

regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the

inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds

are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from

the fact that many anthropologists--for instance, Jevons and

Frazer--expressly oppose "religion" and "magic" to each other, it is

certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism,

and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science

as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one

again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling

is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would

not be worth while.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean

for us _the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their

solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to

whatever they may consider the divine_. Since the relation may be either

moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the

sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical

organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have

already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time,

and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our

field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word "divine"

if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems

of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not

positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,

the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the

Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,

Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract

Ideality. Not a deity _in concreto_, not a superhuman person, but the

immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the

universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to

the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson

famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was

what made the scandal of the performance.

    "These laws," said the speaker, "execute themselves. They are out

    of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in

    the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant

    and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who

    does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts

    off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just,

    then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of

    God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a

    man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of

    acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known. Thefts

    never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of

    stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint

    of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable

    appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth,

    and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of

    the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your

    witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is

    differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different

    applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the

    several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these

    ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being

    shrinks ... he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until

    absolute badness is absolute death. The perception of this law

    awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious

    sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its

    power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the

    embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and

    the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It