The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James is a publication ofthe Pennsylvania State University. This Portable Document file is furnished free and without any chargeof any kind. Any person using this document file, for any purpose, and in any way does so at his orher own risk. Neither the Pennsylvania State University nor Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, nor anyone associatedwith the Pennsylvania State University assumes any responsibility for the material containedwithin the document or for the file as an electronic transmission, in any way.The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James, the PennsylvaniaState University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is aPortable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classicalworks of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.Cover Design: Jim ManisCopyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State UniversityThe Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university.

ContentsCONTENTS ................................................................................................................................................................... 4PREFACE ...................................................................................................................................................................... 9Lecture I: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY ............................................................................................................. 11Lecture II: CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC ................................................................................................ 34Lecture III: THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN ....................................................................................................... 58Lectures IV and V: THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY MINDEDNESS ................................................................... 81APPENDIX to Lectures IV and V ............................................................................................................................ 125Lectures VI and VII: THE SICK SOUL .................................................................................................................. 129Lecture VIII: THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION ......................................... 165Lecture IX: CONVERSION ..................................................................................................................................... 188Lecture X: CONVERSION—Concluded ................................................................................................................. 214Lectures XI, XII, and XIII: SAINTLINESS ............................................................................................................ 253Lectures XIV and XV: THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS ....................................................................................... 318Lectures XVI and XVII: MYSTICISM ................................................................................................................... 365Lecture XVIII: PHILOSOPHY ................................................................................................................................. 416Lecture XIX: OTHER CHARACTERISTICS ........................................................................................................ 442Lecture XX: CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................................. 467POSTSCRIPT ............................................................................................................................................................ 502WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910): A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF “THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPE-RIENCE” ............................................................................................................................................................. 508

William Jameslectures— Meaning of the term “divine”— The divineis what prompts SOLEMN reactions—Impossible tomake our definitions sharp— We must study the moreextreme cases— Two ways of accepting the universe—Religion is more enthusiastic than philosophy—Its characteristic is enthusiasm in solemn emotion—Its ability to overcome unhappiness— Need ofsuch a faculty from the biological point of view.LECTURE III THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN Perceptsversus abstract concepts— Influence of the latteron belief— Kant’s theological Ideas— We have a senseof reality other than that given by the special senses—Examples of “sense of presence”— The feeling of unreality—Sense of a divine presence: examples— Mysticalexperiences: examples— Other cases of sense of God’spresence— Convincingness of unreasoned experience—Inferiority of rationalism in establishing belief—Eitherenthusiasm or solemnity may preponderate in the religiousattitude of individuals.LECTURES IV AND V THE RELIGION OFHEALTHY—MINDEDNESS Happiness is man’s chiefconcern— “Once-born” and “twice-born” characters—Walt Whitman— Mixed nature of Greek feeling—Systematichealthy-mindedness— Its reasonableness—Liberal Christianity shows it— Optimismas encouraged by Popular Science— The “Mind-cure”movement— Its creed— Cases— Its doctrine of evil—Its analogy to Lutheran theology— Salvation by relaxation—Its methods: suggestion— meditation—”recollection”— verification— Diversity of possibleschemes of adaptation to the universe— APPENDIX:TWO mind-cure cases.LECTURES VI AND VII THE SICK SOUL Healthymindednessand repentance— Essential pluralism ofthe healthy-minded philosophy— Morbidmindedness:its two degrees—The pain-thresholdvaries in individuals— Insecurity of natural goods—Failure, or vain success of every life—Pessimism ofall pure naturalism— Hopelessness of Greek and Ro-5

The Varieties of Religious Experienceman view— Pathological unhappiness— “Anhedonia”—Querulous melancholy— Vital zest is a puregift— Loss of it makes physical world look different—Tolstoy— Bunyan— Alline—Morbid fear— Such casesneed a supernatural religion for relief— Antagonismof healthy-mindedness and morbidness— The problemof evil cannot be escaped.LECTURE VIII THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THEPROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION Heterogeneouspersonality—Character gradually attains unity—Examplesof divided self—The unity attained need notbe religious—”Counter conversion” cases—Othercases—Gradual and sudden unification—Tolstoy’srecovery—Bunyan’s.LECTURE IX CONVERSION Case of Stephen Bradley—Thepsychology of character-changes—Emotionalexcitements make new centres of personal energy—Schematicways of representing this—Starbuck likens conversion to normal moral ripening—Leuba’s ideas— Seemingly unconvertible persons—Two types of conversion— Subconscious incubationof motives— Self-surrender— Its importancein religious history— Cases.LECTURE X CONVERSION—concluded Cases ofsudden conversion— Is suddenness essential?— No,it depends on psychological idiosyncrasy— Provedexistence of transmarginal, or subliminal, consciousness—“Automatisms”—Instantaneous conversionsseem due to the possession of an active subconsciousself by the subject— The value of conversion dependsnot on the process, but on the fruits— These are notsuperior in sudden conversion— Professor Coe’sviews—Sanctification as a result— Our psychologicalaccount does not exclude direct presence of the Deity—Sense of higher control—Relations of the emotional“faith-state” to intellectual beliefs— Leubaquoted— Characteristics of the faith-state: sense oftruth; the world appears new— Sensory and motorautomatisms— Permanency of conversions.6

William JamesLECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII SAINTLINESSSainte-Beuve on the State of Grace— Types of characteras due to the balance of impulses and inhibitions—Sovereign excitements—Irascibility— Effectsof higher excitement in general— The saintly life isruled by spiritual excitement— This may annul sensualimpulses permanently— Probable subconsciousinfluences involved— Mechanical scheme for representingpermanent alteration in character— Characteristicsof saintliness— Sense of reality of a higherpower— Peace of mind, charity—Equanimity, fortitude,etc.— Connection of this with relaxation— Purityof life— Asceticism— Obedience— Poverty—Thesentiments of democracy and of humanity— Generaleffects of higher excitements.LECTURES XIV AND XV THE VALUE OF SAINT-LINESS It must be tested by the human value of itsfruits— The reality of the God must, however, alsobe judged— “Unfit” religions get eliminated by “experience”—Empiricism is not skepticism—Individualand tribal religion— Loneliness of religious originators—Corruption follows success— Extravagances—Excessive devoutness, as fanaticism— As theopathicabsorption—Excessive purity— Excessive charity—The perfect man is adapted only to the perfect environment—Saints are leavens— Excesses of asceticism——Asceticism symbolically stands for the heroiclife— Militarism and voluntary poverty as possibleequivalents—Pros and cons of the saintly character—Saints versus “strong” men— Their socialfunction must be considered— Abstractly the saint isthe highest type, but in the present environment itmay fail, so we make ourselves saints at our peril—The question of theological truth.LECTURES XVI AND XVII MYSTICISM Mysticismdefined— Four marks of mystic states— They form adistinct region of consciousness— Examples of theirlower grades— Mysticism and alcohol— “The anaestheticrevelation”—Religious mysticism— Aspects ofNature— Consciousness of God—”Cosmic conscious-7

The Varieties of Religious Experienceness”— Yoga— Buddhistic mysticism— Sufism—Christian mystics— Their sense of revelation— Toniceffects of mystic states— They describe by negatives—Sense of union with the Absolute— Mysticismand music— Three conclusions— (1) Mystical statescarry authority for him who has them— (2) But forno one else— (3) Nevertheless, they break down theexclusive authority of rationalistic states— Theystrengthen monistic and optimistic hypotheses.LECTURE XVIII PHILOSOPHY Primacy of feelingin religion, philosophy being a secondary function—Intellectualism professes to escape objective standardsin her theological constructions— “Dogmatictheology”— Criticism of its account of God’s attributes—”Pragmatism”as a test of the value of conceptions—God’s metaphysical attributes have nopractical significance— His moral attributes areproved by bad arguments; collapse of systematic theology—Does transcendental idealism fare better? Itsprinciples— Quotations from John Caird— They aregood as restatements of religious experience, butuncoercive as reasoned proof— What philosophy CANdo for religion by transforming herself into “scienceof religions.”LECTURE XIX OTHER CHARACTERISTICS Aestheticelements in religion—Contrast of Catholicism andProtestantism— Sacrifice and Confession— Prayer—Religion holds that spiritual work is really effected inprayer— Three degrees of opinion as to what is effected—First degree— Second degree— Third degree—Automatisms, their frequency among religious leaders—Jewish cases— Mohammed— Joseph Smith— Religionand the subconscious region in general.LECTURE XX CONCLUSIONS Summary of religiouscharacteristics— Men’s religions need not be identical—“The science of religions” can only suggest, notproclaims a religious creed— Is religion a “survival”of primitive thought?— Modern science rules out theconcept of personality— Anthropomorphism and be-8

William Jameslief in the personal characterized pre-scientificthought— Personal forces are real, in spite of this—Scientific objects are abstractions, only individualizedexperiences are concrete— Religion holds by the concrete—Primarily religion is a biological reaction— Itssimplest terms are an uneasiness and a deliverance;description of the deliverance— Question of the realityof the higher power— The author’s hypotheses:1. The subconscious self as intermediating betweennature and the higher region— 2. The higher region,or “God”— 3. He produces real effects in nature.POSTSCRIPT Philosophic position of the presentwork defined as piecemeal supernaturalism— Criticismof universalistic supernaturalism—Differentprinciples must occasion differences in fact— Whatdifferences in fact can God’s existence occasion?—The question of immortality— Question of God’suniqueness and infinity: religious experience does notsettle this question in the affirmative— The pluralistichypothesis is more conformed to common sense.PREFACETHIS BOOK would never have been written had I notbeen honored with an appointment as Gifford Lectureron Natural Religion at the University ofEdinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of thetwo courses of ten lectures each for which I thus becameresponsible, it seemed to me that the first coursemight well be a descriptive one on “Man’s ReligiousAppetites,” and the second a metaphysical one on“Their Satisfaction through Philosophy.” But the unexpectedgrowth of the psychological matter as I cameto write it out has resulted in the second subject beingpostponed entirely, and the description of man’sreligious constitution now fills the twenty lectures.In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than statedmy own philosophic conclusions, and the reader whodesires immediately to know them should turn topages 501-509, and to the “Postscript” of the book. Ihope to be able at some later day to express them inmore explicit form.9

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIn my belief that a large acquaintance with particularsoften makes us wiser than the possession of abstractformulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectureswith concrete examples, and I have chosen theseamong the extremer expressions of the religious temperament.To some readers I may consequently seem,before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offera caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety,they will say, are not sane. If, however, they willhave the patience to read to the end, I believe thatthis unfavorable impression will disappear; for I therecombine the religious impulses with other principlesof common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration,and allow the individual reader to draw asmoderate conclusions as he will.My thanks for help in writing these lectures are dueto Edwin D. Starbuck, of Stanford University, whomade over to me his large collection of manuscriptmaterial; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, afriend unseen but proved, to whom I owe preciousinformation; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, toCanning Schiller of Oxford, and to my colleague BenjaminRand, for documents; to my colleague DickinsonS. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, ofNew York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow,for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversationswith the lamented Thomas Davidson andto the use of his books, at Glenmore, above KeeneValley, I owe more obligations than I can well express.Harvard University, March, 1902.10

William JamesTHE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUSEXPERIENCELecture IRELIGION AND NEUROLOGYIT IS WITH no small amount of trepidation that I takemy place behind this desk, and face this learned audience.To us Americans, the experience of receivinginstruction from the living voice, as well as from thebooks, of European scholars, is very familiar. At myown University of Harvard, not a winter passes withoutits harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish,English, French, or German representatives ofthe science or literature of their respective countrieswhom we have either induced to cross the ocean toaddress us, or captured on the wing as they were visitingour land. It seems the natural thing for us tolisten whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit,of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have notyet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventureit begets a certain sense of apology being due forso presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be thecase on a soil as sacred to the American imaginationas that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophicchair of this university were deeply impressed on myimagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser’s Essays inPhilosophy, then just published, was the first philosophicbook I ever looked into, and I well rememberthe awestruck feeling I received from the account ofSir William Hamilton’s classroom therein contained.Hamilton’s own lectures were the first philosophicwritings I ever forced myself to study, and after thatI was immersed in Dugald Stewart and ThomasBrown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence neverget outgrown; and I confess that to find my humbleself promoted from my native wilderness to be actuallyfor the time an official here, and transmuted intoa colleague of these illustrious names, carries with ita sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.But since I have received the honor of this appoint-11

The Varieties of Religious Experiencement 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, hereand at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east,I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, Ihope that many of my countrymen may be asked tolecture in the Scottish universities, changing placeswith Scotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hopethat our people may become in all these higher matterseven as one people; and that the peculiar philosophictemperament, as well as the peculiar politicaltemperament, that goes with our English speech maymore and more pervade and influence the world.As regards the manner in which I shall have to administerthis lectureship, I am neither a theologian,nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, noran anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch oflearning in which I am particularly versed. To thepsychologist the religious propensities of man mustbe at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertainingto his mental constitution. It would seem,therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thingfor me would be to invite you to a descriptive surveyof those religious propensities.If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions,but rather religious feelings and religious impulsesmust be its subject, and I must confine myselfto those more developed subjective phenomena recordedin literature produced by articulate and fullyself-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography.Interesting as the origins and early stages of asubject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly forits full significance, one must always look to its morecompletely evolved and perfect forms. It follows fromthis that the documents that will most concern us willbe those of the men who were most accomplished inthe religious life and best able to give an intelligibleaccount of their ideas and motives. These men, ofcourse, are either comparatively modern writers, orelse such earlier ones as have become religious classics.The documents humains which we shall find most12

William Jamesinstructive need not then be sought for in the hauntsof special erudition—they lie along the beaten highway;and this circumstance, which flows so naturallyfrom the character of our problem, suits admirablyalso your lecturer’s lack of special theological learning.I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphsof personal confession, from books that mostof you at some time will have had already in yourhands, and yet this will be no detriment to the valueof my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurousreader and investigator, lecturing here in future,may unearth from the shelves of libraries documentsthat will make a more delectable and curiousentertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubtwhether he will necessarily, by his control of so muchmore out-of-the-way material, get much closer to theessence 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 thelogical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize thisfact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insistupon the point a little before we enter into the documentsand materials to which I have referred.In recent books on logic, distinction is made betweentwo orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, whatis the nature of it? how did it come about? what is itsconstitution, origin, and history? And second, What isits importance, meaning, or significance, now that it isonce here? The answer to the one question is given inan existential judgment or proposition. The answer tothe other is a proposition of value, what the Germanscall a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominatea spiritual judgment. Neither judgment canbe deduced immediately from the other. They proceedfrom diverse intellectual preoccupations, and themind combines them only by making them first separately,and then adding them together.In the matter of religions it is particularly easy todistinguish the two orders of question. Every religiousphenomenon has its history and its derivation fromnatural antecedents. What is nowadays called the13

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehigher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Biblefrom this existential point of view, neglected too muchby the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditionsdid the sacred writers bring forth their variouscontributions to the holy volume? And what hadthey exactly in their several individual minds, whenthey delivered their utterances? These are manifestlyquestions of historical fact, and one does not see howthe answer to them can decide offhand the still furtherquestion: of what use should such a volume, withits manner of coming into existence so defined, be tous as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer thisother question we must have already in our mindsome sort of a general theory as to what the peculiaritiesin a thing should be which give it value forpurposes of revelation; and this theory itself wouldbe what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combiningit with our existential judgment, we might indeeddeduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible’sworth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were toaffirm that any book, to possess it, must have beencomposed automatically or not by the free caprice ofthe writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific andhistoric 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 thata book may well be a revelation in spite of errors andpassions and deliberate human composition, if only itbe a true record of the inner experiences of greatsouledpersons wrestling with the crises of their fate,then the verdict would be much more favorable. Yousee that the existential facts by themselves are insufficientfor determining the value; and the best adeptsof the higher criticism accordingly never confoundthe existential with the spiritual problem. Withthe same conclusions of fact before them, some takeone view, and some another, of the Bible’s value as arevelation, according as their spiritual judgment asto the foundation of values differs.I make these general remarks about the two sortsof judgment, because there are many religious persons—someof you now present, possibly, are among14

William Jamesthem—who do not yet make a working use of the distinction,and who may therefore feel first a littlestartled at the purely existential point of view fromwhich in the following lectures the phenomena of religiousexperience must be considered. When I handlethem biologically and psychologically as if they weremere curious facts of individual history, some of youmay think it a degradation of so sublime a subject,and may even suspect me, until my purpose getsmore fully expressed, of deliberately seeking to discreditthe religious side of life.Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention;and since such a prejudice on your part wouldseriously obstruct the due effect of much of what Ihave to relate, I will devote a few more words to thepoint.There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religiouslife, exclusively pursued, does tend to make theperson exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now ofyour ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventionalobservances of his country, whether it beBuddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion hasbeen made for him by others, communicated to himby tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation,and retained by habit. It would profit us little to studythis second-hand religious life. We must make searchrather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settersto all this mass of suggested feeling andimitated conduct. These experiences we can only findin individuals for whom religion exists not as a dullhabit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individualsare “geniuses” in the religious line; and like manyother geniuses who have brought forth fruits effectiveenough for commemoration in the pages of biography,such religious geniuses have often shown symptomsof nervous instability. Even more perhaps than otherkinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject toabnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they havebeen creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Oftenthey have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholyduring a part of their career. They have knownno measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas;15

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand frequently they have fallen into trances, heardvoices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiaritieswhich are ordinarily classed as pathological.Often, moreover, these pathological features in theircareer have helped to give them their religious authorityand influence.If you ask for a concrete example, there can be nobetter one than is furnished by the person of GeorgeFox. The Quaker religion which he founded is somethingwhich it is impossible to overpraise. In a day ofshams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritualinwardness, and a return to something more like theoriginal gospel truth than men had ever known in England.So far as our Christian sects today are evolvinginto liberality, they are simply reverting in essenceto the position which Fox and the early Quakersso long ago assumed. No one can pretend for amoment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity,Fox’s mind was unsound. Everyone who confrontedhim personally, from Oliver Cromwell downto county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledgedhis superior power. Yet from the pointof view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopathor detraque of the deepest dye. His Journalabounds in entries of this sort:—“As I was walking with several friends, I lifted upmy head and saw three steeple-house spires, and theystruck at my life. I asked them what place that was?They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of theLord came to me, that I must go thither. Being cometo the house we were going to, I wished the friends towalk into the house, saying nothing to them of whitherI was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away,and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I camewithin a mile of Lichfield where, in a great field, shepherdswere keeping their sheep. Then was I commandedby the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still,for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like afire in me. So I put off my shoes and left them withthe shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, andwere astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, andas soon as I was got within the city, the word of the16

William JamesLord came to me again, saying: Cry, ‘Wo to the bloodycity of Lichfield!’ So I went up and down the streets,crying with a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city ofLichfield! 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 bloodycity of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As Iwent thus crying through the streets, there seemedto me to be a channel of blood running down thestreets, and the market-place appeared like a pool ofblood. When I had declared what was upon me, andfelt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; andreturning to the shepherds gave them some money,and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of theLord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I didnot matter to put on my shoes again, and was at astand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom fromthe Lord so to do: then, after I had washed my feet, Iput on my shoes again. After this a deep considerationcame upon me, for what reason I should be sentto 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 shedin the town during the wars between them, yet therewas no more than had befallen many other places. Butafterwards I came to understand, that in the EmperorDiocletian’s time a thousand Christians were martyr’din Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, throughthe channel of their blood, and into the pool of theirblood in the market-place, that I might raise up thememorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had beenshed above a thousand years before, and lay cold intheir 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 pathologicalaspects of the subject.We must describe and name them just as if theyoccurred in non-religious men. It is true that we instinctivelyrecoil from seeing an object to which ouremotions and affections are committed handled bythe intellect as any other object is handled. The first17

The Varieties of Religious Experiencething the intellect does with an object is to class italong with something else. But any object that is infinitelyimportant to us and awakens our devotion feelsto us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probablya crab would be filled with a sense of personaloutrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apologyas a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am nosuch thing, it would say; I am myself, myself alone.The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare thecauses in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “Iwill analyze the actions and appetites of men as if itwere a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” Andelsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passionsand their properties with the same eye withwhich he looks on all other natural things, since theconsequences of our affections flow from their naturewith the same necessity as it results from the natureof a triangle that its three angles should be equal totwo right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introductionto his history of English literature, has written:“Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter.They always have their causes. There are causesfor ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are fordigestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice andvirtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When weread such proclamations of the intellect bent on showingthe existential conditions of absolutely everything,we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatienceat the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program,in view of what the authors are actually able to perform—menacedand negated in the springs of our innermostlife. Such cold-blooded assimilationsthreaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets,as if the same breath which should succeed in explainingtheir origin would simultaneously explainaway their significance, and make them appear of nomore preciousness, either, than the useful groceriesof which M. Taine speaks.Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumptionthat spiritual value is undone if lowly origin beasserted is seen in those comments which unsentimentalpeople so often pass on their more sentimen-18

William Jamestal acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality sostrongly because his temperament is so emotional.Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is merely amatter of overinstigated nerves. William’s melancholyabout the universe is due to bad digestion—probablyhis liver is torpid. Eliza’s delight in her church is asymptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter wouldbe less troubled about his soul if he would take moreexercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developedexample of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion,quite common nowadays among certain writers, ofcriticizing the religious emotions by showing a connectionbetween them and the sexual life. Conversionis a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerationsof saints, and the devotion of missionaries,are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrificegone astray. For the hysterical nun, starvingfor natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitutefor a more earthly object of affection. And the like.[1][1] As with many ideas that float in the air of one’stime, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statementand expresses itself only partially and by innuendo.It seems to me that few conceptions are lessinstructive than this re-interpretation of religion asperverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is itoften employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, thatthe Reformation may be best understood by rememberingthat its fons et origo was Luther’s wish tomarry a nun:—the effects are infinitely wider thanthe alleged causes, and for the most part opposite innature. It is true that in the vast collection of religiousphenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, andecstatic feelings of union with the Savior in a fewChristian mystics. But then why not equally call religionan aberration of the digestive function, and proveone’s point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, orby the ecstatic feelings of some other saints aboutthe Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in suchpoor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organismgives overtones of comment whenever the19

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemind is strongly stirred to expression. Languagedrawn from eating and drinking is probably as commonin religious literature as is language drawn fromthe sexual life. We “hunger and thirst” after righteousness;we “find the Lord a sweet savor;” we “tasteand see that he is good.” “Spiritual milk for Americanbabes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,”is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer,and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floatsin milk, thought of from the point of view, not of themother, but of the greedy babe.Saint Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describesthe “orison of quietude”: “In this state the soul is likea little child still at the breast, whose mother to caresshim whilst he is still in her arms makes her milkdistill into his mouth without his even moving his lips.So it is here… . Our Lord desires that our will shouldbe satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majestypours into our mouth, and that we should relish thesweetness without even knowing that it cometh fromthe Lord.” And again: “Consider the little infants,united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothersyou will see that from time to time they pressthemselves closer by little starts to which the pleasureof sucking prompts them. Even so, during itsorison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makesattempts at closer union by movements during whichit presses closer upon the divine sweetness.” Cheminde la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.In fact, one might almost as well interpret religionas a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bibleis full of the language of respiratory oppression: “Hidenot thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hidfrom thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me;my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long;as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so mysoul panteth after thee, O my God:” God’s Breath inMan is the title of the chief work of our best knownAmerican mystic (Thomas Lake Harris), and in certainnon-Christian countries the foundation of all religiousdiscipline consists in regulation of the inspira-20

William Jamestion and expiration.These arguments are as good as much of the reasoningone hears in favor of the sexual theory. Butthe champions of the latter will then say that theirchief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The twomain phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy andconversion, they will say, are essentially phenomenaof adolescence, and therefore synchronous with thedevelopment of sexual life. To which the retortagain is easy. Even were the asserted synchronyunrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is notonly the sexual life, but the entire higher mental lifewhich awakens during adolescence. One might thenas well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics,physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology,which springs up during adolescent years alongwith that in poetry and religion, is also a perversionof the sexual instinct:—but that would be too absurd.Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide,what is to be done with the fact that the religiousage par excellence would seem to be old age,when the uproar of the sexual life is past?The plain truth is that to interpret religion one mustin the end look at the immediate content of the religiousconsciousness. The moment one does this, onesees how wholly disconnected it is in the main fromthe content of the sexual consciousness. Everythingabout the two things differs, objects, moods, facultiesconcerned, and acts impelled to. Any general assimilationis simply impossible: what we find most oftenis complete hostility and contrast. If now the defendersof the sex-theory say that this makes no differenceto their thesis; that without the chemical contributionswhich the sex-organs make to the blood,the brain would not be nourished so as to carry onreligious activities, this final proposition may be trueor not true; but at any rate it has become profoundlyuninstructive: we can deduce no consequences fromit which help us to interpret religion’s meaning orvalue. In this sense the religious life depends just asmuch upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneysas on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has21

The Varieties of Religious Experiencelost its point in evaporating into a vague general assertionof the dependence, somehow, of the mindupon the body.We are surely all familiar in a general way with thismethod of discrediting states of mind for which wehave an antipathy. We all use it to some degree incriticizing persons whose states of mind we regard asoverstrained. But when other people criticize our ownmore exalted soul-flights by calling them ‘nothing but’expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outragedand hurt, for we know that, whatever be ourorganism’s peculiarities, our mental states have theirsubstantive value as revelations of the living truth;and we wish that all this medical materialism couldbe made to hold its tongue.Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellationfor the too simple-minded system of thoughtwhich we are considering. Medical materialism finishesup Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road toDamascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex,he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as anhysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.George Fox’s discontent with the shams ofhis age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treatsas a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organtonesof misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenalcatarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are,when you come to the bottom of the matter, mereaffairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably),due to the perverted action of various glands whichphysiology will yet discover. And medical materialismthen thinks that the spiritual authority of all suchpersonages is successfully undermined.[2][2] For a first-rate example of medical-materialistreasoning, see an article on “les varietes du Typedevot,” by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the Revue del’Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largestpossible way. Modern psychology, finding definitepsycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes22

William Jamesas a convenient hypothesis that the dependence ofmental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoingand complete. If we adopt the assumption,then of course what medical materialism insists onmust be true in a general way, if not in every detail:Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not anepileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate;Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicatedby some organ or other, no matter which—and therest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existentialaccount of facts of mental history decide in one wayor another upon their spiritual significance? Accordingto the general postulate of psychology just referredto, there is not a single one of our states of mind, highor low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organicprocess as its condition. Scientific theories are organicallyconditioned just as much as religious emotionsare; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough,we should doubtless see “the liver” determining thedicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does thoseof the Methodist under conviction anxious about hissoul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolatesit, we get the methodist, when in another way,we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our rapturesand our drynesses, our longings and pantings, ourquestions and beliefs. They are equally organicallyfounded, be they religious or of non-religious content.To plead the organic causation of a religious state ofmind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superiorspiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary,unless one has already worked out in advance somepsycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values ingeneral with determinate sorts of physiologicalchange. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings,not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DISbeliefs,could retain any value as revelations of thetruth, for every one of them without exception flowsfrom the state of its possessor’s body at the time.It is needless to say that medical materialism drawsin point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion.It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that somestates of mind are inwardly superior to others, and23

The Varieties of Religious Experiencereveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makesuse of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiologicaltheory of the production of these its favoritestates, by which it may accredit them; and its attemptto discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguelyassociating them with nerves and liver, and connectingthem with names connoting bodily affliction, isaltogether illogical and inconsistent.Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quitecandid with ourselves and with the facts. When wethink certain states of mind superior to others, is itever because of what we know concerning their organicantecedents? No! it is always for two entirelydifferent reasons. It is either because we take an immediatedelight in them; or else it is because we believethem to bring us good consequential fruits forlife. When we speak disparagingly of “feverish fancies,”surely the fever-process as such is not theground of our disesteem—for aught we know to thecontrary, 103 degrees or 104 degrees Fahrenheitmight be a much more favorable temperature fortruths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinaryblood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either thedisagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inabilityto bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.When we praise the thoughts which health brings,health’s peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothingto do with determining our judgment. We know infact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is thecharacter of inner happiness in the thoughts whichstamps them as good, or else their consistency withour other opinions and their serviceability for ourneeds, which make them pass for true in our esteem.Now the more intrinsic and the more remote ofthese criteria do not always hang together. Inner happinessand serviceability do not always agree. Whatimmediately feels most “good” is not always most“true,” when measured by the verdict of the rest ofexperience. The difference between Philip drunk andPhilip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. Ifmerely “feeling good” could decide, drunkennesswould be the supremely valid human experience. But24

William Jamesits revelations, however acutely satisfying at themoment, are inserted into an environment which refusesto bear them out for any length of time. Theconsequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria isthe uncertainty which still prevails over so many ofour spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimentaland mystical experience—we shall hereafterhear much of them—that carry an enormous senseof inner authority and illumination with them whenthey come. But they come seldom, and they do notcome to everyone; and the rest of life makes eitherno connection with them, or tends to contradict themmore than it confirms them. Some persons followmore the voice of the moment in these cases, someprefer to be guided by the average results. Hence thesad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgmentsof human beings; a discordancy which will be broughthome to us acutely enough before these lectures end.It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolvedby any merely medical test. A good exampleof the impossibility of holding strictly to the medicaltests is seen in the theory of the pathological causationof genius promulgated by recent authors. “Genius,”said Dr. Moreau, “is but one of the manybranches of the neuropathic tree.” “Genius,” says Dr.Lombroso, “is a symptom of hereditary degenerationof the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moralinsanity.” “Whenever a man’s life,” writes Mr. Nisbet,“is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded withsufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study,he inevitably falls into the morbid category… . And itis worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater thegenius, the greater the unsoundness.”[3][3] J. F. Nisbet: The Insanity of Genius, 3d ed., London,1893, pp. xvi., xxiv.Now do these authors, after having succeeded inestablishing to their own satisfaction that the worksof genius are fruits of disease, consistently proceedthereupon to impugn the value of the fruits? Do theydeduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doc-25

trine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbidus to admire the productions of genius from now onwards?and say outright that no neuropath can everbe a revealer of new truth?No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strongfor them here, and hold their own against inferenceswhich, in mere love of logical consistency, medicalmaterialism ought to be only too glad to draw. Onedisciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugnthe value of works of genius in a wholesale way (suchworks of contemporary art, namely, as he himself isunable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medicalarguments.[4] But for the most part the masterpiecesare left unchallenged; and the medical line ofattack either confines itself to such secular productionsas everyone admits to be intrinsically eccentric,or else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations.And then it is because the religious manifestationshave been already condemned because thecritic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds.[4] Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.The Varieties of Religious Experience26In the natural sciences and industrial arts it neveroccurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showingup their author’s neurotic constitution. Opinions hereare invariably tested by logic and by experiment, nomatter what may be their author’s neurological type.It should be no otherwise with religious opinions.Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgmentsdirectly passed upon them, judgments basedon our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarilyon what we can ascertain of their experientialrelations to our moral needs and to the rest of whatwe hold as true.Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophicalreasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the onlyavailable criteria. Saint Teresa might have had thenervous system of the placidest cow, and it would notnow save her theology, if the trial of the theology bythese other tests should show it to be contemptible.And conversely if her theology can stand these othertests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervouslyoff her balance Saint Teresa may have been

William Jameswhen she was with us here below.You see that at bottom we are thrown back uponthe general principles by which the empirical philosophyhas always contended that we must be guided inour search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies havesought for tests for truth which might dispense usfrom appealing to the future. Some direct mark, bynoting which we can be protected immediately andabsolutely, now and forever, against all mistake—suchhas been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists.It is clear that the origin of the truth would be anadmirable criterion of this sort, if only the variousorigins could be discriminated from one another fromthis point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinionshows 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 indirect possession by a higher spirit, expressing itselfin prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterancegenerally—these origins have been stock warrantsfor the truth of one opinion after another whichwe find represented in religious history. The medicalmaterialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists,neatly turning the tables on their predecessorsby using the criterion of origin in a destructiveinstead of an accreditive way.They are effective with their talk of pathological originonly so long as supernatural origin is pleaded bythe other side, and nothing but the argument fromorigin is under discussion. But the argument fromorigin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviouslyinsufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverestof the rebutters of supernatural religion ongrounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced towrite:—“What right have we to believe Nature under anyobligation to do her work by means of complete mindsonly? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitableinstrument for a particular purpose. It is thework that is done, and the quality in the worker bywhich it was done, that is alone of moment; and it27

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemay be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint,if in other qualities of character he was singularlydefective—if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer,eccentric, or lunatic… . Home we come again, then, tothe old and last resort of certitude—namely the commonassent of mankind, or of the competent by instructionand training among mankind.”[5][5] H. Maudsley: Natural Causes and SupernaturalSeemings, 1886, pp. 256, 257.In other words, not its origin, but the way in whichit works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley’s final test ofa belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and thiscriterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural originhave also been forced to use in the end. Amongthe visions and messages some have always been toopatently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizuressome have been too fruitless for conduct andcharacter, to pass themselves off as significant, stillless as divine. In the history of Christian mysticismthe problem how to discriminate between such messagesand experiences as were really divine miracles,and such others as the demon in his malice was ableto counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofoldmore the child of hell he was before, has alwaysbeen a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacityand experience of the best directors of conscience. Inthe end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: Bytheir fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affectionsis an elaborate working out of this thesis. The rootsof a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearanceswhatever are infallible proofs of grace. Ourpractice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves,that we are genuinely Christians.“In forming a judgment of ourselves now,” Edwardswrites, we should certainly adopt that evidence whichour supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when wecome to stand before him at the last day… . There isnot one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence ofwhich, in any professor of religion, Christian practice28

William Jamesis not the most decisive evidence… . The degree inwhich our experience is productive of practice showsthe degree in which our experience is spiritual anddivine.”Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositionswhich a vision, or voice, or other apparentheavenly favor leave behind them are the only marksby which we may be sure they are not possible deceptionsof the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:—“Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving morestrength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted,the result of mere operations of the imaginationis but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishmentand energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust:whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to hera harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirablerenewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasonsto those who so often accused my visions of beingthe work of the enemy of mankind and the sportof my imagination… . I showed them the jewels whichthe divine hand had left with me:—they were my actualdispositions. All those who knew me saw that Iwas changed; my confessor bore witness to the fact;this improvement, palpable in all respects, far frombeing hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. Asfor myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demonwere its author, he could have used, in order tolose me and lead me to hell, an expedient so contraryto his own interests as that of uprooting my vices,and filling me with masculine courage and other virtuesinstead, for I saw clearly that a single one of thesevisions was enough to enrich me with all thatwealth.”[6][6] Autobiography, ch. xxviii.I fear I may have made a longer excursus than wasnecessary, and that fewer words would have dispelledthe uneasiness which may have arisen among someof you as I announced my pathological programme.At any rate you must all be ready now to judge thereligious life by its results exclusively, and I shall as-29

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalizeyour piety no more.Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be theground of our final spiritual estimate of a religiousphenomenon, why threaten us at all with so muchexistential study of its conditions? Why not simplyleave pathological questions out?To this I reply in two ways. First, I say, irrepressiblecuriosity imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly,that it always leads to a better understandingof a thing’s significance to consider its exaggerationsand perversions its equivalents and substitutes andnearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may therebyswamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation whichwe pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that wemay by contrast ascertain the more precisely in whatits merits consist, by learning at the same time towhat particular dangers of corruption it may also beexposed.Insane conditions have this advantage, that theyisolate special factors of the mental life, and enableus to inspect them unmasked by their more usualsurroundings. They play the part in mental anatomywhich the scalpel and the microscope play in theanatomy of the body. To understand a thing rightlywe need to see it both out of its environment and init, and to have acquaintance with the whole range ofits variations. The study of hallucinations has in thisway been for psychologists the key to their comprehensionof normal sensation, that of illusions has beenthe key to the right comprehension of perception.Morbid impulses and imperative conceptions, “fixedideas,” so called, have thrown a flood of light on thepsychology of the normal will; and obsessions anddelusions have performed the same service for thatof the normal faculty of belief.Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminatedby the attempts, of which I already made mention,to class it with psychopathical phenomena. Borderlandinsanity, crankiness, insane temperament, lossof mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to usea few of the many synonyms by which it has been30

William Jamescalled), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, common person says to himself about a vexed question;but in a “cranky” mind “What must I do aboutwhen combined with a superior quality of intellect inan individual, make it more probable that he will make it?” is the form the question tends to take. In the autobiographyof that high-souled woman, Mrs. Anniehis mark and affect his age, than if his temperamentwere less neurotic. There is of course no special affinitybetween crankiness as such and superior intel-wish well to any good cause, but very few care to ex-Besant, I read the following passage: “Plenty of peoplelect,[7] for most psychopaths have feeble intellects, ert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anythingin its support. ‘Someone ought to do it, but whyand superior intellects more commonly have normalnervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament,whatever be the intellect with which it finds amiability. ‘Someone ought to do it, so why not I?’ isshould I?’ is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneeditself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitabilityof character. The cranky person has extraordiwardspringing to face some perilous duty. Betweenthe cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly fornaryemotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.”True enough! and between these two sen-ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to passimmediately into belief and action; and when he gets tences lie also the different destinies of the ordinarya new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when asome way “works it off.” “What shall I think of it?” a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperamentcoalesce—as in the endless permutations and combinationsof human faculty, they are bound to coalesce[7] Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirablyshown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in often enough—in the same individual, we have thea large development of the faculty of association by best possible condition for the kind of effective gesimilarity.31

The Varieties of Religious Experiencenius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such away as soon as it is classed with others, or its originmen do not remain mere critics and understanders is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimentalresults and inner quality, in judging of val-with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, theyinflict them, for better or worse, upon their companionsor their age. It is they who get counted when the distinctive significance of religious melancholy andues—who does not see that we are likely to ascertainMessrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke statisticsto defend their paradox.paring them as conscientiously as we can with otherhappiness, or of religious trances, far better by com-To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholywhich, as we shall see, constitutes an essen-by refusing to consider their place in any more gen-varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, thantial moment in every complete religious evolution. eral series, and treating them as if they were outsideTake the happiness which achieved religious belief of nature’s order altogether?confers. Take the trancelike states of insight into truth I hope that the course of these lectures will confirmwhich all religious mystics report.[8] These are each us in this supposition. As regards the psychopathicand all of them special cases of kinds of human experienceof much wider scope. Religious melancholy, not be in the least surprising or disconcerting, evenorigin of so many religious phenomena, that wouldwhatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is were such phenomena certified from on high to beat any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness.Religious trance is trance. And the moment we ganism can possibly yield to its owner the whole bodythe most precious of human experiences. No one or-renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, oreven diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly.In the psychopathic temperament we[8] I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory ofgenius in the Psychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).32

William Jameshave the emotionality which is the sine qua non ofmoral perception; we have the intensity and tendencyto emphasis which are the essence of practical moralvigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticismwhich carry one’s interests beyond the surfaceof the sensible world. What, then, is more naturalthan that this temperament should introduce oneto regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe,which your robust Philistine type of nervoussystem, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumpingits breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t asingle morbid fiber in its composition, would be sureto hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?If there were such a thing as inspiration from ahigher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperamentwould furnish the chief condition of the requisitereceptivity. And having said thus much, I thinkthat I may let the matter of religion and neuroticismdrop.The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid orhealthy, with which the various religious phenomenamust be compared in order to understand them better,forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed“the apperceiving mass” by which we comprehendthem. The only novelty that I can imagine this courseof lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceivingmass. I may succeed in discussing religiousexperiences in a wider context than has been usualin university courses.33

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLecture IICIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPICMOST BOOKS on the philosophy of religion try to beginwith a precise definition of what its essence consistsof. Some of these would-be definitions may possiblycome before us in later portions of this course, and Ishall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any ofthem to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that theyare so many and so different from one another isenough to prove that the word “religion” cannot standfor any single principle or essence, but is rather a collectivename. The theorizing mind tends always tothe oversimplification of its materials. This is the rootof all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism bywhich both philosophy and religion have been infested.Let us not fall immediately into a one-sidedview of our subject, but let us rather admit freely atthe outset that we may very likely find no one essence,but many characters which may alternatelybe equally important to religion. If we should inquirefor the essence of “government,” for example, oneman might tell us it was authority, another submission,an other police, another an army, another anassembly, an other a system of laws; yet all the whileit would be true that no concrete government canexist without all these things, one of which is moreimportant at one moment and others at another. Theman who knows governments most completely is hewho troubles himself least about a definition whichshall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintancewith all their particularities in turn, he wouldnaturally regard an abstract conception in which thesewere unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.And why may not religion be a conceptionequally complex?[9][9] I can do no better here than refer my readers tothe extended and admirable remarks on the futilityof all these definitions of religion, in an article by ProfessorLeuba, published in the Monist for January,1901, after my own text was written.34

William JamesConsider also the “religious sentiment” which wesee referred to in so many books, as if it were a singlesort of mental entity. In the psychologies and in thephilosophies of religion, we find the authors attemptingto specify just what entity it is. One man allies itto the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivativefrom 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 oughtof themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possiblycan be one specific thing; and the moment we arewilling to treat the term “religious sentiment” as acollective name for the many sentiments which religiousobjects may arouse in alternation, we see thatit probably contains nothing whatever of a psychologicallyspecific nature. There is religious fear, religiouslove, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth.But religious love is only man’s natural emotion oflove directed to a religious object; religious fear is onlythe ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the commonquaking of the human breast, in so far as thenotion of divine retribution may arouse it; religiousawe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forestat twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this timeit comes over us at the thought of our supernaturalrelations; and similarly of all the various sentimentswhich may be called into play in the lives of religiouspersons. As concrete states of mind, made up of afeeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotionsof course are psychic entities distinguishablefrom other concrete emotions; but there is no groundfor assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” toexist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself,present in every religious experience withoutexception.As there thus seems to be no one elementary religiousemotion, but only a common storehouse of emotionsupon which religious objects may draw, so theremight conceivably also prove to he no one specific andessential kind of religious object, and no one specificand essential kind of religious act.The field of religion being as wide as this, it is mani-35

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefestly 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 setup an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and thenproceed to defend that definition against all comers,yet this need not prevent me from taking my ownnarrow view of what religion shall consist in for thepurpose of these lectures, or, out of the many meaningsof the word, from choosing the one meaning inwhich I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaimingarbitrarily that when I say “religion” I meanthat. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will nowpreliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose.One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspectsof the subject we leave out. At the outset we are struckby one great partition which divides the religious field.On the one side of it lies institutional, on the otherpersonal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branchof religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man mostin view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for workingon the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremonyand ecclesiastical organization, are the essentialsof religion in the institutional branch. Were weto limit our view to it, we should have to define religionas an external art, the art of winning the favor ofthe gods. In the more personal branch of religion it ison the contrary the inner dispositions of man himselfwhich form the center of interest, his conscience, hisdeserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And althoughthe favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, isstill an essential feature of the story, and theologyplays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which thissort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts,the individual transacts the business by himself alone,and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests andsacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogethersecondary place. The relation goes direct fromheart to heart, from soul to soul, between man andhis maker.Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutionalbranch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiasticalorganization, to consider as little as possible36

William Jamesthe systematic theology and the ideas about the godsthemselves, and to confine myself as far as I can topersonal religion pure and simple. To some of youpersonal religion, thus nakedly considered, will nodoubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the generalname. “It is a part of religion,” you will say, “butonly its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name itby itself, we had better call it man’s conscience ormorality than his religion. The name ‘religion’ shouldbe reserved for the fully organized system of feeling,thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, ofwhich this personal religion, so called, is but a fractionalelement.”But if you say this, it will only show the more plainlyhow much the question of definition tends to becomea dispute about names.Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing toaccept almost any name for the personal religion ofwhich I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality,if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—undereither name it will be equally worthy of our study. Asfor myself, I think it will prove to contain some elementswhich morality pure and simple does not contain,and these elements I shall soon seek to pointout; so I will myself continue to apply the word “religion”to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring inthe theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say somethingof its relation to them.In one sense at least the personal religion will proveitself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism.Churches, when once established, live atsecond-hand upon tradition; but the founders of everychurch owed their power originally to the fact oftheir direct personal communion with the divine. Notonly the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha,Mahomet, but all the originators of Christiansects have been in this case;—so personal religionshould still seem the primordial thing, even to thosewho continue to esteem it incomplete.There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologicallymore primordial than personal devoutnessin the moral sense. Fetishism and magic seem to have37

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepreceded inward piety historically—at least ourrecords of inward piety do not reach back so far. Andif fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion,one may say that personal religion in the inwardsense and the genuinely spiritualecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena ofsecondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apartfrom the fact that many anthropologists—for instance,Jevons and Frazer —expressly oppose “religion” and“magic” to each other, it is certain that the whole systemof thought which leads to magic, fetishism, andthe lower superstitions may just as well be calledprimitive science as called primitive religion. Thequestion thus becomes a verbal one again; and ourknowledge of all these early stages of thought andfeeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect thatfarther discussion would not be worth while.Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily totake it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiencesof individual men in their solitude, so far asthey apprehend themselves to stand in relation towhatever they may consider the divine. Since therelation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it isevident that out of religion in the sense in which wetake it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizationsmay secondarily grow. In these lectures,however, as I have already said, the immediate personalexperiences will amply fill our time, and we shallhardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrarydefinition of our field. But, still, a chance of controversycomes up over the word “divine,” if we takethe definition in too narrow a sense. There are systemsof thought which the world usually calls religious,and yet which do not positively assume a God.Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, theBuddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictnessthe Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendentalidealism, Emersonianism, for instance, alsoseems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Nota deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, butthe immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiri-38

William Jamestual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalistcult. In that address to the graduatingclass at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emersonfamous, the frank expression of this worship of mereabstract 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 notsubject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man thereis a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. Hewho does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.He who puts off impurity thereby puts onpurity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is heGod; the safety of God, the immortality of God, themajesty of God, do enter into that man with justice.If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, andgoes out of acquaintance with his own being. Characteris always known. Thefts never enrich; alms neverimpoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. Theleast admixture of a lie—for example, the taint of vanity,any attempt to make a good impression, a favorableappearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. Butspeak the truth, and all things alive or brute arevouchers, and the very roots of the grass undergroundthere do seem to stir and move to bear yourwitness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit,which is differently named love, justice, temperance,in its different applications, just as the ocean receivesdifferent names on the several shores which it washes.In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaveshimself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks …he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolutebadness is absolute death. The perception of thislaw awakens in the mind a sentiment which we callthe religious sentiment, and which makes our highesthappiness. Wonderful is its power to charm andto command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmerof the world.It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silentsong of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man.It makes him illimitable. When he says ‘I ought’; when39

The Varieties of Religious Experiencelove warns him; when he chooses, warned from onhigh, the good and great deed; then, deep melodieswander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Thenhe can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; forhe can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressionsof this sentiment are sacred and permanentin proportion to their purity. [They] affect usmore than all other compositions. The sentences ofthe olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are stillfresh and fragrant. And the unique impression ofJesus upon mankind, whose name is not so muchwritten as ploughed into the history of this world, isproof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.”[10][10] Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has adivine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also thesoul within the soul of man. But whether this soul ofthe universe be a mere quality like the eye’s brilliancyor the skin’s softness, or whether it be a self-consciouslife like the eye’s seeing or the skin’s feeling, is a decisionthat never unmistakably appears in Emerson’spages. It quivers on the boundary of these things,sometimes leaning one way sometimes the other, tosuit the literary rather than the philosophic need.Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it werea God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests andkeep the world’s balance straight. The sentences inwhich Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to thisfaith are as fine as anything in literature: “If you loveand serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagemescape the remuneration. Secret retributions arealways restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divinejustice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All thetyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the worldin vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settlesforevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and manand mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or bepulverized by the recoil.”[11][11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.40

William JamesNow it would be too absurd to say that the innerexperiences that underlie such expressions of faithas this and impel the writer to their utterance arequite unworthy to be called religious experiences. Thesort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the onehand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, maketo the individual and the son of response which hemakes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishablefrom, and in many respects identical with, the bestChristian appeal and response. We must therefore,from the experiential point of view, call these godlessor quasi-godless creeds “religions”; and accordinglywhen in our definition of religion we speak of theindividual’s relation to “what he considers the divine,”we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly,as denoting any object that is god-like, whether it bea concrete deity or not. But the term “godlike,” if thustreated as a floating general quality, becomes exceedinglyvague, for many gods have flourished in religioushistory, and their attributes have been discrepantenough. What then is that essentially godlike quality—beit embodied in a concrete deity or not—ourrelation to which determines our character as religiousmen? It will repay us to seek some answer tothis question before we proceed farther.For one thing, gods are conceived to be first thingsin the way of being and power. They overarch andenvelop, and from them there is no escape. What relatesto them is the first and last word in the way oftruth. Whatever then were most primal and envelopingand deeply true might at this rate be treatedas godlike, and a man’s religion might thus be identifiedwith his attitude, whatever it might be, towardwhat he felt to be the primal truth.Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible.Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reactionupon life, so why not say that any total reactionupon life is a religion? Total reactions are differentfrom casual reactions, and total attitudes are differentfrom usual or professional attitudes. To get atthem you must go behind the foreground of existenceand reach down to that curious sense of the41

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence,intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious,which in some degree everyone possesses. Thissense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does toour peculiar individual temperament, makes us eitherstrenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous,gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction,involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconsciousas it is, is the completest of all our answersto the question, “What is the character of this universein which we dwell?” It expresses our individualsense of it in the most definite way. Why then not callthese reactions our religion, no matter what specificcharacter they may have? Non-religious as some ofthese reactions may be, in one sense of the word “religious,”they yet belong to the general sphere of thereligious life, and so should generically be classed asreligious reactions. “He believes in No-God, and heworships him,” said a colleague of mine of a studentwho was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and themore fervent opponents of Christian doctrine haveoften enough shown a temper which, psychologicallyconsidered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.But so very broad a use of the word “religion” wouldbe inconvenient, however defensible it might remainon logical grounds. There are trifling, sneering attitudeseven toward the whole of life; and in some menthese attitudes are final and systematic. It wouldstrain the ordinary use of language too much to callsuch attitudes religious, even though, from the pointof view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they mightconceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of lookingupon life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend,at the age of seventy-three: “As for myself,” he says,“weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment,I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred,and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on firewith quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and,thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce evenwhen it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. Allcomes out even at the end of the day, and all comesout still more even when all the days are over.”42

William JamesMuch as we may admire such a robust old gamecockspirit in a valetudinarian, to call it a religious spiritwould be odd. Yet it is for the moment Voltaire’s reactionon the whole of life. Je me’n fiche is the vulgarFrench equivalent for our English ejaculation “Whocares?” And the happy term je me’n fichisme recentlyhas been invented to designate the systematicdetermination not to take anything in life too solemnly.“All is vanity” is the relieving word in all difficultcrises for this mode of thought, which that exquisiteliterary genius Renan took pleasure, in his laterdays of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegiousforms which remain to us as excellent expressionsof the “all is vanity” state of mind. Takethe following passage, for example—we must hold toduty, even against the evidence, Renan says—but hethen goes on:—“There are many chances that the world may benothing but a fairy pantomime of which no God hascare. We must therefore arrange ourselves so thaton neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong.We must listen to the superior voices, but in such away that if the second hypothesis were true we shouldnot have been too completely duped. If in effect theworld be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic peoplewho will be the shallow ones, and the worldly mindedwhom the theologians now call frivolous will be thosewho are really wise.“In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything—thatperhaps is wisdom. Give ourselves up, accordingto the hour, to confidence, to skepticism, tooptimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certainmoments at least we shall be with the truth… .Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seemsto say to Nature that we take her no more seriouslythan she takes us. I maintain that one should alwaystalk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternalto be virtuous but we have the right to add to thistribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal. In thisway we return to the right quarter jest for jest; weplay the trick that has been played on us. SaintAugustine’s phrase: Lord, if we arc deceived, it is by43

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethee! remains a fine one, well suited to our modernfeeling. Only we wish the Eternal to know that if weaccept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly.We are resigned in advance to losing the interest onour investments of virtue, but we wish not to appearridiculous by having counted on them too securely.”[12][12] Feuilles detachees, pp. 394-398 (abridged).Surely all the usual associations of the word “religion”would have to be stripped away if such a systematicparti pris of irony were also to be denoted bythe name. For common men “religion,” whatevermore special meanings it may have, signifies alwaysa serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gatherits universal message, that phrase would be, “All isnot vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearancesmay suggest.” If it can stop anything, religion as commonlyapprehended can stop just such chaffing talkas Renan’s. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says“hush” to all vain chatter and smart wit.But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostileto heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appearstragic enough in some religions, but the tragedyis realized as purging, and a way of deliverance isheld to exist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholyin a future lecture; but melancholy, accordingto our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title tobe called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius’s racywords, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screamingafter the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of aSchopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a less degreeone may sometimes say the same of our own sadCarlyle—though often an ennobling sadness, is almostas often only peevishness running away with the bitbetween its teeth. The sallies of the two German authorsremind one, half the time, of the sick shriekingsof two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note whichreligious sadness gives forth.There must be something solemn, serious, and tenderabout any attitude which we denominate religious.44

William JamesIf glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must notscream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiencesthat I wish to interest you in religious experiences.So I propose—arbitrarily again, if youplease—to narrow our definition once more by sayingthat the word “divine,” as employed therein, shallmean for us not merely the primal and envelopingand real, for that meaning if taken without restrictionmight prove too broad. The divine shall meanfor us only such a primal reality as the individual feelsimpelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, andneither by a curse nor a jest.But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotionalattributes, admit of various shades; and, do what wewill with our defining, the truth must at last be confrontedthat we are dealing with a field of experiencewhere there is not a single conception that can besharply drawn. The pretension, under such conditions,to be rigorously “scientific” or “exact” in ourterms would only stamp us as lacking in understandingof our task. Things are more or less divine, statesof mind are more or less religious, reactions are moreor less total, but the boundaries are always misty,and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree.Nevertheless, at their extreme of development,there can never be any question as to what experiencesare religious. The divinity of the object and thesolemnity of the reaction are too well marked fordoubt. Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is “religious,”or “irreligious,” or “moral,” or “philosophical,”is only likely to arise when the state of mind isweakly characterized, but in that case it will be hardlyworthy of our study at all. With states that can onlyby courtesy be called religious we need have nothingto do, our only profitable business being with whatnobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else.I said in my former lecture that we learn most abouta thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were,or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true ofreligious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. Theonly cases likely to be profitable enough to repay ourattention will therefore be cases where the religious45

The Varieties of Religious Experiencespirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestationswe may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example,is the total reaction upon life of FrederickLocker Lampson, whose autobiography, entitled“Confidences,” proves him to have been a most amiableman.“I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small painat the thought of having to part from what has beencalled the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fableof life. I would not care to live my wasted life overagain, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, Ihave but little wish to be younger. I submit with achill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is theDivine Will, and my appointed destiny. I dread theincrease of infirmities that will make me a burden tothose around me, those dear to me. No! let me slipaway as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the endcome, if peace come with it.“I do not know that there is a great deal to be saidfor this world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it haspleased God so to place us, and it must please mealso. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimedhappiness—care and weariness, weariness and care,with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenageof a brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a frowardchild, that must be played with and humored, to keepit quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care isover.”[13][13] Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and agraceful state of mind. For myself, I should have noobjection to calling it on the whole a religious state ofmind, although I dare say that to many of you it mayseem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good aname. But what matters it in the end whether we callsuch a state of mind religious or not? It is too insignificantfor our instruction in any case; and its verypossessor wrote it down in terms which he would nothave used unless he had been thinking of more energeticallyreligious moods in others, with which he46

William Jamesfound himself unable to compete. It is with these moreenergetic states that our sole business lies, and wecan perfectly well afford to let the minor notes andthe uncertain border go. It was the extremer casesthat I had in mind a little while ago when I said thatpersonal religion, even without theology or ritual,would prove to embody some elements that moralitypure and simple does not contain. You may rememberthat I promised shortly to point out whatthose elements were. In a general way I can now saywhat I had in mind.“I accept the universe” is reported to have been afavorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist,Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeatedthis phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic commentis said to have been: “Gad! she’d better!” At bottomthe whole concern of both morality and religion is withthe manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do weaccept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily andaltogether? Shall our protests against certain thingsin it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that,even with evil, there are ways of living that must leadto good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as ifstunned into submission—as Carlyle would have us—”Gad! we’d better!”—or shall we do so with enthusiasticassent? Morality pure and simple accepts thelaw of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as toacknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with theheaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel itas a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developedmanifestations, the service of the highestnever is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind,and a mood of welcome, which may fill any placeon the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiasticgladness, has taken its place.It makes a tremendous emotional and practical differenceto one whether one accept the universe inthe drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity,or with the passionate happiness of Christiansaints. The difference is as great as that between passivityand activity, as that between the defensive andthe aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by47

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich an individual may grow from one state into theother, many as are the intermediate stages which differentindividuals represent, yet when you place thetypical extremes beside each other for comparison,you feel that two discontinuous psychological universesconfront you, and that in passing from one tothe other a “critical point” has been overcome.If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations wesee much more than a difference of doctrine; ratheris it a difference of emotional mood that parts them.When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reasonthat has ordered things, there is a frosty chill abouthis words which you rarely find in a Jewish, and neverin a Christian piece of religious writing. The universeis “accepted” by all these writers; but how devoid ofpassion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperoris! Compare his fine sentence: “If gods care not forme or my children, here is a reason for it,” with Job’scry: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!” andyou immediately see the difference I mean. Theanima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personaldestiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respectedand submitted to, but the Christian God is there tobe loved; and the difference of emotional atmosphereis like that between an arctic climate and the tropics,though the outcome in the way of accepting actualconditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstractterms to be much the same.“It is a man’s duty,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to comforthimself and wait for the natural dissolution, andnot to be vexed, but to find refreshment solely in thesethoughts—first that nothing will happen to me whichis not conformable to the nature of the universe; andsecondly that I need do nothing contrary to the Godand deity within me; for there is no man who can compelme to transgress. He is an abscess on the universewho withdraws and separates himself from thereason of our common nature, through being displeasedwith the things which happen. For the samenature produces these, and has produced thee too.And so accept everything which happens, even if itseem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health48

William Jamesof the universe and to the prosperity and felicity ofZeus. For he would not have brought on any man whathe has brought if it were not useful for the whole.The integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttestoff anything. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is inthy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a mannertriest to put anything out of the way.”[14][14] Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).Compare now this mood with that of the old Christianauthor of the Theologia Germanica:—“Where men are enlightened with the true light,they renounce all desire and choice, and commit andcommend themselves and all things to the eternalGoodness, so that every enlightened man could say:‘I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his ownhand is to a man.’ Such men are in a state of freedom,because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, andthe hope of reward or heaven, and are living in puresubmission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfectfreedom of fervent love. When a man truly perceivethand considereth himself, who and what he is, andfindeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy,he falleth into such a deep abasement that itseemeth to him reasonable that all creatures inheaven and earth should rise up against him. Andtherefore he will not and dare not desire any consolationand release; but he is willing to be unconsoledand unreleased; and he doth not grieve over his sufferings,for they are right in his eyes, and he hathnothing to say against them. This is what is meant bytrue repentance for sin; and he who in this presenttime entereth into this hell, none may console him.Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but Heis laying his hand upon him, that the man may notdesire nor regard anything but the eternal Good only.And then, when the man neither careth for nordesireth anything but the eternal Good alone, andseeketh not himself nor his own things, but the honourof God only, he is made a partaker of all manner ofjoy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man49

The Varieties of Religious Experienceis henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell andthis heaven are two good safe ways for a man, andhappy is he who truly findeth them.”[15][15] Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth’s translation.How much more active and positive the impulse ofthe Christian writer to accept his place in the universeis! Marcus Aurelius agrees to the scheme—theGerman theologian agrees with it. He literallyabounds in agreement, he runs out to embrace thedivine decrees.Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to somethinglike a Christian warmth of sentiment, as in the oftenquoted passage of Marcus Aurelius:—“Everything harmonizes with me which is harmoniousto thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too earlynor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everythingis fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: fromthee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee allthings return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops;and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus?”[16][16] Book IV., 523.But compare even as devout a passage as this witha genuine Christian outpouring, and it seems a littlecold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation of Christ:—“Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that beaccording as thou wilt. Give what thou wilt, so muchas thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thouknowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour.Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy willwith me in all things… . When could it be evil whenthou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sakethan rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrimupon the earth with thee, than without thee topossess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; andwhere thou art not, behold there death and hell.”[17][17] Benham’s translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix.50

William JamesCompare Mary Moody Emerson: “Let me be a bloton this fair world, the obscurest the loneliest sufferer,with one proviso—that I know it is His agency. I willlove Him though He shed frost and darkness on everyway of mine.” R. W. Emerson: Lectures and BiographicalSketches, p. 188.It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studyingthe meaning of an organ, to ask after its most peculiarand characteristic sort of performance, and toseek its office in that one of its functions which noother organ can possibly exert. Surely the samemaxim holds good in our present quest. The essenceof religious experiences, the thing by which we finallymust judge them, must be that element or quality inthem which we can meet nowhere else. And such aquality will be of course most prominent and easy tonotice in those religious experiences which are mostone-sided, exaggerated, and intense.Now when we compare these intenser experienceswith the experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonablethat we are tempted to call them philosophicalrather than religious, we find a character that isperfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me,should be regarded as the practically important differentiaof religion for our purpose; and just what it iscan easily be brought out by comparing the mind ofan abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralistsimilarly conceived.A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, wesay, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personalconsiderations and more by objective ends thatcall for energy, even though that energy bring personalloss and pain. This is the good side of war, in sofar as it calls for “volunteers.” And for morality life isa war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmicpatriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even asick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carryon the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attentionaway from his own future, whether in this worldor the next. He can train himself to indifference to hispresent drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever51

The Varieties of Religious Experienceobjective interests still remain accessible. He can followpublic news, and sympathize with other people’saffairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silentabout his miseries. He can contemplate whateverideal aspects of existence his philosophy is ableto present to him, and practice whatever duties, suchas patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires.Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane.He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave.And yet he lacks something which the Christian parexcellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example,has in abundant measure, and which makes of him ahuman being of an altogether different denomination.The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumpingsick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of akind of callousness to diseased conditions of bodywhich probably no other human records show. Butwhereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effortof volition, the Christian spurning is the result ofthe excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in thepresence of which no exertion of volition is required.The moralist must hold his breath and keep hismuscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude ispossible all goes well—morality suffices. But the athleticattitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitablydoes break down even in the most stalwartwhen the organism begins to decay, or when morbidfears invade the mind. To suggest personal will andeffort to one all sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediableimpotence is to suggest the most impossible ofthings. What he craves is to be consoled in his verypowerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universerecognizes and secures him, all decaying and failingas he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in thelast resort. The sanest and best of us are of one claywith lunatics and prison inmates, and death finallyruns the robustest of us down. And whenever we feelthis, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality ofour voluntary career comes over us that all our moralityappears but as a plaster hiding a sore it cannever cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowestsubstitute for that well-being that our lives ought to52

William Jamesbe grounded in, but, alas! are not.And here religion comes to our rescue and takesour fate into her hands. There is a state of mind,known to religious men, but to no others, in whichthe will to assert ourselves and hold our own has beendisplaced by a willingness to close our mouths and beas nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. Inthis state of mind, what we most dreaded has becomethe habitation of our safety, and the hour of ourmoral death has turned into our spiritual birthday.The time for tension in our soul is over, and that ofhappy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternalpresent, with no discordant future to be anxiousabout, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as itis by mere morality, it is positively expunged andwashed away.We shall see abundant examples of this happy stateof mind in later lectures of this course. We shall seehow infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highestflights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope,ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagernessand impulse, it adds to life an enchantment whichis not rationally or logically deducible from anythingelse. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it doescome—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tellus, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say —is eitherthere or not there for us, and there are persons whocan no more become possessed by it than they can fallin love with a given woman by mere word of command.Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to theSubject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere ofpower. When the outward battle is lost, and the outerworld disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interiorworld which otherwise would be an empty waste.If religion is to mean anything definite for us, itseems to me that we ought to take it as meaning thisadded dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temperof espousal, in regions where morality strictly socalled can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. Itought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedomfor us, with the struggle over, the keynote of theuniverse sounding in our ears, and everlasting pos-53

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesession spread before our eyes.[18][18] Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionallysombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousnessis lacking. They are religious in the widersense, yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so,and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, withoutdisputing about words, to study first, so as to getat its typical differentia.This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlastingis what we find nowhere but in religion. It is partedoff from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoymentof the present, by that element of solemnity ofwhich I have already made so much account. Solemnityis a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain ofits marks are patent enough. A solemn state of mindis never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certainmeasure of its own opposite in solution. A solemnjoy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; asolemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.But there are writers who, realizing that happinessof a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forgetthis complication, and call all happiness, as such,religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifiesreligion with the entire field of the soul’s liberationfrom oppressive moods.“The simplest functions of physiological life,” hewrites may be its ministers. Every one who is at allacquainted with the Persian mystics knows how winemay be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed,in all countries and in all ages some form of physicalenlargement—singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement—hasbeen intimately associated with worship.Even the momentary expansion of the soul inlaughter is, to however slight an extent, a religiousexercise… . Whenever an impulse from the worldstrikes against the organism, and the resultant is notdiscomfort or pain, not even the muscular contractionof strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansionor aspiration of the whole soul—there is religion. It isthe infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly54

William Jameson every little wave that promises to bear us towardsit.”[19][19] The New Spirit, p. 232.But such a straight identification of religion with anyand every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarityof religious happiness out. The more commonplacehappinesses which we get are “reliefs,” occasionedby our momentary escapes from evils eitherexperienced or threatened. But in its most characteristicembodiments, religious happiness is nomere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape.It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardlyit knows it to be permanently overcome.If you ask how religion thus falls on the thornsand faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation,I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion’ssecret, and to understand it you must yourself havebeen a religious man of the extremer type. In ourfuture examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-mindedtype of religious consciousness, we shallfind this complex sacrificial constitution, in which ahigher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check.In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St.Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness ofthe picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figurebeing there. The richness of its allegorical meaningalso is due to his being there—that is, the world is allthe richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keepour foot upon his neck. In the religious consciousness,that is just the position in which the fiend, thenegative or tragic principle, is found; and for that veryreason the religious consciousness is so rich from theemotional point of view.[20] We shall see how in certainmen and women it takes on a monstrously asceticform. There are saints who have literally fed onthe negative principle, on humiliation and privation,and the thought of suffering and death—their soulsgrowing in happiness just in proportion as their out-[20] I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamentedcolleague and Friend, Charles Carroll Everett.55

The Varieties of Religious Experienceward state grew more intolerable. No other emotionthan religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiarpass. And it is for that reason that when we askour question about the value of religion for humanlife, I think we ought to look for the answer amongthese violenter examples rather than among those ofa more moderate hue.Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutestpossible form to start with, we can shade down asmuch as we please later. And if in these cases, repulsiveas they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging,we find ourselves compelled to acknowledgereligion’s value and treat it with respect, it will haveproved in some way its value for life at large. By subtractingand toning down extravagances we maythereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimatesway.To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have todeal so muck with eccentricities and extremes. “HowCAN religion on the whole be the most important ofall human functions,” you may ask, “if every severalmanifestation of it in turn have to be corrected andsobered down and pruned away?”Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustainreasonably—yet I believe that something like itwill have to be our final contention. That personal attitudewhich the individual finds himself impelled totake up towards what he apprehends to be the divine—andyou will remember that this was our definition—willprove to be both a helpless and a sacrificialattitude. That is, we shall have to confess to atleast some amount of dependence on sheer mercy,and to practice some amount of renunciation, greator small, to save our souls alive. The constitution ofthe world we live in requires it:—“Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!Das ist der ewige GesangDer jedem an die Ohren klingt,Den, unser ganzes Leben langUns heiser jede Stunde singt.”56

William JamesFor when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutelydependent on the universe; and into sacrificesand surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked atand accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into ouronly permanent positions of repose. Now in thosestates of mind which fall short of religion, the surrenderis submitted to as an imposition of necessity, andthe sacrifice is undergone at the very best withoutcomplaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrenderand sacrifice are positively espoused: evenunnecessary givings-up are added in order that thehappiness may increase. Religion thus makes easyand felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if itbe the only agency that can accomplish this result, itsvital importance as a human faculty stands vindicatedbeyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of ourlife, performing a function which no other portion ofour nature can so successfully fulfill. From the merelybiological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusionto which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitablybe led, and led moreover by following the purelyempirical method of demonstration which I sketchedto you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of religionas a metaphysical revelation I will say nothingnow.But to foreshadow the terminus of one’s investigationsis one thing, and to arrive there safely is another.In the next lecture, abandoning the extremegeneralities which have engrossed us hitherto, I proposethat we begin our actual journey by addressingourselves directly to the concrete facts.57

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLecture IIITHE REALITY OF THE UNSEENWERE ONE ASKED to characterize the life of religion inthe broadest and most general terms possible, onemight say that it consists of the belief that there is anunseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniouslyadjusting ourselves thereto. This belief andthis adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.I wish during this hour to call your attention to someof the psychological peculiarities of such an attitudeas this, or belief in an object which we cannot see. Allour attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as wellas religious, are due to the “objects” of our consciousness,the things which we believe to exist, whetherreally or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objectsmay be present to our senses, or they may be presentonly to our thought. In either case they elicit from usa reaction; and the reaction due to things of thoughtis notoriously in many cases as strong as that due tosensible presences. It may be even stronger. Thememory of an insult may make us angrier than theinsult did when we received it. We are frequentlymore ashamed of our blunders afterwards than wewere at the moment of making them; and in generalour whole higher prudential and moral life is basedon the fact that material sensations actually presentmay have a weaker influence on our action than ideasof remoter facts.The more concrete objects of most men’s religion,the deities whom they worship, are known to themonly in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, tovery few Christian believers to have had a sensiblevision of their Saviour; though enough appearances ofthis sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception,to merit our attention later. The whole force ofthe Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in thedivine personages determines the prevalent attitudeof the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentalityof pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual’spast experience directly serves as a model.58

William JamesBut in addition to these ideas of the more concretereligious objects, religion is full of abstract objectswhich prove to have an equal power. God’s attributesas such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness,his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity,the various mysteries of the redemptive process, theoperation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertilewells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers.[21]We shall see later that the absence of definitesensible images is positively insisted on by themystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua nonof a successful orison, or contemplation of the higherdivine truths. Such contemplations are expected (andabundantly verify the expectation, as we shall alsosee) to influence the believer’s subsequent attitudevery powerfully for good.[21] Example: “I have had much comfort lately inmeditating on the passages which show the personalityof the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from theFather and the Son. It is a subject that requiressearching into to find out, but, when realized, givesone so much more true and lively a sense of the fullnessof the Godhead, and its work in us and to us,than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect onus.” Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hareto Lucy H. Hare.Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about suchobjects of belief as God, the design of creation, thesoul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things,he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all.Our conceptions always require a sense-content towork with, and as the words soul,” “God,” “immortality,”cover no distinctive sense-content whatever,it follows that theoretically speaking they are wordsdevoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough theyhave a definite meaning for our practice. We can actas if there were a God; feel as if we were free; considerNature as if she were full of special designs; layplans as if we were to be immortal; and we find thenthat these words do make a genuine difference in ourmoral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects59

The Varieties of Religious Experienceactually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent inpraktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the pointof view of our action, for a knowledge of what theymight be, in case we were permitted positively to conceivethem. So we have the strange phenomenon, asKant assures us, of a mind believing with all itsstrength in the real presence of a set of things of noone of which it can form any notion whatsoever.My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to yourmind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracyof this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, butonly to illustrate the characteristic of human naturewhich we are considering, by an example so classicalin its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeedattach itself so strongly to our object of beliefthat our whole life is polarized through and through,so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thingbelieved in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definitedescription, can hardly be said to be present to ourmind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch orsight, with no representative faculty whatever, mightnevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacityfor magnetic feeling; and as if, through the variousarousals of its magnetism by magnets coming andgoing in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determinedto different attitudes and tendencies. Sucha bar of iron could never give you an outward descriptionof the agencies that had the power of stirringit so strongly; yet of their presence, and of theirsignificance for its life, it would be intensely awarethrough every fibre of its being.It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styledthem, that have this power of making us vitally feelpresences that we are impotent articulately to describe.All sorts of higher abstractions bring with themthe same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember thosepassages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture.The whole universe of concrete objects, as weknow them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalistwriter, but for all of us, in a wider and higheruniverse of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance.As time, space, and the ether soak through all things60

William Jamesso (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness,beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak throughall things good, strong, significant, and just.Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form thebackground for all our facts, the fountain-head of allthe possibilities we conceive of. They give its “nature,”as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we knowis “what” it is by sharing in the nature of one of theseabstractions. We can never look directly at them, forthey are bodiless and featureless and footless, but wegrasp all other things by their means, and in handlingthe real world we should be stricken with helplessnessin just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects,these adjectives and adverbs and predicates andheads of classification and conception.This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractionsis one of the cardinal facts in our humanconstitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as theydo, we turn towards them and from them, we seekthem, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as ifthey were so many concrete beings. And beings theyare, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit asthe changing things of sense are in the realm of space.Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense ofthis common human feeling, that the doctrine of thereality of abstract objects has been known as the platonictheory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, forexample, is for Plato a perfectly definite individualbeing, of which the intellect is aware as of somethingadditional to all the perishing beauties of the earth.“The true order of going,” he says, in the often quotedpassage in his “Banquet,” “is to use the beauties ofearth as steps along which one mounts upwards forthe sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two,and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms tofair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, untilfrom fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absoluteBeauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beautyis.”[22] In our last lecture we had a glimpse of theway in which a platonizing writer like Emerson maytreat the abstract divineness of things, the moral[22] Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.61

structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship.In those various churches without a God whichto-day are spreading through the world under thename of ethical societies, we have a similar worshipof the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as anultimate object. “Science” in many minds is genuinelytaking the place of a religion. Where this is so, thescientist treats the “Laws of Nature” as objective factsto be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation ofGreek mythology would have it that in their originthe Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personificationsof those great spheres of abstract law and orderinto which the natural world falls apart—the skysphere,the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and thelike; just as even now we may speak of the smile ofthe morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of thecold, without really meaning that these phenomenaof nature actually wear a human face.[23][23] Example: “Nature is always so interesting, underwhatever aspect she shows herself, that when itrains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. Sheappears the more beautiful, the more afflicted sheis.” B. de St. Pierre.The Varieties of Religious Experience62As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we neednot at present seek an opinion. But the whole arrayof our instances leads to a conclusion something likethis: It is as if there were in the human consciousnessa sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, aperception of what we may call “something there,”more deep and more general than any of the specialand particular “senses” by which the current psychologysupposes existent realities to be originallyrevealed. If this were so, we might suppose the sensesto waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habituallydo, by first exciting this sense of reality; butanything else, any idea, for example, that might similarlyexcite it, would have that same prerogative ofappearing real which objects of sense normally possess.So far as religious conceptions were able to touchthis reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spiteof criticism, even though they might be so vague andremote as to be almost unimaginable, even though theymight be such non-entities in point of whatness, asKant makes the objects of his moral theology to be.

William JamesThe most curious proofs of the existence of such anundifferentiated sense of reality as this are found inexperiences of hallucination. It often happens that anhallucination is imperfectly developed: the personaffected will feel a “presence” in the room, definitelylocalized, facing in one particular way, real in the mostemphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly,and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard,touched, nor cognized in any of the usual “sensible”ways. Let me give you an example of this, before Ipass to the objects with whose presence religion ismore peculiarly concerned.An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellectsI know, has had several experiences of thissort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries:—“I have several times within the past few years feltthe so-called ‘consciousness of a presence.’ The experienceswhich I have in mind are clearly distinguishablefrom another kind of experience which I havehad very frequently, and which I fancy many personswould also call the ‘consciousness of a presence.’But the difference for me between the two sets ofexperience is as great as the difference between feelinga slight warmth originating I know not where, andstanding in the midst of a conflagration with all theordinary senses alert.“It was about September, 1884, when I had the firstexperience. On the previous night I had had, aftergetting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactilehallucination of being grasped by the arm, whichmade me get up and search the room for an intruder;but the sense of presence properly so called came onthe next night. After I had got into bed and blown outthe candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previousnight’s experience, when suddenly I felt somethingcome into the room and stay close to my bed. Itremained only a minute or two. I did not recognize itby any ordinary sense and yet there was a horriblyunpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirredsomething more at the roots of my being than anyordinary perception. The feeling had something of the63

The Varieties of Religious Experiencequality of a very large tearing vital pain spreadingchiefly over the chest, but within the organism—andyet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence.At all events, something was present with me, and Iknew its presence far more surely than I have everknown the presence of any fleshly living creature. Iwas conscious of its departure as of its coming: analmost instantaneously swift going through the door,and the ‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.“On the third night when I retired my mind wasabsorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, andI was still absorbed in these when I became aware ofthe actual presence (though not of the coming) of thething that was there the night before, and of the ‘horriblesensation.’ I then mentally concentrated all myeffort to charge this ‘thing,’ if it was evil to depart, ifit was not evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if itcould not explain itself, to go, and that I would compelit to go. It went as on the previous night, and mybody quickly recovered its normal state.“On two other occasions in my life I have had preciselythe same ‘horrible sensation.’ Once it lasted afull quarter of an hour. In all three instances the certaintythat there in outward space there stood somethingwas indescribably stronger than the ordinarycertainty of companionship when we are in the closepresence of ordinary living people. The somethingseemed close to me, and intensely more real than anyordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like untomyself so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, asit were, I didn’t recognize it as any individual beingor person.”Of course such an experience as this does not connectitself with the religious sphere. Yet it may uponoccasion do so; and the same correspondent informsme that at more than one other conjuncture he hadthe sense of presence developed with equal intensityand abruptness, only then it was filled with a qualityof joy.“There was not a mere consciousness of somethingthere, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startlingawareness of some ineffable good. Not vague ei-64

William Jamesther, not like the emotional effect of some poem, orscene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledgeof the close presence of a sort of mighty person, andafter it went, the memory persisted as the one perceptionof reality. Everything else might be a dream,but not that.”My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpretthese latter experiences theistically, as signifying thepresence of God. But it would clearly not have beenunnatural to interpret them as a revelation of thedeity’s existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism,we shall have much more to say upon thishead.Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcertyou, I will venture to read you a couple of similarnarratives, much shorter, merely to show that we aredealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In thefirst case, which I take from the Journal of the Societyfor Psychical Research, the sense of presence developedin a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination—butI leave that part of the story out.“I had read,” the narrator says, “some twenty minutesor so, was thoroughly absorbed in the book, mymind was perfectly quiet, and for the time being myfriends were quite forgotten, when suddenly withouta moment’s warning my whole being seemed rousedto the highest state of tension or aliveness, and I wasaware, with an intenseness not easily imagined bythose who had never experienced it, that anotherbeing or presence was not only in the room, but quiteclose to me. I put my book down, and although myexcitement was great, I felt quite collected, and notconscious of any sense of fear. Without changing myposition, and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehowthat my friend A. H. was standing at my left elbowbut so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchairin which I was leaning back. Moving my eyesround slightly without otherwise changing my position,the lower portion of one leg became visible, andI instantly recognized the gray-blue material of trousershe often wore, but the stuff appeared semitransparent,reminding me of tobacco smoke in consis-65

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetency,”[24]— and hereupon the visual hallucinationcame.[24] Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.Another informant writes:—“Quite early in the night I was awakened… . I feltas if I had been aroused intentionally, and at firstthought some one was breaking into the house… . Ithen turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediatelyfelt a consciousness of a presence in theroom, and singular to state, it was not the consciousnessof a live person, but of a spiritual presence. Thismay provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the factsas they occurred to me. I do not know how to betterdescribe my sensations than by simply stating that Ifelt a consciousness of a spiritual presence… . I feltalso at the same time a strong feeling of superstitiousdread, as if something strange and fearful were aboutto happen.”[25][25] E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the followingtestimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has thegift of automatic or involuntary writing:—“Whenever I practice automatic writing, whatmakes me feel that it is not due to a subconscious selfis the feeling I always have of a foreign presence, externalto my body. It is sometimes so definitely characterizedthat I could point to its exact position. Thisimpression of presence is impossible to describe. Itvaries in intensity and clearness according to the personalityfrom whom the writing professes to come. Ifit is some one whom I love, I feel it immediately, beforeany writing has come. My heart seems to recognizeit.”In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full lengtha curious case of presence felt by a blind man. Thepresence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded mandressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himselfunder the crack of the door and moving across thefloor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject ofthis quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent66

William Jamesreporter. He is entirely without internal visual imageryand cannot represent light or colors to himself,and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc.,were not involved in this false perception. It seemsto have been an abstract conception rather, with thefeelings of reality and spatial outwardness directlyattached to it—in other words, a fully objectified andexteriorized idea.Such cases, taken along with others which would betoo tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to provethe existence in our mental machinery of a sense ofpresent reality more diffused and general than thatwhich our special senses yield. For the psychologiststhe tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling wouldform a pretty problem—nothing could be more naturalthan to connect it with the muscular sense, withthe feeling that our muscles were innervating themselvesfor action. Whatsoever thus innervated ouractivity, or “made our flesh creep”—our senses arewhat do so oftenest—might then appear real andpresent, even though it were but an abstract idea.But with such vague conjectures we have no concernat present, for our interest lies with the faculty ratherthan with its organic seat.Like all positive affections of consciousness, thesense of reality has its negative counterpart in theshape of a feeling of unreality by which persons maybe haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:—“When I reflect on the fact that I have made myappearance by accident upon a globe itself whirledthrough space as the sport of the catastrophes of theheavens,” says Madame Ackermann; “when I seemyself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensibleas I am myself, and all excitedly pursuingpure chimeras, I experience a strange feelingof being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have lovedand suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream.My last word will be, ‘I have been dreaming.’”[26][26] Pensees d’un Solitaire, p. 66.67

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIn another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholythis sense of the unreality of things may becomea carking pain, and even lead to suicide.We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctivelyreligious sphere of experience, many persons(how many we cannot tell) possess the objectsof their belief, not in the form of mere conceptionswhich their intellect accepts as true, but rather inthe form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.As his sense of the real presence of theseobjects fluctuates, so the believer alternates betweenwarmth and coldness in his faith. Other exampleswill bring this home to one better than abstract description,so I proceed immediately to cite some. Thefirst example is a negative one, deploring the loss ofthe sense in question. I have extracted it from anaccount given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance,of his religious life. It seems to me to showclearly that the feeling of reality may be somethingmore like a sensation than an intellectual operationproperly so-called.“Between twenty and thirty I gradually becamemore and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannotsay that I ever lost that ‘indefinite consciousness’which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an AbsoluteReality behind phenomena. For me this Realitywas not the pure Unknowable of Spencer’s philosophy,for although I had ceased my childish prayers toGod, and never prayed to it in a formal manner, yetmy more recent experience shows me to have beenin a relation to it which practically was the same thingas prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especiallywhen I had conflict with other people, either domesticallyor in the way of business, or when I was depressedin spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognizethat I used to fall back for support upon thiscurious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamentalcosmical it. It was on my side, or I was on Itsside, however you please to term it, in the particulartrouble, and it always strengthened me and seemedto give me endless vitality to feel its underlying andsupporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing foun-68

William Jamestain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which Iinstinctively turned at times of weakness, and it alwaysbrought me out. I know now that it was a personalrelation I was in to it, because of late years thepower of communicating with it has left me, and I amconscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never tofail to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set ofyears when sometimes I found it, and then again Iwould be wholly unable to make connection with it. Iremember many occasions on which at night in bed,I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry.I turned this way and that in the darkness, and gropedmentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind ofmy mind which had always seemed to be close at handas it were, closing the passage, and yielding support,but there was no electric current. A blank was thereinstead of it: I couldn’t find anything. Now, at the ageof nearly fifty, my power of getting into connectionwith it has entirely left me; and I have to confess thata great help has gone out of my life. Life has becomecuriously dead and indifferent; and I can now see thatmy old experience was probably exactly the samething as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did notcall them by that name. What I have spoken of as ‘It’was practically not Spencer’s Unknowable, but justmy own instinctive and individual God, whom I reliedupon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow Ihave lost.”Nothing is more common in the pages of religiousbiography than the way in which seasons of lively andof difficult faith are described as alternating. Probablyevery religious person has the recollection ofparticular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth,a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence,swept in and overwhelmed the languor of themore ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell’s correspondencethere is a brief memorandum of an experienceof this kind:—“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was atMary’s, and happening to say something of the presenceof spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimlyaware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with69

The Varieties of Religious Experienceme on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the wholesystem rose up before me like a vague destiny loomingfrom the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt theSpirit of God in me and around rue. The whole roomseemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver toand fro with the presence of Something I knew notwhat. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of aprophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. Ihave not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect itone day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledgeits grandeur.”[27]Here is a longer and more developed experiencefrom a manuscript communication by a clergyman—I take it from Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—“I remember the night, and almost the very spoton the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were,into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together ofthe two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deepcalling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle hadopened up within being answered by the unfathom-[27] Letters of Lowell, i. 75.able deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stoodalone with Him who had made me, and all the beautyof the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation.I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison ofmy spirit with His. The ordinary sense of thingsaround me faded. For the moment nothing but anineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossiblefully to describe the experience. It was like theeffect of some great orchestra when all the separatenotes have melted into one swelling harmony thatleaves the listener conscious of nothing save that hissoul is being wafted upwards, and almost burstingwith its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the nightwas thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darknessheld a presence that was all the more felt because itwas not seen. I could not any more have doubted thathe was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself tobe, if possible, the less real of the two.“My highest faith in God and truest idea of him werethen born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Visionsince, and felt the Eternal round about me. But70

never since has there come quite the same stirring ofthe heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to facewith God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was,as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief,except that my early crude conception, had, as it wereburst into flower. There was no destruction of theold, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that timeno discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God’sexistence has been able to shake my faith. Havingonce felt the presence of God’s spirit, I have neverlost it again for long. My most assuring evidence ofhis existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision inthe memory of that supreme experience, and in theconviction, gained from reading and reflection, thatsomething the same has come to all who have foundGod. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical.I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defendit from that or any other charge. I feel that inwriting of it I have overlaid it with words rather thanput it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I havedescribed it as carefully as I now am able to do.”William JamesHere is another document, even more definite incharacter, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translatefrom the French original.[28]“I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth dayof tramping, and in good training. We had come theday before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I felt neitherfatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind wasequally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news fromhome; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote,for we had a good guide, and there was not ashadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow.I can best describe the condition in which I wasby calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once Iexperienced a feeling of being raised above myself, Ifelt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as Iwas conscious of it—as if his goodness and his powerwere penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotionwas so violent that I could barely tell the boys topass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a[28] I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy’s permission,from his rich collection of psychological documents.71

The Varieties of Religious Experiencestone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowedwith tears. I thanked God that in the courseof my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustainedmy life and took pity both on the insignificantcreature and on the sinner that I was. I begged himardently that my life might be consecrated to thedoing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I shoulddo his will from day to day in humility and poverty,leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of whetherI should some time be called to bear witness moreconspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart;that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communionwhich he had granted, and I was able to walk on,but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed bythe interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedlyfor several minutes, my eyes were swollen, andI did not wish my companions to see me. The state ofecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, althoughit seemed at the time to last much longer. Mycomrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross ofBarine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutesto join them, for as well as I can remember, theysaid that I had kept them back for about half an hour.The impression had been so profound that in climbingslowly the slope I asked myself if it were possiblethat Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimatecommunication with God. I think it well to add thatin this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color,odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presencewas accompanied with no determinate localization.It was rather as if my personality had beentransformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. Butthe more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse,the more I feel the impossibility of describingthe thing by any of our usual images. At bottom theexpression most apt to render what I felt is this: Godwas present, though invisible; he fell under no one ofmy senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.”The adjective “mystical” is technically applied, mostoften. to states that are of brief duration. Of coursesuch hours of rapture as the last two persons describeare mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I72

William Jamesshall have much to say. Meanwhile here is theabridged record of another mystical or semi-mysticalexperience, in a mind evidently framed by naturefor ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck’s collection. Thelady who gives the account is the daughter of a manwell known in his time as a writer against Christianity.The suddenness of her conversion shows well hownative the sense of God’s presence must be to certainminds. She relates that she was brought up inentire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when inGermany, after being talked to by Christian friends,she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan ofsalvation flashed upon her like a stream of light.“To this day,” she writes, “I cannot understand dallyingwith religion and the commands of God. Thevery instant I heard my Father’s cry calling unto me,my heart bounded in recognition.I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud,‘Here, here I am, my Father.’ Oh, happy child, whatshould I do? ‘Love me,’ answered my God. ‘I do, Ido,’ I cried passionately. ‘Come unto me,’ called myFather. ‘I will,’ my heart panted. Did I stop to ask asingle question? Not one. It never occurred to me toask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate overmy unfitness, or to find out what I thought of hischurch, or … to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied!I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and myFather? Did he not love me? Had he not called me?Was there not a Church into which I might enter? …Since then I have had direct answers to prayer—sosignificant as to be almost like talking with God andhearing his answer. The idea of God’s reality hasnever left me for one moment.”Here is still another case, the writer being a managed twenty-seven, in which the experience, probablyalmost as characteristic, is less vividly described:—“I have on a number of occasions felt that I hadenjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine.These meetings came unasked and unexpected,and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliterationof the conventionalities which usually sur-73

The Varieties of Religious Experienceround and cover my life… . Once it was when fromthe summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashedand corrugated landscape extending to a long convexof ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again fromthe same point when I could see nothing beneath mebut a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blownsurface of which a few high peaks, including the one Iwas on, seemed plunging about as if they were draggingtheir anchors.What I felt on these occasions was a temporary lossof my own identity, accompanied by an illuminationwhich revealed to me a deeper significance than I hadbeen wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find myjustification for saying that I have enjoyed communicationwith God. Of course the absence of such a beingas this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of lifewithout its presence.”Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic senseof God’s presence the following sample from ProfessorStarbuck’s manuscript collection may serve togive an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine—probablythousands of unpretending Christians wouldwrite an almost identical account.“God is more real to me than any thought or thingor person. I feel his presence positively, and the moreas I live in closer harmony with his laws as written inmy body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain;and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness mostnearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companionin prayer and praise, and our communion isdelightful. He answers me again and again, often inwords so clearly spoken that it seems my outer earmust have carried the tone, but generally in strongmental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfoldingsome new view of him and his love for me,and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances,in school matters, social problems, financialdifficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his neverleaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would bea blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.”I subjoin some more examples from writers of differentages and sexes. They are also from Professor74

William JamesStarbuck’s collection, and their number might begreatly multiplied. The first is from a man twentysevenyears old:—“God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often getanswers. Thoughts sudden and distinct from any Ihave been entertaining come to my mind after askingGod for his direction. Something over a year ago Iwas for some weeks in the direst perplexity. Whenthe trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, butbefore long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctlya passage of Scripture: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee.’Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I couldhear this quotation. I don’t think I ever doubted theexistence of God, or had him drop out of my consciousness.God has frequently stepped into my affairsvery perceptibly, and I feel that he directs manylittle details all the time. But on two or three occasionshe has ordered ways for me very contrary tomy ambitions and plans.”Another statement (none the less valuable psychologicallyfor being so decidedly childish) is that of aboy of seventeen:—“Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in theservice, and before I go out I feel as if God was withme, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalmswith me… . And then again I feel as if I could sit besidehim, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc.When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, Itry to get with him and generally feel his presence.”I let a few other cases follow at random:—“God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere.He is closer to me than my own breath. In him literallyI live and move and have my being.”—“There are times when I seem to stand in his verypresence, to talk with him. Answers to prayer havecome, sometimes direct and overwhelming in theirrevelation of his presence and powers. There aretimes when God seems far off, but this is always myown fault.”—“I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at thesame time soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimesit seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms.”75

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceSuch is the human ontological imagination, and suchis the convincingness of what it brings to birth.Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized withan intensity almost like that of an hallucination. Theydetermine our vital attitude as decisively as the vitalattitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense,by which each is haunted, of the other being in theworld. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuousbeing of his idol, even when his attention isaddressed to other matters and he no longer representsher features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedlyaffects him through and through. I spokeof the convincingness of these feelings of reality, andI must dwell a moment longer on that point. Theyare as convincing to those who have them as any directsensible experiences can be, and they are, as arule, much more convincing than results establishedby mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirelywithout them; probably more than one of you herepresent is without them in any marked degree; but ifyou do have them, and have them at all strongly, theprobability is that you cannot help regarding them asgenuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kindof reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerableby you in words, can expel from yourbelief.The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy issometimes spoken of as rationalism. Rationalism insiststhat all our beliefs ought ultimately to find forthemselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism,must consist of four things: (1) definitelystatable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation;(3) definite hypotheses based on such facts;and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vagueimpressions of something indefinable have no placein the rationalistic system, which on its positive sideis surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not onlyare all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science(amongst other good things) is its result.Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental lifeas it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apartfrom their learning and science, and that they in-76

William Jameswardly and privately follow, we have to confess thatthe part of it of which rationalism can give an accountis relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestigeundoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challengeyou for proofs, and chop logic, and put you downwith words. But it will fail to convince or convert youall the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed toits conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they comefrom a deeper level of your nature than the loquaciouslevel which rationalism inhabits. Your wholesubconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, yourneeds, your divinations, have prepared the premises,of which your consciousness now feels the weight ofthe result; and something in you absolutely knowsthat that result must be truer than any logic-choppingrationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradictit. This inferiority of the rationalistic level infounding belief is just as manifest when rationalismargues for religion as when it argues against it. Thatvast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawnfrom the order of nature, which a century ago seemedso overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little morethan gather dust in libraries, for the simple reasonthat our generation has ceased to believe in the kindof God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being Godmay be, we know to-day that he is nevermore thatmere external inventor of “contrivances” intendedto make manifest his “glory” in which our greatgrandfatherstook such satisfaction, though just howwe know this we cannot possibly make clear by wordseither to others or to ourselves. I defy any of youhere fully to account for your persuasion that if a Godexist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personagethan that Being.The truth is that in the metaphysical and religioussphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only whenour inarticulate feelings of reality have already beenimpressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed,our intuitions and our reason work together,and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhistor of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Ourimpulsive belief is here always what sets up the origi-77

The Varieties of Religious Experiencenal body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophyis but its showy translation into formulas. Theunreasoned and immediate assurance is the deepthing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surfaceexhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.If a person feels the presence of a living God afterthe fashion shown by my quotations, your criticalarguments, be they never so superior, will vainly setthemselves to change his faith.Please observe, however, that I do not yet say thatit is better that the subconscious and non-rationalshould thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confinemyself to simply pointing out that they do so holdit as a matter of fact.So much for our sense of the reality of the religiousobjects. Let me now say a brief word more about theattitudes they characteristically awaken.We have already agreed that they are solemn; andwe have seen reason to think that the most distinctiveof them is the sort of joy which may result inextreme cases from absolute self-surrender. Thesense of the kind of object to which the surrender ismade has much to do with determining the precisecomplexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon ismore complex than any simple formula allows. In theliterature of the subject, sadness and gladness haveeach been emphasized in turn. The ancient saying thatthe first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminouscorroboration from every age of religious history;but none the less does religious history showthe part which joy has evermore tended to play.Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary,being the gladness of deliverance from thefear. This latter state of things, being the more complex,is also the more complete; and as we proceed, Ithink we shall have abundant reason for refusing toleave out either the sadness or the gladness, if welook at religion with the breadth of view which it demands.Stated in the completest possible terms, aman’s religion involves both moods of contraction andmoods of expansion of his being. But the quantitativemixture and order of these moods vary so much from78

William Jamesone age of the world, from one system of thought, conviction which some men can feel, and which forand from one individual to another, that you may insisteither on the dread and the submission, or on the feeling of religious joy.them is as near an approach as can be made to thepeace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, “In Job,” says that coldly truthful writer, the authorof Mark Rutherford, “God reminds us that manand still remain materially within the limits of thetruth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionallysanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize mense, constructed on no plan or theory which theis not the measure of his creation. The world is im-opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes. intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere.This is the burden of every verse, and is theThe constitutionally sombre religious person makeseven of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger secret if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient,there is nothing more… . God is great, westill hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contractionare not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, butchildish after our deliverance to explode into twitteringlaughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to for-the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlightyet if we possess our souls in patience, we may passget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie again. We may or we may not! … What more have welow; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the to say now than God said from the whirlwind overBook of Job, for example, the impotence of man and two thousand five hundred years ago?”[29]the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the otherauthor’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; what canst hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incompletethou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?”There is an astringent relish about the truth of this [29] Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, London, 1885,pp. 196, 198.79

The Varieties of Religious Experienceunless the burden be altogether overcome and thedanger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitionsthat seem to the sombre minds of whom we have justbeen speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makesreligious peace so different from merely animal joys.In the opinion of some writers an attitude might becalled religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrificeor submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowingof the head. Any “habitual and regulated admiration,”says Professor J. R. Seeley,[30] “is worthy to be calleda religion”; and accordingly he thinks that our Music,our Science, and our so-called “Civilization,” as thesethings are now organized and admiringly believed in,form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainlythe unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feelthat we must inflict our civilization upon “lower” races,by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothingso much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading itsreligion by the sword.[30] In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion,3d edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122.In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radicalopinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sortmay be considered a religious exercise, for it bearswitness to the soul’s emancipation. I quoted this opinionin order to deny its adequacy. But we must nowsettle our scores more carefully with this whole optimisticway of thinking. It is far too complex to be decidedoff-hand. I propose accordingly that we makeof religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.80

William JamesLectures IV and VTHE RELIGION OF HEALTHYMINDEDNESSIF WE WERE to ask the question: “What is human life’schief concern?” one of the answers we should receivewould be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep,how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men atall times the secret motive of all they do, and of allthey are willing to endure. The hedonistic school inethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiencesof happiness and unhappiness which differentkinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religiouslife than in the moral life, happiness and unhappinessseem to be the poles round which the interestrevolves. We need not go so far as to say withthe author whom I lately quoted that any persistententhusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call merelaughter a religious exercise; but we must admit thatany persistent enjoyment may produce the sort ofreligion which consists in a grateful admiration of thegift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledgethat the more complex ways of experiencingreligion are new manners of producing happiness,wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind ofhappiness, when the first gift of natural existence isunhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.With such relations between religion and happiness,it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regardthe happiness which a religious belief affords as a proofof its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, healmost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to betrue; therefore it is true—such, rightly or wrongly, isone of the “immediate inferences” of the religious logicused by ordinary men.“The near presence of God’s spirit,” says a Germanwriter,[31] “may be experienced in its reality—indeedonly experienced. And the mark by which thespirit’s existence and nearness are made irrefutablyclear to those who have ever had the experience is[31] C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.81

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe utterly incomparable feeling of happiness whichis connected with the nearness, and which is thereforenot only a possible and altogether proper feelingfor us to have here below, but is the best and mostindispensable proof of God’s reality. No other proofis equally convincing, and therefore happiness is thepoint from which every efficacious new theologyshould start.”In the hour immediately before us, I shall inviteyou to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness,leaving the more complex sorts to be treatedon a later day.In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable.“Cosmic emotion” inevitably takes in themthe form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not onlyof those who are animally happy. I mean those who,when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them,positively refuse to feel it, as if it were somethingmean and wrong. We find such persons in every age,passionately flinging themselves upon their sense ofthe goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of theirown condition, and in spite of the sinister theologiesinto which they may he born. From the outset theirreligion is one of union with the divine. The hereticswho went before the reformation are lavishly accusedby the church writers of antinomian practices, just asthe first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgiesby the Romans. It is probable that there neverhas been a century in which the deliberate refusal tothink ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficientnumber of persons to form sects, open or secret, whoclaimed all natural things to be permitted. SaintAugustine’s maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac—if you butlove [God], you may do as you incline—is morally oneof the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant,for such persons, with passports beyond the boundsof conventional morality. According to their charactersthey have been refined or gross; but their beliefhas been at all times systematic enough to constitutea definite religious attitude. God was for them a giverof freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. SaintFrancis and his immediate disciples were, on the82

William Jameswhole, of this company of spirits, of which there areof course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlieryears of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, andmany of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type.They owed their influence to a certain authoritativenessin their feeling that Nature, if you will only trusther sufficiently, is absolutely good.It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhapsmore often feminine than masculine, and youngthan old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinitiesare rather with flowers and birds and all enchantinginnocencies than with dark human passions,who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religiousgladness, being in possession from the outset,needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.“God has two families of children on this earth,” saysFrancis W. Newman,[32] “the once-born and thetwice-born,” and the once-born he describes as follows:“They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as aGlorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of abeautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind,Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generallyhave no metaphysical tendencies: they do notlook back into themselves. Hence they are not distressedby their own imperfections: yet it would beabsurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardlythink of themselves at all. This childlike quality oftheir nature makes the opening of religion very happyto them: for they no more shrink from God, than achild from an emperor, before whom the parenttrembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception ofany of the qualities in which the severer Majesty ofGod consists.[33] He is to them the impersonation ofKindness and Beauty. They read his character, not inthe disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmoniousnature. Of human sin they know perhapslittle in their own hearts and not very much in the[32] The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d [33] I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gaveedition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.her to think that she “could always cuddle up to God.”83

The Varieties of Religious Experienceworld; and human suffering does but melt them totenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inwarddisturbance ensues; and without being as yetspiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhapsromantic sense of excitement in their simpleworship.”In the Romish Church such characters find a morecongenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whosefashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedlypessimistic order. But even in Protestantismthey have been abundant enough; and in its recent“liberal” developments of Unitarianism andlatitudinarianism generally, minds of this order haveplayed and still are playing leading and constructiveparts. Emerson himself is an admirable example.Theodore Parker is another—here are a couple ofcharacteristic passages from Parker’s correspondence.[34]“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics youfind no consciousness of sin.’ It is very true—God be[34] John Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty,avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, andother actual vices, and struggled and got rid of thedeformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmityagainst God,’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groanagainst non-existent evil. I have done wrong thingsenough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark,draw bow, and try again. But I am not conscious ofhating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know thereis much ‘health in me’, and in my body, even now,there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumptionand Saint Paul.” In another letter Parker writes:“I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; andif sometimes they were a little cold, and the streamran adverse and something rough, it was never toostrong to be breasted and swum through. From thedays of earliest boyhood, when I went stumblingthrough the grass, … up to the gray-bearded manhoodof this time, there is none but has left me honeyin the hive of memory that I now feed on for presentdelight. When I recall the years … I am filled with a84

William Jamessense of sweetness and wonder that such little things always glad to receive his suggestions to me… . I cancan make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood,the half-philosophical novels of the time had aconfess that the chiefest of all my delights is still thereligious.”deal to say about the young men and maidens whoAnother good expression of the “once-born” type were facing the ‘problem of life.’ I had no idea whateverwhat the problem of life was. To live with all myof consciousness, developing straight and natural, withno element of morbid compunction or crisis, is containedin the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost ofmight seemed to me easy; to learn where there waseminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural;Starbuck’s circulars. I quote a part of it:—and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he“I observe, with profound regret, the religious could not help it, and without proving to himself thatstruggles which come into many biographies, as if almostessential to the formation of the hero. I ought that he is God’s child, that he may live and move andhe ought to enjoy it… . A child who is early taughtto speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage,not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a finite strength at hand for the conquering of any dif-have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, in-family where the religion is simple and rational; who ficulty, will take life more easily, and probably willis trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he make more of it, than one who is told that he is bornnever knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligiousstruggles are. I always knew God loved me, One can but recognize in such writers as these thethe child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.”[35]and I was always grateful to him for the world he presence of a temperament organically weighted onplaced me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was[35] Starbuck: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.85

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoythose of opposite temperament linger, over the weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperatedand sad. I feel as if these were so many diver-darker aspects of the universe. In some individualsoptimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacityfor even a transient sadness or a momentary hu-on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am sosions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to livemility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenitalanaesthesia.[36]I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased—accommodating.This finding of a luxury in woe is very common duringadolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff But everything in life pleases me. I find everythingno, not exactly that—I know not how to express it.expresses it well:—agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for“In his depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering,I don’t condemn life. On the contrary, I like it is not I who undergo all this—my body weeps andhappiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. Itand find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything cries; but something inside of me which is above meis glad of it all.” [37][36] “I know not to what physical laws philosophers The supreme contemporary example of such an inabilityto feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.will some day refer the feelings of melancholy. Formyself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all “His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr.sensations,” writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he Bucke “seemed to be strolling or sauntering aboutdevotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees,the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects ofde la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude—each of themmore optimistic than the last. [37] Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.86

William Jamesthe sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, thetree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.It was evident that these things gave him a pleasurefar beyond what they give to ordinary people.Until I knew the man,” continues Dr. Bucke, “it hadnot occurred to me that any one could derive so muchabsolute happiness from these things as he did. Hewas very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated;liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowersjust as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no manwho ever lived liked so many things and disliked sofew as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed tohave a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemedto please him. He appeared to like (and I believe hedid like) all the men, women, and children he saw(though I never knew him to say that he liked anyone), but each who knew him felt that he liked him orher, and that he liked others also. I never knew himto argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money.He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimesquite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himselfor his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasurein the opposition of enemies. When I first knew[him], I used to think that he watched himself, andwould not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness,antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It didnot occur to me as possible that these mental statescould be absent in him. After long observation, however,I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousnesswas entirely real. He never spoke deprecatinglyof any nationality or class of men, or time inthe world’s history, or against any trades or occupations—noteven against any animals, insects, or inanimatethings, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any ofthe results of those laws, such as illness, deformity,and death. He never complained or grumbled eitherat the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He neverswore. He could not very well, since he never spoke inanger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibitedfear, and I do not believe he ever felt it.”[38][38] R. M. Bucke: Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182-186,abridged.87

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceWalt Whitman owes his importance in literature tothe systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractileelements. The only sentiments he allowed himselfto express were of the expansive order; and heexpressed these in the first person, not as your meremonstrously conceited individual might so expressthem, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionateand mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, andends by persuading the reader that men and women,life and death, and all things are divinely good.Thus it has come about that many persons to-dayregard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternalnatural religion. He has infected them with his ownlove of comrades, with his own gladness that he andthey exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult;a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in whichthe lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are alreadybeginning to be drawn;[39] hymns are written byothers in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explic-[39] I refer to The Conservator, edited by HoraceTraubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.itly compared with the founder of the Christian religion,not altogether to the advantage of the latter.Whitman is often spoken of as a “pagan.” The wordnowadays means sometimes the mere natural animalman without a sense of sin; sometimes it meansa Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness.In neither of these senses does it fitly definethis poet. He is more than your mere animal manwho has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He isaware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in hisindifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedomfrom flexions and contractions, which your genuinepagan in the first sense of the word would nevershow.“I could turn and live with animals, they are soplacid and self-contained,I stand and look at them long and long;They do not sweat and whine about their condition.They do not lie awake in the dark and weep fortheir sins.Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented withthe mania of owning things,88

William JamesNot one kneels to another, nor to his kind thatlived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the wholeearth.”[40]No natural pagan could have written these wellknownlines. But on the other hand Whitman is lessthan a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, evenin Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortalityof this sunlit world, and such a consciousnessWalt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, forexample, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam’syoung son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:—“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentestthou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far thanthou… . Over me too hang death and forceful fate.There cometh morn or eve or some noonday whenmy life too some man shall take in battle, whetherwith spear he smite, or arrow from the string.”[41][40] Song of Myself, 32.[41] Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neckwith his sword, heaves him by the foot into theScamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eatthe white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty andthe sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interferewith one another, so did the Greeks and Romanskeep all their sadnesses and gladnessesunmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did notreckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save thecredit of the universe as to make them insist, as somany of US insist, that what immediately appears asevil must be “good in the making,” or somethingequally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad,for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills ofnature—Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is called goodis perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,”would have been mere silliness to them—nor did they,in order to escape from those ills, invent “another anda better world” of the imagination, in which, alongwith the ills, the innocent goods of sense would alsofind no place. This integrity of the instinctive reac-89

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, tematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceivinggives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And things as good. Every abstract way of conceivingthis quality Whitman’s outpourings have not got. His things selects some one aspect of them as their essencefor the time being, and disregards the otheroptimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel hasa touch of bravado and an affected twist,[42] and this aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceivingdiminishes its effect on many readers who yet are good as the essential and universal aspect of being,well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; andquite willing to admit that in important respects although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seemWhitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets. a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectuallyIf, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness sincere with himself and honest about facts, a littleto the tendency which looks on all things and sees reflection shows that the situation is too complex tothat they are good, we find that we must distinguish lie open to so simple a criticism.between a more involuntary and a more voluntary In the first place, happiness, like every other emotionalstate, has blindness and insensibility to oppos-or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntaryvariety, healthy-mindedness is a way of ing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for selfprotectionagainst disturbance. When happiness isfeeling happy about things immediately. In its sys-actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more[42] “God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanicoptimisticfriend in my presence one morning when can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the manacquire the feeling of reality than the thought of goodhe was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannotthen and there be believed in. He must ignore it;The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christianeducation in humility still rankled in his breast.90

William Jamesand to the bystander he may then seem perverselyto shut his eyes to it and hush it up.But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in aperfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberatereligious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we callevil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon.It can so often be converted into a bracing andtonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s innerattitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting sooften departs and turns into a relish when, after vainlyseeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear itcheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, withreference to many of the facts that seem at first todisconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuseto admit their badness; despise their power; ignoretheir presence; turn your attention the other way; andso far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, thoughthe facts may still exist, their evil character exists nolonger. Since you make them evil or good by your ownthoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughtswhich proves to be your principal concern.The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn ofmind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. Andonce in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not onlydoes the human instinct for happiness, bent on selfprotectionby ignoring, keep working in its favor, buthigher inner ideals have weighty words to say. Theattitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is meanand ugly. What can be more base and unworthy thanthe pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by whatoutward ills it may have been engendered? What ismore injurious to others? What less helpful as a wayout of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuatesthe trouble which occasioned it, and increases the totalevil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought toreduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it inourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in thesubjective sphere without zealously emphasizing thebrighter and minimizing the darker aspects of theobjective sphere of things at the same time. And thusour resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at91

a comparatively small point within ourselves, maynot stop until it has brought the entire frame of realityunder a systematic conception optimistic enoughto be congenial with its needs.In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight orpersuasion that the total frame of things absolutelymust be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormouspart in the history of the religious consciousness,and we must look at it later with some care. But weneed not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mysticalconditions of rapture suffice for my immediatecontention. All invasive moral states and passionateenthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction.The common penalties cease to deter the patriot,the usual prudences are flung by the lover to thewinds. When the passion is extreme, suffering mayactually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause,death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In thesestates, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems tobe swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotentexcitement which engulfs the evil, and which theThe Varieties of Religious Experience92human being welcomes as the crowning experience ofhis life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in theheroic opportunity and adventure.The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness asa religious attitude is therefore consonant with importantcurrents in human nature, and is anything butabsurd. In fact. we all do cultivate it more or less, evenwhen our professed theology should in consistency forbidit. We divert our attention from disease and deathas much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencieswithout end on which our life is founded arehuddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that theworld we recognize officially in literature and in societyis a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner andbetter than the world that really is.[43][43] “As I go on in this life, day by day, I becomemore of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to thisworld, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing,the commonest things are a burthen. The prim,obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdyand orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form aspectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. L.Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.

William JamesThe advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity,during the past fifty years, may fairly be called avictory of healthy-mindedness within the church overthe morbidness with which the old hell-fire theologywas more harmoniously related. We have now wholecongregations whose preachers, far from magnifyingour consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather tomaking little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternalpunishment, and insist on the dignity rather than onthe depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupationof the old-fashioned Christian with thesalvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensiblerather than admirable; and a sanguine and“muscular” attitude. which to our forefathers wouldhave seemed purely heathen, has become in theireyes an ideal element of Christian character. I amnot asking whether or not they are right, I am onlypointing out the change. The persons to whom I referhave still retained for the most part their nominalconnection with Christianity, in spite of their discardingof its more pessimistic theological elements. Butin that “theory of evolution” which, gathering momentumfor a century, has within the past twentyfiveyears swept so rapidly over Europe and America,we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion ofNature, which has entirely displaced Christianity fromthe thought of a large part of our generation. The ideaof a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine ofgeneral meliorism and progress which fits the religiousneeds of the healthy-minded so well that itseems almost as if it might have been created for theiruse. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpretedthus optimistically and embraced as a substitute forthe religion they were born in, by a multitude of ourcontemporaries who have either been trained scientifically,or been fond of reading popular science, andwho had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfiedwith what seemed to them the harshness and irrationalityof the orthodox Christian scheme. As examplesare better than descriptions, I will quote adocument received in answer to Professor Starbuck’scircular of questions.93

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceThe writer’s state of mind may by courtesy be calleda religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature ofthings, it is systematic and reflective and it loyallybinds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognizein him, coarse-meated and incapable ofwounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporarytype.Q. What does Religion mean to you?us to rely on some supernatural power, when we oughtto rely on ourselves. I teetotally disbelieve in a God.The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and ageneral lack of any knowledge of Nature. If I were todie now, being in a healthy condition for my age, bothmentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather,die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or anyother rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die—there being no immortality in either case.A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observeuseless to others. I am sixty-seven years of ageand have resided in X fifty years, and have been inbusiness forty-five, consequently I have some littleexperience of life and men, and some women too, andI find that the most religious and pious people are as arule those most lacking in uprightness and morality.The men who do not go to church or have any religiousconvictions are the best. Praying, singing ofhymns, and sermonizing are pernicious—they teachQ. What comes before your mind corresponding tothe words God, Heaven, Angels, etc?A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion.These words mean so much mythic bosh.Q. Have you had any experiences which appearedprovidential?A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintendingkind. A little judicious observation as well94

William Jamesas knowledge of scientific law will convince any one ofthis fact.Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of anOratorio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especiallyShakespeare, etc., etc. Of songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all moraland soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns aremy detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fineweather, and until within a few years used to walkSundays into the country, twelve miles often, withno fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I have droppedthe bicycle.regard as the deepest law. Mankind is a progressiveanimal. I am satisfied he will have made a great advanceover his present status a thousand years hence.Q. What is your notion of sin?A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease,incidental to man’s development not being yet advancedenough. Morbidness over it increases the disease.We should think that a million of years henceequity, justice, and mental and physical good orderwill be so fixed and organized that no one will haveany idea of evil or sin.Q. What is your temperament?I never go to church, but attend lectures when thereare any good ones. All of my thoughts and cogitationshave been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for insteadof doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavorto adjust myself to my environment. This IA. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically.Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all.If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart,clearly we need not look to this brother. His content-95

The Varieties of Religious Experiencement with the finite incases him like a lobster-shelland shields him from all morbid repining at his distancefrom the infinite. We have in him an excellentexample of the optimism which may be encouragedby popular science.To my mind a current far more important and interestingreligiously than that which sets in from naturalscience towards healthy-mindedness is that whichhas recently poured over America and seems to begathering force every day—I am ignorant what footholdit may yet have acquired in Great Britain—andto which, for the sake of having a brief designation, Iwill give the title of the “Mind-cure movement.”There are various sects of this “New Thought,” touse another of the names by which it calls itself; buttheir agreements are so profound that their differencesmay be neglected for my present purpose, andI will treat the movement, without apology, as if itwere a simple thing.It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, withboth a speculative and a practical side. In its gradualdevelopment during the last quarter of a century, ithas taken up into itself a number of contributory elements,and it must now be reckoned with as a genuinereligious power. It has reached the stage, for example,when the demand for its literature is greatenough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced forthe market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers—aphenomenon never observed, I imagine,until a religion has got well past its earliest insecurebeginnings.One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the fourGospels; another is Emersonianism or New Englandtranscendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism;another is spiritism, with its messages of “law” and“progress” and “development”; another the optimisticpopular science evolutionism of which I have recentlyspoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributeda strain. But the most characteristic feature of themind-cure movement is an inspiration much moredirect. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive96

William Jamesbelief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudesas such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, had it in them; regeneration of character has gone onproved possible to many who never supposed theyhope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restoredto countless homes. The indirect influence offear, worry, and all nervously precautionary statesof mind.[44] Their belief has in a general way been this has been great. The mind-cure principles arecorroborated by the practical experience of their disciples;and this experience forms to-day a mass im-spirit at second-hand. One hears of the “Gospel ofbeginning so to pervade the air that one catches theirposing in amount.Relaxation,” of the “Don’t Worry Movement,” ofThe blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; people who repeat to themselves, “Youth, health,life-long invalids have had their health restored. The vigor!” when dressing in the morning, as their mottomoral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberateadoption of a healthy-minded attitude has Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbid-for the day.den in many households; and more and more people[44] “Cautionary Verses for Children”: this title of a are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeablesensations, or to make much of the ordinary in-much used work, published early in the nineteenthcentury, shows how far the muse of evangelical conveniences and ailments of life. These general tonicprotestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the effects on public opinion would be good even if theidea of danger, had at last drifted away from the originalgospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called ter abound so that we can afford to overlook the in-more striking results were non-existent. But the lat-a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety numerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixedwhich marked the earlier part of our century in the in with them (for in everything human failure is aevangelical circles of England and America.97

The Varieties of Religious Experiencematter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiageof a good deal of the mind-cure literature, someof which is so moonstruck with optimism and sovaguely expressed that an academically trained intellectfinds it almost impossible to read it at all.The plain fact remains that the spread of the movementhas been due to practical fruits, and the extremelypractical turn of character of the Americanpeople has never been better shown than by the factthat this, their only decidedly original contribution tothe systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimatelyknit up with concrete therapeutics. To theimportance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professionsin the United States are beginning, thoughwith much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open theireyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther,both speculatively and practically, and its latest writersare far and away the ablest of the group.[45] Itmatters nothing that, just as there are hosts of personswho cannot pray, so there are greater hosts whocannot by any possibility be influenced by the mindcurers’ideas. For our immediate purpose, the importantpoint is that so large a number should existwho CAN be so influenced. They form a psychic typeto be studied with respect.[46][45] I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. HenryWood, especially the former. Mr. Dresser’s works arepublished by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York andLondon; Mr. Wood’s by Lee & Shepard Boston.[46] Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quoteanother reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University,whose thesis on “the Effects of Mind on Bodyas evidenced by Faith Cures” is published in theAmerican Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.).This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludesthat the cures by mind-cure exist, but are in no respectdifferent from those now officially recognizedin medicine as cures by suggestion; and the end of hisessay contains an interesting physiological speculationas to the way in which the suggestive ideas may98

William Jameswork (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the generalphenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddardwrites: “In spite of the severe criticism we have madeof reports of cure, there still remains a vast amountof material, showing a powerful influence of the mindin disease. Many cases are of diseases that have beendiagnosed and treated by the best physicians of thecountry, or which prominent hospitals have tried theirhand at curing, but without success. People of cultureand education have been treated by this methodwith satisfactory results. Diseases of long standinghave been ameliorated, and even cured… . We havetraced the mental element through primitive medicineand folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, andwitchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible toaccount for the existence of these practices, if theydid not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, itmust have been the mental element that was effective.The same argument applies to those modernschools of mental therapeutics—Divine Healing andChristian Science. It is hardly conceivable that thelarge body of intelligent people who comprise the bodyknown distinctively as Mental Scientists should continueto exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It isnot a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is notlocal. It is true that many failures are recorded, butthat only adds to the argument. There must be manyand striking successes to counterbalance the failures,otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion…. Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Sciencedo not, and never can in the very nature of things, cureall diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications ofthe general principles of the broadest mental sciencewill tend to prevent disease… . We do find sufficientevidence to convince us that the proper reform inmental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of illsthat the ordinary physician cannot touch; would evendelay the approach of death to many a victim beyondthe power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherenceto a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well,and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating illsthat are unpreventable” (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).99

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceTo come now to a little closer quarters with their attraction are the natural motives, but is weakeningcreed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothingmore than the general basis of all religious experi-fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should be en-and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary,ence, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connectedwith two spheres of thought, a shallower and a tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear and in the detirelyremoved, as dead flesh is removed from livingprofounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to nunciation of its expressions, I have coined the wordlive more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere fearthought to stand for the unprofitable element ofis that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, forethought, and have defined the word ‘worry’ asof egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. fearthought in contradistinction to forethought. I haveBut whereas Christian theology has always considered also defined fearthought as the self-imposed or selfpermittedsuggestion of inferiority, in order to placeforwardness to be the essential vice of this part ofhuman nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of it where it really belongs, in the category of harmful,the beast in it is fear; and this is what gives such an unnecessary, and therefore not respectableentirely new religious turn to their persuasion. things.”[47]“Fear,” to quote a writer of the school, “has had its The “misery-habit,” the “martyr-habit,” engenderedby the prevalent “fearthought,” get pungentuses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitutethe whole of forethought in most animals; but criticism from the mind-cure writers:—that it should remain any part of the mental equipmentof human civilized life is an absurdity. I find [47] Horace Fletcher: Happiness as found in ForethoughtMinus Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii.that the fear clement of forethought is not stimulatingto those more civilized persons to whom duty and Chicago and New York, Stone. 1897, pp. 21-25,abridged.100

William James“Consider for a moment the habits of life into whichwe are born.There are certain social conventions or customs andalleged requirements, there is a theological bias, ageneral view of the world. There are conservativeideas in regard to our early training, our education,marriage, and occupation in life. Following close uponthis, there is a long series of anticipations, namely,that we shall suffer certain children’s diseases, diseasesof middle life, and of old age; the thought thatwe shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again becomechildlike; while crowning all is the fear of death.Then there is a long line of particular tears andtrouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, asideas associated with certain articles of food, the dreadof the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the achesand pains associated with cold weather, the fear ofcatching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming ofhay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle ofthe day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads,worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations,pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly trainof fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especiallyphysicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an arrayworthy to rank with Bradley’s ‘unearthly ballet ofbloodless categories.’“Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled byinnumerable volunteers from daily life—the fear ofaccident, the possibility of calamity, the loss of property,the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreakof war. And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves.When a friend is taken ill, we must forth withfear the worst and apprehend death. If one meetswith sorrow … sympathy means to enter into and increasethe suffering.”[48]“Man,” to quote another writer, “often has fearstamped upon him before his entrance into the outerworld; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondageto fear of disease and death, and thus his wholementality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed,[48] H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York,1899, p. 38.101

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification… Think of the millions of sensitive and responsivesouls among our ancestors who have beenunder the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare!Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothingbut the boundless divine love? exuberance, and vitality,constantly poured in, even though unconsciouslyto us, could in some degree neutralize suchan ocean of morbidity.”[49][49] Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion through MentalPhotography. Boston, 1899, p. 54.Although the disciples of the mind-cure often useChristian terminology, one sees from such quotationshow widely their notion of the fall of man divergesfrom that of ordinary Christians.[50][50] Whether it differs so much from Christ’s ownnotion is for the exegetists to decide. According toHarnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much asour mind-curers do. “What is the answer which Jesussends to John the Baptist?” asks Harnack, and saysit is this: “‘The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepersare cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up,and the gospel is preached to the poor.’ That is the‘coming of the kingdom,’ or rather in these savingworks the kingdom is already there. By the overcomingand removal of misery, of need, of sickness, bythese actual effects John is to see that the new timehas arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part ofthis work of redemption, but Jesus points to that asthe sense and seal of his mission. Thus to thewretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, butnot as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism.He never makes groups and departments of theills, he never spends time in asking whether the sickone ‘deserves’ to be cured; and it never occurs to himto sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowheresays that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and thatevil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sicknessand health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for himsomething dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan;but he feels the power of the saviour within him.He knows that advance is possible only when weaknessis overcome, when sickness is made well.” DasWesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39.102

William JamesTheir notion of man’s higher nature is hardly lessdivergent, being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritualin man appears in the mind-cure philosophy as partlyconscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through thesubconscious part of it we are already one with theDivine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creationof a new inner man. As this view is variouslyexpressed by different writers, we find in it traces ofChristian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, ofvedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminalself. A quotation or two will put us at the centralpoint of view:—“The great central fact of the universe is that spiritof infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifestsitself in and through all. This spirit of infinite lifeand power that is back of all is what I call God. I carenot what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence,the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whateverterm may be most convenient, so long as we areagreed in regard to the great central fact itself. Godthen fills the universe alone, so that all is from Himand in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He isthe life of our life our very life itself. We are partakersof the life of God; and though we differ from Himin that we are individualized spirits, while He is theInfinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside,yet in essence the life of God and the life of man areidentically the same, and so are one. They differ notin essence or quality; they differ in degree.“The great central fact in human life is the cominginto a conscious vital realization of our oneness withthis Infinite Life and the opening of ourselves fully tothis divine inflow. In just the degree that we comeinto a conscious realization of our oneness with theInfinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow,do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powersof the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channelsthrough which the Infinite Intelligence and Power canwork. In just the degree in which you realize youroneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange diseasefor ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering andpain for abounding health and strength. To recognize103

The Varieties of Religious Experienceour own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal,is to attach the belts of our machinery to the as did the Nazarene: ‘I and my Father are one,’ has nocan feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence,powerhouse of the Universe. One need remain in hell further need of healer, or of healing. This is the wholeno longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholenesscan no man lay than this fact of impregnable di-heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose soto rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combineto help us heavenward.”[51]feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, movineunion. Disease can no longer attack one whoseLet me now pass from these abstracter statements mently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence,how can weariness enter the consciousness,to some more concrete accounts of experience withthe mind-cure religion. I have many answers from how illness assail that indomitable spark?correspondents—the only difficulty is to choose. The “This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatiguehas been abundantly proven in my own case;first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends.One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses for my earlier life bears a record of many, many yearswell the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbsby which all mind-cure disciples are inspired. paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, they are to-day, although my belief in the necessityor depression is the human sense of separateness from of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since mythat Divine Energy which we call God. The soul which resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healerunceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and[51] R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand,N.Y. 1899. I have strung scattered passages ment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch con-can truthfully assert that I have never known a motogether.104

William Jamesstantly with excessive weakness, illness, and diseaseof all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity besick?—since ‘Greater is he that is with us than all thatcan strive against us.’”My second correspondent, also a woman, sends methe following statement:—“Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was alwaysbreaking down, and had several attacks of whatis called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia,being on the verge of insanity; besides having manyother troubles, especially of the digestive organs. Ihad been sent away from home in charge of doctors,had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, beenfed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach.But I never recovered permanently till this NewThought took possession of me.“I think that the one thing which impressed me mostwas learning the fact that we must be in absolutelyconstant relation or mental touch (this word is to mevery expressive) with that essence of life which permeatesall and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizableunless we live it into ourselves actually,that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost,deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God inus, for illumination from within, just as we turn to thesun for light, warmth, and invigoration without. Whenyou do this consciously, realizing that to turn inwardto the light within you is to live in the presence ofGod or your divine self, you soon discover the unrealityof the objects to which you have hitherto beenturning and which have engrossed you without.“I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitudefor bodily health as such, because that comes ofitself, as an incidental result, and cannot be found byany special mental act or desire to have it, beyondthat general attitude of mind I have referred to above.That which we usually make the object of life, thoseouter things we are all so wildly seeking, which we sooften live and die for, but which then do not give uspeace and happiness, they should all come of themselvesas accessory, and as the mere outcome or naturalresult of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom105

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdomof God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, sothat all else comes as that which shall be ‘added untoyou’—as quite incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps;and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfectpoise in the very centre of our being.“When I say that we commonly make the object ofour life that which we should not work for primarily,I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthyand excellent, such as success in business,fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renownin philanthropic undertakings. Such thingsshould be results, not objects. I would also includepleasures of many kinds which seem harmless andgood at the time, and are pursued because many acceptthem—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, andfashions in their various development, these beingmostly approved by the masses, although they maybe unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities.”Here is another case, more concrete, also that of awoman. I read you these cases without comment—they express so many varieties of the state of mindwe are studying.“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till myfortieth year. [Details of ill-health are given which Iomit.] I had been in Vermont several months hopingfor good from the change of air, but steadily growingweaker, when one day during the latter part of October,while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heardas it were these words: ‘You will be healed and do awork you never dreamed of.’ These words were impressedupon my mind with such power I said at oncethat only God could have put them there. I believedthem in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,which continued until Christmas, when I returnedto Boston. Within two days a young friend offeredto take me to a mental healer (this was January7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing butMind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body isonly a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.’ Icould not accept all she said, but I translated all thatwas there for me in this way: ‘There is nothing but106

William JamesGod; I am created by Him, and am absolutely dependentupon Him; mind is given me to use; and byjust so much of it as I will put upon the thought ofright action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage tomy ignorance and fear and past experience.’ That dayI commenced accordingly to take a little of every foodprovided for the family, constantly saying to myself:‘The Power that created the stomach must take careof what I have eaten.’ By holding these suggestionsthrough the evening I went to bed and fell asleep,saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with God’s Thoughtof me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the firsttime in several years [the distress-turns had usuallyrecurred about two o’clock in the night]. I felt thenext day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I hadfound the secret that would in time give me perfecthealth. Within ten days I was able to eat anythingprovided for others, and after two weeks I began tohave my own positive mental suggestions of Truth,which were to me like stepping-stones. I will note afew of them, they came about two weeks apart.“1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.“2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well.“3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footedbeast with a protuberance on every part of my bodywhere I had suffering, with my own face, begging meto acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed myattention on being well, and refused to even look atmy old self in this form.“4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background,with faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.“5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes withthe longing look; and again the refusal. Then camethe conviction, the inner consciousness, that I wasperfectly well and always had been, for I was Soul, anexpression of God’s Perfect Thought. That was to methe perfect and completed separation between what107

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceI was and what I appeared to be. I succeeded in neverlosing sight after this of my real being, by constantlyaffirming this truth, and by degrees (though it tookme two years of hard work to get there) I expressedhealth continuously throughout my whole body.“In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience Ihave never known this Truth to fail when I appliedit, though in my ignorance I have often failed to applyit, but through my failures I have learned the simplicityand trustfulness of the little child.”But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples,and I must lead you back to philosophic generalitiesagain. You see already by such records ofexperience how impossible it is not to class mind-cureas primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of theoneness of our life with God’s life is in fact quite indistinguishablefrom an interpretation of Christ’smessage which in these very Gifford lectures has beendefended by some of your very ablest Scottish religiousphilosophers.[52][52] The Cairds, for example. In Edward Caird’sGlasgow Lectures of 1890-92 passages like thisabound:—“The declaration made in the beginning of the ministryof Jesus that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdomof heaven is at hand,’ passes with scarce a breakinto the announcement that ‘the kingdom of God isamong you’; and the importance of this announcementis asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak,a difference in kind between the greatest saints andprophets who lived under the previous reign of division,and ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ Thehighest ideal is brought close to men and declared tobe within their reach, they are called on to be ‘perfectas their Father in heaven is perfect.’ The senseof alienation and distance from God which had grownupon the pious in Israel just in proportion as theyhad learned to look upon Him as no mere nationaldivinity, but as a God of justice who would punishIsrael for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declaredto be no longer in place; and the typical form108

William Jamesof Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrastbetween this world and the next which throughall the history of the Jews had continually been growingwider: ‘As in heaven, so on earth.’ The sense ofthe division of man from God, as a finite being fromthe Infinite, as weak and sinful from the OmnipotentGoodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpowerthe consciousness of oneness. The terms ‘Son’and ‘Father’ at once state the opposition and markits limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition,but one which presupposes an indestructibleprinciple of unity, that can and must become a principleof reconciliation.” The Evolution of Religion, ii.pp. 146, 147.But philosophers usually profess to give a quasilogicalexplanation of the existence of evil, whereasof the general fact of evil in the world, the existenceof the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness,the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them,profess to give no speculative explanation Evil is empiricallythere for them as it is for everybody, but thepractical point of view predominates, and it would illagree with the spirit of their system to spend time inworrying over it as a “mystery” or “problem,” or in“laying to heart” the lesson of its experience, afterthe manner of the Evangelicals. Don’t reason aboutit, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond!It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrownand left be hind, transcended and forgotten.Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, isthe most radical branch of mind-cure in its dealingswith evil. For it evil is simply a lie, and any one whomentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbidsus to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention.Of course, as our next lectures will show us,this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimatelylinked with the practical merits of the system we areexamining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mindcurerwould ask us, if I can put you in possession of alife of good?After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has109

The Varieties of Religious Experiencedeveloped a living system of mental hygiene whichmay well claim to have thrown all previous literatureof the Diatetit der Seele into the shade. This systemis wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism:“Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads topower.” “Thoughts are things,” as one of the mostvigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at thebottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts areof health, youth, vigor, and success, before you knowit these things will also be your outward portion. Noone can fail of the regenerative influence of optimisticthinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man ownsindefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary,and all the contracted and egoistic modes ofthought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curershere bring in a doctrine that thoughts are “forces,”and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, oneman’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all thethoughts of the same character that exist the worldover. Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcementsfrom elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires;and the great point in the conduct of life is to get theheavenly forces on one’s side by opening one’s ownmind to their influx.On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similaritybetween the mind-cure movement and theLutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the believer inmoralism and works, with his anxious query, “What shallI do to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: “You aresaved now, if you would but believe it.” And the mindcurerscome with precisely similar words of emancipation.They speak, it is true, to persons for whom theconception of salvation has lost its ancient theologicalmeaning, but who labor nevertheless with the sameeternal human difficulty. Things are wrong with them;and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole,well?” is the form of their question. And the answer is:“You are well, sound, and clear already, if you did butknow it.” “The whole matter may be summed up in onesentence,” says one of the authors whom I have alreadyquoted, “God is well, and so are you. You must awakento the knowledge of your real being.”110

William JamesThe adequacy of their message to the mental needs Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience.The whole outcome of these lectures will, Iof a large fraction of mankind is what gave force tothose earlier gospels. Exactly the same adequacy imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormousdiversities which the spiritual lives of differentholds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish asit may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, andgrowth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one their capacities all vary and must be classed underis tempted to ask whether it may not be destined different heads. The result is that we have really differenttypes of religious experience; and, seeking in(probably by very reason of the crudity and extravaganceof many of its manifestations[53]) to play a part these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthymindedtype, we must take it where we find it in mostalmost as great in the evolution of the popular religionof the future as did those earlier movements in radical form. The psychology of individual types oftheir day.character has hardly begun even to be sketched asBut I here fear that I may begin to “jar upon the yet—our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-likenerves” of some of the members of this academic contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear inaudience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clericoacademic-scientifictype, the officially and convention-think, should hardly take so large a place in dignifiedally “correct” type, “the deadly respectable” type, for[53] It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is thatDresser, which assumes more and more the form of nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomenafrom our notice, merely because we are incapablemind-cure experience and academic philosophy mutuallyimpregnating each other, will score the practicaltriumphs of the less critical and rational sects.of taking part in anything like them ourselves.111

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceNow the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, ofmethodistic conversions, and of what I call the mindcuremovement seems to prove the existence of numerouspersons in whom—at any rate at a certainstage in their development—a change of character forthe better, so far from being facilitated by the ruleslaid down by official moralists, will take place all themore successfully if those rules be exactly reversed.Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness.“Be vigilant, day and night,” they adjure us;“hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink fromno effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.” Butthe persons I speak of find that all this conscious effortleads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands,and only makes them twofold more the children of hellthey were before. The tense and voluntary attitudebecomes in them an impossible fever and torment.Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearingsare made so hot and the belts so tight.Under these circumstances the way to success, asvouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations,is by an anti-moralistic method, by the “surrender”of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity,not activity; relaxation, not intentness, shouldbe now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility,let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny tohigher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to whatbecomes of it all, and you will find not only that yougain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition,the particular goods you sincerely thought youwere renouncing. This is the salvation through selfdespair,the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology,the passage into nothing of which JacobBehmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usuallybe passed, a corner turned within one. Somethingmust give way, a native hardness must break downand liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantlysee hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,and leaves on the Subject an impression that he hasbeen wrought on by an external power.Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be,this is certainly one fundamental form of human ex-112

William Jamesperience. Some say that the capacity or incapacityfor it is what divides the religious from the merelymoralistic character. With those who undergo it in itsfullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality.They know; for they have actually felt the higherpowers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.A story which revivalist preachers often tell is thatof a man who found himself at night slipping downthe side of a precipice.At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall,and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. Butfinally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with adespairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He felljust six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier,his agony would have been spared. As the motherearth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will theeverlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutelyin them, and give up the hereditary habit of relyingon our personal strength, with its precautions thatcannot shelter and safeguards that never save.The mind-curers have given the widest scope tothis sort of experience. They have demonstrated thata form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologicallyindistinguishable from the Lutheran justificationby faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of freegrace, is within the reach of persons who have no convictionof sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology.It is but giving your little private convulsiveself a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there.The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of thecombined optimism and expectancy, the regenerativephenomena which ensue on the abandonment ofeffort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matterwhether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic,or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causalexplanation.[54][54] The theistic explanation is by divine grace, whichcreates a new nature within one the moment the oldnature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation(which is that of most mind-curers) is by themerging of the narrower private self into the wideror greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is113

The Varieties of Religious Experienceyour own “subconscious” self), the moment the isolatingbarriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed.The medico-materialistic explanation is that simplercerebral processes act more freely where they areleft to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically(though in this instance not spiritually)“higher” ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeedin inhibiting results.—Whether this third explanationmight, in a psycho-physical account of the universe,be combined with either of the others may beleft an open question here.When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion,we shall learn something more about all this.Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mindcurer’smethods.They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestiveinfluence of environment plays an enormous partin all spiritual education.But the word “suggestion,” having acquired officialstatus, is unfortunately already beginning to play inmany quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation,being used to fend off all inquiry into thevarying susceptibilities of individual cases. “Suggestion”is only another name for the power of ideas, sofar as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct.Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficaciousover others. Ideas efficacious at some timesand in some human surroundings are not so at othertimes and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churchesare not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day,whatever they may have been in earlier centuries;and when the whole question is as to why the salt haslost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blankwaving of the word “suggestion” as if it were a bannergives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychologicalessay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothingbut ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that“Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popularChristianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics,and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious]ideas will do anything for us that can be done.”114

And this in spite of the actual fact that the popularChristianity does absolutely nothing, or did nothinguntil mind-cure came to the rescue.[55][55] Within the churches a disposition has alwaysprevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; somethingsent by God for our good, either as chastisement,as warning, or as opportunity for exercisingvirtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning “merit.”“Illness,” says a good Catholic writer P. Lejeune:(Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), “is the mostexcellent corporeal mortifications, the mortificationwhich one has not one’s self chosen, which is imposeddirectly by God, and is the direct expression of hiswill. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gaysays, ‘this one is of gold; since although it comes ofourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on itsgreater side, as coming (like all that happens) fromthe providence of God, it is of divine manufacture.And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!… I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illnessis mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequentlythe triumph of mortified souls.’” Accordingto this view, disease should in any case be submissivelyaccepted, and it might under certain circumstanceseven be blasphemous to wish it away.William James115Of course there have been exceptions to this, andcures by special miracle have at all times been recognizedwithin the church’s pale, almost all the greatsaints having more or less performed them. It wasone of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintainthem still to be possible. An extremely pure facultyof healing after confession and conversion on thepatient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, was quitespontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh.Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exertedduring nearly thirty years. Blumhardt’s Life byZundel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chaptersix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healingactivity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divineinterposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure,simple, and non-fanatical character, and in this partof his work followed no previous model. In Chicagoto-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a ScottishBaptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of Healing”were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume,and who, although he denounces the cures wrought

The Varieties of Religious Experiencein other sects as “diabolical counterfeits” of his own be lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be aexclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole be homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows thiscounted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of thecircles the fundamental article of faith is that disease acute religion of the few against the chronic religion ofshould never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worsewants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not than that which irreligion opposes to the movings oftolerate ourselves on any lower terms.the Spirit. “We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards,An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individualwith the force of a revelation. The mind-cure tians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken“concerning all those saints that are not lively Chris-with its gospel of healthy-mindedness has come as a away; if that be true that is often said by some at thisrevelation to many whose hearts the church Christianityhad left hardened. It has let loose their springs natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that itday, that these cold dead saints do more hurt thanof higher life. In what can the originality of any religiousmovement consist, save in finding a channel, The next condition of success is the apparent exist-would be well for mankind if they were all dead.”[56]until then sealed up, through which those springs may ence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthymindednesswith readiness for regeneration by let-be set free in some group of human beings?The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, ting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic asand above all the force of novelty, are always the primesuggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure [56] Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in Newshould ever become official, respectable, and England I quote these words, dissuades from such aintrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys makinghis thrust at the cold dead church members.116

William Jamesregards the natural man, Catholicism has been toolegalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the otherto appeal in any generous way to the type of characterformed of this peculiar mingling of elements. Howeverfew of us here present may belong to such a type,it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination,well represented in the world.Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestantcountries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconsciouslife. To their reasoned advice and dogmaticassertion, its founders have added systematic exercisein passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation,and have even invoked something like hypnoticpractice. I quote some passages at random:—“The value, the potency of ideals is the great practicaltruth on which the New Thought most stronglyinsists—the development namely from within outward,from small to great.[57] Consequently one’sthought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even[57] H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.though this trust be literally like a step in thedark.[58] To attain the ability thus effectively to directthe mind, the New Thought advises the practiceof concentration, or in other words, the attainment ofself-control. One is to learn to marshal the tendenciesof the mind, so that they may be held together asa unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should setapart times for silent meditation, by one’s self, preferablyin a room where the surroundings are favorableto spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, thisis called ‘entering the silence.’”[59]“The time will come when in the busy office or onthe noisy street you can enter into the silence by simplydrawing the mantle of your own thoughts aboutyou and realizing that there and everywhere theSpirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power,and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.This is the spirit of continual prayer.[60] One of the[58] Dresser: Living by the spirit, 58.[59] Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 33.[60] Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.117

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemost intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a cityoffice where several other gentlemen were doing businessconstantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbedby the many various sounds about him, thisself-centred faithful man would, in any moment ofperplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completelyabout him that he would be as fully inclosed in hisown psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removedfrom all distractions, as though he were alone in someprimeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him into themystic silence in the form of a direct question, to whichhe expected a certain answer, he would remain utterlypassive until the reply came, and never oncethrough many years’ experience did he find himselfdisappointed or misled.”[61]Wherein, I should like to know, does this intrinsicallydiffer from the practice of “recollection” whichplays so great a part in Catholic discipline? Otherwisecalled the practice of the presence of God (andso known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy[61] Trine: p. 117.Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacherAlvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation.“It is the recollection of God, the thought of God,which in all places and circumstances makes us seehim present, lets us commune respectfully and lovinglywith him, and fills us with desire and affection forhim… . Would you escape from every ill? Never losethis recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor inadversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invokenot, to excuse yourself from this duty, either thedifficulty or the importance of your business, for youcan always remember that God sees you, that you areunder his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forgethim, reanimate a thousand times the recollection.If you cannot practice this exercise continuously,at least make yourself as familiar with it as possible;and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter drawnear the fire as often as they can, go as often as youcan to that ardent fire which will warm your soul.”[62][62] Quoted by Lejeune: Introd. a la vie Mystique,1899, p. 66.118

William JamesAll the external associations of the Catholic disciplineare of course unlike anything in mind-curethought, but the purely spiritual part of the exerciseis identical in both communions, and in both communionsthose who urge it write with authority, for theyhave evidently experienced in their own persons thatwhereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances:—“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged,promoted, and strengthened. Its current can beturned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit andwears a channel. By means of such discipline the mentalhorizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure andlofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almostmechanical, but perseverance will at length render iteasy, then pleasant, and finally delightful.“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of itsthoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we will,we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuousplane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritualand Real, and there gain a residence. The assumptionof states of expectancy and receptivity willattract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturallyas air inclines to a vacuum… . Whenever thethough; is not occupied with one’s daily duty or profession,it should he sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere.There are quiet leisure moments by day, andwakeful hours at night, when this wholesome anddelightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage.If one who has never made any systematiceffort to lift and control the thought-forces will, for asingle month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested,he will be surprised and delighted at the result,and nothing will induce him to go back to careless,aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorableseasons the outside world, with all its current ofdaily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silentsanctuary of the inner temple of soul to communeand aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicatelysensitive, so that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible,the tumultuous waves of external sense are119

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehushed, and there is a great calm. The ego graduallybecomes conscious that it is face to face with the DivinePresence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherlylife which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.There is soul contact with the Parent- Soul, and aninflux of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness fromthe Inexhaustible Fountain.”[63]When we reach the subject of mysticism, you willundergo so deep an immersion into these exaltedstates of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I mayso express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt withwhich this little sprinkling may affect you will havelong since passed away— doubt, I mean, as to whetherall such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoricset down pour encourager les autres. You will thenbe convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousnessof “union” form a perfectly definite class of experiences,of which the soul may occasionally partake,and which certain persons may live by in a deeper[63] Henry Wood: Ideal suggestion through MentalPhotography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged).sense than they live by anything else with which theyhave acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophicalreflection with which I should like to passfrom the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close atopic which I fear is already only too long drawn out.It concerns the relation of all this systematizedhealthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientificmethod and the scientific life.In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly ofthe relation of religion to science on the one hand,and to primeval savage thought on the other. Thereare plenty of persons to-day—”scientists” or “positivists,”they are fond of calling themselves—who willtell you that religious thought is a mere survival, anatavistic reversion to a type of consciousness whichhumanity in its more enlightened examples has longsince left behind and out-grown. If you ask them toexplain themselves more fully, they will probably saythat for primitive thought everything is conceived ofunder the form of personality. The savage thinks thatthings operate by personal forces, and for the sake of120

William Jamesindividual ends. For him, even external nature obeysindividual needs and claims, just as if these were somany elementary powers. Now science, on the otherhand, these positivists say, has proved that personality,so far from being an elementary force in nature,is but a passive resultant of the really elementaryforces, physical, chemical, physiological, andpsycho-physical, which are all impersonal and generalin character. Nothing individual accomplishesanything in the universe save in so far as it obeys andexemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquireof them by what means science has thus supplantedprimitive thought, and discredited its personalway of looking at things, they would undoubtedlysay it has been by the strict use of the method ofexperimental verification. Follow out science’s conceptionspractically, they will say, the conceptions thatignore personality altogether, and you will always becorroborated. The world is so made that all your expectationswill be experientially verified so long, andonly so long, as you keep the terms from which youinfer them impersonal and universal.But here we have mind-cure, with her diametricallyopposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identicalclaim. Live as if I were true, she says, and everyday will practically prove you right. That the controllingenergies of nature are personal, that your ownpersonal thoughts are forces, that the powers of theuniverse will directly respond to your individual appealsand needs, are propositions which your wholebodily and mental experience will verify. And thatexperience does largely verify these primeval religiousideas is proved by the fact that the mind-curemovement spreads as it does, not by proclamationand assertion simply, but by palpable experientialresults. Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority,it carries on an aggressive warfare against thescientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science’sown peculiar methods and weapons. Believing that ahigher power will take care of us in certain ways betterthan we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinelythrow ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it121

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefinds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroboratedby its observation.How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed,is evident enough from the narratives whichI have quoted. I will quote yet another couple ofshorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concreteturn. Here is one:—“One of my first experiences in applying my teachingwas two months after I first saw the healer. I fell,spraining my right ankle, which I had done once fouryears before, having then had to use a crutch andelastic anklet for some months, and carefully guardingit ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I madethe positive suggestion (and felt it through all mybeing): ‘There is nothing but God, and all life comesfrom him perfectly. I cannot be sprained or hurt, Iwill let him take care of it.’ Well, I never had a sensationin it, and I walked two miles that day.”The next case not only illustrates experiment andverification, but also the element of passivity and surrenderof which awhile ago I made such account.“I went into town to do some shopping one morning,and I had not been gone long before I began tofeel ill. The ill feeling increased rapidly, until I hadpains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache,all the symptoms in short that precede an attackof influenza. I thought that I was going to havethe grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or somethingworse. The mind-cure teachings that I had been listeningto all the winter thereupon came into my mind,and I thought that here was an opportunity to testmyself. On my way home I met a friend, I refrainedwith some effort from telling her how I felt. That wasthe first step gained. I went to bed immediately, andmy husband wished to send for the doctor. But I toldhim that I would rather wait until morning and seehow I felt. Then followed one of the most beautifulexperiences of my life.“I cannot express it in any other way than to saythat I did ‘lie down in the stream of life and let it flowover me.’ I gave up all fear of any impending disease;I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no122

William Jamesintellectual effort, or train of thought.to have been cured by the experiments tried wasMy dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid ofthe Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfectconfidence that all would be well, that all WASwell. The creative life was flowing into me every instant,and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony,and full of the peace that passeth understanding.There was no place in my mind for a jarring body.I had no consciousness of time or space or persons;but only of love and happiness and faith.“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor whenI fell asleep; but when I woke up in the morning, Iwas well.”These are exceedingly trivial instances,[64] but inthem, if we have anything at all, we have the methodof experiment and verification. For the point I amdriving at now, it makes no difference whether youconsider the patients to be deluded victims of theirimagination or not. That they seemed to themselves[64] See Appendix to this lecture for two other casesfurnished me by friends.enough to make them converts to the system. Andalthough it is evident that one must be of a certainmental mould to get such results (for not every onecan get thus cured to his own satisfaction any morethan every one can be cured by the first regular practitionerwhom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedanticand over-scrupulous for those who can gettheir savage and primitive philosophy of mental healingverified in such experimental ways as this, to givethem up at word of command for more scientifictherapeutics.What are we to think of all this? Has science madetoo wide a claim?I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are,to say the least, premature. The experiences whichwe have been studying during this hour (and a greatmany other kinds of religious experiences are likethem) plainly show the universe to be a more manysidedaffair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allowsfor. What, in the end, are all our verifications butexperiences that agree with more or less isolated sys-123

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds haveframed? But why in the name of common sense needwe assume that only one such system of ideas can betrue? The obvious outcome of our total experience isthat the world can be handled according to many systemsof ideas, and is so handled by different men, andwill each time give some characteristic kind of profit,for which he cares, to the handler, while at the sametime some other kind of profit has to be omitted orpostponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electriclighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventingand curing a certain amount of disease. Religion inthe shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity,moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain formsof disease as well as science does, or even better in acertain class of persons. Evidently, then, the scienceand the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlockingthe world’s treasure-house to him who can useeither of them practically. Just as evidently neither isexhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use.And why, after all, may not the world be so complexas to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality,which we can thus approach in alternation by usingdifferent conceptions and assuming different attitudes,just as mathematicians handle the same numericaland spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry,by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions,and each time come out right? On this view religionand science, each verified in its own way from hour tohour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitivethought, with its belief in individualized personalforces, seems at any rate as far as ever from beingdriven by science from the field to-day. Numbers ofeducated people still find it the directest experimentalchannel by which to carry on their intercourse withreality.[65][65] Whether the various spheres or systems are everto fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as mostphilosophers assume that they must, and how, if so,that conception may best be reached, are questionsthat only the future can answer. What is certain nowis the fact of lines of disparate conception, each correspondingto some part of the world’s truth, eachverified in some degree, each leaving out some partof real experience.124

William JamesThe case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand thatI could not resist the temptation of using it to bringthese last truths home to your attention, but I mustcontent myself to-day with this very brief indication.In a later lecture the relations of religion both to scienceand to primitive thought will have to receivemuch more explicit attention.APPENDIX to Lectures IV and V(See note [64].)CASE I. “My own experience is this: I had long beenill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozenyears before, had been a diplopia which deprived meof the use of my eyes for reading and writing almostentirely, while a later one had been to shut me outfrom exercise of any kind under penalty of immediateand great exhaustion. I had been under the careof doctors of the highest standing both in Europe andAmerica, men in whose power to help me I had hadgreat faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time whenI seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heardsome things that gave me interest enough in mentalhealing to make me try it; I had no great hope of gettingany good from it—it was a chance I tried, partlybecause my thought was interested by the new possibilityit seemed to open, partly because it was theonly chance I then could see. I went to X in Boston,125

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefrom whom some friends of mine had got, or thoughtthey had got, great help; the treatment was a silentone; little was said, and that little carried no convictionto my mind, whatever influence was exerted wasthat of another person’s thought or feeling silentlyprojected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervoussystem as it were, as we sat still together. I believedfrom the start in the possibility of such action,for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping orhindering, the body’s nerve-activities, and I thoughttelepathy probable, although unproved, but I had nobelief in it as more than a possibility, and no strongconviction nor any mystic or religious faith connectedwith my thought of it that might have brought imaginationstrongly into play.“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour eachday, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so,I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of atide of new energy rising within me, a sense of powerto pass beyond old halting-places, of power to breakthe bounds that, though often tried before, had longbeen veritable walls about my life, too high to climb.I began to read and walk as I had not done for years,and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable.This tide seemed to mount for some weeks,three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, Icame away, taking the treatment up again a fewmonths later. The lift I got proved permanent, andleft me slowly gaining ground instead of losing, it butwith this lift the influence seemed in a way to havespent itself, and, though my confidence in the realityof the power had gained immensely from this firstexperience, and should have helped me to make furthergain in health and strength if my belief in it hadbeen the potent factor there, I never after this gotany result at all as striking or as clearly marked asthis which came when I made trial of it first, withlittle faith and doubtful expectation. It is difficult toput all the evidence in such a matter into words, togather up into a distinct statement all that one basesone’s conclusions on, but I have always felt that I hadabundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the126

William Jamesconclusion that I came to then, and since have heldto, that the physical change which came at that timewas, first, the result of a change wrought within meby a change of mental state; and secondly, that thatchange of mental state was not, save in a very secondaryway, brought about through the influence ofan excited imagination, or a consiously received suggestionof an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that thischange was the result of my receiving telephathically,and upon a mental stratum quite below the level ofimmediate consciousness, a healthier and more energeticattitude, receiving it from another personwhose thought was directed upon me with the intentionof impressing the idea of this attitude upon me.In my case the disease was distinctly what would beclassed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunitiesas I have had of observing, I have cometo the conclusion that the dividing line that has beendrawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling theinternal activities and the nutrition of the bodythroughout; and I believe that the central nervoussystem, by starting and inhibiting local centres, canexercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, ifit can be brought to bear. In my judgment the questionis simply how to bring it to bear, and I think thatthe uncertainty and remarkable differences in theresults obtained through mental healing do but showhow ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work andof the means we should take to make them effective.That these results are not due to chance coincidencesmy observation of myself and others makes me sure;that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters intothem as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, butin many others, and sometimes very extraordinaryones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole Iam inclined to think that as the healing action, likethe morbid one, springs from the plane of the normallyUNconscious mind, so the strongest and mosteffective impressions are those which it receives, insome as yet unknown subtle way, directly from ahealthier mind whose state, through a hidden law ofsympathy, it reproduces.”127

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceCASE II. “At the urgent request of friends, and withno faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previousunsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist),our little daughter was placed under the careof a healer, and cured of a trouble about which thephysician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.This interested me, and I began studying earnestlythe method and philosophy of this method ofhealing. Gradually an inner peace and tranquillitycame to me in so positive a way that my mannerchanged greatly. My children and friends noticed thechange and commented upon it. All feelings of irritabilitydisappeared. Even the expression of my facechanged noticeably.“I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant indiscussion, both in public and private. I grew broadlytolerant and receptive toward the views of others. Ihad been nervous and irritable, coming home two orthree times a week with a sick headache induced, asI then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grewserene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirelydisappeared. I had been in the habit of approachingevery business interview with an almost morbiddread. I now meet every one with confidence and innercalm.“I may say that the growth has all been toward theelimination of selfishness. I do not mean simply thegrosser, more sensual forms, but those subtler andgenerally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselvesin sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has beenin the direction of a practical, working realization ofthe immanence of God and the Divinity of man’s true,inner self.128

William JamesLectures VI and VIITHE SICK SOULAT OUR LAST MEETING, we considered the healthymindedtemperament, the temperament which hasa constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, andin which the tendency to see things optimistically islike a water of crystallization in which the individual’scharacter is set. We saw how this temperament maybecome the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religionin which good, even the good of this world’s life,is regarded as the essential thing for a rational beingto attend to. This religion directs him to settle hisscores with the more evil aspects of the universe bysystematically declining to lay them to heart or makemuch of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations,or even, on occasion, by denying outrightthat they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry over diseaseis itself an additional form of disease, which onlyadds to the original complaint. Even repentance andremorse, affections which come in the character ofministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxingimpulses. The best repentance is to up and act forrighteousness, and forget that you ever had relationswith sin.Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthymindednesswoven into the heart of it, and this hasbeen one secret of its fascination. He whom Reasonleads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by theinfluence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil isan “inadequate” knowledge, fit only for slavish minds.So Spinoza categorically condemns repentance. Whenmen make mistakes, he says—“One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscienceand repentance to help to bring them on the rightpath, and might thereupon conclude (as every onedoes conclude) that these affections are good things.Yet when we look at the matter closely, we shall findthat not only are they not good, but on the contrarydeleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest thatwe can always get along better by reason and love of129

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetruth than by worry of conscience and remorse.Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch as they form aparticular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages ofsadness,” he continues, “I have already proved, andshown that we should strive to keep it from our life.Just so we should endeavor, since uneasiness of conscienceand remorse are of this kind of complexion,to flee and shun these states of mind.”[66]Within the Christian body, for which repentance ofsins has from the beginning been the critical religiousact, healthy-mindedness has always come forwardwith its milder interpretation. Repentance accordingto such healthy- minded Christians means gettingaway from the sin, not groaning and writhing over itscommission. The Catholic practice of confession andabsolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematicmethod of keeping healthy- mindedness ontop. By it a man’s accounts with evil are periodicallysquared and audited, so that he may start the cleanpage with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic will tell[66] Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purgingoperation. Martin Luther by no means belonged tothe healthy-minded type in the radical sense in whichwe have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly absolutionfor sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he hadsome very healthy- minded ideas, due in the main tothe largeness of his conception of God.“When I was a monk,” he says “I thought that Iwas utterly cast away, if at any time I felt the lust ofthe flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshlylust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. Iassayed many ways to help to quiet my conscience,but It would not be; for the concupiscence and lust ofmy flesh did always return, so that I could not rest,but was continually vexed with these thoughts: Thisor that sin thou hast committed: thou art infectedwith envy, with impatiency, and such other sins:therefore thou art entered into this holy order in vain,and all thy good works are unprofitable. But if then Ihad rightly understood these sentences of Paul: ‘Theflesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit con-130

William Jamestrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another,so that ye cannot do the things that ye woulddo,’ I should not have so miserably tormented myself,but should have thought and said to myself, asnow commonly I do, ‘Martin, thou shalt not utterlybe without sin, for thou hast flesh; thou shalt thereforefeel the battle thereof.’ I remember that Staupitzwas wont to say, ‘I have vowed unto God above athousand times that I would become a better man:but I never performed that which I vowed. HereafterI will make no such vow: for I have now learnedby experience that I am not able to perform it. Unless,therefore, God be favorable and merciful untome for Christ’s sake, I shall not be able, with all myvows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.’This (of Staupitz’s) was not only a true, but also agodly and a holy desperation; and this must they allconfess, both with mouth and heart, who will be saved.For the godly trust not to their own righteousness.They look unto Christ their reconciler who gave hislife for their sins. Moreover, they know that the remnantof sin which is in their flesh is not laid to theircharge, but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in themean while they fight in spirit against the flesh, lestthey should fulfill the lusts thereof; and although theyfeel the flesh to rage and rebel, and themselves alsodo fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet arethey not discouraged, nor think therefore that theirstate and kind of life, and the works which are doneaccording to their calling, displease God; but they raiseup themselves by faith.”[67]One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got thatspiritual genius, Molinos, the founder of Quietism, soabominably condemned was his healthy-mindedopinion of repentance:—“When thou fallest into a fault, in what mattersoever it be do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it.For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained byOriginal Sin. The common enemy will make thee believe,as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou[67] Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891,pp. 510-514 (abridged).131

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewalkest in error, and therefore art out of God and his not to disturb thyself, and reap no good.”[68]favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of Now in contrast with such healthy-minded viewsthe divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and makinga giant of it; and putting it into thy head that ev-minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, aas these, if we treat them as a way of deliberatelyery day thy soul grows worse instead of better, whilst way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, basedit so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life arethine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning mostsuggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in the comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, runningat tournament with others, and falling in the best bid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed ourWe have now to address ourselves to this more mor-of the career, should lie weeping on the ground and last hour with a general philosophical reflection onafflicting himself with discourses upon his fall? Man the healthy-minded way of taking life, I should like(they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take at this point to make another philosophical reflectionthe course again, for he that rises again quickly and upon it before turning to that heavier task. You willcontinues his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou excuse the brief delay.seest thyself fallen once and a thousand times, thou If we admit that evil is an essential part of our beingand the key to the interpretation of our life, weoughtest to make use of the remedy which I havegiven thee, that is, a loving confidence in the divine load ourselves down with a difficulty that has alwaysmercy. These are the weapons with which thou must proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Thefightand conquer cowardice and vain thoughts. Thisis the means thou oughtest to use—not to lose time, [68] Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii.,xviii. abridged.132

William Jamesism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematicphilosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctanceto let God be anything less than All-in-All. In otherwords, philosophic theism has always shown a tendencyto become pantheistic and monistic, and to considerthe world as one unit of absolute fact; and thishas been at variance with popular or practical theism,which latter has ever been more or less franklypluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itselfperfectly well satisfied with a universe composed ofmany original principles, provided we be only allowedto believe that the divine principle remains supreme,and that the others are subordinate. In this latter caseGod is not necessarily responsible for the existenceof evil; he would only be responsible if it were notfinally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheisticview, evil, like everything else, must have its foundationin God; and the difficulty is to see how this canpossibly be the case if God be absolutely good. Thisdifficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in whichthe world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such aunit is an individual, and in it the worst parts mustbe as essential as the best, must be as necessary tomake the individual what he is; since if any part whateverin an individual were to vanish or alter, it wouldno longer be that individual at all. The philosophy ofabsolute idealism, so vigorously represented both inScotland and America to-day, has to struggle withthis difficulty quite as much as scholastic theismstruggled in its time; and although it would be prematureto say that there is no speculative issue whateverfrom the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say thatthere is no clear or easy issue, and that the only obviousescape from paradox here is to cut loose fromthe monistic assumption altogether, and to allow theworld to have existed from its origin in pluralisticform, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lowerthings and principles, rather than an absolutely unitaryfact. For then evil would not need to be essential;it might be, and may always have been, an independentportion that had no rational or absoluteright to live with the rest, and which we might con-133

The Varieties of Religious Experienceceivably hope to see got rid of at last.preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth.Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated,described it, casts its vote distinctly for this pluralisticview. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himselfmore or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-extensiveand the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out andeverything actual is rational, and that evil, as an elementdialectically required, must be pinned in and tual, marked by its deliverance from all contact withwith the whole actual, is a mere extract from the ac-kept and consecrated and have a function awarded this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff.to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness Here we have the interesting notion fairly andrefuses to say anything of the sort.[69] Evil, it says, squarely presented to us, of there being elements ofis emphatically irrational, and not to be pinned in, or the universe which may make no rational whole inconjunction with the other elements, and which, from[69] I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of the point of view of any system which those othermany mind-cure writers; for these utterances are elements make up, can only be considered so muchreally inconsistent with their attitude towards disease,and can easily be shown not to be logically in-and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forgetirrelevance and accident—so much “dirt,” as it were,volved in the experiences of union with a higher Presencewith which they connect themselves. The higher ther to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to men-this notion; for although most philosophers seem ei-Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of tion it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselvesin the end as containing an element of truth.things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experienceto regard it as a part, if only it be the most The mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to usideal part.134

William Jamesas having dignity and importance. We have seen it tobe a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal toimagination to cure disease; we have seen its methodof experimental verification to be not unlike themethod of all science; and now here we find mindcureas the champion of a perfectly definite conceptionof the metaphysical structure of the world. I hopethat, in view of all this, you will not regret my havingpressed it upon your attention at such length.Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way ofthinking, and turn towards those persons who cannotso swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousnessof evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer fromits presence. Just as we saw that in healthymindednessthere are shallower and profounder levels,happiness like that of the mere animal, and moreregenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there differentlevels of the morbid mind, and the one is muchmore formidable than the other. There are peoplefor whom evil means only a mal-adjustment withthings, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with theenvironment. Such evil as this is curable, in principleat least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifyingeither the self or the things, or both at once, thetwo terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as amarriage bell again. But there are others for whomevil is no mere relation of the subject to particularouter things, but something more radical and general,a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, whichno alteration of the environment, or any superficialrearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and whichrequires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, theLatin races have leaned more towards the former wayof looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in theplural, removable in detail; while the Germanic raceshave tended rather to think of Sin in the singular,and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrainedin our natural subjectivity, and never to beremoved by any superficial piecemeal operations.[70]These comparisons of races are always open to ex-[70] Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884,passim.135

The Varieties of Religious Experienceception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religionhas inclined to the more intimately pessimisticpersuasion, and this way of feeling, being the moreextreme, we shall find by far the more instructive forour study.Recent psychology has found great use for the word“threshold” as a symbolic designation for the point atwhich one state of mind passes into another. Thuswe speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness ingeneral, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, orother outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attentionat all. One with a high threshold will dozethrough an amount of racket by which one with a lowthreshold would be immediately waked. Similarly,when one is sensitive to small differences in any orderof sensation, we say he has a low “differencethreshold”—hismind easily steps over it into the consciousnessof the differences in question. And just sowe might speak of a “pain-threshold,” a “fear-threshold,”a “misery-threshold,” and find it quicklyoverpassed by the consciousness of some individuals,but lying too high in others to be often reachedby their consciousness. The sanguine and healthymindedlive habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line,the depressed and melancholy live beyondit, in darkness and apprehension. There are men whoseem to have started in life with a bottle or two ofchampagne inscribed to their credit; whilst othersseem to have been born close to the pain-threshold,which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.Does it not appear as if one who lived more habituallyon one side of the pain-threshold might need adifferent sort of religion from one who habitually livedon the other? This question, of the relativity of differenttypes of religion to different types of need,arises naturally at this point, and will became a seriousproblem ere we have done. But before we confrontit in general terms, we must address ourselvesto the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls,as we may call them in contrast to the healthyminded,have to say of the secrets of their prisonhouse,their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let136

William Jamesus then resolutely turn our backs on the once-bornand their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simplycry out, in spite of all appearances, “Hurrah for theUniverse!—God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with theworld.” Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear,and the sentiment of human helplessness may not opena profounder view and put into our hands a more complicatedkey to the meaning of the situation.To begin with, how can things so insecure as thesuccessful experiences of this world afford a stableanchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakestlink, and life is after all a chain.In the healthiest and most prosperous existence,how many links of illness, danger, and disaster arealways interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottomof every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said,something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a fallingdead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things thatsound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bringa feeling of coming from a deeper region and oftenhave an appalling convincingness. The buzz of lifeceases at their touch as a piano-string stops soundingwhen the damper falls upon it.Of course the music can commence again;—andagain and again—at intervals. But with this thehealthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediablesense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack;it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthymindednessas never to have experienced in his ownperson any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is areflecting being, he must generalize and class his ownlot with that of others; and, doing so, he must seethat his escape is just a lucky chance and no essentialdifference. He might just as well have been born toan entirely different fortune. And then indeed thehollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it ofwhich the best you can say is, “Thank God, it has letme off clear this time!” Is not its blessedness a fragilefiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, notmuch unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success?If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as137

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethat! But take the happiest man, the one most enviedby the world, and in nine cases out of ten hisinmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his idealsin the line of his achievements are pitched farhigher than the achievements themselves, or else hehas secret ideals of which the world knows nothing,and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself tobe found wanting.When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can expresshimself in this wise, how must it be with lesssuccessful men?“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “againstthe course of my existence. But at bottom it has beennothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm thatduring the whole of my 75 years, I have not had fourweeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetualrolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”What single-handed man was ever on the whole assuccessful as Luther? Yet when he had grown old, helooked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure.“I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will comeforthwith and carry me hence. Let him come, aboveall, with his last Judgment: I will stretch out my neck,the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest.”—And having a necklace of white agates in his hand atthe time he added: “O God, grant that it may comewithout delay. I would readily eat up this necklaceto-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow.”—TheElectress Dowager, one day when Luther was diningwith her, said to him: “Doctor, I wish you may liveforty years to come.” “Madam,” replied he, “ratherthan live forty years more, I would give up my chanceof Paradise.”Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at everyturn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds,our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of ourinadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damningemphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, nomere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy theworld’s demands, but every pound of flesh exacted issoaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of sufferingknown to man are connected with the poison-138

William Jamesous humiliations incidental to these results.And they are pivotal human experiences. A processso ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integralpart of life. “There is indeed one element inhuman destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “thatnot blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else weare intended to do, we are not intended to succeed;failure is the fate allotted.”[71] And our nature beingthus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologiansshould have held it to be essential, and thoughtthat only through the personal experience of humiliationwhich it engenders the deeper sense of life’s significanceis reached?[72][71] He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness:“Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.”[72] The God of many men is little more than theircourt of appeal against the damnatory judgmentpassed on their failures by the opinion of this world.To our own consciousness there is usually a residuumof worth left over after our sins and errors have beentold off—our capacity of acknowledging and regrettingthem is the germ of a better self in posse at least.But the world deals with us in actu and not in posse:and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at fromwithout, it never takes account. Then we turn to theAll-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this goodin us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with ourrepentance on his mercy only by an All-knower canwe finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitelyemerges from this sort of experience of life.But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness.Make the human being’s sensitiveness a little greater,carry him a little farther over the misery-threshold,and the good quality of the successful moments themselveswhen they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All naturalgoods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath;love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.Can things whose end is always dust and disappointmentbe the real goods which our souls require? Backof everything is the great spectre of universal death,the all-encompassing blackness:—139

The Varieties of Religious Experience“What profit hath a man of all his labour which hetaketh under the Sun? I looked on all the works thatmy hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity andvexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons ofmen befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth theother, all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again… .The dead know not anything, neither have they anymore a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.Also their love and their hatred and their envy is nowperished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the Sun… . Trulythe light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyesto behold the Sun: but if a man live many years andrejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days ofdarkness; for they shall be many.”In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricablytogether. But if the life be good, the negation ofit must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential factsof existence; and all natural happiness thus seemsinfected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchresurrounds it.To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightlysubject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contemplationengenders, the only relief that healthymindednesscan give is by saying: “Stuff and nonsense,get out into the open air!” or “Cheer up, old fellow, you’llbe all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!”But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talkas that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribereligious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentmentwith one’s brief chance at natural good is but the veryconsecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Ourtroubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact thatwe can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexesus; the fact that we now for a moment live and arewell is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life notcorrelated with death, a health not liable to illness, akind of good that will not perish, a good in fact thatflies beyond the Goods of nature.It all depends on how sensitive the soul may becometo discords. “The trouble with me is that I believetoo much in common happiness and goodness,”140

William Jamessaid a friend of mine whose consciousness was of thissort, “and nothing can console me for their transiency.I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.”And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animalexcitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness,a little irritable weakness and descent of thepain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of allour usual springs of delight into full view, and turn usinto melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life andglory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but thestanding quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old agehas the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life,however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to endin sadness.This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic,agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its bestwith its strange power of living in the moment andignoring and forgetting, still the evil background isreally there to be thought of, and the skull will grin inat the banquet. In the practical life of the individual,we know how his whole gloom or glee about anypresent fact depends on the remoter schemes andhopes with which it stands related. Its significanceand framing give it the chief part of its value. Let itbe known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable itmay be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish.The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease,may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever,but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealedit; and the knowledge knocks the satisfactionout of all these functions. They are partners of deathand the worm is their brother, and they turn to amere flatness.The lustre of the present hour is always borrowedfrom the background of possibilities it goes with. Letour common experiences be enveloped in an eternalmoral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance;let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deitiespay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmospherewhich man breathes in;—and his days passby with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with141

emoter values. Place round them on the contrarythe curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanentmeaning which for pure naturalism and thepopular science evolutionism of our time are all thatis visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turnsrather to an anxious trembling.For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations,mankind is in a position similar to that of aset of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded bycliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing thatlittle by little the ice is melting, and the inevitableday drawing near when the last film of it will disappear,and to be drowned ignominiously will be thehuman creature’s portion. The merrier the skating,the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, andthe ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignantthe sadness with which one must take in the meaningof the total situation.The early Greeks are continually held up to us inliterary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousnesswhich the religion of nature may engender.The Varieties of Religious Experience142There was indeed much joyousness among theGreeks—Homer’s flow of enthusiasm for most thingsthat the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homerthe reflective passages are cheerless,[73] and themoment the Greeks grew systematically pensive andthought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.[74]The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that[73] E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: “Nothing then is morewretched anywhere than man of all that breathes andcreeps upon this earth.”[74] E.g., Theognis, 425-428: “Best of all for all thingsupon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendorsof the sun; next best to traverse as soon as possiblethe gates of Hades.” See also the almost identicalpassage in Oedipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthologyis full of pessimistic utterances: “Naked cameI upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—whythen do I vainly toil when I see the end naked beforeme?”—”How did I come to be? Whence am l? Whereforedid I come? To pass away. How can I learn aughtwhen naught I know? Being naught I came to life:once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingnessis the whole race of mortals.”—”For death weare all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs thatis wantonly butchered.”

William Jamesfollows too much happiness, the all-encompassingdeath, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligiblecruelty, were the fixed background of theirimagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheismis only a poetic modern fiction. They knew nojoys comparable in quality of preciousness to thosewhich we shall erelong see that Ilrahmans, Buddhists,Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whosereligion is non-naturalistic, get from their severalcreeds of mysticism and renunciation.The difference between Greek pessimism and theoriental and modern variety is that the Greeks hadnot made the discovery that the pathetic mood maybe idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility.Their spirit was still too essentially masculine forpessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on intheir classic literature. They would have despised alife set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it tokeep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. Thediscovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as thisworld goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, wasreserved for races more complex, and (so to speak)more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to beingin the classic period. But all the same was the outlookof those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation werethe farthest advance which the Greek mind made inthat direction. The Epicurean said: “Seek not to behappy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happinessis always linked with pain; therefore hug thesafe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures.Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiminglow; and above all do not fret.” The Stoic said:“The only genuine good that life can yield a man isthe free possession of his own soul; all other goodsare lies.” Each of these philosophies is in its degree aphilosophy of despair in nature’s boons. Trustful selfabandonmentto the joys that freely offer has entirelydeparted from both Epicurean and Stoic; and whateach proposes is a way of rescue from the resultantdust-and-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean stillawaits results from economy of indulgence and damp-143

The Varieties of Religious Experienceing of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and givesup natural good altogether. There is dignity in boththese forms of resignation. They represent distinctstages in the sobering process which man’s primitiveintoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo.In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the otherit has become quite cold; and although I have spokenof them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic,yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably beto all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definitestage accomplished in the evolution of the worldsicksoul.[75] They mark the conclusion of what wecall the once-born period, and represent the highestflights of what twice-born religion would call thepurely natural man —Epicureanism, which can onlyby great courtesy be called a religion, showing hisrefinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will.They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciledcontradiction, and seek no higher unity. Comparedwith the complex ecstasies which the supernaturallyregenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheistindulge in, their receipts for equanimity areexpedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity.[75] For instance, on the very day on which I writethis page, the post brings me some aphorisms from aworldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serveas a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism:“By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understandssomething different. It is a phantom pursuedonly by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfiedwith the more modest but much more definite termcontentment. What education should chiefly aim at isto save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoringcondition, but by no means an indispensableone, of contentment. Woman’s heart and love are ashrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for theaverage man, to force him into working. But the wiseman will always prefer work chosen by himself.”144

William JamesPlease observe, however, that I am not yet pretendingfinally to judge any of these attitudes. I amonly describing their variety. The securest way to therapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-bornmake report has as an historic matter of fact beenthrough a more radical pessimism than anything thatwe have yet considered. We have seen how the lustreand enchantment may be rubbed off from thegoods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappinessso great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten,and all sentiment of their existence vanishfrom the mental field. For this extremity of pessimismto be reached, something more is needed thanobservation of life and reflection upon death. The individualmust in his own person become the prey of apathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiastsucceeds in ignoring evil’s very existence, sothe subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himselfto ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may nolonger have the least reality. Such sensitiveness andsusceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrencewhere the nervous constitution is entirely normal;one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even wherehe is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outwardfortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution,of which I said so much in my first lecture, makingits active entrance on our scene, and destined toplay a part in much that follows. Since these experiencesof melancholy are in the first instance absolutelyprivate and individual, I can now help myselfout with personal documents. Painful indeed they willbe to listen to, and there is almost an indecency inhandling them in public. Yet they lie right in themiddle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychologyof religion at all seriously, we must be willingto forget conventionalities, and dive below the smoothand lying official conversational surface.One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression.Sometimes it is mere passive joylessnessand dreariness. discouragement, dejection, lack oftaste and zest and spring.Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia145

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto designate this condition.“The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new wordto pair off with analgesia,” he writes, “has been verylittle studied, but it exists. A young girl was smittenwith a liver disease which for some time altered herconstitution. She felt no longer any affection for herfather and mother. She would have played with herdoll, but it was impossible to find the least pleasure inthe act. The same things which formerly convulsedher with laughter entirely failed to interest her now.Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistratewho was also a prey to hepatic disease. Everyemotion appeared dead within him. He manifestedneither perversion nor violence, but complete absenceof emotional reaction. If he went to the theatre, whichhe did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there.The thought of his house of his home, of his wife, andof his absent children moved him as little, he said, asa theorem of Euclid.”[76]Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce[76] Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.a temporary condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrialor celestial, is imagined only to be turned fromwith disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connectedwith the religious evolution of a singularly loftycharacter, both intellectual and moral, is well describedby the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographicalrecollections. In consequence of mentalisolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school,young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustionwith symptoms which he thus describes:—“I had such a universal terror that I woke at nightwith a start, thinking that the Pantheon was tumblingon the Polytechnic school, or that the school wasin flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the Catacombs,and that Paris was being swallowed up. Andwhen these impressions were past, all day long withoutrespite I suffered an incurable and intolerabledesolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, infact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt somethinglike the suffering of hell. Before that I had never eventhought of hell. My mind had never turned in that146

direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressedme in that way. I took no account of hell. Now,and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is sufferedthere.“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is thatevery idea of heaven was taken away from me: I couldno longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heavendid not seem to me worth going to. It was like avacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadowsless real than the earth. I could conceive no joy,no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection,love— all these words were now devoid ofsense. Without doubt I could still have talked of allthese things, but I had become incapable of feelinganything in them, of understanding anything aboutthem, of hoping anything from them, or of believingthem to exist. There was my great and inconsolablegrief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longerthe existence of happiness or perfection. An abstractheaven over a naked rock. Such was my presentabode for eternity.”[77]William James147[77] A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp.119-121, abridged. Some persons are affected withanhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss ofthe usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supplysuch examples as the following:—An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen,poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing hermotive for the act. To her parents she writes:—“Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what issweeter than life, and that is death. So good-by forever,my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, but astrong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfillfor three or four years. I have always had a hope thatsome day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it,and now it has come… . It is a wonder I have put thisoff so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up abit and put all thought out of my head.” To her brothershe writes: “Good-by forever, my own dearestbrother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever.I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness forwhat I am going to do… . I am tired of living, so amwilling to die… . Life may be sweet to some, but deathto me is sweeter.” S. A. K. Strahan: Suicide and Insanity,2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131.

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceSo much for melancholy in the sense of incapacityfor joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positiveand active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia whollyunknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partakeof various characters, having sometimes more thequality of loathing; sometimes that of irritation andexasperation; or again of self-mistrust and self-despair;or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. Thepatient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, oraccuse outside powers; and he may or he may not betormented by the theoretical mystery of why he shouldso have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and weshould not treat our classifications with too much respect.Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportionof cases that connect themselves with the religioussphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance,as a rule do not. I quote now literally from thefirst case of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It is aletter from a patient in a French asylum.“I suffer too much in this hospital, both physicallyand morally. Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness(for I no longer sleep since I am shut up here,and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, andI am waked with a jump by night mares dreadful visions,lightning, thunder, and the rest), fear, atrociousfear, presses me down, holds me without respite,never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all! Whathave I done to deserve this excess of severity? Underwhat form will this fear crush me? What would Inot owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat,drink, lie awake all night, suffer without interruption—such is the fine legacy I have received from mymother! What I fail to understand is this abuse ofpower. There are limits to everything, there is amiddle way. But God knows neither middle way norlimits. I say God, but why? All I have known so farhas been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God asmuch as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothingbut suicide, but with neither courage nor meanshere to execute the act. As you read this, it will easilyprove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas areincoherent enough—I can see that myself. But I can-148

William Jamesnot keep myself from being either crazy or an idiot;and, as things are, from whom should I ask pity? Iam defenseless against the invisible enemy who istightening his coils around me. I should be no betterarmed against him even if I saw him, or had seenhim. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death,death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to youlong enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise,having neither brain nor thoughts left. O God!what a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom,doubtless between an evening and a morning; andhow true and right I was when in our philosophyyearin college I chewed the cud of bitterness withthe pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in lifethan gladness—it is one long agony until the grave.Think how gay it makes me to remember that thishorrible misery of mine, coupled with this unspeakablefear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows howmany more years!”[78][78] Roubinovitch et Toulouse: La Melancolie, 1897,p. 170, abridged.This letter shows two things. First, you see how theentire consciousness of the poor man is so choked withthe feeling of evil that the sense of there being anygood in the world is lost for him altogether. His attentionexcludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has lefthis heaven. And secondly you see how the queruloustemper of his misery keeps his mind from taking areligious direction. Querulousness of mind tends infact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, sofar as I know, no part whatever in the construction ofreligious systems.Religious melancholy must be cast in a more meltingmood. Tolstoy has left us, in his book called MyConfession, a wonderful account of the attack of melancholywhich led him to his own religious conclusions.The latter in some respects are peculiar; butthe melancholy presents two characters which makeit a typical document for our present purpose. Firstit is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive lossof appetite for all life’s values; and second, it showshow the altered and estranged aspect which the world149

The Varieties of Religious Experienceassumed in consequence of this stimulated Tolstoy’sintellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and effortfor philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at somelength; but before doing so, I will make a general remarkon each of these two points.First on our spiritual judgments and the sense ofvalue in general.It is notorious that facts are compatible with oppositeemotional comments, since the same fact will inspireentirely different feelings in different persons,and at different times in the same person; and thereis no rationally deducible connection between anyouter fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke.These have their source in another sphere ofexistence altogether, in the animal and spiritual regionof the subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible,suddenly stripped of all the emotion with whichyour world now inspires you, and try to imagine it asit exists, purely by itself, without your favorable orunfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. Itwill be almost impossible for you to realize such a conditionof negativity and deadness. No one portion ofthe universe would then have importance beyondanother; and the whole collection of its things andseries of its events would be without significance,character, expression, or perspective. Whatever ofvalue, interest, or meaning our respective worlds mayappear endued with are thus pure gifts of thespectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most familiarand extreme example of this fact. If it comes,it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoningcan force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creatureloved as utterly as the sunrise transforms MontBlanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment;and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the loverand gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, withindignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they arethere, life changes. And whether they shall be thereor not depends almost always upon non-logical, oftenon organic conditions. And as the excited interestwhich these passions put into the world is our gift tothe world, just so are the passions themselves gifts—150

William Jamesgifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimeshigh; but almost always nonlogical and beyondour control. How can the moribund old man reasonback to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminenceof great things with which our old earth tingledfor him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts,either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spiritbloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materialslend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, asthe stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternatingcolored lights may be shed upon it from theoptical apparatus in the gallery.Meanwhile the practically real world for each oneof us, the effective world of the individual, is the compoundworld, the physical facts and emotional valuesin indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or perverteither factor of this complex resultant, and thekind of experience we call pathological ensues.In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaningwhatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. Theresult was a transformation in the whole expressionof reality. When we come to study the phenomenonof conversion or religious regeneration, we shall seethat a not infrequent consequence of the change operatedin the subject is a transfiguration of the face ofnature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upona new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similarchange, only it is in the reverse direction. Theworld now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny.Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculationin the eyes it glares with. “It is as if I lived inanother century,” says one asylum patient.—”I seeeverything through a cloud,” says another, “thingsare not as they were, and I am changed.”—”I see,”says a third, “I touch, but the things do not come nearme, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything.”—”Personsmove like shadows, and soundsseem to come from a distant world.”—”There is nolonger any past for me; people appear so strange; itis as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in atheatre; as if people were actors, and everything werescenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why?151

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceEverything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression.”—”Iweep false tears, I have unreal hands: rally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, itexcitement and interest which our functions natu-the things I see are not real things.”—Such are expressionsthat naturally rise to the lips of melancholy were meaningless whose meaning had always beenwas now flat sober, more than sober, dead. Thingssubjects describing their changed state.[79]self-evident. The questions “Why?” and “What next?”Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a began to beset him more and more frequently. Atprey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangenessis wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is able, and as if he could easily find the answers if hefirst it seemed as if such questions must be answer-concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If would take the time; but as they ever became morethe natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, urgent, he perceived that it was like those first discomfortsof a sick man, to which he pays but littlewhat world, what thing is real? An urgent wonderingand questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, attention till they run into one continuous suffering,and in the desperate effort to get into right relations and then he realizes that what he took for a passingwith the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomesfor him a satisfying religious solution.world for him, means his death.disorder means the most momentous thing in theAt about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he beganto have moments of perplexity, of what he calls found no response.These questions “Why?” “Wherefore?” “What for?”arrest, as if he knew not “how to live,” or what to do. “I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had brokenIt is obvious that these were moments in which the within me on which my life had always rested, that Ihad nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my[79] I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me toLa Tristesse et la Joie, 1900.152

William Jamesget rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannotbe said exactly that I wished to kill myself, forthe force which drew me away from life was fuller,more powerful, more general than any mere desire.It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only itimpelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspirationof my whole being to get out of life.“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health,hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to therafters of the room where every night I went to sleepalone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest Ishould yield to the too easy temptation of putting anend to myself with my gun.“I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life;I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I stillhoped something from it.“All this took place at a time when so far as all myouter circumstances went, I ought to have been completelyhappy. I had a good wife who loved me andwhom I loved; good children and a large propertywhich was increasing with no pains taken on my part.I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintancethan I had ever been; I was loaded with praiseby strangers; and without exaggeration I could believemy name already famous. Moreover I was neitherinsane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed aphysical and mental strength which I have rarely metin persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants,I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedlyand feel no bad effects.“And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to anyactions of my life. And I was surprised that I had notunderstood this from the very beginning. My state ofmind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was beingplayed upon me by some one. One can live only solong as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but whenone grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all astupid cheat.What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funnyor silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in thedesert by a wild beast is very old.153

The Varieties of Religious Experience“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, thetraveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but atthe bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting withopen mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man,not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of thebeast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he shouldbe devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches ofa wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks ofthe well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he mustsoon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, andsee two mice, one white, the other black, evenly movinground the bush to which he hangs, and gnawingoff its roots“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitablyperish; but while thus hanging he looks abouthim and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops ofhoney. These he reaches with his tongue and licksthem off with rapture.“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing thatthe inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tearme, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made amartyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoledme; but the honey pleases me no longer, andday and night the white mouse and the black mousegnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but onething: the inevitable dragon and the mice—I cannotturn my gaze away from them.“This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truthwhich every one may understand. What will be theoutcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do tomorrow?What will be the outcome of all my life? Whyshould I live? Why should I do anything? Is there inlife any purpose which the inevitable death whichawaits me does not undo and destroy?“These questions are the simplest in the world.From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they arein the soul of every human being. Without an answerto them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life togo on.“‘But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘there maybe something I have failed to notice or to comprehend.It is not possible that this condition of despair154

William Jamesshould be natural to mankind.’ And I sought for anexplanation in all the branches of knowledge acquiredby men. I questioned painfully and protractedly andwith no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence,but laboriously and obstinately for days and nightstogether. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks tosave himself—and I found nothing. I became convinced,moreover, that all those who before me hadsought for an answer in the sciences have also foundnothing. And not only this, but that they have recognizedthat the very thing which was leading me todespair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the onlyincontestable knowledge accessible to man.”To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha,Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only fourways in which men of his own class and society areaccustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animalblindness, sucking the honey without seeing thedragon or the mice—”and from such a way,” he says,“I can learn nothing, after what I now know;” or reflectiveepicureanism, snatching what it can while theday lasts—which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefactionthan the first; or manly suicide; or seeingthe mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintivelyclinging to the bush of life. Suicide was naturally theconsistent course dictated by the logical intellect.“Yet,” says Tolstoy, “whilst my intellect was working,something else in me was working too, and keptme from the deed—a consciousness of life, as I maycall it, which was like a force that obliged my mind tofix itself in another direction and draw me out of mysituation of despair… . During the whole course of thisyear, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myselfhow to end the business, whether by the rope or bythe bullet, during all that time, alongside of all thosemovements of my ideas and observations, my heartkept languishing with another pining emotion. I cancall this by no other name than that of a thirst forGod. This craving for God had nothing to do with themovement of my ideas—in fact, it was the direct contraryof that movement—but it came from my heart.It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like155

The Varieties of Religious Experiencean orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute—that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was is not the simple, ignorance of ill, but something vastlymitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements,but finding natural evil no such stumbling-one.”[80]Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, block and terror because it now sees it swallowed upwhich, starting from this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption,not of mere reversion to natural health, and therecovery, I will say nothing in this lecture, reservingit for a later hour. The only thing that need interest sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to himus now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantmentwith ordinary life, and the fact that the whole he could enjoy before.a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being thanrange of habitual values may, to a man as powerful We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholyenshrined in literature in John Bunyan’s au-and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastlya mockery.tobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were largelyWhen disillusionment has gone as far as this, there objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in generalwas what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’sis seldom a restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted ofthe fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never troubles were over the condition of his own personalcomes again. The happiness that comes, when any self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,sensitive of conscience to a diseased de-does come—and often enough it fails to return in angree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and[80] My extracts are from the French translation by a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory.These were usually texts of Scripture which,“Zonia.” In abridging I have taken the liberty oftransposing one passage.156

William Jamessometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable,would come in a half- hallucinatory form as if theywere voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it betweenthem like a shuttlecock. Added to this were afearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse, nowI am farther from conversion than ever I was before.If now I should have burned at the stake, I could notbelieve that Christ had love for me; alas, I could neitherhear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savorany of his things. Sometimes I would tell my conditionto the people of God, which, when they heard,they would pity me, and would tell of the Promises.But they had as good have told me that I must reachthe Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive orrely upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to theact of sinning, I never was more tender than now; Idurst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as astraw, for my conscience now was sore, and wouldsmart at every touch; I could not tell how to speakmy words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, howgingerly did I then go, in all I did or said! I foundmyself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir;and was as there left both by God and Christ, and thespirit, and all good things.“But my original and inward pollution, that was myplague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was moreloathsome in my own eyes than was a toad; and Ithought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and corruption,I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heartas water would bubble out of a fountain. I could havechanged heart with anybody. I thought none but theDevil himself could equal me for inward wickednessand pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsakenof God; and thus I continued a long while, even forsome years together.“And now I was sorry that God had made me a man.The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition,for they had not a sinful nature; they were notobnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go tohell-fire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced,had my condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed157

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would Ihave been in the condition of the dog or horse, for Iknew they had no soul to perish under the everlastingweight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay,and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken topieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrowwas, that I could not find with all my soul that I diddesire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedinglyhard. If I would have given a thousand poundsfor a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor sometimesscarce desire to shed one.“I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nordid I ever so know, as now, what it was to be wearyof my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would Ihave been anything but myself! Anything but a man!and in any condition but my own.”[81]Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the lightagain, but we must also postpone that part of his storyto another hour. In a later lecture I will also give the[81] Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I haveprinted a number of detached passages continuously.end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelistwho worked in Nova Scotia a hundred yearsago, and who thus vividly describes the high-watermark of the religious melancholy which formed itsbeginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan’s.“Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me;the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees,plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed inmourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse,and everything around me seemed to be conspiringmy ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that Ithought that every one I saw knew them, and sometimesI was almost ready to acknowledge manythings, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes itseemed to me as if every one was pointing me out asthe most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so greata sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things herebelow, that I knew the whole world could not possiblymake me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation.When I waked in the morning, the first thoughtwould be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do,158

William Jameswhere shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I “Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism andshall be perhaps in hell before morning. I would many general depression of spirits about my prospects, Itimes look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilightto procure some article that was there; whenmy heart I was in their place, that I might have nosoul to lose; and when I have seen birds flying over suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, justmy head, have often thought within myself, Oh, that as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of myI could fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, own existence. Simultaneously there arose in myhow happy should I be, if I were in their place!”[82] mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I hadEnvy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespreadaffection in this type of sadness.ish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on oneseen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with green-The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, withthe form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarsefor permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer.The original is in French, and though the sub-over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there likegray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawnject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruviantime of which he writes, his case has otherwise the mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and lookingabsolutely non-human. This image and my fearmerit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.entered into a species of combination with each other[82] The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry that shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that IAlline, Boston 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintancewith this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin for it should strike for me as it struck for him. Therepossess can defend me against that fate, if the hourRand.159

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewas such a horror of him, and such a perception ofmy own merely momentary discrepancy from him,that it was as if something hitherto solid within mybreast gave way entirely, and I became a mass ofquivering fear. After this the universe was changedfor me altogether. I awoke morning after morningwith a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, andwith a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knewbefore, and that I have never felt since.[83] It waslike a revelation; and although the immediate feelingspassed away, the experience has made me sympatheticwith the morbid feelings of others ever since.It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to goout into the dark alone.[83] Compare Bunyan. “There was I struck into avery great trembling, insomuch that at some times Icould, for days together, feel my very body, as wellas my mind, to shake and totter under the sense ofthe dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on thosethat have sinned that most fearful and unpardonablesin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stomach,by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially atsome times, as if my breast-bone would have splitasunder… . Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink,under the burden that was upon me; which burdenalso did so oppress me that I could neither stand, norgo, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.”“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I rememberwondering how other people could live, how I myselfhad ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecuritybeneath the surface of life. My mother in particular,a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfectparadox in her unconsciousness of danger, whichyou may well believe I was very careful not to disturbby revelations of my own state of mind (I havealways thought that this experience of melancholiaof mine had a religious bearing.”On asking this correspondent to explain more fullywhat he meant by these last words, the answer hewrote was this:—“I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful160

William Jamesthat if I had not clung to scripture-texts like ‘The eternalGod is my refuge,’ etc., ‘Come unto me, all ye that rounding him without opening or end. Not the confererinto a material of overwhelming horror, sur-labor and are heavy-laden,’ etc., ‘I am the resurrectionand the life,’ etc., I think I should have grown blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it closeception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grislyreally insane.”[84]upon one, and no other conception or sensation ableThere is no need of more examples. The cases we to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantlyhave looked at are enough. One of them gives us the remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectualand moral consolations in presence of a needvanity of mortal things; another the sense of sin; andthe remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—andin one or other of these three ways it problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring aof help like this! Here is the real core of the religiousalways is that man’s original optimism and self-satisfactionget leveled with the dust.sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these.final message unless he says things that will have aIn none of these cases was there any intellectual But the deliverance must come in as strong a form asinsanity or delusion about matters of fact; but were the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems awe disposed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia,with its hallucinations and delusions, it would tic, with blood and miracles and supernatural opera-reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgias-be a worse story still—desperation absolute and complete,the whole universe coagulating about the suftutionsneed them too much.tions, may possibly never be displaced. Some consti-Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonismmay naturally arise between the healthy-[84] For another case of fear equally sudden, seeHenry James: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, minded way of viewing life and the way that takes allBoston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.161

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethis experience of evil as something essential. To thislatter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might callit, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakablyblind and shallow. To the healthy-mindedway, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seemsunmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in ratholesinstead of living in the light; with their manufactureof fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesomekind of misery, there is something almostobscene about these children of wrath and cravers ofa second birth. If religious intolerance and hangingand burning could again become the order of the day,there is little doubt that, however it may have beenin the past, the healthy-minded would at presentshow themselves the less indulgent party of the two.In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartialonlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel? Itseems to me that we are bound to say that morbidmindednessranges over the wider scale of experience,and that its survey is the one that overlaps. Themethod of averting one’s attention from evil, and livingsimply in the light of good is splendid as long as itwill work. It will work with many persons; it will workfar more generally than most of us are ready to suppose;and within the sphere of its successful operationthere is nothing to be said against it as a religioussolution. But it breaks down impotently as soon asmelancholy comes; and even though one be quite freefrom melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt thathealthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophicaldoctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positivelyto account for are a genuine portion of reality;and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance,and possibly the only openers of our eyes tothe deepest levels of truth.The normal process of life contains moments as badas any of those which insane melancholy is filled with,moments in which radical evil gets its innings andtakes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror areall drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilizationis founded on the shambles, and every individualexistence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.162

If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive thereyourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologictimes is hard for our imagination—they seemtoo much like mere museum specimens. Yet there isno tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that didnot daily through long years of the foretime hold fastto the body struggling in despair of some fated livingvictim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims,if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world aboutus to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardensthe infernal cat plays with the panting mouse,or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodilesand rattlesnakes and pythons are at this momentvessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existencefills every minute of every day that drags itslength along; and whenever they or other wild beastsclutch their living prey, the deadly horror which anagitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reactionon the situation.[85][85] Example: “It was about eleven o’clock at night… but I strolled on still with the people… . Suddenlyupon the left side of our road, a crackling was heardWilliam James163among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in aninstant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced uponthe one of the party that was foremost, and carriedhim off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of theanimal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones inhis mouth, and his last cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarilyreechoed by all of us, was over in three seconds;and then I know not what happened till I returnedto my senses, when I found myself and companionslying down on the ground as if prepared tobe devoured by our enemy the sovereign of the forest.I find my pen incapable of describing the terrorof that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, ourpower of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently,and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heardfrom us. In this state we crept on all fours for somedistance back, and then ran for life with the speed ofan Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunatelyhappened to come to a small village… . After this everyone of us was attacked with fever, attended withshivering, in which deplorable state we remained tillmorning.”—Autobiography of Lutullah a MohammedanGentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIt may indeed be that no religious reconciliation withthe absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils,indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but itmay be that there are forms of evil so extreme as toenter into no good system whatsoever, and that, inrespect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect tonotice is the only practical resource. This questionmust confront us on a later day. But provisionally,and as a mere matter of program and method, sincethe evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as thegood ones, the philosophic presumption should be thatthey have some rational significance, and that systematichealthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accordto sorrow, pain, and death any positive and activeattention whatever, is formally less complete thansystems that try at least to include these elements intheir scope.The completest religions would therefore seem tobe those in which the pessimistic elements are bestdeveloped. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity arethe best known to us of these. They are essentiallyreligions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreallife before he can be born into the real life. In mynext lecture, I will try to discuss some of the psychologicalconditions of this second birth. Fortunatelyfrom now onward we shall have to deal with morecheerful subjects than those which we have recentlybeen dwelling on.164

William JamesLecture VIIITHE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OFITS UNIFICATIONTHE LAST LECTURE was a painful one, dealing as it didwith evil as a pervasive element of the world we livein. At the close of it we were brought into full view ofthe contrast between the two ways of looking at lifewhich are characteristic respectively of what we calledthe healthy-minded, who need to be born only once,and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in orderto be happy. The result is two different conceptionsof the universe of our experience. In the religionof the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinearor one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in onedenomination, whose parts have just the values whichnaturally they appear to have, and of which a simplealgebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the totalworth. Happiness and religious peace consist inliving on the plus side of the account. In the religionof the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is adouble-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached bythe simple addition of pluses and elimination of minusesfrom life. Natural good is not simply insufficientin amount and transient, there lurks a falsity inits very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not byearlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and cannever be the thing intended for our lasting worship.It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciationand despair of it are our first step in the directionof the truth. There are two lives, the natural andthe spiritual, and we must lose the one before we canparticipate in the other.In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and puresalvationism, the two types are violently contrasted;though here as in most other current classifications,the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions,and the concrete human beings whom we oftenestmeet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically,however, you all recognize the difference: youunderstand, for example, the disdain of the method-165

The Varieties of Religious Experienceist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘Howthe latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivismof the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at theand making of paradox and the inversion of natural “This horrible duality has often given me matterappearances the essence of God’s truth.[86]for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, alwaysThe psychological basis of the twice-born characterseems to be a certain discordancy or heterogenefering,bestirring itself. This second me that I haveseated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, sufityin the native temperament of the subject, an incompletelyunified moral and intellectual constitution. put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how itnever been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse mocks!”[87]Daudet. “The first time that I perceived that I was Recent works on the psychology of character havetwo was at the death of my brother Henri, when my had much to say upon this point.[88] Some personsare born with an inner constitution which is harmoniousand well balanced from the outset. Their im-[86] E.g., “Our young people are diseased with thetheological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination,and the like. These never presented a [87] Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.practical difficulty to any man—never darkened [88] See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Lesacross any man’s road, who did not go out of his way Caracteres, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibres, lesto seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and Unifies, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, lesmeasles, and whooping-coughs, etc. Emerson: SpiritualLaws.chic types.Incoherents, les Emiettes, as so many diverse psy-166

William Jamespulses are consistent with one another, their will followswithout trouble the guidance of their intellect, no lack of spirit on the platform, I have preferred todoer; when I have been lecturing and debating withtheir passions are not excessive, and their lives are go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than tolittle haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;and are so in degrees which may vary from platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrinkring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on thesomething so slight as to result in a merely odd or from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am awhimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public.How often have I passed unhappy quarters of anconsequences may be inconvenient in the extreme.Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a hour screwing up my courage to find fault with somegood example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s autobiography. subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove,“I have ever been the queerest mixture of weaknessand strength, and have paid heavily for the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking fromand how often have I jeered myself for a fraud as theweakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness,and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrinkblaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly.shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unluckystring; as a girl I would shrink away from form, opposition makes me speak my best.”[89]into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the plat-strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiableweakness; but a stronger degree of heterogene-so that I was full of eager gratitude to any one whonoticed me kindly, as the young mistress of a house I ity may make havoc of the subject’s life. There arewas afraid of my servants, and would let careless work persons whose existence is little more than a seriespass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-[89] Annie Besant: an Autobiography, p. 82.167

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof zig-zags, as now one tendency and now another “degenere superieur” is simply a man of sensibilitygets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, in many directions, who finds more difficulty than isthey wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupttheir most deliberate plans, and their lives running his furrow straight, because his feelings andcommon in keeping his spiritual house in order andare one long drama of repentance and of effort to repairmisdemeanors and mistakes.In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrationalimpulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually.Heterogeneous personality has been explained as impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitionswhich beset the psychopathic temperamentthe result of inheritance—the traits of character ofincompatible and antagonistic ancestors are supposedto be preserved alongside of each other.[90] ite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyanwhen it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquis-This explanation may pass for what it is worth—it had an obsession of the words, “Sell Christ for this,certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” which wouldcause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find run through his mind a hundred times together, untilthe extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament,of which I spoke in my first lecture. All will not,” he impulsively said, “Let him go if he will,”one day out of breath with retorting, “I will not, Iwriters about that temperament make the inner and this loss of the battle kept him in despair forheterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently,indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to theover a year. The lives of the saints are full of suchascribe that temperament to a man at all. A direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connectsitself with the life of the subconscious self, so-called,[90] Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental of which we must erelong speak more directly.Diseases, September, 1893.168

William JamesNow in all of us, however constituted, but to a degreethe greater in proportion as we are intense andsensitive and subject to diversified temptations, andto the greatest possible degree if we are decidedlypsychopathic, does the normal evolution of characterchiefly consist in the straightening out and unifyingof the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings,the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being acomparative chaos within us—they must end byforming a stable system of functions in right subordination.Unhappiness is apt to characterize the periodof order-making and struggle. If the individual be oftender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappinesswill take the form of moral remorse andcompunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, andof standing in false relations to the author of one’sbeing and appointer of one’s spiritual fate. This is thereligious melancholy and “conviction of sin” that haveplayed so large a part in the history of ProtestantChristianity. The man’s interior is a battle-ground forwhat he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual,the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes hisMahomet say:—“Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:Tantot l’homme d’en haut, et tantot l’homme d’enbas;Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne,Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne.”Wrong living, impotent aspirations; “What I would,that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” as SaintPaul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligibleand intolerable burden to which one is mysteriouslythe heir.Let me quote from some typical cases of discordantpersonality, with melancholy in the form of self-condemnationand sense of sin. Saint Augustine’s case isa classic example. You all remember his half-pagan,half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigrationto Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheismand subsequent skepticism, and his restless searchfor truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted169

The Varieties of Religious Experienceby the struggle between the two souls in his breast “The new will which I began to have was not yetand ashamed of his own weakness of will, when so strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthenedby long indulgence. So these two wills, one old,many others whom he knew and knew of had thrownoff the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselvesto chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice with each other and disturbed my soul. I understoodone new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contendedin the garden say, “Sume, lege” (take and read), and by my own experience what I had read, ‘flesh lustethopening the Bible at random, saw the text, “not in against spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ It was myselfchambering and wantonness,” etc., which seemed directlysent to his address, and laid the inner storm to I approved in myself than in that which I disapprovedindeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that whichrest forever.[91] Augustine’s psychological genius has in myself. Yet it was through myself that habit hadgiven an account of the trouble of having a divided attained so fierce a mastery over me, because I hadself which has never been surpassed.willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to[91] Louis Gourdon (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint earth, I refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as muchAugustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by afraid to be freed from all bonds, as I ought to havean analysis of Augustine’s writings immediately afterthe date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the “Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon theefeared being trammeled by them.account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The were like the efforts of one who would awake, butcrisis in the garden marked a definitive conversion being overpowered with sleepiness is soon asleepfrom his former life, but it was to the neo-platonic again. Often does a man when heavy sleepiness is onspiritualism and only a halfway stage toward Christianity.The latter he appears not fully and radically proving it, encourage it; even so I was sure it washis limbs defer to shake it off, and though not ap-to have embraced until four years more had passed.170

William Jamesbetter to surrender to thy love than to yield to myown lusts, yet though the former course convincedme, the latter pleased and held me bound. There wasnaught in me to answer thy call ‘Awake, thou sleeper,’but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘Presently; yes,presently; wait a little while.’ But the ‘presently’ hadno ‘present,’ and the ‘little while’ grew long… . For Iwas afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and healme at once of my disease of lust, which I wished tosatiate rather than to see extinguished. With whatlashes of words did I not scourge my own soul. Yet itshrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse tooffer… . I said within myself: ‘Come, let it be donenow,’ and as I said it, I was on the point of the resolve.I all but did it, yet I did not do it. And I madeanother effort, and almost succeeded, yet I did notreach it, and did not grasp it, hesitating to die to death,and live to life, and the evil to which I was so wontedheld me more than the better life I had not tried.”[92][92] Confessions, Book VIII., Chaps. v., vii., xi.,abridged.There could be no more perfect description of thedivided will, when the higher wishes lack just thatlast acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, ofdynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists),that enables them to burst their shell, and makeirruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendenciesforever. In a later lecture we shall have muchto say about this higher excitability.I find another good description of the divided will inthe autobiography of Henry Alline, the Nova Scotianevangelist, of whose melancholy I read a brief accountin my last lecture. The poor youth’s sins were, as youwill see, of the most harmless order, yet they interferedwith what proved to be his truest vocation, sothey gave him great distress.“I was now very moral in my life, but found no restof conscience. I now began to be esteemed in youngcompany, who knew nothing of my mind all this while,and their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for Isoon began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I stillflattered myself that if I did not get drunk, nor curse,171

The Varieties of Religious Experiencenor swear, there would be no sin in frolicking and carnalmirth, and I thought God would indulge youngpeople with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation.I still kept a round of duties, and would notsuffer myself to run into any open vices, and so gotalong very well in time of health and prosperity, butwhen I was distressed or threatened by sickness,death, or heavy storms of thunder, my religion wouldnot do, and I found there was something wanting, andwould begin to repent my going so much to frolics,but when the distress was over, the devil and my ownwicked heart, with the solicitations of my associates,and my fondness for young company, were suchstrong allurements, I would again give way, and thusI got to be very wild and rude, at the same time keptup my rounds of secret prayer and reading; but God,not willing I should destroy myself, still followed mewith his calls, and moved with such power upon myconscience, that I could not satisfy myself with mydiversions, and in the midst of my mirth sometimeswould have such a sense of my lost and undone condition,that I would wish myself from the company, andafter it was over, when I went home, would make manypromises that I would attend no more on these frolics,and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; butwhen I came to have the temptation again, I wouldgive way: no sooner would I hear the music and drinka glass of wine, but I would find my mind elevated andsoon proceed to any sort of merriment or diversion,that I thought was not debauched or openly vicious;but when I returned from my carnal mirth I felt asguilty as ever, and could sometimes not close my eyesfor some hours after I had gone to my bed. I was oneof the most unhappy creatures on earth.“Sometimes I would leave the company (oftenspeaking to the fiddler to cease from playing, as if Iwas tired), and go out and walk about crying andpraying, as if my very heart would break, and beseechingGod that he would not cut me off, nor giveme up to hardness of heart. Oh, what unhappy hoursand nights I thus wore away! When I met sometimeswith merry companions, and my heart was ready to172

William Jamessink, I would labor to put on as cheerful a countenanceas possible, that they might not distrust anything,and sometimes would begin some discoursewith young men or young women on purpose, or proposea merry song, lest the distress of my soul wouldbe discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same timeI would then rather have been in a wilderness in exile,than with them or any of their pleasures or enjoyments.Thus for many months when I was in company?I would act the hypocrite and feign a merryheart but at the same time would endeavor as muchas I could to shun their company, oh wretched andunhappy mortal that I was! Everything I did, andwherever I went, I was still in a storm and yet I continuedto be the chief contriver and ringleader of thefrolics for many months after; though it was a toiland torment to attend them; but the devil and myown wicked heart drove me about like a slave, tellingme that I must do this and do that, and bear this andbear that, and turn here and turn there, to keep mycredit up, and retain the esteem of my associates:and all this while I continued as strict as possible inmy duties, and left no stone unturned to pacify myconscience, watching even against my thoughts, andpraying continually wherever I went: for I did notthink there was any sin in my conduct, when I wasamong carnal company, because I did not take anysatisfaction there, but only followed it, I thought, forsufficient reasons.“But still, all that I did or could do, conscience wouldroar night and day.”Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into thesmooth waters of inner unity and peace, and I shallnext ask you to consider more closely some of thepeculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs.It may come gradually, or it may occur abruptly;it may come through altered feelings, or through alteredpowers of action; or it may come through newintellectual insights, or through experiences which weshall later have to designate as ‘mystical.’ However itcome, it brings a characteristic sort of relief; and neversuch extreme relief as when it is cast into the reli-173

The Varieties of Religious Experiencegious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is onlyone of the ways in which men gain that gift. Easily,permanently, and successfully, it often transforms themost intolerable misery into the profoundest andmost enduring happiness.But to find religion is only one out of many ways ofreaching unity; and the process of remedying innerincompleteness and reducing inner discord is a generalpsychological process, which may take place withany sort of mental material, and need not necessarilyassume the religious form. In judging of the religioustypes of regeneration which we are about to study, itis important to recognize that they are only one speciesof a genus that contains other types as well. Forexample, the new birth may be away from religioninto incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosityinto freedom and license; or it may be producedby the irruption into the individual’s life of some newstimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity,revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instanceswe have precisely the same psychological form ofevent,—a firmness, stability, and equilibrium succeedinga period of storm and stress and inconsistency.In these non-religious cases the new man mayalso be born either gradually or suddenly.The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquentmemorial of his own “counter-conversion,” asthe transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has beenwell styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy’s doubts hadlong harassed him; but he dates his final crisis from acertain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable,and where the immediate result was sadness at theillusions he had lost.“I shall never forget that night of December,” writesJouffroy, “in which the veil that concealed from memy own incredulity was torn. I hear again my stepsin that narrow naked chamber where long after thehour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking upand down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds,which now and again illuminated the frigid windowpanes.The hours of the night flowed on and I did notnote their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts,174

William Jamesas from layer to layer they descended towards the sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must livefoundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiledby one all the illusions which until then had screened me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. Theits windings from my view, made them every momentmore clearly visible.of my life.”[93]days which followed this discovery were the saddest“Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked “Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe Isailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, was always more or less skeptical about ‘God;’ skepticismgrew as an undercurrent, all through my earlyfrightened at the unknown void in which I was aboutto float, I turned with them towards my childhood, youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotionalelements in my religious growth. When I wasmy family, my country, all that was dear and sacredto me: the inflexible current of my thought was too sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I lovedstrong—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me God. I replied ‘Yes,’ as was customary and expected.to let go of everything. The investigation went on But instantly with a flash something spoke within me,more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its ‘No, you do not.’ I was haunted for a long time withterm, and did not stop until the end was reached. I shame and remorse for my falsehood and for myknew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear thatleft that stood erect.“This moment was a frightful one; and when towardsmorning I threw myself exhausted on my bed, 2me edition, p. 83. I add two other cases of counter-[93] Th. Jouffroy: Nouveaux Melanges philosophiques,I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, conversion dating from a certain moment. The first isgo out like a fire, and before me another life opened, from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection, andthe narrator is a woman.175

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethere might be an avenging God who would punishme in some terrible way… . At nineteen, I had an attackof tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heardtold a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs,and then continued the operation until shebecame insensible. I felt the horror of the thingkeenly. Instantly this thought flashed through mymind: ‘I have no use for a God who permits suchthings.’ This experience was followed by months ofstoical indifference to the God of my previous life,mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhatproud defiance of him. I still thought there mightbe a God. If so he would probably damn me, but Ishould have to stand it. I felt very little fear and nodesire to propitiate him. I have never had any personalrelations with him since this painful experience.”The second case exemplifies how small an additionalstimulus will overthrow the mind into a new state ofequilibrium when the process of preparation and incubationhas proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbiallast straw added to the camel’s burden, orthat touch of a needle which makes the salt in a supersaturatedfluid suddenly begin to crystallize out.Tolstoy writes: “S., a frank and intelligent man, toldme as follows how he ceased to believe:—“He was twenty-six years old when one day on ahunting expedition, the time for sleep having come,he set himself to pray according to the custom he hadheld from childhood.“His brother, who was hunting with him, lay uponthe hay and looked at him. When S. had finished hisprayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said,‘Do you still keep up that thing?’ Nothing more wassaid. But since that day, now more than thirty yearsago, S. has never prayed again; he never takes communion,and does not go to church. All this, not becausehe became acquainted with convictions of hisbrother which he then and there adopted; not becausehe made any new resolution in his soul, butmerely because the words spoken by his brother werelike the light push of a finger against a leaning wallalready about to tumble by its own weight. These176

William Jameswords but showed him that the place wherein he supposedreligion dwelt in him had long been empty, andthat the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bowswhich he made during his prayer, were actions withno inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, hecould no longer keep them up.” Ma Confession, p. 8.I subjoin an additional document which has comeinto my possession, and which represents in a vividway what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion,if the opposite of ‘falling in love,’ falling out oflove, may be so termed. Falling in love also conformsfrequently to this type, a latent process of unconsciouspreparation often preceding a sudden awakening tothe fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. Thefree and easy tone in this narrative gives it a sinceritythat speaks for itself.“For two years of this time I went through a verybad experience, which almost drove me mad. I hadfallen violently in love with a girl who, young as shewas, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look backon her now, I hate her, and wonder how I could everhave fallen so low as to be worked upon to such anextent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell into aregular fever, could think of nothing else; wheneverI was alone, I pictured her attractions, and spent mostof the time when I should have been working, in recallingour previous interviews, and imagining futureconversations. She was very pretty, good humored,and jolly to the last degree, and intensely pleased withmy admiration. Would give me no decided answeryes or no and the queer thing about it was that whilstpursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all alongthat she was unfit to be a wife for me, and that shenever would say yes. Although for a year we took ourmeals at the same boarding-house, so that I saw hercontinually and familiarly, our closer relations had tobe largely on the sly, and this fact, together with myjealousy of another one of her male admirers and myown conscience despising me for my uncontrollableweakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that Ireally thought I should become insane. I understandwell those young men murdering their sweethearts,177

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless Idid love her passionately, and in some ways she diddeserve it.“The queer thing was the sudden and unexpectedway in which it all stopped. I was going to my workafter breakfast one morning, thinking as usual of herand of my misery, when, just as if some outside powerlaid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almostrunning to my room, where I immediately gotout all the relics of her which I possessed, includingsome hair, all her notes and letters and ambrotypeson glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I actuallycrushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce joyof revenge and punishment. I now loathed and despisedher altogether, and as for myself I felt as if aload of disease had suddenly been removed from me.That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote toher again in all the subsequent years, and I have neverhad a single moment of loving thought towards onefor so many months entirely filled my heart. In fact,I have always rather hated her memory, though nowI can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in thatdirection. At any rate, from that happy morning onwardI regained possession of my own proper soul,and have never since fallen into any similar trap.”This seems to me an unusually clear example of twodifferent levels of personality, inconsistent in theirdictates, yet so well balanced against each other asfor a long time to fill the life with discord and dissatisfaction.At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis,the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and this happensso unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the writer’swords, “some outside power laid hold.”Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and aconverse case of hatred suddenly turning into love,in his Psychology of Religion, p. 141. Compare theother highly curious instances which he gives on pp.137-144, of sudden non-religious alterations of habitor character. He seems right in conceiving all suchsudden changes as results of special cerebral functionsunconsciously developing until they are readyto play a controlling part when they make irruption178

William Jamesinto the conscious life. When we treat of sudden ‘conversion,’I shall make as much use as I can of thishypothesis of subconscious incubation.In John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character,there is an account of a case of sudden conversion toavarice, which is illustrative enough to quote:—A young man, it appears, “wasted, in two or threeyears, a large patrimony in profligate revels with anumber of worthless associates who called themselveshis friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted,treated him of course with neglect or contempt.Reduced to absolute want, he one day wentout of the house with an intention to put an end to hislife, but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, hecame to the brow of an eminence which overlookedwhat were lately his estates. Here he sat down, andremained fixed in thought a number of hours, at theend of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement,exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution,which was, that all these estates should be hisagain; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantlybegan to execute. He walked hastily forward, determinedto seize the first opportunity, of howeverhumble a kind, to gain any money, though it wereever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutelynot to spend, if he could help it, a farthing of whateverhe might obtain. The first thing that drew hisattention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on thepavement before a house. He offered himself to shovelor wheel them into the place where they were to belaid, and was employed.He received a few pence for the labor; and then, inpursuance of the saving part of his plan requestedsome small gratuity of meat and drink, which wasgiven him. He then looked out for the next thing thatmight chance; and went, with indefatigable industry,through a succession of servile employments in differentplaces, of longer and shorter duration, still scrupulousin avoiding, as far as possible, the expense of apenny. He promptly seized every opportunity whichcould advance his design, without regarding themeanness of occupation or appearance. By this179

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemethod he had gained, after a considerable time,money enough to purchase in order to sell again afew cattle, of which he had taken pains to understandthe value. He speedily but cautiously turned his firstgains into second advantages; retained without asingle deviation his extreme parsimony; and thusadvanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipientwealth. I did not hear, or have forgotten,the continued course of his life, but the final resultwas, that he more than recovered his lost possessions,and died an inveterate miser, worth L60,000.”[94]Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religiouscase, namely, that immediately concerns us. Here isone of the simplest possible type, an account of theconversion to the systematic religion of healthymindednessof a man who must already have beennaturally of the healthy-minded type. It shows how,when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall.Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book calledMenticulture, relates that a friend with whom he was[94] Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.talking of the self-control attained by the Japanesethrough their practice of the Buddhist disciplinesaid:—“‘You must first get rid of anger and worry.’ ‘But,’said I, ‘is that possible?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he; ‘it is possibleto the Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.’“On my way back I could think of nothing else butthe words get rid, get rid’; and the idea must havecontinued to possess me during my sleeping hours,for the first consciousness in the morning broughtback the same thought, with the revelation of a discovery,which framed itself into the reasoning, ‘If it ispossible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessaryto have them at all?’ I felt the strength of theargument, and at once accepted the reasoning. Thebaby had discovered that it could walk. It would scornto creep any longer.“From the instant I realized that these cancer spotsof worry and anger were removable, they left me.With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised.From that time life has had an entirely dif-180

William Jamesferent aspect.“Although from that moment the possibility and desirabilityof freedom from the depressing passions hasbeen a reality to me, it took me some months to feelabsolute security in my new position; but, as the usualoccasions for worry and anger have presented themselvesover and over again, and I have been unableto feel them in the slightest degree, I no longer dreador guard against them, and I am amazed at my increasedenergy and vigor of mind, at my strength tomeet situations of all kinds and at my disposition tolove and appreciate everything.“I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousandmiles by rail since that morning. The same Pullmanporter, conductor, hotel-waiter, peddler, bookagent,cabman, and others who were formerly asource of annoyance and irritation have been met,but I am not conscious of a single incivility. All at oncethe whole world has turned good to me. I have become,as it were, sensitive only to the rays of good.“I could recount many experiences which prove abrand-new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient.Without the slightest feeling of annoyance orimpatience, I have seen a train that I had planned totake with a good deal of interested and pleasurableanticipation move out of the station without me, becausemy baggage did not arrive. The porter fromthe hotel came running and panting into the stationjust as the train pulled out of sight. When he saw me,he looked as if he feared a scolding. and began to tellof being blocked in a crowded street and unable toget out. When he had finished, I said to him: ‘It doesn’tmatter at all, you couldn’t help it, so we will try againto-morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had allthis trouble in earning it.’ The look of surprise thatcame over his face was so filled with pleasure that Iwas repaid on the spot for the delay in my departure.Next day he would not accept a cent for the service,and he and I are friends for life.“During the first weeks of my experience I was onguard only against worry and anger; but, in the meantime, having noticed the absence of the other depress-181

The Varieties of Religious Experienceing and dwarfing passions, I began to trace a relationship,until I was convinced that they are allgrowths from the two roots I have specified. I havefelt the freedom now for so long a time that I am sureof my relation toward it; and I could no more harborany of the thieving and depressing influences thatonce I nursed as a heritage of humanity than a fopwould voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.“There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianityand pure Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences andall Religions fundamentally teach what has been a discoveryto me; but none of them have presented it inthe light of a simple and easy process of elimination.At one time I wondered if the elimination would notyield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, thecontrary is the result. I feel such an increased desireto do something useful that it seems as if I were aboy again and the energy for play had returned. Icould fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if therewere occasion for it. It does not make one a coward.It can’t, since fear is one of the things eliminated. Inotice the absence of timidity in the presence of anyaudience. When a boy, I was standing under a treewhich was struck by lightning, and received a shockfrom the effects of which I never knew exemptionuntil I had dissolved partnership with worry. Sincethen, lightning and thunder have been encounteredunder conditions which would formerly have causedgreat depression and discomfort, without [my] experiencinga trace of either. Surprise is also greatlymodified, and one is less liable to become startled byunexpected sights or noises.“As far as I am individually concerned, I am notbothering myself at present as to what the results ofthis emancipated condition may be. I have no doubtthat the perfect health aimed at by Christian Sciencemay be one of the possibilities, for I note a markedimprovement in the way my stomach does its dutyin assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I amsure it works better to the sound of a song than underthe friction of a frown. Neither am I wasting anyof this precious time formulating an idea of a future182

William Jamesexistence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have was meaningless took only this finite life into account.within myself is as attractive as any that has been He was looking for the value of one finite term in thatpromised or that I can imagine; and I am willing to of another, and the whole result could only be one oflet the growth lead where it will, as long as the anger those indeterminate equations in mathematics whichand their brood have no part in misguiding it.”[95] end with infinity. Yet this is as far as the reasoningThe older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentimentand crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite asmight recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual common people do, and life grows possible again.realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the other “Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been,sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy there also has been the faith that gave the possibilityand Bunyan may again serve us as examples, examples,as it happens, of the gradual way, though it tue of which man does not destroy himself, but con-of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by vir-must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to followthese windings of the hearts of others, and one Man did not believe that he must live for something,tinues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. Iffeels that their words do not reveal their total secret. he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, ofHowe’er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending the divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actionsquestioning, seemed to come to one insight after another.First he perceived that his conviction that life secret depths of human thought. They are ideas with-with God—these are ideas elaborated in the infiniteout which there would be no life, without which I[95] H. Fletcher: Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True myself,” said Tolstoy, “would not exist. I began toLiving, New York and Chicago, 1899, pp. 26, 36, see that I had no right to rely on my individual reaabridged.183

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesoning and neglect these answers given by faith, forthey are the only answers to the question.”Yet how believe as the common people believe,steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It isimpossible—but yet their life! their life! It is normal.It is happy! It is an answer to the question!Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction—hesays it took him two years to arrive there—that his trouble had not been with life in general, notwith the common life of common men, but with thelife of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the lifewhich he had personally always led, the cerebral life,the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personalambition. He had been living wrongly and mustchange. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies andvanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, tobelieve in God, therein lay happiness again.“I remember,” he says, “one day in early spring, Iwas alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysteriousnoises. I listened, and my thought went back towhat for these three years it always was busy with—the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how didI ever come by the idea?“And again there arose in me, with this thought,glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awokeand received a meaning… .Why do I look farther? avoice within me asked. He is there:he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledgeGod and to live are one and the same thing. God iswhat life is. Well, then! live, seek God, and there willbe no life without him… .“After this, things cleared up within me and aboutme better than ever, and the light has never whollydied away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or whenthe change took place I cannot tell. But as insensiblyand gradually as the force of life had been annulledwithin me, and I had reached my moral death-bed,just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy oflife come back. And what was strange was that thisenergy that came back was nothing new. It was myancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the solepurpose of my life was to be better. I gave up the life184

William Jamesof the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life,but a parody on life, which its superfluities simplykeep us from comprehending,”—and Tolstoy thereuponembraced the life of the peasants, and has feltright and happy, or at least relatively so, eversince.[96]As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was notmerely an accidental vitiation of his humors, thoughit was doubtless also that. It was logically called forby the clash between his inner character and his outeractivities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoywas one of those primitive oaks of men to whom thesuperfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications,and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundlyunsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracitieslie with more natural and animal things. Hiscrisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discoveryof its genuine habitat and vocation, the escapefrom falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth.[96] I have considerably abridged Tolstoy’s words inmy translation.It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily andslowly finding its unity and level. And though notmany of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough,perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in ourbones, most of us may at least feel as if it might bebetter for us if we could.Bunyan’s recovery seems to have been even slower.For years together he was alternately haunted withtexts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at lastwith an ever growing relief in his salvation throughthe blood of Christ.“My peace would be in and out twenty times a day;comfort now and trouble presently; peace now andbefore I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear asever heart could hold.” When a good text comes hometo him, “This,” he writes, “gave me good encouragementfor the space of two or three hours”; or “Thiswas a good day to me, I hope I shall not forget it”, or“The glory of these words was then so weighty on methat I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet, not with griefand trouble, but with solid joy and peace”; or “This185

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemade a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought lightwith it, and commanded a silence in my heart of allthose tumultuous thoughts that before did use, likemasterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and makea hideous noise within me. It showed me that JesusChrist had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.”Such periods accumulate until he can write: “Andnow remained only the hinder part of the tempest,for the thunder was gone beyond me, only some dropswould still remain, that now and then would fall uponme”;—and at last: “Now did my chains fall off my legsindeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons;my temptations also fled away; so that from that time,those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to troubleme; now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace andlove of God… . Now could I see myself in Heaven andEarth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head,by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth bymy body or person… . Christ was a precious Christ tomy soul that night; I could scarce lie in my bed for joyand peace and triumph through Christ.”Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spiteof his neurotic constitution, and of the twelve yearshe lay in prison for his non-conformity, his life wasturned to active use. He was a peacemaker and doerof good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrotehas brought the very spirit of religious patience hometo English hearts.But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become whatwe have called healthy-minded. They had drunk toodeeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste,and their redemption is into a universe two storiesdeep. Each of them realized a good which broke theeffective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness waspreserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of thefaith by which it was overcome. The fact of interestfor us is that as a matter of fact they could and didfind something welling up in the inner reaches of theirconsciousness, by which such extreme sadness couldbe overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as that bywhich men live; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus,an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the186

William Jamespositive willingness to live, even in full presence of theevil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable.For Tolstoy’s perceptions of evil appear withintheir sphere to have remained unmodified. His laterworks show him implacable to the whole system of officialvalues: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamiesof empire; the spuriousness of the church, thevain conceit of the professions; the meannesses andcruelties that go with great success; and every otherpompous crime and lying institution of this world. Toall patience with such things his experience has beenfor him a perroanent ministry of death.Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.“I must first pass a sentence of death,” he says,“upon everything that can properly be called a thingof this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children,my health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead tome, and myself as dead to them; to trust in Godthrough Christ, as touching the world to come, and astouching this world, to count the grave my house, tomake my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption,Thou art my father and to the worm, Thou art mymother and sister… . The parting with my wife andmy poor children hath often been to me as the pullingof my flesh from my bones, especially my poorblind child who lay nearer my heart than all I hadbesides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thoulike to have for thy portion in this world! Thou mustbe beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness,and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endurethat the wind should blow upon thee. But yet Imust venture you all with God, though it goeth to thequick to leave you.”[97]The “hue of resolution” is there, but the full flood ofecstatic liberation seems never to have poured overpoor John Bunyan’s soul.These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a generalway with the phenomenon technically called “Conversion.”In the next lecture I shall invite you to studyits peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.[97] In my quotations from Bunyan I have omittedcertain intervening portions of the text.187

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLecture IXCONVERSIONTO BE CONVERTED, to be regenerated, to receive grace,to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are somany phrases which denote the process, gradual orsudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciouslywrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unifiedand consciously right superior and happy, in consequenceof its firmer hold upon religious realities. Thisat least is what conversion signifies in general terms,whether or not we believe that a direct divine operationis needed to bring such a moral change about.Before entering upon a minuter study of the process,let me enliven our understanding of the definitionby a concrete example. I choose the quaint caseof an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experienceis related in a scarce American pamphlet.[98][98] A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, fromthe age of five to twenty four years, including his remarkableexperience of the power of the Holy Spiriton the second evening of November, 1829. Madison,Connecticut, 1830.I select this case because it shows how in these inneralterations one may find one unsuspected depthbelow another, as if the possibilities of character laydisposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existencewe have no premonitory knowledge.Bradley thought that he had been already fully convertedat the age of fourteen.“I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in humanshape, for about one second in the room, with armsextended, appearing to say to me, Come. The nextday I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my happinesswas so great that I said that I wanted to die; thisworld had no place in my affections, as I knew of, andevery day appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath.I had an ardent desire that all mankind might feel asI did; I wanted to have them all love God supremely.188

William JamesPrevious to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous;but now I desired the welfare of all mankind,and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies,and I felt as if I should be willing to bear thescoffs and sneers of any person, and suffer anythingfor His sake, if I could be the means in the hands ofGod, of the conversion of one soul.”Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of arevival of religion that had begun in his neighborhood.“Many of the young converts,” he says, “would cometo me when in meeting and ask me if I had religion,and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This didnot appear to satisfy them; they said they knew theyhad it. I requested them to pray for me, thinking withmyself, that if I had not got religion now, after so longa time professing to be a Christian, that it was time Ihad, and hoped their prayers would be answered inmy behalf.“One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at theAcademy. He spoke of the ushering in of the day ofgeneral judgment; and he set it forth in such a solemnand terrible manner as I never heard before.The scene of that day appeared to be taking place,and so awakened were all the powers of my mind that,like Felix, I trembled involuntarily on the benchwhere I was sitting, though I felt nothing at heart.The next day evening I went to hear him again. Hetook his text from Revelation: ‘And I saw the dead,small and great, stand before God.’ And he representedthe terrors of that day in such a manner that it appearedas if it would melt the heart of stone. When hefinished his discourse, an old gentleman turned to meand said ‘This is what I call preaching.’ I thought thesame, but my feelings were still unmoved by what hesaid, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did.“I will now relate my experience of the power ofthe Holy Spirit which took place on the same night.Had any person told me previous to this that I couldhave experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in themanner which I did, I could not have believed it, andshould have thought the person deluded that told meso. I went directly home after the meeting, and when189

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceI got home I wondered what made me feel so stupid.I retired to rest soon after I got home, and felt indifferentto the things of religion until I began to be exercisedby the Holy Spirit, which began in about fiveminutes after, in the following manner:—“At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quickall on a sudden, which made me at first think thatperhaps something is going to ail me, though I wasnot alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased inits beating, which soon convinced me that it was theHoly Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began tofeel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a senseof unworthiness as I never felt before. I could notvery well help speaking out, which I did, and said,Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or words tothat effect, while there was a stream (resembling airin feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a moresensible manner than that of drinking anything, whichcontinued, as near as I could judge, five minutes ormore, which appeared to be the cause of such a palpitationof my heart. It took complete possession ofmy soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord,while in the midst of it, not to give me any more happiness,for it seemed as if I could not contain what Ihad got. My heart seemed as if it would burst, but itdid not stop until I felt as if I was unutterably full ofthe love and grace of God. In the mean time whilethus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what canit mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memorybecame exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me justas if the New Testament was placed open before me,eighth chapter of Romans, and as light as if somecandle lighted was held for me to read the 26th and27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words:‘The Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groaningswhich cannot be uttered.’ And all the time that myheart was a-beating, it made me groan like a personin distress, which was not very easy to stop, though Iwas in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed inanother room came and opened the door, and askedme if I had got the toothache. I told him no, and thathe might get to sleep. I tried to stop. I felt unwilling190

William Jamesto go to sleep myself, I was so happy, fearing I shouldlose it— thinking within myself‘My willing soul would stayIn such a frame as this.’And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stoppedbeating, feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit,I thought that perhaps there might be angels hoveringround my bed. I felt just as if I wanted to conversewith them, and finally I spoke, saying ‘O yeaffectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so muchinterest in our welfare, and we take so little interestin our own.’ After this, with difficulty I got to sleep;and when I awoke in the morning my first thoughtswere: What has become of my happiness? and, feelinga degree of it in my heart, I asked for more, whichwas given to me as quick as thought. I then got up todress myself, and found to my surprise that I couldbut just stand. It appeared to me as if it was a littleheaven upon earth. My soul felt as completely raisedabove the fears of death as of going to sleep; and likea bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it was the will ofGod, to get released from my body and to dwell withChrist, though willing to live to do good to others, andto warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feelingas solemn as if I had lost all my friends, and thinkingwith myself, that I would not let my parents know ituntil I had first looked into the Testament. I wentdirectly to the shelf and looked into it, at the eighth ofRomans, and every verse seemed to almost speakand to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and asif my feelings corresponded with the meaning of theword. I then told my parents of it, and told them thatI thought that they must see that when I spoke, thatit was not my own voice, for it appeared so to me. Myspeech seemed entirely under the control of the Spiritwithin me; I do not mean that the words which I spokewere not my own, for they were. I thought that I wasinfluenced similar to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost(with the exception of having power to give itto others, and doing what they did). After breakfast I191

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewent round to converse with my neighbors on religion,which I could not have been hired to have donebefore this, and at their request I prayed with them,though I had never prayed in public before.“I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by tellingthe truth, and hope by the blessing of God, it may dosome good to all who shall read it. He has fulfilled hispromise in sending the Holy Spirit down into ourhearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all the Deistsand Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ.”So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of theeffect of which upon his later life we gain no information.Now for a minuter survey of the constituent elementsof the conversion process.If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatiseon Psychology, you will read that a man’s ideas,aims, and objects form diverse internal groups andsystems, relatively independent of one another. Each‘aim’ which he follows awakens a certain specific kindof interested excitement, and gathers a certain groupof ideas together in subordination to it as its associates;and if the aims and excitements are distinct inkind, their groups of ideas may have little in common.When one group is present and engrosses theinterest, all the ideas connected with other groupsmay be excluded from the mental field. The Presidentof the United States when, with paddle, gun, andfishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for avacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom.The presidential anxieties have lapsed into thebackground entirely; the official habits are replacedby the habits of a son of nature, and those who knewthe man only as the strenuous magistrate would not“know him for the same person” if they saw him asthe camper.If now he should never go back, and never againsuffer political interests to gain dominion over him,he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanentlytransformed being. Our ordinary alterationsof character, as we pass from one of our aimsto another, are not commonly called transformations,because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by an-192

William Jamesother in the reverse direction; but whenever one aimgrows so stable as to expel definitively its previousrivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak ofthe phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a“transformation.”These alternations are the completest of the waysin which a self may be divided. A less complete way isthe simultaneous coexistence of two or more differentgroups of aims, of which one practically holds theright of way and instigates activity, whilst the othersare only pious wishes, and never practically come toanything. Saint Augustine’s aspirations to a purer life,in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Anotherwould be the President in his full pride of office,wondering whether it were not all vanity, andwhether the life of a wood-chopper were not thewholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations aremere velleitates, whimsies. They exist on the remoteroutskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man,the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirelydifferent system. As life goes on, there is a constantchange of our interests, and a consequent change ofplace in our systems of ideas, from more central tomore peripheral, and from more peripheral to morecentral parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance,that one evening when I was a youth, my fatherread aloud from a Boston newspaper that partof Lord Gifford’s will which founded these four lectureships.At that time I did not think of being ateacher of philosophy, and what I listened to was asremote from my own life as if it related to the planetMars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system partand parcel of my very self, and all my energies, forthe time being, devoted to successfully identifyingmyself with it. My soul stands now planted in whatonce was for it a practically unreal object, and speaksfrom it as from its proper habitat and centre.When I say “Soul,” you need not take me in theontological sense unless you prefer to; for althoughontological language is instinctive in such matters, yetBuddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe thefacts in the phenomenal terms which are their favor-193

The Varieties of Religious Experienceites. For them the soul is only a succession of fields ofconsciousness: yet there is found in each field a part,or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains theexcitement, and from which, as from a centre, theaim seems to be taken. Talking of this part, we involuntarilyapply words of perspective to distinguish itfrom the rest, words like “here,” “this,” “now,” “mine,”or “me”; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions“there,” “then,” “that,” “his” or “thine,” “it,” “notme.” But a “here” can change to a “there,” and a“there” become a “here,” and what was “mine” andwhat was “not mine” change their places.What brings such changes about is the way in whichemotional excitement alters. Things hot and vital tous to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if seen fromthe hot parts of the field that the other parts appearto us, and from these hot parts personal desire andvolition make their sallies. They are in short the centresof our dynamic energy, whereas the cold partsleave us indifferent and passive in proportion to theircoldness.Whether such language be rigorously exact is forthe present of no importance. It is exact enough, ifyou recognize from your own experience the factswhich I seek to designate by it.Now there may be great oscillation in the emotionalinterest, and the hot places may shift before one almostas rapidly as the sparks that run through burntuppaper. Then we have the wavering and dividedself we heard so much of in the previous lecture. Orthe focus of excitement and heat, the point of viewfrom which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanentlywithin a certain system; and then, if the changebe a religious one, we call it a conversion, especially ifit be by crisis, or sudden.Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in aman’s consciousness, the group of ideas to which hedevotes himself, and from which he works, call it thehabitual centre of his personal energy. It makes agreat difference to a man whether one set of his ideas,or another, be the centre of his energy; and it makesa great difference, as regards any set of ideas which194

William Jameshe may possess, whether they become central or remainperipheral in him. To say that a man is “converted”means, in these terms, that religious ideas,previously peripheral in his consciousness, now takea central place, and that religious aims form the habitualcentre of his energy.Now if you ask of psychology just how the excitementshifts in a man’s mental system, and why aimsthat were peripheral become at a certain momentcentral, psychology has to reply that although she cangive a general description of what happens, she isunable in a given case to account accurately for allthe single forces at work. Neither an outside observernor the Subject who undergoes the process can explainfully how particular experiences are able tochange one’s centre of energy so decisively, or whythey so often have to bide their hour to do so. Wehave a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly,but on a certain day the real meaning of the thoughtpeals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenlyturned into a moral impossibility. All we knowis that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and coldbeliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and whenone grows hot and alive within us, everything has tore-crystallize about it. We may say that the heat andliveliness mean only the “motor efficacy,” long deferredbut now operative, of the idea; but such talkitself is only circumlocution, for whence the suddenmotor efficacy? And our explanations then get sovague and general that one realizes all the more theintense individuality of the whole phenomenon.In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolismof a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a systemof ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and withtendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutuallycheck or reinforce one another. The collection of ideasalters by subtraction or by addition in the course ofexperience, and the tendencies alter as the organismgets more aged. A mental system may be underminedor weakened by this interstitial alteration just as abuilding is, and yet for a time keep upright by deadhabit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional195

The Varieties of Religious Experienceshock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration,will make the whole fabric fall together; and and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear,in precipitating mental rearrangements. The suddenthen the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known tostable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the everybody.[100] Hope, happiness, security, resolve,rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the emotions characteristic of conversion, can be equallynew structure remains permanent.explosive. And emotions that come in this explosiveFormed associations of ideas and habits are usually way seldom leave things as they found them.factors of retardation in such changes of equilibrium. [99] Jouffroy is an example: “Down this slope it wasNew information, however acquired, plays an acceleratingpart in the changes; and the slow mutation of had got far from its first faith. But this melancholythat my intelligence had glided, and little by little itour instincts and propensities, under the “unimaginabletouch of time” has an enormous influence. More-of my consciousness; too many scruples, too manyrevolution had not taken place in the broad daylightover, all these influences may work subconsciously guides and sacred affections had made it dreadful toor half unconsciously.[99] And when you get a Subjectin whom the subconscious life—of which I must progress it had made. It had gone on in silence, by anme, so that I was far from avowing to myself thespeak more fully soon—is largely developed, and in involuntary elaboration of which I was not the accomplice;and although I had in reality long ceased towhom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get acase of which you can never give a full account, and in be a Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention,which, both to the Subject and the onlookers, there I should have shuddered to suspect it, and thought itmay appear an element of marvel. Emotional occasions,especially violent ones, are extremely potent Then follows Jouffroy’s account of his counter-con-calumny had I been accused of such a falling away.”version, quoted above on p. 173.196

William James[100] One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p.176, note, for fear, p. 161 ; for remorse, see Othelloafter the murder; for anger see Lear after Cordelia’sfirst speech to him; for resolve, see p. 175 (J. Fostercase). Here is a pathological case in which guilt was thefeeling that suddenly exploded: “One night I was seizedon entering bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describesas coming over him with a sense of holiness,but over me with a sense of guilt. During that wholenight I lay under the influence of the rigor, and fromits inception I felt that I was under the curse of God. Ihave never done one act of duty in my life—sins againstGod and man beginning as far as my memory goesback—a wildcat in human shape.”In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion,Professor Starbuck of California has shown by a statisticalinquiry how closely parallel in its manifestationsthe ordinary “conversion” which occurs in youngpeople brought up in evangelical circles is to thatgrowth into a larger spiritual life which is a normalphase of adolescence in every class of human beings.The age is the same, falling usually between fourteenand seventeen. The symptoms are the same,—senseof incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression,morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxietyabout the hereafter; distress over doubts, andthe like. And the result is the same—a happy reliefand objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greaterthrough the adjustment of the faculties to the wideroutlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apartfrom revivalistic examples, and in the ordinary stormand stress and moulting-time of adolescence, we alsomay meet with mystical experiences, astonishing thesubjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalisticconversion. The analogy, in fact, is complete; andStarbuck’s conclusion as to these ordinary youthfulconversions would seem to be the only sound one:Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon,incidental to the passage from the child’ssmall universe to the wider intellectual and spirituallife of maturity.197

The Varieties of Religious Experience[101] E. D. Starbuck: The Psychology of Religion, pp.224, 262.198“Theology,” says Dr. Starbuck, “takes the adolescenttendencies and builds upon them; it sees thatthe essential thing in adolescent growth is bringingthe person out of childhood into the new life of maturityand personal insight. It accordingly brings thosemeans to bear which will intensify the normal tendencies.It shortens up the period of duration of stormand stress.” The conversion phenomena of “convictionof sin” last, by this investigator’s statistics, aboutone fifth as long as the periods of adolescent stormand stress phenomena of which he also got statistics,but they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments,loss of sleep and appetite, for example,are much more frequent in them. “The essential distinctionappears to be that conversion intensifies butshortens the period by bringing the person to a definitecrisis.”[101]The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has inmind are of course mainly those of very commonplacepersons, kept true to a pre-appointed type byinstruction, appeal, and example. The particular formwhich they affect is the result of suggestion and imitation.[102]If they went through their growth-crisisin other faiths and other countries, although the es-[102] No one understands this better than JonathanEdwards understood it already. Conversion narrativesof the more commonplace sort must always be takenwith the allowances which he suggests:“A rule received and established by common consenthas a very great, though to many persons an insensibleinfluence in forming their notions of the process of theirown experience. I know very well how they proceed asto this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities ofobserving their conduct. Very often their experience atfirst appears like a confused chaos, but then those partsare selected which bear the nearest resemblance to suchparticular steps as are insisted on; and these are dweltupon in their thoughts, and spoken of from time to time,till they grow more and more conspicuous in their view,and other parts which are neglected grow more and moreobscure. Thus what they have experienced is insensiblystrained, so as to bring it to an exact conformity to thescheme already established in their minds. And it becomesnatural also for ministers, who have to deal withthose who insist upon distinctness and clearness ofmethod, to do so too.” Treatise on Religious Affections.

William Jamessence of the change would be the same (since it is one to use the technical word, accompanied by the yearningafter the peace of unity.” “The word ‘religion,’”in the main so inevitable), its accidents would be different.In Catholic lands, for example, and in our own he says, “is getting more and more to signify the conglomerateof desires and emotions springing from theEpiscopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction ofsin is usual as in sects that encourage revivals. The sense of sin and its release”; and he gives a large numberof examples, in which the sin ranges from drunk-sacraments being more relied on in these morestrictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual’s personal enness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of itacceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated may beset one and crave relief as urgently as doesand led up to.the anguish of the sickened flesh or any form of physicalmisery.But every imitative phenomenon must once havehad its original, and I propose that for the future we Undoubtedly this conception covers an immensekeep as close as may be to the more first-hand and number of cases. A good one to use as an example isoriginal forms of experience. These are more likely that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversionto be found in sporadic adult cases.became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards inProfessor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychologyof conversion,[103] subordinates the theo-“One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem,New York. His experience runs as follows:—logical aspect of the religious life almost entirely to its a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawnedmoral aspect. The religious sense he defines as “the or sold everything that would bring a drink. I couldfeeling of unwholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eatenfor days, and for four nights preceding I had suffered[103] Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena,American Journal of Psychology, vii. 309 (1896).with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight199

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetill morning. I had often said, ‘I will never be a tramp.I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, ifever it comes, I will find a home in the bottom of theriver.’ But the Lord so ordered it that when that timedid come I was not able to walk one quarter of theway to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed tofeel some great and mighty presence. I did not knowthen what it was. I did learn afterwards that it wasJesus, the sinner’s friend. I walked up to the bar andpounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle.Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornfulcuriosity. I said I would never take another drink, if Idied on the street, and really I felt as though thatwould happen before morning. Something said, ‘If youwant to keep this promise, go and have yourselflocked up.’ I went to the nearest station-house andhad myself locked up.“I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed asthough all the demons that could find room came inthat place with me. This was not all the company Ihad, either. No, praise the Lord: that dear Spirit thatcame to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray.I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, Ikept on praying. As soon as I was able to leave mycell I was taken to the police court and remanded backto the cell. I was finally released, and found my wayto my brother’s house, where every care was givenme. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit neverleft me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morningI felt that day would decide my fate, and towardevening it came into my head to go to Jerry M’Auley’sMission. I went. The house was packed, and withgreat difficulty I made my way to the space near theplatform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkardand the outcast—that man of God, Jerry M’Auley.He rose, and amid deep silence told his experience.There was a sincerity about this man that carriedconviction with it, and I found myself saying, ‘I wonderif God can save me?’ I listened to the testimonyof twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whomhad been saved from rum, and I made up my mindthat I would be saved or die right there. When the200

invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd ofdrunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs.M’Auley prayed fervently for us. Oh, what a conflictwas going on for my poor soul! A blessed whisper said,‘Come’; the devil said, ‘Be careful.’ I halted but amoment, and then, with a breaking heart, I said, ‘DearJesus, can you help me?’ Never with mortal tonguecan I describe that moment. Although up to thatmoment my soul had been filled with indescribablegloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noondaysun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh,the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of restingon Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness andpower had come into my life; that, indeed, old thingshad passed away and all things had become new.“From that moment till now I have never wanted adrink of whiskey, and I have never seen moneyenough to make me take one. I promised God thatnight that if he would take away the appetite forstrong drink, I would work for him all my life. He hasdone his part, and I have been trying to doWilliam James201mine.”[104]Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinaltheology in such an experience, which startswith the absolute need of a higher helper, and endswith the sense that he has helped us. He gives othercases of drunkards’ conversions which are purelyethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefswhatever. John B. Gough’s case, for instance, is practically,says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist—neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.[105] But in[104] I have abridged Mr. Hadley’s account. For otherconversions of drunkards, see his pamphlet, RescueMission Work, published at the Old Jerry M’AuleyWater Street Mission, New York City. A striking collectionof cases also appears in the appendix to ProfessorLeuba’s article.[105] A restaurant waiter served provisionally asGough’s ‘Saviour.’ General Booth, the founder of theSalvation Army, considers that the first vital step insaving outcasts consists in making them feel thatsome decent human being cares enough for them totake an interest in the question whether they are torise or sink.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencespite of the importance of this type of regeneration, Some persons, for instance, never are, and possiblywith little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer never under any circumstances could be, converted.surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the Religious ideas cannot become the centre of theirsubjectively centered form of morbid melancholy, of spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servantsof God in practical ways, but they are not chil-which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we sawin our seventh lecture that there are objective forms dren of his kingdom. They are either incapable ofof melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaningof the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden votion, they are life-long subjects of “barrenness” andimagining the invisible; or else, in the language of de-that weighs upon one—you remember Tolstoy’s “dryness.” Such inaptitude for religious faith may incase.[106] So there are distinct elements in conversion,and their relations to individual lives deserve to faculties may be checked in their natural tendency tosome cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religiousbe discriminated.[107]expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive,the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for ex-[106] The crisis of apathetic melancholy—no use inlife—into which J. S. Mill records that he fell, from ample, within which so many good souls, who inwhich he emerged by the reading of Marmontel’s former times would have freely indulged their religiouspropensities, find themselves nowadays, as itMemoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth’spoetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysicalcase. See Mill’s Autobiography, New York, 1873, something weak and shameful, under which so manywere, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith aspp. 141, 148.of us today lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In[107] Starbuck, in addition to “escape from sin,” discriminates“spiritual illumination” as a distinct type of To the end of their days they refuse to believe, theirmany persons such inhibitions are never overcome.conversion experience. Psychology of Religion, p. 85.202

William Jamespersonal energy never gets to its religious centre, andthe latter remains inactive in perpetuity.In other persons the trouble is profounder. Thereare men anaesthetic on the religious side, deficient inthat category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organismcan never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain tothe reckless “animal spirits” enjoyed by those of sanguinetemperament; so the nature which is spirituallybarren may admire and envy faith in others, butcan never compass the enthusiasm and peace whichthose who are temperamentally qualified for faithenjoy. All this may, however, turn out eventually tohave been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even latein life some thaw, some release may take place, somebolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and theman’s hard heart may soften and break into religiousfeeling. Such cases more than any others suggest theidea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long asthey exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal withirretrievably fixed classes. Now there are two formsof mental occurrence in human beings, which lead toa striking difference in the conversion process, a differenceto which Professor Starbuck has called attention.You know how it is when you try to recollecta forgotten name. Usually you help the recallby working for it, by mentally running over theplaces, persons, and things with which the word wasconnected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feelthen as if the harder you tried the less hope therewould be, as though the name were jammed, andpressure in its direction only kept it all the morefrom rising. And then the opposite expedient oftensucceeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of somethingaltogether different, and in half an hour thelost name comes sauntering into your mind, asEmerson says, as carelessly as if it had never beeninvited. Some hidden process was started in you bythe effort, which went on after the effort ceased, andmade the result come as if it came spontaneously. Acertain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to herpupils after the thing to be done has been clearlypointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: “Stop203

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetrying and it will do itself!”[108]the sport, there may come a day when all at once theThere is thus a conscious and voluntary way andan involuntary and unconscious way in which mentalresults may get accomplished; and we find both waysexemplified in the history of conversion, giving us twotypes, which Starbuck calls the volitional type andthe type by self-surrender respectively.In the volitional type the regenerative change isusually gradual, and consists in the building up, pieceby piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits.But there are always critical points here at which themovement forward seems much more rapid. Thispsychological fact is abundantly illustrated by Dr.Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishmentproceeds apparently by jerks and starts just asthe growth of our physical bodies does.“An athlete … sometimes awakens suddenly to anunderstanding of the fine points of the game and to areal enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens toan appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in[108] Psychology of Religion, p. 117.game plays itself through him—when he loses himselfin some great contest. In the same way, a musicianmay suddenly reach a point at which pleasure inthe technique of the art entirely falls away, and insome moment of inspiration he becomes the instrumentthrough which music flows. The writer haschanced to hear two different married persons, bothof whose wedded lives had been beautiful from thebeginning, relate that not until a year or more aftermarriage did they awake to the full blessedness ofmarried life. So it is with the religious experience ofthese persons we are studying.”[109]We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrationsof subconsciously maturing processes eventuatingin results of which we suddenly grow conscious.Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycockof Edinburgh were among the first to call attention tothis class of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I[109] Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also,pp. 137-144 and 262.204

William Jamesam mistaken, introduced the term “unconscious cerebration,”which has since then been a popular phraseof explanation. The facts are now known to us farmore extensively than he could know them, and theadjective “unconscious,” being for many of them almostcertainly a misnomer, is better replaced by thevaguer term “subconscious” or “subliminal.”Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easyto give examples,[110] but they are as a rule less interestingthan those of the self-surrender type, inwhich the subconscious effects are more abundantand often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter,the more so because the difference between thetwo types is after all not radical. Even in the mostvoluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there arepassages of partial self-surrender interposed; and inthe great majority of all cases, when the will had doneits uttermost towards bringing one close to the completeunification aspired after, it seems that the verylast step must be left to other forces and performedwithout the help of its activity. In other words, selfsurrenderbecomes then indispensable. “The personalwill,” says Dr. Starbuck, “must be given up. In manycases relief persistently refuses to come until the personceases to resist, or to make an effort in the directionhe desires to go.”[110] For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitionalelement: “Just at this point the whole questionof Gospel salvation opened to my mind in a mannermost marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw,as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality andfullness of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvationseemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted,and all that was necessary on my part to getmy own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ.After this distinct revelation had stood for some littletime before my mind, the question seemed to be put,‘will you accept it now, to-day?’ I replied, ‘Yes; I willaccept it to-day, or I will die in the attempt!’” He thenwent into the woods, where he describes his struggles.He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride.“I then reproached myself for having promised to give205

my heart to God before I left the woods. When I cameto try, I found I could not… . My inward soul hungback, and there was no going out of my heart to God.The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of mypromise that I would give my heart to God that day,The Varieties of Religious Experienceand ashamed to have any human being, and a sinnerlike myself, find me on my knees endeavoring to makemy peace with my offended God!’ The sin appearedawful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord.”Memoirs, pp. 14-16, abridged.or die in the attempt. It seemed to me as if that wasbinding on my soul; and yet I was going to break my “I had said I would not give up; but when my willvow. A great sinking and discouragement came over was broken, it was all over,” writes one of Starbuck’sme, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. correspondents.— Another says: “I simply said:Just at this moment I again thought I heard some one ‘Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matterapproach me, and I opened my eyes to see whether itwith Thee,’ and immediately there came to me a greatpeace.”—Another: “All at once it occurred to me thatwere so. But right there the revelation of my pride ofI might be saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it allheart, as the great difficulty that stood in the way, wasmyself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my load.”—distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of myAnother: “I finally ceased to resist, and gave myselfwickedness in being ashamed to have a human beingup, though it was a hard struggle. Gradually the feelingcame over me that I had done my part, and Godsee me on my knees before God took such powerfulpossession of me, that I cried at the top of my voice, was willing to do his.”[111]—”Lord Thy will be done;and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if all damn or save!” cries John Nelson,[112] exhaustedthe men on earth and all the devils in hell surrounded with the anxious struggle to escape damnation; andme. ‘What!’ I said, ‘such a degraded sinner as I am, on[111] Starbuck: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.my knees confessing my sins to the great and holy God; [112] Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson,London, no date, p. 24.206

William Jamesat that moment his soul was filled with peace.Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems tome a true, account—so far as conceptions so schematiccan claim truth at all—of the reasons why selfsurrenderat the last moment should be so indispensable.To begin with, there are two things in the mindof the candidate for conversion: first, the present incompletenessor wrongness, the “sin” which he is eagerto escape from; and, second, the positive idealwhich he longs to compass. Now with most of us thesense of our present wrongness is a far more distinctpiece of our consciousness than is the imagination ofany positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases,indeed, the “sin” almost exclusively engrosses theattention, so that conversion is “a process of strugglingaway from sin rather than of striving towardsrighteousness.”[113] A man’s conscious wit and will,so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming atsomething only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yetall the while the forces of mere organic ripening within[113] Starbuck, p. 64.him are going on towards their own prefigured result,and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconsciousallies behind the scenes, which in their waywork towards rearrangement; and the rearrangementtowards which all these deeper forces tend ispretty surely definite, and definitely different fromwhat he consciously conceives and determines. It mayconsequently be actually interfered with (jammed,as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energeticallyto recall it), by his voluntary efforts slantingfrom the true direction.Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of thematter when he says that to exercise the personalwill is still to live in the region where the imperfectself is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary,the subconscious forces take the lead, it is moreprobably the better self in posse which directs theoperation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguelyaimed at from without, it is then itself the organizingcentre. What then must the person do? “He mustrelax,” says Dr. Starbuck—”that is, he must fall back207

The Varieties of Religious Experienceon the larger Power that makes for righteousness,which has been welling up in his own being, and let itfinish in its own way the work it has begun… . The actof yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s selfover to the new life, making it the centre of a newpersonality, and living, from within, the truth of itwhich had before been viewed objectively.”[114]“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity” is the theologicalway of putting this fact of the need of self-surrender;whilst the physiological way of stating it wouldbe, “Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervoussystem will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledgethe same fact.[115]To state it in terms of our own symbolism: Whenthe new centre of personal energy has been subconsciouslyincubated so long as to be just ready to openinto flower, “hands off” is the only word for us, it mustburst forth unaided!We have used the vague and abstract language of[114] Starbuck, p. 115.[115] Starbuck, p. 113.psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis describedis the throwing of our conscious selves uponthe mercy of powers which, whatever they may be,are more ideal than we are actually, and make forour redemption, you see why self-surrender has beenand always must be regarded as the vital turningpointof the religious life, so far as the religious life isspiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual andsacraments. One may say that the whole developmentof Christianity in inwardness has consisted inlittle more than the greater and greater emphasis attachedto this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicismto Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from thatto Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technicalChristianity altogether, to pure “liberalism” or transcendentalidealism, whether or not of the mind-curetype, taking in the mediaeval mystics, the quietists,the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can tracethe stages of progress towards the idea of an immediatespiritual help, experienced by the individual inhis forlornness and standing in no essential need of208

William Jamesdoctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmonyup to this point, since both admit that there are forcesseemingly outside of the conscious individual thatbring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology,defining these forces as “subconscious,” andspeaking of their effects, as due to “incubation,” or“cerebration,” implies that they do not transcend theindividual’s personality; and herein she diverges fromChristian theology, which insists that they are directsupernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to youthat we do not yet consider this divergence final, butleave the question for a while in abeyance—continuedinquiry may enable us to get rid of some of theapparent discord.Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychologyof self-surrender.When you find a man living on the ragged edge ofhis consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness,and consequently inconsolable, andthen simply tell him that all is well with him, that hemust stop his worry, break with his discontent, andgive up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pureabsurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tellshim that all is not well, and the better way you offersounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert coldbloodedfalsehoods. “The will to believe” cannot bestretched as far as that. We can make ourselves morefaithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, butwe cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when ourperception actively assures us of its opposite. The bettermind proposed to us comes in that case in the formof a pure negation of the only mind we have, and wecannot actively will a pure negation.There are only two ways in which it is possible toget rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirableaffections. One is that an opposite affectionshould overpoweringly break over us, and the otheris by getting so exhausted with the struggle that wehave to stop—so we drop down, give up, and don’tcare any longer. Our emotional brain-centres strikework, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now209

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethere is documentary proof that this state of temporaryexhaustion not infrequently forms part of theconversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of thesick soul guards the door, the expansive confidenceof the soul of faith gains no presence. But let theformer faint away, even but for a moment, and thelatter can profit by the opportunity, and, having onceacquired possession, may retain it.Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh passes from the everlastingNo to the everlasting Yes through a “Centre ofIndifference.”Let me give you a good illustration of this feature inthe conversion process. That genuine saint, DavidBrainerd, describes his own crisis in the followingwords:—“One morning, while I was walking in a solitary placeas usual, I at once saw that all my contrivances andprojects to effect or procure deliverance and salvationfor myself were utterly in vain; I was broughtquite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I sawthat it was forever impossible for me to do anythingtowards helping or delivering myself, that I had madeall the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity;and that all my pleas were vain, for I saw that selfinteresthad led me to pray, and that I had neveronce prayed from any respect to the glory of God. Isaw that there was no necessary connection betweenmy prayers and the bestowment of divine mercy, thatthey laid not the least obligation upon God to bestowhis grace upon me; and that there was no more virtueor goodness in them than there would be in mypaddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I hadbeen heaping up my devotions before God, fasting,praying, etc., pretending, and indeed really thinkingsometimes that I was aiming at the glory of God;whereas I never once truly intended it, but only myown happiness. I saw that as I had never done anythingfor God, I had no claim on anything from himbut perdition, on account of my hypocrisy and mockery.When I saw evidently that I had regard to nothingbut self-interest, then my duties appeared a vilemockery and a continual course of lies, for the whole210

was nothing but self-worship, and an horrid abuse ofGod.“I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind,from Friday morning till the Sabbath evening following(July 12, 1739), when I was walking again in thesame solitary place. Here, in a mournful melancholystate I was attempting to pray; but found no heart toengage in that or any other duty; my former concern,exercise, and religious affections were now gone.I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me; butstill was not distressed; yet disconsolate, as if therewas nothing in heaven or earth could make me happy.Having been thus endeavoring to pray—though, as Ithought, very stupid and senseless—for near half anhour; then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakableglory seemed to open to the apprehension of mysoul. I do not mean any external brightness, nor anyimagination of a body of light, but it was a new inwardapprehension or view that I had of God, such asI never had before, nor anything which had the leastWilliam Jamesof any one person in the Trinity, either the Father,the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be Divineglory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, tosee such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and Iwas inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should beGod over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivatedand delighted with the excellency of God that Iwas even swallowed up in him, at least to that degreethat I had no thought about my own salvation, andscarce reflected that there was such a creature asmyself. I continued in this state of inward joy, peace,and astonishing, till near dark without any sensibleabatement; and then began to think and examinewhat I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in mymind all the evening following. I felt myself in a newworld, and everything about me appeared with a differentaspect from what it was wont to do. At thistime, the way of salvation opened to me with suchinfinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that Iwondered I should ever think of any other way ofresemblance to it. I had no particular apprehension salvation; was amazed that I had not dropped myown contrivances, and complied with this lovely,211

The Varieties of Religious Experienceblessed, and excellent way before. If I could have been actively drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly truesaved by my own duties or any other way that I hadin a great many instances, as we shall presently see.formerly contrived, my whole soul would now haverefused it. I wondered that all the world did not seeBut often there seems little doubt that both conditions—subconsciousand comply with this way of salvation, entirely byripening of the one affection andthe righteousness of Christ.”[116]exhaustion of the other—must simultaneously haveI have italicized the passage which records the exhaustionof the anxious emotion hitherto habitual. Inconspired, in order to produce the result.a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of reports,T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton’s, being brought tothe writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and an acute paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing allthe entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,[117]day, locked himself in his room in the evening in com-yet often again they speak as if the higher plete despair, crying aloud, “How long, O Lord, how[116] Edward’s and Dwight’s Life of Brainerd, Newlong?” “After repeating this and similar language,” heHaven, 1822, pp. 45-47, abridged.[117] Describing the whole phenomenon as a changesays, “several times, I seemed to sink away into a stateof equilibrium, we might say that the movement of of insensibility. When I came to myself again I was onnew psychic energies towards the personal centre and my knees, praying not for myself but for others. I feltthe recession of old ones towards the margin (or thesubmission to the will of God, willing that he should dorising of some objects above, and the sinking of othersbelow the conscious threshold) were only two ways ofwith me as should seem good in his sight. My concerndescribing an indivisible event. Doubtless this is often seemed all lost in concern for others.”[118]absolutely true, and Starbuck is right when he says Our great American revivalist Finney writes: “I saidthat “self-surrender” and “new determination,” thoughto myself: ‘What is this? I must have grieved the Holyseeming at first sight to be such different experiences,are “really the same thing. Self-surrender sees theGhost entirely away.change in terms of the old self, determination sees it in [118] A. A. Bonar: Nettleton and his Labors,terms of the new.” Op. cit., p. 160.Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261.212

William JamesI have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle ofconcern about my soul; and it must be that the Spirithas left me.’ ‘Why!’ thought I, ‘I never was so far frombeing concerned about my own salvation in my life.’… I tried to recall my convictions, to get back againthe load of sin under which I had been laboring. I triedin vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet andpeaceful that I tried to feel concerned about that, lestit should be the result of my having grieved the Spiritaway.”[119]But beyond all question there are persons in whom,quite independently of any exhaustion in the Subject’scapacity for feeling, or even in the absence of anyacute previous feeling, the higher condition, havingreached the due degree of energy, bursts through allbarriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood. These arethe most striking and memorable cases, the cases ofinstantaneous conversion to which the conception ofdivine grace has been most peculiarly attached. I havegiven one of them at length—the case of Mr. Bradley.But I had better reserve the other cases and my commentson the rest of the subject for the following lecture.[119] Charles G. Finney: Memoirs written by Himself,1876, pp. 17, 18.213

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLecture XCONVERSION—ConcludedIN THIS LECTURE we have to finish the subject of Conversion,considering at first those striking instantaneousinstances of which Saint Paul’s is the mosteminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotionalexcitement or perturbation of the senses, acomplete division is established in the twinkling of aneye between the old life and the new. Conversion ofthis type is an important phase of religious experience,owing to the part which it has played in Protestanttheology, and it behooves us to study it conscientiouslyon that account.I think I had better cite two or three of these casesbefore proceeding to a more generalized account. Onemust know concrete instances first; for, as ProfessorAgassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalizationthan just so far as one’s previous acquaintancewith particulars enables one to take it in.I will go back, then, to the case of our friend HenryAlline, and quote his report of the 26th of March, 1775,on which his poor divided mind became unified forgood.“As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamentingmy miserable lost and undone condition, andalmost ready to sink under my burden, I thought Iwas in such a miserable case as never any man wasbefore. I returned to the house, and when I got to thedoor, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the followingimpressions came into my mind like a powerfulbut small still voice. You have been seeking, praying,reforming, laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating,and what have you done by it towards yoursalvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now thanwhen you first began? Are you any more preparedfor heaven, or fitter to appear before the impartialbar of God, than when you first began to seek?“It brought such conviction on me that I was obligedto say that I did not think I was one step nearer thanat first, but as much condemned, as much exposed,214

William Jamesand as miserable as before. I cried out within myself,O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord, dost notfind out some new way, I know nothing of, I shallnever be saved, for the ways and methods I haveprescribed to myself have all failed me, and I am willingthey should fail. O Lord, have mercy! O Lord, havemercy!“These discoveries continued until I went into thehouse and sat down. After I sat down, being all inconfusion, like a drowning man that was just givingup to sink, and almost in an agony, I turned very suddenlyround in my chair, and seeing part of an oldBible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it ingreat haste; and opening it without any premeditation,cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which was thefirst time I ever saw the word of God: it took hold ofme with such power that it seemed to go through mywhole soul, so that it seemed as if God was prayingin, with, and for me. About this time my father calledthe family to attend prayers; I attended, but paid noregard to what he said in his prayer, but continuedpraying in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me,help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and saveme, or I am gone forever; thou canst this night, ifthou pleasest, with one drop of thy blood atone formy sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God. Atthat instant of time when I gave all up to him to dowith me as he pleased, and was willing that God shouldrule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love brokeinto my soul with repeated scriptures, with suchpower that my whole soul seemed to be melted downwith love, the burden of guilt and condemnation wasgone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled andfilled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was afew minutes ago groaning under mountains of death,and crying to an unknown God for help, was now filledwith immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith, freedfrom the chains of death and darkness, and cryingout, My Lord and my God; thou art my rock and myfortress, my shield and my high tower, my life, myjoy, my present and my everlasting portion. Lookingup, I thought I saw that same light [he had on more215

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethan one previous occasion seen subjectively a brightblaze of light], though it appeared different; and assoon as I saw it, the design was opened to me, accordingto his promise, and I was obliged to cry out:Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of conversion,the change, and the manifestations of it areno more disputable than that light which I see, oranything that ever I saw.“In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hourafter my soul was set at liberty, the Lord discoveredto me my labor in the ministry and call to preach thegospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I’ll go; send me, sendme. I spent the greatest part of the night in ecstasiesof joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days forhis free and unbounded grace. After I had been solong in this transport and heavenly frame that mynature seemed to require sleep, I thought to closemy eyes for a few moments; then the devil steppedin, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should lose itall, and when I should awake in the morning I wouldfind it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediatelycried out, O Lord God, if I am deceived,undeceive me.“I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, andseemed to be refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke,the first inquiry was, Where is my God? And in aninstant of time, my soul seemed awake in and withGod, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love.About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parentswhat God had done for my soul, and declared tothem the miracle of God’s unbounded grace. I took aBible to show them the words that were impressedby God on my soul the evening before; but when Icame to open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.“I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, inpreaching the gospel, that it seemed as if I could notrest any longer, but go I must and tell the wonders ofredeeming love. I lost all taste for carnal pleasures,and carnal company, and was enabled to forsakethem.”[120][120] Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31-40,abridged.216

William JamesYoung Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, andwith no book-learning but his Bible, and no teachingsave that of his own experience, became a Christianminister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank,for its austerity and single-mindedness, with that ofthe most devoted saints. But happy as he became inhis strenuous way, he never got his taste for eventhe most innocent carnal pleasures back. We mustclass him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst thoseupon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanentimprint. His redemption was into another universethan this mere natural world, and life remainedfor him a sad and patient trial. Years later we canfind him making such an entry as this in his diary:“On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding,and had the happiness thereby to be the means ofexcluding carnal mirth.”The next case I will give is that of a correspondentof Professor Leuba, printed in the latter’s article, alreadycited, in vol. vi. of the American Journal of Psychology.This subject was an Oxford graduate, theson of a clergyman, and the story resembles in manypoints the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which everybodymay be supposed to know. Here it is, somewhatabridged:—“Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversionI never darkened the door of my father’schurch, although I lived with him for eight years, makingwhat money I wanted by journalism, and spendingit in high carousal with any one who would sit with meand drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for aweek together, and then a terrible repentance, andwould not touch a drop for a whole month.“In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three yearsof age, I never had a desire to reform on religiousgrounds. But all my pangs were due to some terribleremorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorsetaking the shape of regret after my folly inwasting my life in such a way—a man of superior talentsand education. This terrible remorse turned megray in one night, and whenever it came upon me Iwas perceptibly grayer the next morning. What I217

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesuffered in this way is beyond the expression of words.It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Oftendid I vow that if I got over ‘this time’ I wouldreform. Alas, in about three days I fully recovered,and was as happy as ever. So it went on for years,but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I always recovered,and as long as I let drink alone, no man wasas capable of enjoying life as I was.“I was converted in my own bedroom in my father’srectory house at precisely three o’clock in the afternoonof a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I was in perfecthealth, having been off from the drink for nearlya month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. Infact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A younglady friend sent me a copy of Professor Drummond’sNatural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me myopinion of it as a literary work only. Being proud ofmy critical talents and wishing to enhance myself inmy new friend’s esteem, I took the book to my bedroomfor quiet, intending to give it a thorough study,and then write her what I thought of it. It was herethat God met me face to face, and I shall never forgetthe meeting. ‘He that hath the Son hath life eternal,he that hath not the Son hath not life.’ I had read thisscores of times before, but this made all the difference.I was now in God’s presence and my attentionwas absolutely ‘soldered’ on to this verse, and I wasnot allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairlyconsidered what these words really involved. Onlythen was I allowed to proceed, feeling all the whilethat there was another being in my bedroom, thoughnot seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous,and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionablyshown me, in one second of time, that I had nevertouched the Eternal: and that if I died then, I mustinevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as Inow know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed itme in ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I feltGod’s love so powerfully upon me that only a mightysorrow crept over me that I had lost all through myown folly; and what was I to do? What could I do? Idid not repent even; God never asked me to repent.218

William JamesAll I felt was ‘I am undone,’ and God cannot help it,although he loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty.All the time I was supremely happy: I feltlike a little child before his father. I had done wrong,but my Father did not scold me, but loved me mostwondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to acertainty, and being naturally of a brave disposition Idid not quail under it, but deep sorrow for the past,mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold uponme, and my soul thrilled within me to think it was allover. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so lovingly,so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what wasit after all? The old, old story over again, told in thesimplest way: ‘There is no name under heavenwhereby ye can be saved except that of the LordJesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soulseemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from thathour to this, nearly nine years now, there has neverbeen in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christand God the Father both worked upon me that afternoonin July, both differently, and both in the mostperfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and thenin a conversion so astounding that the whole villageheard of it in less than twenty-four hours.“But a time of trouble was yet to come. The dayafter my conversion I went into the hay-field to lenda hand with the harvest, and not having made anypromise to God to abstain or drink in moderation only,I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sisterwas heart-broken; and I felt ashamed of myselfand got to my bedroom at once, where she followedme weeping copiously. She said I had been convertedand fallen away instantly. But although I was quitefull of drink (not muddled, however), I knew thatGod’s work begun in me was not going to be wasted.About midday I made on my knees the first prayerbefore God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven;I felt that was no good, for I would be sure tofall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself tohim in the profoundest belief that my individualitywas going to be destroyed, that he would take all fromme, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the219

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesecret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitatingaccount of the circumstances.[121] The pre-terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. Thesame thing occurred with my pipe: after being a regularsmoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went had an elder brother who had been converted anddisposing conditions appear to have been slight. Heat once, and has never returned. So with every known was a Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious, andsin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother andcomplete. I have had no temptation since conversion, generally to his “cloth.” Finding himself at Rome inGod seemingly having shut out Satan from that course his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a French gentlemanwho tried to make a proselyte of him, but whowith me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but neveron sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownershipin my own life, he has guided me in a thousand tions than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a reli-succeeded no farther after two or three conversa-ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredibleto those who do not enjoy the blessing of a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonnegious medal round his neck, and to accept and read atruly surrendered life.”represents his own part in the conversations as havingbeen of a light and chaffing order; but he notesSo much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom younotice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite the fact that for some days he was unable to banishas one of the conversion’s fruits.The most curious record of sudden conversion with [121] My quotations are made from an Italian translationof this letter in the Biografia del sig. M. A.which I am acquainted is that of M. AlphonseRatisbonne, a free-thinking French Jew, to Catholicism,at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, Monsignore D. O’Connell of Rome for bringing to myRatisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have to thanknotice. I abridge the original.220

William Jamesthe words of the prayer from his mind, and that thenight before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, inthe imagery of which a black cross with no Christ uponit figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next dayhe was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations.I now give his own words.“If at this time any one had accosted me, saying:‘Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoringJesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shalllie prostrate with your face upon the ground in ahumble church; you shall be smiting your breast atthe foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in acollege of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism,ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; youshall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures;renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be,your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteemof your friends, and your attachment to the Jewishpeople; you shall have no other aspiration than tofollow Christ and bear his cross till death;’—if, I say,a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, Ishould have judged that only one person could bemore mad than he—whosoever, namely, might believein the possibility of such senseless folly becomingtrue.And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom,my sole happiness.“Coming out of the cafe I met the carriage of MonsieurB. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invitedme in for a drive, but first asked me to wait fora few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at thechurch of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waitingin the carriage, I entered the church myself to look atit. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, andempty; I believe that I found myself there almostalone. No work of art attracted my attention; and Ipassed my eyes mechanically over its interior withoutbeing arrested by any particular thought. I canonly remember an entirely black dog which went trottingand turning before me as I mused. In an instantthe dog had disappeared, the whole church had vanished,I no longer saw anything, … or more truly I221

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesaw, O my God, one thing alone. “Heavens, how can Ispeak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain toexpressing the inexpressible. Any description, howeversublime it might be, could be but a profanationof the unspeakable truth.“I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in mytears, with my heart beside itself, when M. B. calledme back to life. I could not reply to the questionswhich followed from him one upon the other. But finallyI took the medal which I had on my breast, andwith all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image ofthe Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed,it was She! It was indeed She! [What he hadseen had been a vision of the Virgin.]“I did not know where I was: I did not know whetherI was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changedand believed myself another me; I looked for myselfin myself and did not find myself. In the bottom ofmy soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; Icould not speak; I had no wish to reveal what hadhappened. But I felt something solemn and sacredwithin me which made me ask for a priest. I was ledto one; and there alone, after he had given me thepositive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, andwith my heart still trembling. I could give no accountto myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledgeand a faith. All that I can say is that in an instantthe bandage had fallen from my eyes, and not onebandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages inwhich I had been brought up. One after another theyrapidly disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappearunder the rays of the burning sun.“I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss ofdarkness; and I was living, perfectly living. But I wept,for at the bottom of that gulf I saw the extreme ofmisery from which I had been saved by an infinitemercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities,stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder andwith gratitude. You may ask me how I came to thisnew insight, for truly I had never opened a book ofreligion nor even read a single page of the Bible, andthe dogma of original sin is either entirely denied or222

William Jamesforgotten by the Hebrews of to-day, so that I hadthought so little about it that I doubt whether I everknew its name. But how came I, then, to this perceptionof it? I can answer nothing save this, that on enteringthat church I was in darkness altogether, andon coming out of it I saw the fullness of the light. I canexplain the change no better than by the simile of aprofound sleep or the analogy of one born blind whoshould suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees,but cannot define the light which bathes him and bymeans of which he sees the objects which excite hiswonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how canwe explain the light which is the truth itself? And Ithink I remain within the limits of veracity when Isay that without having any knowledge of the letterof religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived itssense and spirit. Better than if I saw them, I felt thosehidden things; I felt them by the inexplicable effectsthey produced in me. It all happened in my interiormind, and those impressions, more rapid than thoughtshook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, inanother direction, towards other aims, by other paths.I express myself badly. But do you wish, Lord, that Ishould inclose in poor and barren words sentimentswhich the heart alone can understand?”I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but thesewill suffice to show you how real, definite, and memorablean event a sudden conversion may be to himwho has the experience. Throughout the height of ithe undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectatoror undergoer of an astounding process performedupon him from above. There is too much evidence ofthis for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combiningthis fact with the doctrines of election andgrace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with usat these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculousway, unlike what happens at any other junctureof our lives. At that moment, it believes, an absolutelynew nature is breathed into us, and we become partakersof the very substance of the Deity.That the conversion should be instantaneous seemscalled for on this view, and the Moravian Protestants223

The Varieties of Religious Experienceappear to have been the first to see this logical consequence.The Methodists soon followed suit, practi-the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinary reli-For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ’s blood,cally if not dogmatically, and a short time ere his gious duties are practically supposed to suffice to hisdeath, John Wesley wrote:—salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair“In London alone I found 652 members of our Societywho were exceeding clear in their experience, For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there haveand surrender followed by relief should be experienced.and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, notAnd every one of these (without a single exception) effectively received, and Christ’s sacrifice in so far forthhas declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous;that the change was wrought in a moment. the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounderis incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if notHad half of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declaredit was gradually wrought in them, I should set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not onlyspiritual instinct. The individual models which it hashave believed this, with regard to them, and thought the more interesting dramatically, but psychologicallythat some were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously.But as I have not found, in so long a space In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain andthey have been the more complete.of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot but America we have, so to speak, the codified and stereotypedprocedure to which this way of thinking hasbelieve that sanctification is commonly, if not always,an instantaneous work.”[122]led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints ofAll this while the more usual sects of Protestantism the once-born type exist, that there may be a gradualhave set no such store by instantaneous conversion. growth in holiness without a cataclysm; in spite ofthe obvious leakage (as one may say) of much mere[122] Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 463.224

William Jamesnatural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalismhas always assumed that only its own type ofreligious experience can be perfect; you must first benailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, andthen in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.It is natural that those who personally have traversedsuch an experience should carry away a feelingof its being a miracle rather than a natural process.Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visionswitnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; andit always seems, after the surrender of the personalwill, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded inand taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation,safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelousand jubilant as well to warrant one’s belief in aradically new substantial nature.“Conversion,” writes the New England Puritan, JosephAlleine, “is not the putting in a patch of holiness;but with the true convert holiness is woven into allhis powers, principles, and practice. The sincereChristian is quite a new fabric, from the foundationto the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature.”And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain:“Those gracious influences which are the effects ofthe Spirit of God are altogether supernatural—arequite different from anything that unregenerate menexperience. They are what no improvement, or compositionof natural qualifications or principles will everproduce; because they not only differ from what isnatural, and from everything that natural men experiencein degree and circumstances, but also in kind,and are of a nature far more excellent. From hence itfollows that in gracious affections there are [also] newperceptions and sensations entirely different in theirnature and kind from anything experienced by the[same] saints before they were sanctified… . The conceptionswhich the saints have of the loveliness of God,and that kind of delight which they experience in it,are quite peculiar, and entirely different from anythingwhich a natural man can possess, or of which hecan form any proper notion.”225

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceAnd that such a glorious transformation as thisought of necessity to be preceded by despair is shownby Edwards in another passage.“Surely it cannot be unreasonable,” he says, “thatbefore God delivers us from a state of sin and liabilityto everlasting woe, he should give us some considerablesense of the evil from which he delivers us, inorder that we may know and feel the importance ofsalvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value ofwhat God is pleased to do for us. As those who aresaved are successively in two extremely differentstates—first in a state of condemnation and then in astate of justification and blessedness—and as God, inthe salvation of men, deals with them as rational andintelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom,that those who are saved should be made sensibleof their Being, in those two different states. Inthe first place, that they should be made sensible oftheir state of condemnation; and afterwards, of theirstate of deliverance and happiness.”Such quotations express sufficiently well for ourpurpose the doctrinal interpretation of these changes.Whatever part suggestion and imitation may haveplayed in producing them in men and women in excitedassemblies, they have at any rate been in countlessindividual instances an original and unborrowedexperience. Were we writing the story of the mindfrom the purely natural-history point of view, withno religious interest whatever, we should still haveto write down man’s liability to sudden and completeconversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.What, now, must we ourselves think of this question?Is an instantaneous conversion a miracle inwhich God is present as he is present in no change ofheart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes ofhuman beings, even among the apparently regenerate,of which the one class really partakes of Christ’snature while the other merely seems to do so? Or, onthe contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration,even in these startling instantaneous examples,possibly be a strictly natural process, divinein its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in226

William Jamesanother less so, and neither more nor less divine inits mere causation and mechanism than any otherprocess, high or low, of man’s interior life?Before proceeding to answer this question, I mustask you to listen to some more psychological remarks.At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men’scentres of personal energy within them and the lightingup of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomenaas partly due to explicitly conscious processesof thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconsciousincubation and maturing of motives depositedby the experiences of life. When ripe, the resultshatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speakof the subconscious region, in which such processesof flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way.I only regret that my limits of time here force me tobe so short.The expression “field of consciousness” has but recentlycome into vogue in the psychology books. Untilquite lately the unit of mental life which figuredmost was the single “idea,” supposed to be a definitelyoutlined thing. But at present psychologists aretending, first, to admit that the actual unit is moreprobably the total mental state, the entire wave ofconsciousness or field of objects present to the thoughtat any time; and, second, to see that it is impossibleto outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.As our mental fields succeed one another, each hasits centre of interest, around which the objects ofwhich we are less and less attentively conscious fadeto a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable.Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields.Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for wethen see masses of truth together, and often getglimpses of relations which we divine rather than see,for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regionsof objectivity, regions which we seem rather tobe about to perceive than to perceive actually. Atother times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fieldsmay narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselvescorrespondingly oppressed and contracted.Different individuals present constitutional differ-227

The Varieties of Religious Experienceences in this matter of width of field. Your great organizinggeniuses are men with habitually vast fieldsof mental vision, in which a whole programme of futureoperations will appear dotted out at once, therays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance.In common people there is never this magnificentinclusive view of a topic. They stumble along,feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, andoften stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousnessis a mere spark, without memory of thepast or thought of the future, and with the presentnarrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensationof the body.The important fact which this “field” formula commemoratesis the indetermination of the margin. Inattentivelyrealized as is the matter which the margincontains, it is nevertheless there, and helps bothto guide our behavior and to determine the nextmovement of our attention. It lies around us like a“magnetic field,” inside of which our centre of energyturns like a compass-needle, as the present phase ofconsciousness alters into its successor. Our whole paststore of memories floats beyond this margin, readyat a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residualpowers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute ourempirical self stretches continuously beyond it. Sovaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actualand what is only potential at any moment of ourconscious life, that it is always hard to say of certainmental elements whether we are conscious of themor not.The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficultyof tracing the marginal outline, has neverthelesstaken for granted, first, that all the consciousnessthe person now has, be the same focal or marginal,inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field”of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign asthe latter’s outline may be; and, second, that what isabsolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent.and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.And having reached this point, I must now ask youto recall what I said in my last lecture about the sub-228

William Jamesconscious life. I said, as you may recollect, that thosewho first laid stress upon these phenomena could notknow the facts as we now know them. My first dutynow is to tell you what I meant by such a statement.I cannot but think that the most important step forwardthat has occurred in psychology since I havebeen a student of that science is the discovery, firstmade in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, thereis not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, withits usual centre and margin, but an addition theretoin the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelingswhich are extra-marginal and outside of the primaryconsciousness altogether, but yet must beclassed as conscious facts of some sort, able to revealtheir presence by unmistakable signs. I call this themost important step forward because, unlike theother advances which psychology has made, this discoveryhas revealed to us an entirely unsuspectedpeculiarity in the constitution of human nature. Noother step forward which psychology has made canproffer any such claim as this.In particular this discovery of a consciousness existingbeyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myersterms it, casts light on many phenomena of religiousbiography. That is why I have to advert to it now,although it is naturally impossible for me in this placeto give you any account of the evidence on which theadmission of such a consciousness is based. You willfind it set forth in many recent books, Binet’s Alterationsof Personality[123] being perhaps as good aone as any to recommend.The human material on which the demonstrationhas been made has so far been rather limited and, inpart at least, eccentric, consisting of unusually suggestiblehypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients.Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are presumablyso uniform that what is shown to be true ina marked degree of some persons is probably true insome degree of all, and may in a few be true in anextraordinarily high degree.The most important consequence of having a[123] Published in the International Scientific Series.229

The Varieties of Religious Experiencestrongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort isthat one’s ordinary fields of consciousness are liableto incursions from it of which the subject does notguess the source, and which, therefore, take for himthe form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitionsof action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinationsof sight or hearing. The impulses may takethe direction of automatic speech or writing, themeaning of which the subject himself may not understandeven while he utters it; and generalizing thisphenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of automatism,sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual,to this whole sphere of effects, due to “uprushes”into the ordinary consciousness of energiesoriginating in the subliminal parts of the mind.The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenonof post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called. Yougive to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible,an order to perform some designated act—usual oreccentric, it makes no difference—after he wakes fromhis hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comesor the time elapses upon which you have told him thatthe act must ensue, he performs it;—but in so doinghe has no recollection of your suggestion, and he alwaystrumps up an improvised pretext for his behaviorif the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even besuggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear avoice at a certain interval after waking, and when thetime comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, withno inkling on the subject’s part of its source.In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet,Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminalconsciousness of patients with hysteria, wehave revealed to us whole systems of undergroundlife, in the shape of memories of a painful sort whichlead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primaryfields of consciousness, and making irruptionsthereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralysesof feeling and of motion, and the whole processionof symptoms of hysteric disease of body andof mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconsciousmemories, and the patient immediately gets230

well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr.Myers’s sense of the word. These clinical recordssound like fairy-tales when one first reads them, yetit is impossible to doubt their accuracy; and, the pathhaving been once opened by these first observers,similar observations have been made elsewhere.They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon ournatural constitution.And it seems to me that they make a farther stepinevitable. Interpreting the unknown after the analogyof the known, it seems to me that hereafter, whereverwe meet with a phenomenon of automatism, beWilliam Jamescases, the lost memories which are the source haveto be extracted from the patient’s Subliminal by anumber of ingenious methods, for an account of whichyou must consult the books. In other pathologicalcases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathicobsessions, the source is yet to seek, but by analogyit also should be in subliminal regions which improvementsin our methods may yet conceivably put ontap. There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed—butthe assumption involves a vast programof work to be done in the way of verification, in whichthe religious experiences of man must play theirit motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountablecaprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are [124] The reader will here please notice that in my ex-part.[124]bound first of all to make search whether it be not anclusive reliance in the last lecture on the subconscious“incubation” of motives deposited by a growing experience,I followed the method of employing accepted prin-explosion, into the fields of ordinary consciousness,of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminalregions of the mind. We should look, therefore, region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a placeciples of explanation as far as one can. The subliminalfor its source in the Subject’s subconscious life. In thenow admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulationof vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentivelyor attentively registered), and for their elabo-hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by oursuggestion, so we know it directly. In the hysteric ration according to ordinary psychological or logical lawsinto results that end by attaining such a “tension”that231

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethey may at times enter consciousness with somethinglike a burst. It thus is “scientific” to interpret all otherwiseunaccountable invasive alterations of consciousnessas results of the tension of subliminal memoriesreaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me toconfess that there are occasional bursts into consciousnessof results of which it is not easy to demonstrateany prolonged subconscious incubation. Some of thecases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of theunseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages59, 60, 61, 66); and we shall see other experiences ofthe kind when we come to the subject of mysticism. Thecase of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly thatof Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of saint Paul, mightnot be so easily explained in this simple way. The result,then, would have to be ascribed either to a merelyphysiological nerve storm, a “discharging lesion” like thatof epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as inthe two latter cases named, to some more mystical ortheological hypothesis. I make this remark in order thatthe reader may realize that the subject is really complex.But I shall keep myself as far as possible at presentto the more “scientific” view; and only as the plot thickensin subsequent lectures shall I consider the questionof its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all thefacts. That subconscious incubation explains a greatnumber of them, there can be no doubt.And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneousconversions. You remember the cases ofAlline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxfordconverted at three in the afternoon. Similar occurrencesabound, some with and some without luminousvisions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, andof being wrought on by a higher control. If, abstractingaltogether from the question of their value for thefuture spiritual life of the individual, we take them ontheir psychological side exclusively, so many peculiaritiesin them remind us of what we find outside of conversionthat we are tempted to class them along withother automatisms, and to suspect that what makesthe difference between a sudden and a gradual convertis not necessarily the presence of divine miraclein the case of one and of something less divine in thatof the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity,the fact, namely, that in the recipient of the moreinstantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects whoare in possession of a large region in which mental workcan go on subliminally, and from which invasive expe-232

William Jamesriences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primaryconsciousness, may come.probably agree that no splendor worthy of a whollyspontaneous course of methodistic growth, you willI do not see why Methodists need object to such a supernatural creature fulgurates from them, or setsview. Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusionsto which I sought to lead you in my very first rienced that favor. Were it true that a suddenly con-them apart from the mortals who have never expe-lecture. You may remember how I there argued verted man as such is, as Edwards says,[125] of anagainst the notion that the worth of a thing can be entirely different kind from a natural man, partakingdecided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, as he does directly of Christ’s substance, there surelyour opinion of the significance and value of a human ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctiveradiance attaching even to the lowliest specimenevent or condition, must be decided on empiricalgrounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of this genus, to which no one of us could remain insensible,and which, so far as it went, would proveof conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerateit, even though it be a piece of natural psychology;if not, we ought to make short work with it, no among mere natural men. But notoriously there is nohim more excellent than ever the most highly giftedmatter what supernatural being may have infused it. such radiance. Converted men as a class are indis-Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except theclass of preeminent saints of whom the names illuminehistory, and consider only the usual run of the work of God in the conversion of one soul, consid-[125] Edwards says elsewhere: “I am bold to say that“saints,” the shopkeeping church-members and ordinaryyouthful or middle-aged recipients of instanchaseof it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal iseredtogether with the source foundation, and purtaneousconversion, whether at revivals or in the sue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creationof the whole material universe.”233

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetinguishable from natural men; some natural men evenexcel some converted men in their fruits; and no oneignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-dayinspection of the “accidents” of the two groupsof persons before him, that their substance differed asmuch as divine differs from human substance.The believers in the non-natural character of suddenconversion have had practically to admit thatthere is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of alltrue converts. The super-normal incidents, such asvoices and visions and overpowering impressions ofthe meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts,the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connectedwith the crisis of change, may all come by wayof nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan.The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is tobe found only in the disposition of the genuine childof God, the permanently patient heart, the love ofself eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is alsofound in those who pass no crisis, and may even befound outside of Christianity altogether.Throughout Jonathan Edwards’s admirably richand delicate description of the supernaturally infusedcondition, in his Treatise on Religious Affections, thereis not one decisive trait, not one mark, that unmistakablyparts it off from what may possibly be onlyan exceptionally high degree of natural goodness. Infact, one could hardly read a clearer argument thanthis book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis thatno chasm exists between the orders of human excellence,but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuousdifferences, and generation and regenerationare matters of degree.All which denial of two objective classes of humanbeings separated by a chasm must not leave us blindto the extraordinary momentousness of the fact ofhis conversion to the individual himself who gets converted.There are higher and lower limits of possibilityset to each personal life. If a flood but goes aboveone’s head, its absolute elevation becomes a matterof small importance; and when we touch our ownupper limit and live in our own highest centre of en-234

ergy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter howmuch higher some one else’s centre may be. A smallman’s salvation will always be a great salvation andthe greatest of all facts for him, and we should rememberthis when the fruits of our ordinaryevangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how muchless ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs andearthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, mighthave been, if such poor grace as they have receivedhad never touched them at all?[126][126] Emerson writes: “When we see a soul whoseacts are regal, graceful and pleasant as roses, we mustthank God that such things can be and are, and notturn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a betterman, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.”True enough. Yet Crump may really be the bettercrump, for his inner discords and second birth;and your once-born “regal” character though indeedalways better than poor Crump, may fall far short ofwhat he individually might be had he only someCrump-like capacity for compunction over his ownpeculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariablygentlemanly as these may be.William James235If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, eachclass standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, Ibelieve we shall find natural men and converts bothsudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms whichregenerative change effects have, then, no generalspiritual significance, but only a psychological significance.We have seen how Starbuck’s laborious statisticalstudies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinaryspiritual growth. Another American psychologist,Prof. George A. Coe,[127] has analyzed the casesof seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for conversion,known to him, and the results strikingly confirmthe view that sudden conversion is connectedwith the possession of an active subliminal self. Examininghis subjects with reference to their hypnoticsensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogichallucinations, odd impulses, religious dreams aboutthe time of their conversion, etc., he found these relativelymuch more frequent in the group of convertswhose transformation had been “striking,” “striking”[127] In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetransformation being defined as a change which,though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to thesubject of it to be distinctly different from a processof growth, however rapid.”[128] Candidates for conversionat revivals are, as you know, often disappointed:they experience nothing striking. ProfessorCoe had a number of persons of this class among hisseventy-seven subjects, and they almost all, whentested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a subclasswhich he calls “spontaneous,” that is, fertile in selfsuggestions,as distinguished from a “passive” subclass,to which most of the subjects of striking transformationbelonged. His inference is that self-suggestionof impossibility had prevented the influence uponthese persons of an environment which, on the more“passive” subjects, had easily brought forth the effectsthey looked for. Sharp distinctions are difficultin these regions, and Professor Coe’s numbers aresmall. But his methods were careful, and the resultstally with what one might expect; and they seem, onthe whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which isthat if you should expose to a converting influence asubject in whom three factors unite: first, pronouncedemotional sensibility; second, tendency toautomatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passivetype; you might then safely predict the result: therewould be a sudden conversion, a transformation ofthe striking kind.Does this temperamental origin diminish the significanceof the sudden conversion when it has occurred?Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says;for “the ultimate test of religious values is nothingpsychological, nothing definable in terms of how ithappens, but something ethical, definable only interms of what is attained.”[129]As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall seethat what is attained is often an altogether new levelof spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in whichimpossible things have become possible, and newenergies and endurances are shown. The personality[128] Op. cit., p. 112. [129] Op. cit., p. 144.236

William Jamesis changed, the man is born anew, whether or not hispsychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particularshape to his metamorphosis. “Sanctification” is thetechnical name of this result; and erelong examples ofit shall be brought before you. In this lecture I havestill only to add a few remarks on the assurance andpeace which fill the hour of change itself.One word more, though, before proceeding to thatpoint, lest the final purpose of my explanation of suddennessby subliminal activity be misunderstood. Ido indeed believe that if the Subject have no liabilityto such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fieldshave a hard rind of a margin that resists incursionsfrom beyond it, his conversion must he gradual if itoccur, and must resemble any simple growth into newhabits. His possession of a developed subliminal self,and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a conditiosine qua non of the Subject’s becoming converted inthe instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodoxChristians, ask me as a psychologist whether the referenceof a phenomenon to a subliminal self does notexclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deityaltogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologistI do not see why it necessarily should. The lowermanifestations of the Subliminal, indeed, fall withinthe resources of the personal subject: his ordinarysense-material, inattentively taken in and subconsciouslyremembered and combined, will account forall his usual automatisms. But just as our primary wideawakeconsciousness throws open our senses to thetouch of things material so it is logically conceivablethat if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directlytouch us, the psychological condition of theirdoing so might be our possession of a subconsciousregion which alone should yield access to them. Thehubbub of the waking life might close a door which inthe dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.Thus that perception of external control which is soessential a feature in conversion might, in some casesat any rate, be interpreted as the orthodox interpretit: forces transcending the finite individual might impresshim, on condition of his being what we may call237

The Varieties of Religious Experiencea subliminal human specimen. But in any case thevalue of these forces would have to be determinedby their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendencywould of itself establish no presumption thatthey were more divine than diabolical.I confess that this is the way in which I should rathersee the topic left lying in your minds until I come to amuch later lecture, when I hope once more to gatherthese dropped threads together into more definitiveconclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainlyought not at this point of our inquiry to be held toexclude all notion of a higher penetration.If there be higher powers able to impress us, theymay get access to us only through the subliminal door.Let us turn now to the feelings which immediatelyfill the hour of the conversion experience. The firstone to be noted is just this sense of higher control. Itis not always, but it is very often present. We sawexamples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere.The need of such a higher controlling agencyis well expressed in the short reference which theeminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makesto the crisis of his own conversion. It was at Naples inhis early manhood, in the summer of 1827.“My sadness,” he says, “was without limit, and havinggot entire possession of me, it filled my life fromthe most indifferent external acts to the most secretthoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings,my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that Isaw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder bymy reason and my will, which were themselves diseased,would be to act like a blind man who shouldpretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of theother equally blind one. I had then no resource savein some influence from without. I remembered thepromise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarationsof the Gospel had never succeeded in bringinghome to me, I learned at last from necessity, andbelieved, for the first time in my life, in this promise,in the only sense in which it answered the needs ofmy soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernaturalaction, capable of giving me thoughts, and238

William Jamestaking them away from me, and exerted on me by a without resource, and no works it can accomplish willGod as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of avail. Redemption from such subjective conditionsnature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoningall my personal resources, and acknowledg-Christ’s accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.must be a free gift or nothing, and grace throughing no other title to his mercy than my own utter “God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, themisery, I went home and threw myself on my knees miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and ofand prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From those that are brought even to nothing; and his natureis to give sight to the blind, to comfort the bro-this day onwards a new interior life began for me:not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had ken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperateand damned. Now that pernicious and pesti-lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, andonce entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to lent opinion of man’s own righteousness, which willwhom I then had learned to give myself up, little by not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable,little did the rest.”[130]but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come toIt is needless to remind you once more of the admirablecongruity of Protestant theology with the struc-take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat inhis own natural and proper work. Therefore God mustture of the mind as shown in such experiences. In the pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vainextreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can confidence, that she may so learn at length by herdo absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned.But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrifiedand cast down, he is so little able to raise himself[130] I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod,in his book la Vie, and a letter printed in the work: up again and say, ‘Now I am bruised and afflictedAdolphe Monod: I,. Souvenirs de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433.239

The Varieties of Religious Experienceenough; now is the time of grace; now is the time tohear Christ.’ The foolishness of man’s heart is so greatthat then he rather seeketh to himself more laws tosatisfy his conscience. ‘If I live,’ saith he, ‘I will amendmy life: I will do this, I will do that.’ But here, exceptthou do the quite contrary, except thou send Mosesaway with his law, and in these terrors and this anguishlay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, lookfor no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thychastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thymerits? what shall all these do? what shall the law ofMoses avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner,through works or merits could have loved the Son ofGod, and so come to him, what needed he to deliverhimself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner,could be redeemed by any other price, whatneeded the Son of God to be given? But because therewas no other price, therefore he delivered neithersheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirelyand wholly ‘for me,’ even ‘for me,’ I say, a miserable,wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfortand apply this to myself.And this manner of applying is the very true forceand power of faith. For he died not to justify the righteous,but the UN-righteous, and to make them thechildren of God.”[131]That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literallyyou are the very being whom Christ’s sacrificehas already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine,has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as thismessage from Luther’s personal experience. As Protestantsare not all sick souls, of course reliance on whatLuther exults in calling the dung of one’s merits, thefilthy puddle of one’s own righteousness, has come tothe front again in their religion; but the adequacy ofhis view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our humanmental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousnesswhen it was a new and quickening thing.Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work waspart of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is[131] Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, andch. ii. verse 20, abridged.240

faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But this isonly one part of Luther’s faith, the other part beingfar more vital. This other part is something not intellectualbut immediate and intuitive, the assurance,namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, withoutone plea, etc., am saved now and forever. [132][132] In some conversions, both steps are distinct; inthis one, for example:—“Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I wassoon struck by an expression: ‘the finished work of Christ.’‘Why,’ I asked of myself, ‘does the author use theseterms? Why does he not say “the atoning work”?’ Thenthese words, ‘It is finished,’ presented themselves to mymind. ‘What is it that is finished?’ I asked, and in aninstant my mind replied: ‘A perfect expiation for sin;entire satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paidby the Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not forours only, but for those of all men. If, then, the entirework is finished, all the debt paid, what remains for meto do?’ In another instant the light was shed throughmy mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous convictionwas given me that nothing more was to be done, save tofall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, topraise God forever.” Autobiography of Hudson Taylor. Itranslate back into English from the French translationof Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not beingaccessible.William James241Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contendingthat the conceptual belief about Christ’s work, althoughso often efficacious and antecedent, is reallyaccessory and non-essential, and that the “joyousconviction” can also come by far other channels thanthis conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself,the assurance that all is well with one, that he wouldgive the name of faith par excellence. “When the senseof estrangement,” he writes, “fencing man about in anarrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individualfinds himself ‘at one with all creation.’ He lives in theuniversal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God,are one. That state of confidence, trust, union with allthings, following upon the achievement of moral unity,is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly,on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a characterof certainty, assume a new reality, become an objectof faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational,argumentation is irrelevant. But such convictionbeing a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is agross error to imagine that the chief practical value

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof the faith-state is its power to stamp with the sealof reality certain particular theological conceptions.[133]On the contrary, its value lies solely inthe fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biologicalgrowth reducing contending desires to one direction;a growth which expresses itself in new affective statesand new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-likeactivities. The ground of the specific assurance in religiousdogmas is then an affective experience. Theobjects of faith may even be preposterous; the affectivestream will float them along, and invest themwith unshakable certitude. The more startling theaffective experience, the less explicable it seems, theeasier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiatednotions.”[134][133] Tolstoy’s case was a good comment on thosewords. There was almost no theology in his conversion.His faith-state was the sense come back thatlife was infinite in its moral significance.[134] American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345-347,abridged.The characteristics of the affective experiencewhich, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be calledthe state of assurance rather than the faith-state, canbe easily enumerated, though it is probably difficultto realize their intensity, unless one has been throughthe experience one’s self.The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sensethat all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony,the willingness to be, even though the outerconditions should remain the same. The certainty ofGod’s “grace,” of “justification,” “salvation,” is an objectivebelief that usually accompanies the change inChristians; but this may be entirely lacking and yetthe affective peace remain the same—you will recollectthe case of the Oxford graduate: and many mightbe given where the assurance of personal salvationwas only a later result. A passion of willingness, ofacquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre ofthis state of mind.The second feature is the sense of perceiving truthsnot known before. The mysteries of life become lu-242

cid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually,the solution is more or less unutterable in words. Butthese more intellectual phenomena may be postponeduntil we treat of mysticism.A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objectivechange which the world often appears to undergo.“An appearance of newness beautifies everyobject,” the precise opposite of that other sort of newness,that dreadful unreality and strangeness in theappearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholypatients, and of which you may recall my relatingsome examples.[135] This sense of clean andbeautiful newness within and without is one of thecommonest entries in conversion records. JonathanEdwards thus describes it in himself:—“After this my sense of divine things gradually increased,and became more and more lively, and hadmore of that inward sweetness. The appearance ofeverything was altered; there seemed to be, as itwere, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine[135] Above, p. 150.William Jamesglory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom,his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything;in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds andblue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the waterand all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind.And scarce anything, among all the works of nature,was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerlynothing had been so terrible to me. Before, Iused to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, andto be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstormrising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.”[136]Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist,records his sense of newness thus:—“I said to the Lord: ‘Thou hast said, they that askshall receive, they that seek shall find, and to themthat knock the door shall be opened, and I have faithto believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happythat I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. Ipraised God with my whole heart… . I think this was[136] Dwight: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p.61, abridged.243

The Varieties of Religious Experiencein November, 1823, but what day of the month I donot know. I remember this, that everything lookednew to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees.I was like a new man in a new world. I spent thegreater part of my time in praising the Lord.”[137]Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense ofnewness by quotations. I take the two following fromStarbuck’s manuscript collection. One, a woman,says:—“I was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religiousfriends seeking and praying for my conversion.My emotional nature was stirred to its depths; confessionsof depravity and pleading with God for salvationfrom sin made me oblivious of all surroundings.I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization offorgiveness and renewal of my nature. When risingfrom my knees I exclaimed, ‘Old things have passedaway, all things have become new.’ It was like enteringanother world, a new state of existence. Natural[137] W. F. Bourne: The King’s Son, a Memoir of BillyBray, London, Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarifiedthat I saw beauty in every material object in theuniverse, the woods were vocal with heavenly music;my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wantedeverybody to share in my joy.”The next case is that of a man:—“I know not how I got back into the encampment,but found myself staggering up to Rev. ——’s Holinesstent—and as it was full of seekers and a terriblenoise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and someshouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, Ifell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, andevery time I would call on God, something like a man’shand would strangle me by choking. I don’t knowwhether there were any one around or near me ornot. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help,but just as often as I would pray, that unseen handwas felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off.Finally something said: ‘Venture on the atonement,for you will die anyway if you don’t.’ So I made onefinal struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same244

William Jameschoking and strangling, determined to finish the sentenceof prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die,and the last I remember that time was falling backon the ground with the same unseen hand on mythroat. I don’t know how long I lay there or what wasgoing on. None of my folks were present. When I cameto myself, there were a crowd around me praisingGod. The very heavens seemed to open and pourdown rays of light and glory. Not for a moment only,but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemedto pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed,and everything became new. My horses and hogs andeven everybody seemed changed.”This man’s case introduces the feature ofautomatisms, which in suggestible subjects have beenso startling a feature at revivals since, in Edwards’s,Wesley’s and Whitfield’s time, these became a regularmeans of gospel-propagation. They were at firstsupposed to be semi-miraculous proofs of “power”on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergenceof opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards,in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in NewEngland, has to defend them against their critics; andtheir value has long been matter of debate even withinthe revivalistic denominations.[138] They undoubtedlyhave no essential spiritual significance, and althoughtheir presence makes his conversion morememorable to the convert, it has never been provedthat converts who show them are more perseveringor fertile in good fruits than those whose change ofheart has had less violent accompaniments. On thewhole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntaryvocal utterances, and suffocation, must besimply ascribed to the subject’s having a large subliminalregion, involving nervous instability. This isoften the subject’s own view of the matter afterwards.One of Starbuck’s correspondents writes, for instance:—[138] Consult William B. Sprague: Lectures on Revivalsof Religion, New York, 1832, in the long Appendixto which the opinions of a large number ofministers are given.245

The Varieties of Religious Experience“I have been through the experience which is knownas conversion. My explanation of it is this: the subjectworks his emotions up to the breaking point, atthe same time resisting their physical manifestations,such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly letsthem have their full sway over his body. The relief issomething wonderful, and the pleasurable effects ofthe emotions are experienced to the highest degree.”There is one form of sensory automatism which possiblydeserves special notice on account of its frequency.I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatoryluminous phenomena, photisms, to use the termof the psychologists. Saint Paul’s blinding heavenlyvision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort;so does Constantine’s cross in the sky. The last casebut one which I quoted mentions floods of light andglory. Henry Alline mentions a light, about whoseexternality he seems uncertain. Colonel Gardiner seesa blazing light. President Finney writes:—“All at once the glory of God shone upon and roundabout me in a manner almost marvelous… . A lightperfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostratedme on the ground… . This light seemed likethe brightness of the sun in every direction. It wastoo intense for the eyes… . I think I knew somethingthen, by actual experience, of that light that prostratedPaul on the way to Damascus. It was surely alight such as I could not have endured long.”[139]Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon.Here is another from Starbuck’s collection,where the light appeared evidently external:—“I had attended a series of revival services for abouttwo weeks off and on. Had been invited to the altarseveral times, all the time becoming more deeplyimpressed, when finally I decided I must do this, or Ishould be lost. Realization of conversion was veryvivid, like a ton’s weight being lifted from my heart;a strange light which seemed to light up the wholeroom (for it was dark); a conscious supreme blisswhich caused me to repeat ‘Glory to God’ for a longtime. Decided to be God’s child for life, and to give up[139] Memoirs, p. 34.246

my pet ambition, wealth and social position. Myformer habits of life hindered my growth somewhat,but I set about overcoming these systematically, andin one year my whole nature was changed, i. e., myambitions were of a different order.”Here is another one of Starbuck’s cases, involving aluminous element:—“I had been clearly converted twenty-three yearsbefore, or rather reclaimed. My experience in regenerationwas then clear and spiritual, and I had notbackslidden. But I experienced entire sanctificationon the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven o’clockin the morning. The particular accompaniments of theexperience were entirely unexpected. I was quietlysitting at home singing selections out of PentecostalHymns. Suddenly there seemed to be a somethingsweeping into me and inflating my entire being—sucha sensation as I had never experienced before.When this experience came, I seemed to be conductedaround a large, capacious, well-lighted room.As I walked with my invisible conductor and lookedaround, a clear thought was coined in my mind, ‘Theyare not here, they are gone.’ As soon as the thoughtWilliam James247was definitely formed in my mind, though no wordwas spoken, the Holy Spirit impressed me that I wassurveying my own soul. Then, for the first time in allmy life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin,and filled with the fullness of God.”Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminousaffection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinationsproduced by the intoxicant cactus budscalled mescal by the Mexicans:—“When I went in the morning into the fields to work,the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. Iwell remember we reaped oats, and how every strawand head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in akind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so expressit, in the glory of God.”[140][140] These reports of sensorial photism shade offinto what are evidently only metaphorical accountsof the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, for instance,in Brainerd’s statement: “As I was walking ina thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open tothe apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any externalbrightness, for I saw no such thing, nor anyimagination of a body of light in the third heavens, oranything of that nature, but it was a new inward apprehensionor view that I had of God.”

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIn a case like this next one from Starbuck’s manuscriptcollection the lighting up of the darkness isprobably also metaphorical:—“One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got hometo the ranch where I was working, I would offer myselfwith my faculties and all to God to be used only by andfor him… . It was raining and the roads were muddy;but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down bythe side of the road and told God all about it, intendingthen to get up and go on. Such a thing as any specialanswer to my prayer never entered my mind, havingbeen converted by faith, but still being most undoubtedlysaved. Well, while I was praying, I remember holdingout my hands to God and telling him they shouldwork for him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speakfor him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrumentand give me a satisfying experience—when suddenlythe darkness of the night seemed lit up—I felt,realized, knew, that God heard and answered myprayer. Deep happiness came over me; I felt I was acceptedinto the inner circle of God’s loved ones.”In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:—“A prayer meeting had been called for at close ofevening service. The minister supposed me impressedby his discourse (a mistake—he was dull).He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said:‘Do you not want to give your heart to God?’ I repliedin the affirmative. Then said he, ‘Come to thefront seat.’ They sang and prayed and talked withme. I experienced nothing but unaccountable wretchedness.They declared that the reason why I did not‘obtain peace’ was because I was not willing to giveup all to God. After about two hours the minister saidwe would go home. As usual, on retiring, I prayed. Ingreat distress, I at this time simply said, ‘Lord, I havedone all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.’Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me agreat peace, and I arose and went into my parents’bedroom and said, ‘I do feel so wonderfully happy.’This I regard as the hour of conversion. It was thehour in which I became assured of divine acceptance248

William Jamesand favor. So far as my life was concerned, it madelittle immediate change.”The most characteristic of all the elements of theconversion crisis, and the last one of which I shallspeak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced. We havealready heard several accounts of it, but I will add acouple more. President Finney’s is so vivid that I giveit at length:—“All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; andthe utterance of my heart was, ‘I want to pour mywhole soul out to God.’ The rising of my soul was sogreat that I rushed into the back room of the frontoffice, to pray. There was no fire and no light in theroom; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it wereperfectly light. As I went in and shut the door afterme, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ faceto face. It did not occur to me then, nor did it for sometime afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state.On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as Iwould see any other man. He said nothing but lookedat me in such a manner as to break me right down athis feet. I have always since regarded this as a mostremarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a realitythat he stood before me, and I fell down at his feetand poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like achild, and made such confessions as I could with mychoked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed hisfeet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impressionthat I touched him, that I recollect. I must havecontinued in this state for a good while, but my mindwas too absorbed with the interview to recollect anythingthat I said. But I know, as soon as my mindbecame calm enough to break off from the interview,I returned to the front office, and found that the firethat I had made of large wood was nearly burned out.But as I turned and was about to take a seat by thefire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.Without any expectation of it, without ever havingthe thought in my mind that there was any such thingfor me, without any recollection that I had ever heardthe thing mentioned by any person in the world, theHoly Spirit descended upon me in a manner that249

The Varieties of Religious Experienceseemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feelthe impression, like a wave of electricity, goingthrough and through me. Indeed, it seemed to comein waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not expressit in any other way. It seemed like the verybreath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemedto fan me, like immense wings.“No words can express the wonderful love that wasshed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy andlove; and I do not know but I should say I literallybellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.These waves came over me, and over me, and overme, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, ‘Ishall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ Isaid, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more;’ yet I had nofear of death.“How long I continued in this state, with this baptismcontinuing to roll over me and go through me, Ido not know. But I know it was late in the eveningwhen a member of my choir —for I was the leader ofthe choir—came into the office to see me. He was amember of the church. He found me in this state ofloud weeping, and said to me, ‘Mr. Finney, what ailsyou?’ I could make him no answer for some time. Hethen said, ‘Are you in pain?’ I gathered myself up asbest I could, and replied, ‘No, but so happy that Icannot live.’”I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better thangive his own brief account of his post-conversion feelings:—“I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along thestreet, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say ‘Glory’;and I lift up the other, and it seems to say ‘Amen’;and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.”[141][141] I add in a note a few more records:—“One morning, being in deep distress, fearing everymoment I should drop into hell, I was constrainedto cry in earnest for mercy, and the Lord came to myrelief, and delivered my soul from the burden andguilt of sin. My whole frame was in a tremor fromhead to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The250

William Jamespleasure I then felt was indescribable. The happinesslasted about three days, during which time I neverspoke to any person about my feelings.” Autobiographyof Dan Young, edited by W. P. Strickland, NewYork, 1860.“In an instant there rose up in me such a sense ofGod’s taking care of those who put their trust in himthat for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavenswere lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began tocry and laugh.” H. W. Beecher, quoted by Leuba.“My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay therepraising God in such ecstasy of joy as only the soulwho experiences it can realize.” —”I cannot expresshow I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeonand lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and Isang praise unto him who loved me and washed mefrom my sins. I was forced to retire into a secret place,for the tears did flow, and I did not wish myshopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it asecret.”—”I experienced joy almost to weeping.”—”Ifelt my face must have shone like that of Moses.I had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatestjoy it was ever my lot to experience.”—”I weptand laughed alternately.I was as light as if walking on air. I felt as if I hadgained greater peace and happiness than I had everexpected to experience.” Starbuck’s correspondents.One word, before I close this lecture, on the questionof the transiency or permanence of these abruptconversions. Some of you, I feel sure, knowing thatnumerous backslidings and relapses take place, makeof these their apperceiving mass for interpreting thewhole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile atso much “hysterics.” Psychologically, as well as religiously,however, this is shallow. It misses the pointof serious interest, which is not so much the durationas the nature and quality of these shiftings of characterto higher levels. Men lapse from every level—weneed no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance,well known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant,it reveals new flights and reaches of ideal-251

The Varieties of Religious Experienceity while it lasts. These revelations form its significanceto men and women, whatever be its duration.So with the conversion experience: that it should foreven a short time show a human being what the highwatermark of his spiritual capacity is, this is whatconstitutes its importance—an importance whichbacksliding cannot diminish, although persistencemight increase it. As a matter of fact, all the morestriking instances of conversion, all those, for instance,which I have quoted, have been permanent. The caseof which there might be most doubt, on account of itssuggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure, was thecase of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed thatRatisbonne’s whole future was shaped by those fewminutes. He gave up his project of marriage, becamea priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went todwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews,showed no tendency to use for egotistic purposes thenotoriety given him by the peculiar circumstances ofhis conversion—which, for the rest, he could seldomrefer to without tears—and in short remained an exemplaryson of the Church until he died, late in the80’s, if I remember rightly.The only statistics I know of, on the subject of theduration of conversions, are those collected for ProfessorStarbuck by Miss Johnston. They embrace onlya hundred persons, evangelical church-members,more than half being Methodists. According to thestatement of the subjects themselves, there had beenbacksliding of some sort in nearly all the cases, 93per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men. Discussingthe returns more minutely, Starbuck findsthat only 6 per cent. are relapses from the religiousfaith which the conversion confirmed, and that thebacksliding complained of is in most only a fluctuationin the ardor of sentiment. Only six of the hundredcases report a change of faith. Starbuck’s conclusionis that the effect of conversion is to bring withit “a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constantand permanent, although the feelings fluctuate…. In other words, the persons who have passedthrough conversion, having once taken a stand for252

William Jamesthe religious life, tend to feel themselves identifiedwith it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasmdeclines.”[142]Lectures XI, XII, and XIIISAINTLINESS[142] Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.THE LAST LECTURE left us in a state of expectancy. Whatmay the practical fruits for life have been, of suchmovingly happy conversions as those we heard of?With this question the really important part of ourtask opens, for you remember that we began all thisempirical inquiry not merely to open a curious chapterin the natural history of human consciousness, butrather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the totalvalue and positive meaning of all the religious troubleand happiness which we have seen. We must, therefore,first describe the fruits of the religious life, andthen we must judge them. This divides our inquiryinto two distinct parts. Let us without further preambleproceed to the descriptive task.It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our businessin these lectures. Some small pieces of it, it istrue, may be painful, or may show human nature in a253

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, becausethe best fruits of religious experience are the bestthings that history has to show. They have alwaysbeen esteemed so; here if anywhere is the genuinelystrenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of suchexamples as I have lately had to wander through,though it has been only in the reading of them, is tofeel encouraged and uplifted and washed in bettermoral air.The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience,bravery to which the wings of human naturehave spread themselves have been flown for religiousideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, someremarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or the stateof grace.“Even from the purely human point of view,”Sainte-Beuve says, “the phenomenon of grace muststill appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent, andrare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve acloser study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certainfixed and invincible state, a state which is genuinelyheroic, and from out of which the greatest deedswhich it ever performs are executed. Through all thedifferent forms of communion, and all the diversityof the means which help to produce this state,whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a general confession,by a solitary prayer and effusion, whateverin short to be the place and the occasion, it is easy torecognize that it is fundamentally one state in spiritand fruits. Penetrate a little beneath the diversity ofcircumstances, and it becomes evident that in Christiansof different epochs it is always one and the samemodification by which they are affected: there is veritablya single fundamental and identical spirit of pietyand charity, common to those who have receivedgrace; an inner state which before all things is one oflove and humility, of infinite confidence in God, andof severity for one’s self, accompanied with tendernessfor others. The fruits peculiar to this conditionof the soul have the same savor in all, under distantsuns and in different surroundings, in Saint Teresa of254

William JamesAvila just as in any Moravian brother of at any given time, is always a resultant of two sets ofHerrnhut.”[143]forces within us, impulses pushing us one way andSainte-Beuve has here only the more eminent instancesof regeneration in mind, and these are of course yes!” say the impulses; “No! no!” say the inhibitions.obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. “Yes!the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devoteeshave often laid their course so differently from matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibitionFew people who have not expressly reflected on theother men that, judging them by worldly law, we might is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictivepressure almost as if we were fluids pentbe tempted to call them monstrous aberrations fromthe path of nature. I begin therefore by asking a generalpsychological question as to what the inner condisantthat it becomes subconscious. All of you, for ex-within the cavity of a jar. The influence is so incestionsare which may make one human character differ ample, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment,and entirely without express consciousness ofso extremely from another.I reply at once that where the character, as somethingdistinguished from the intellect, is concerned, left alone in the room, each of you would probablythe fact, because of the influence of the occasion. Ifthe causes of human diversity lie chiefly in our differingsusceptibilities of emotional excitement, and tude more “free and easy.” But proprieties and theirinvoluntarily rearrange himself, and make his atti-in the different impulses and inhibitions which these inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotionalbring in their train. Let me make this more clear. excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appearSpeaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, in the street with his face covered with shaving-latherbecause a house across the way was on fire; and a[143] Sainte-Beuve: Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, woman will run among strangers in her nightgown ifabridged.255

The Varieties of Religious Experienceit be a question of saving her baby’s life or her own.Take a self-indulgent woman’s life in general. She willyield to every inhibition set by her disagreeable sensations,lie late in bed, live upon tea or bromides, keepindoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedientto its “no.” But make a mother of her, and whathave you? Possessed by maternal excitement, shenow confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil withoutan instant of hesitation or a word of complaint.The inhibitive power of pain over her is extinguishedwherever the baby’s interests are at stake. The inconvenienceswhich this creature occasions have become,as James Hinton says, the glowing heart of agreat joy, and indeed are now the very conditionswhereby the joy becomes most deep.This is an example of what you have already heardof as the “expulsive power of a higher affection.” Butbe the affection high or low, it makes no difference,so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough.In one of Henry Drummond’s discourses he tells ofan inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalowupon it remained unsubmerged, and becamethe refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles inaddition to the human beings who were there. At acertain moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimmingtowards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dogupon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessedby such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmencould calmly step up with a rifle and blowout its brains. The tiger’s habitual ferocity was temporarilyquelled by the emotion of fear, which becamesovereign, and formed a new centre for his character.Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, butmany contrary ones are mixed together. In that caseone hears both “yeses” and “noes,” and the “will” iscalled on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, forexample, with his dread of cowardice impelling himto advance, his fears impelling him to run, and hispropensities to imitation pushing him towards variouscourses if his comrades offer various examples.His person becomes the seat of a mass of interferences;and he may for a time simply waver, because256

William Jamesno one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity,though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones thatone as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists andall their inhibitions away. The fury of his comrades’charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courageto the soldier; the panic of their rout will give thispitch of fear. In these sovereign excitements, thingsordinarily impossible grow natural because the inhibitionsare annulled. Their “no! no!” not only is notheard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paperhoops to the circus rider—no impediment;the flood is higher than the dam they make.“Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!” criesthe grenadier, frantic over his Emperor’s capture,when his wife and babes are suggested; and men pentinto a burning theatre have been known to cut theirway through the crowd with knives.[144][144] “‘Love would not be love,’ says Bourget, ‘unlessit could carry one to crime.’ And so one may saythat no passion would be a veritable passion unless itcould carry one to crime.” (Sighele: Psychollogie dessectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annulthe ordinary inhibitions set by “conscience.” And conversely,of all the criminal human beings, the false,cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live,there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse maynot be at some moment overpowered by the presenceof some other emotion to which his character isalso potentially liable, provided that other emotionbe only made intense enough. Fear is usually the mostavailable emotion for this result in this particular classof persons. It stands for conscience, and may here beclassed appropriately as a “higher affection.” If weare soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment tobe near at hand, how quickly do we put our moralhouse in order—we do not see how sin can evermoreexert temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fireChristianity well knew how to extract from fear itsfull equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, andits full conversion value.One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly257

The Varieties of Religious Experienceimportant in the composition of the energetic character,from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions.I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility,susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper;and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience,grimness, earnestness, severity of character.Earnestness means willingness to live with energy,though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain toother people or pain to one’s self—it makes little difference;for when the strenuous mood is on one, theaim is to break something, no matter whose or what.Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly asanger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destructionpure and simple is its essence. This is what makes itso invaluable an ally of every other passion. Thesweetest delights are trampled on with a ferociouspleasure the moment they offer themselves as checksto a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited.It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renouncelong-rooted privileges and possessions, tobreak with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joyin the astringency and desolation; and what is calledweakness of character seems in most cases to consistin the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of whichone’s own inferior self and its pet softnesses must oftenbe the targets and the victims.[145][145] Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveledat as an extraordinary instance of superior intelligencewith inferior character. He writes (Journal,Paris, 1895, p. 56), “I am tossed and draggedabout by my miserable weakness. Never was anythingso ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage,now solitude; now Germany, now France hesitationupon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am unableto give up anything.” He can’t “get mad” at anyof his alternatives; and the career of a man beset bysuch an all-round amiability is hopeless.So far I have spoken of temporary alterations producedby shifting excitements in the same person.But the relatively fixed differences of character of258

different persons are explained in a precisely similarway. In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion,whole ranges of inhibition habitually vanish,which in other men remain effective, and other sortsof inhibition take their place. When a person has aninborn genius for certain emotions, his life differsstrangely from that of ordinary people, for none oftheir usual deterrents check him. Your mere aspirantto a type of character, on the contrary, only shows,when your natural lover, fighter, or reformer, withwhom the passion is a gift of nature, comes along, thehopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive action.He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; thegenius with the inborn passion seems not to feel themat all; he is free of all that inner friction and nervouswaste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth, a JohnBrown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstaclesomnipotent over those around them are as if nonexistent.Should the rest of us so disregard them,there might be many such heroes, for many have thewish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequateWilliam James259degree of inhibition-quenching fury is lacking.[146][146] The great thing which the higher excitabilitiesgive is courage; and the addition or subtraction of acertain amount of this quality makes a different man,a different life. Various excitements let the courageloose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example willdo it; love will do it, wrath will do it. In some people itis natively so high that the mere touch of danger doesit, though danger is for most men the great inhibitorof action. “Love of adventure” becomes in such personsa ruling passion. “I believe,” says GeneralSkobeleff, “that my bravery is simply the passion andat the same time the contempt of danger. The risk oflife fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewerthere are to share it, the more I like it. The participationof my body in the event is required to furnishme an adequate excitement. Everything intellectualappears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man toman, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myselfheadforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me.I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after dangeras one runs after women; I wish it never to stop.Were it always the same, it would always bring me anew pleasure.

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceWhen I throw myself into an adventure in which I whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tamehope to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty;I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to action, sinks away at once. Our conventional-persons and dull moods are sovereign impedimentsto delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes ity,[147] our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demandsfor precedent and permission, for guaranteeme; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with animpetus that my will would in vain try to resist. and surety, our small suspicions, timidities, despairs,(Juliette Adam: Le General Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue,1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to have been a like bubbles in the sun—where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, brokencruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if onemay judge by his “Memorie,” lived in an unflagging “Wo sind die Sorge nun und Nothemotion of similar danger-seeking excitement. Die mich noch gestern wollt’ erschlaffen?Ich scham’ mich dess’ im Morgenroth.”The difference between willing and merely wishing,between having ideals that are creative and ideals The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly underthat are but pinings and regrets, thus depends solely that their very contact is unfelt. Set free of them, weeither on the amount of steam-pressure chronically float and soar and sing. This auroral openness anddriving the character in the ideal direction, or on theamount of ideal excitement transiently acquired. [147] See the case on p. 69, above, where the writerGiven a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity,magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm vine as consisting “merely in the temporary oblit-describes his experiences of communion with the Di-of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That eration of the conventionalities which usually covermy life.”260

William Jamesuplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright andcaroling quality, which is nowhere more marked thanwhere the controlling emotion is religious. “The truemonk,” writes an Italian mystic, “takes nothing withhim but his lyre.”We may now turn from these psychological generalitiesto those fruits of the religious state which formthe special subject of our present lecture. The manwho lives in his religious centre of personal energy,and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs fromhis previous carnal self in perfectly definite ways.The new ardor which burns in his breast consumesin its glow the lower “noes” which formerly beset him,and keeps him immune against infection from theentire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimitiesonce impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalitiesand mean incentives once tyrannical hold nosway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardnessin his heart has broken down. The rest of us can,I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feelingin those temporary “melting moods” into which eitherthe trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novelsometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it isthen as if our tears broke through an inveterate innerdam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies andmoral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washedand soft of heart and open to every nobler leading.With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns,but not so with saintly persons. Many saints,even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, havepossessed what the church traditionally reveres as aspecial grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these personsthe melting mood seems to have held almostuninterrupted control. And as it is with tears andmelting moods, so it is with other exalted affections.Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis;but in either case it may have “come to stay.”At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanenceto be true of the general paramountcy of thehigher insight, even though in the ebbs of emotionalexcitement meaner motives might temporarily prevailand backsliding might occur. But that lower temp-261

tations may remain completely annulled, apart fromtransient emotion and as if by alteration of the man’shabitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidencein certain cases. Before embarking on the generalnatural history of the regenerate character, letme convince you of this curious fact by one or twoexamples. The most numerous are those of reformeddrunkards. You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley inthe last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water StreetMission abounds in similar instances.[148] You alsoremember the graduate of Oxford, converted at threein the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-fieldthe next day, but after that permanently cured of hisappetite. “From that hour drink has had no terrors forme: I never touch it, never want it. The same thingoccurred with my pipe… . the desire for it went at onceand has never returned. So with every known sin, thedeliverance in each case being permanent and complete.I have had no temptations since conversion.”[148] Above, p. 200. “The only radical remedy I knowfor dipsomania is religiomania,” is a saying I haveheard quoted from some medical man.The Varieties of Religious Experience262Here is an analogous case from Starbuck’s manuscriptcollection:—“I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where therewas a Holiness meeting, … and I began saying, ‘Lord,Lord, I must have this blessing.’ Then what was tome an audible voice said: ‘Are you willing to give upeverything to the Lord?’ and question after questionkept coming up, to all of which I said: ‘Yes, Lord; yes,Lord!’ until this came: ‘Why do you not accept it now?’and I said: ‘I do, Lord.’—I felt no particular joy, onlya trust. Just then the meeting closed, and, as I wentout on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a finecigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and Itook a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, allmy appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked alongthe street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquorcame out, I found that all my taste and longing forthat accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! … [But]for ten or eleven long years [after that] I was in thewilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite forliquor never came back.”

The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a mancured of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Mr.Spears the colonel said, “I was effectually cured of allinclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted tothat I thought nothing but shooting me through thehead could have cured me of it; and all desire andinclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I hadbeen a sucking child; nor did the temptation returnto this day.” Mr. Webster’s words on the same subjectare these: “One thing I have heard the colonelfrequently say, that he was much addicted to impuritybefore his acquaintance with religion; but that,so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt thepower of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfullythat his sanctification in this respect seemedmore remarkable than in any other.”[149]Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensitiesreminds us so strongly of what has been observedas the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is[149] Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner,London Religious Tract Society, pp. 23-32.William James263difficult not to believe that subliminal influences playthe decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart,just as they do in hypnotism.[150] Suggestive thera-[150] Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck’sbook, in which a “sensory automatism” brought aboutquickly what prayers and resolves had been unableto effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:—“When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking,but the desire was on me, and had me in its power. Icried and prayed and promised God to quit, but couldnot. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fiftythree,as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voicecame to me. I did not hear it with my ears, but moreas a dream or sort of double think. It said, ‘Louisa,lay down smoking.’ At once I replied. ‘Will you takethe desire away?’ But it only kept saying: ‘Louisa, laydown smoking.’ Then I got up, laid my pipe on themantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had anydesire to. The desire was gone as though I had neverknown it or touched tobacco. The sight of otherssmoking and the smell of smoke never gave me theleast wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion,p. 142.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepeutics abound in records of cure, after a few sittings,of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, leftto ordinary moral and physical influences, hadstruggled in vain. Both drunkenness and sexual vicehave been cured in this way, action through the subliminalseeming thus in many individuals to have theprerogative of inducing relatively stable change. Ifthe grace of God miraculously operates, it probablyoperates through the subliminal door, then. But justhow anything operates in this region is still unexplained,and we shall do well now to say good-by tothe process of transformation altogether—leaving it,if you like, a good deal of a psychological or theologicalmystery—and to turn our attention to the fruitsof the religious condition, no matter in what way theymay have been produced.[151][151] Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destructionof old influences physiologically, as a cuttingoff of the connection between higher and lowercerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in whichthe association-centres connected with the spirituallife are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in theway correspondents describe their experiences… .For example: ‘Temptations from without still assailme, but there is nothing within to respond to them.’The ego [here] is wholly identified with the highercentres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness.Another of the respondents says: ‘Since then, althoughSatan tempts me, there is as it were a wall ofbrass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’”—Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sortmust occur in the cerebral organ. But on the side accessibleto introspection, their causal condition is nothingbut the degree of spiritual excitement, getting atlast so high and strong as to be sovereign, and it mustbe frankly confessed that we do not know just why orhow such sovereignty comes about in one person andnot in another. We can only give our imagination a certaindelusive help by mechanical analogies.If we should conceive, for example, that the humanmind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium,264

William Jamesmight be like a many-sided solid with different surfaceson which it could lie flat, we might liken mentalrevolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position inwhich it lies on surface A, for instance, it will lingerfor a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever ceaseto urge it, it will tumble back or “relapse” under thecontinued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate farenough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surfaceA altogether, the body will fall over, on surfaceB, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls ofgravity towards A have vanished, and may now bedisregarded. The polyhedron has become immuneagainst farther attraction from their direction.In this figure of speech the lever may correspondto the emotional influences making for a new life, andthe initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacksand inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence failsto reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it producesare unstable, and the man relapses into hisoriginal attitude. But when a certain intensity is attainedby the new emotion, a critical point is passed,and there then ensues an irreversible revolution,equivalent to the production of a new nature.The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion ina character is Saintliness.[152] The saintly characteris the character for which spiritual emotions are thehabitual centre of the personal energy; and there is acertain composite photograph of universal saintliness,the same in all religions, of which the features caneasily be traced.[153][152] I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of “sanctimoniousness”which sometimes clings to it, becauseno other word suggests as well the exact combinationof affections which the text goes on to describe.[153] “It will be found,” says Dr. W. R. Inge (in hislectures on Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p.326), “that men of preeminent saintliness agree veryclosely in what they tell us. They tell us that theyhave arrived at an unshakable conviction, not basedon inference but on immediate experience, that Godis a spirit with whom the human spirit can hold inter-265

The Varieties of Religious Experiencecourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine ofgoodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see hisfootprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presencewithin them as the very life of their life, so thatin proportion as they come to themselves they cometo him. They tell us what separates us from him andfrom happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms;and secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that theseare the ways of darkness and death, which hide fromus the face of God; while the path of the just is like ashining light, which shineth more and more unto theperfect day.”They are these:—1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of thisworld’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, notmerely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existenceof an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness thispower is always personified as God; but abstractmoral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner versionsof holiness or right may also be felt as the truelords and enlargers of our life, in ways which I describedin the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.[154][154] The “enthusiasm of humanity” may lead to alife which coalesces in many respects with that ofChristian saintliness. Take the following rules proposedto members of the Union pour l’Action morale,in the Bulletin de l’Union, April 1-15, 1894. See, also,Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892.“We would make known in our own persons the usefulnessof rule, of discipline, of resignation and renunciation;we would teach the necessary perpetuity ofsuffering, and explain the creative part which it plays.We would wage war upon false optimism; on the basehope of happiness coming to us ready made; on thenotion of a salvation by knowledge alone, or by materialcivilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization,precarious external arrangement ill-fitted toreplace the intimate union and consent of souls. Wewould wage war also on bad morals, whether in pub-266

William Jameslic or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, andover-refinement, on all that tends to increase thepainful, immoral, and anti-social multiplications of ourwants; on all that excites envy and dislike in the soulof the common people, and confirms the notion thatthe chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We wouldpreach by our example the respect of superiors andequals, the respect of all men; affectionate simplicityin our relations with inferiors and insignificant persons;indulgence where our own claims only are concerned,but firmness in our demands where they relateto duties towards others or towards the public.“For the common people are what we help them tobecome; their vices are our vices, gazed upon, envied,and imitated; and if they come back with all theirweight upon us, it is but just.2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal powerwith our own life, and a willing self-surrender to itscontrol.3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlinesof the confining selfhood melt down.4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards lovingand harmonious affections, towards “yes, yes,” andaway from “no,” where the claims of the non-ego areconcerned. These fundamental inner conditions havecharacteristic practical consequences, as follows:—a. Asceticism.—The self-surrender may become sopassionate as to turn into self-immolation. It may thenso over-rule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh thatthe saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism,measuring and expressing as they do thedegree of his loyalty to the higher power.b. Strength of Soul.—The sense of enlargement of lifemay be so uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions,commonly omnipotent, become too insignificantfor notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude267

The Varieties of Religious Experienceopen out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimitytakes their place. Come heaven, come hell, itmakes no difference now!“We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity,all ambition to appear important. We pledge ourselvesto abstain from falsehood, in all its degrees. We promisenot to create or encourage illusions as to what ispossible, by what we say or write. We promise to oneanother active sincerity, which strives to see truthclearly, and which never fears to declare what it sees.“We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal wavesof fashion, to the ‘booms’ and panics of the publicmind, to all the forms of weakness and of fear.“We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of seriousthings we will speak seriously and unsmilingly, withoutbanter and without the appearance of banter;—and even so of all things, for there are serious ways ofbeing light of heart.“We will put ourselves forward always for what weare, simply and without false humility, as well as withoutpedantry, affectation, or pride.”c. Purity.—The shifting of the emotional centre bringswith it, first, increase of purity. The sensitiveness tospiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing ofexistence from brutal and sensual elements becomesimperative. Occasions of contact with such elementsare avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritualconsistency and keep unspotted from the world. Insome temperaments this need of purity of spirit takesan ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh aretreated with relentless severity.d. Charity.—The shifting of the emotional centre brings,secondly, increase of charity, tenderness for fellowcreatures.The ordinary motives to antipathy, whichusually set such close bounds to tenderness amonghuman beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies,and treats loathsome beggars as his brothers.I now have to give some concrete illustrations ofthese fruits of the spiritual tree. The only difficulty isto choose, for they are so abundant.268

[155] Above, pp. 243 ff.William James269Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendlypower seems to be the fundamental feature in thespiritual life, I will begin with that.In our narratives of conversion we saw how theworld might look shining and transfigured to the convert,[155]and, apart from anything acutely religious,we all have moments when the universal life seemsto wrap us round with friendliness. In youth andhealth, in summer, in the woods or on the mountains,there come days when the weather seems all whisperingwith peace, hours when the goodness andbeauty of existence enfold us like a dry warm climate,or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtlyringing with the world’s security. Thoreau writes:—“Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, foran hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood ofman was not essential to a serene and healthy life. Tobe alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midstof a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I wassuddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent societyin Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, andin every sight and sound around my house, an infiniteand unaccountable friendliness all at once, likean atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fanciedadvantages of human neighborhood insignificant, andI have never thought of them since. Every little pineneedleexpanded and swelled with sympathy and befriendedme. I was so distinctly made aware of thepresence of something kindred to me, that I thoughtno place could ever be strange to me again.”[156]In the Christian consciousness this sense of the envelopingfriendliness becomes most personal and definite.“The compensation,” writes a German author,—”for the loss of that sense of personal independencewhich man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearanceof all fear from one’s life, the quite indescribableand inexplicable feeling of an inner security, whichone can only experience, but which, once it has beenexperienced, one can never forget.”[157][156] H. Thoreau: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206,abridged.[157] C. H. Hilty: Gluck, vol. i. p. 85.

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceI find an excellent description of this state of mind ger and catastrophe. Quite as sensitive to pain as thein a sermon by Mr. Voysey:—most highly strung organism, I yet feel that the worst“It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of it altogether,by the thought that God is our loving andthat this sense of God’s unfailing presence with themin their going out and in their coming in, and by night sleepless keeper, and that nothing can hurt us withouthis will.”[158]and day, is a source of absolute repose and confidentcalmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall More excited expressions of this condition are abundantin religious literature. I could easily weary youthem. That nearness of God is a constant securityagainst terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at with their monotony. Here is an account from Mrs.all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves Jonathan Edwards:—protected by a love which is denied to others, but that “Last night,” Mrs. Edwards writes, “was the sweetestnight I ever had in my life. I never before, for sothey are in a state of mind equally ready to be safe orto meet with injury. If injury befall them, they will be long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light andcontent to bear it because the Lord is their keeper, rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul, but withoutand nothing can befall them without his will. If it be the least agitation of body during the whole time. Parthis will, then injury is for them a blessing and no calamityat all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man times between sleeping and waking. But all night Iof the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and some-protected and shielded from harm. And I for one— continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of theby no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved manamabsolutely satisfied with this arrangement, andheavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent love, of hisdo not wish for any other kind of immunity from dan-[158] The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892,p. 258.270

William Jamesnearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an est while I was asleep.[159] As I awoke early the nextinexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely donein him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divinelove come down from the heart of Christ in cerning me were nothing, and that I had no more towith myself. I felt that the opinions of the world con-heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a do with any outward interest of my own than withstream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time my that of a person whom I never saw. The glory of Godheart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that[159] Compare Madame Guyon: “It was my practicethere seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowingto arise at midnight for purposes of devotion… . Itof heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float orseemed to me that God came at the precise time andswim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the moteswoke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him.swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams ofWhen I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he didhis light which come in at the window. I think thatnot awake me, but at such times I felt, even in mywhat I felt each minute was worth more than all thesleep, a singular possession of God. He loved me sooutward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a timein my whole life put together. It was pleasure, withoutthe least sting, or any interruption. It was a sweetence.My sleep is sometimes broken—a sort of halfwhen I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presness,which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all sleep; but my soul seems to be awake enough to knowthat my feeble frame could sustain. There was but God, when it is hardly capable of knowing anythinglittle difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but else.” T. C. Upham: The Life and Religious Experiencesof Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York,if there was any difference, the sweetness was great-1877, vol. i. p. 260.271

The Varieties of Religious Experienceseemed to swallow up every wish and desire of myheart… . After retiring to rest and sleeping a littlewhile, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God’s mercyto me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness todie; and after that, in making me willing to live, that Imight do and suffer whatever he called me to here. Ialso thought how God had graciously given me anentire resignation to his will, with respect to the kindand manner of death that I should die; having beenmade willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and ifit were God’s will, to die in darkness. But now it occurredto me, I used to think of living no longer thanto the ordinary age of man. Upon this I was led to askmyself, whether I was not willing to be kept out ofheaven even longer; and my whole heart seemedimmediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and athousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God,the torment of my body being so great, awful, andoverwhelming that none could bear to live in the countrywhere the spectacle was seen, and the torment ofmy mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to methat I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrityof soul in consenting that it should be so, if it weremost for the glory of God, so that there was no hesitation,doubt, or darkness in my mind. The glory ofGod seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, andevery conceivable suffering, and everything that wasterrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothingbefore it. This resignation continued in its clearnessand brightness the rest of the night, and all the nextday, and the night following, and on Monday in theforenoon, without interruption or abatement.”[160]The annals of Catholic saintship abound in recordsas ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. “Often the assaultsof the divine love,” it is said of the SisterSeraphique de la Martiniere, “reduced her almost tothe point of death. She used tenderly to complain ofthis to God. ‘I cannot support it,’ she used to say.‘Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire[160] I have considerably abridged the words of theoriginal, which is given in Edwards’s Narrative of theRevival in New England.272

William Jamesunder the violence of your love.’”[161]Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Lovewhich are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have alwaysbeen reckoned essential theological virtues, howeverlimited may have been the kinds of service which theparticular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would followlogically from the assurance of God’s friendly presence,the notion of our brotherhood as men being animmediate inference from that of God’s fatherhood ofus all. When Christ utters the precepts: “Love yourenemies, bless them that curse you, do good to themthat hate you, and pray for them which despitefullyuse you, and persecute you,” he gives for a reason:“That ye may be the children of your Father which isin heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil andon the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on theunjust.” One might therefore be tempted to explainboth the humility as to one’s self and the charity towardsothers which characterize spiritual excitement,[161] Bougaud: Hist. de la Bienheureuse MargueriteMarie, 1894, p. 125.as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief.But these affections are certainly not mere derivativesof theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, andin Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonizewith paternal theism beautifully; but they harmonizewith all reflection whatever upon the dependenceof mankind on general causes; and we must, Ithink, consider them not subordinate but coordinateparts of that great complex excitement in the study ofwhich we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm,ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are allunifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit ofthe selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness torule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrallyas a characteristic affection to which our natureis liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, asea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain itsparts by deriving them too cleverly from one another.Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychiccomplex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence.Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all ex-273

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so longas they endure.We find this the case even when they are pathologicalin origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesseet la Joie,[162] M. Georges Dumas compares togetherthe melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity,and shows that, while selfishness characterizesthe one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses.No human being so stingy and useless as wasMarie in her melancholy period! But the moment thehappy period begins, “sympathy and kindness becomeher characteristic sentiments. She displays auniversal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act… .She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients,interested in getting them out, desirous to procurewool to knit socks for some of them. Never since shehas been under my observation have I heard her inher joyous period utter any but charitable opinions.”[163]And later, Dr. Dumas says of all such joyousconditions that “unselfish sentiments and tenderemotions are the only affective states to be found inthem. The subject’s mind is closed against envy, hatred,and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed intobenevolence, indulgence, and mercy.”[164]There is thus an organic affinity between joyousnessand tenderness, and their companionship in thesaintly life need in no way occasion surprise. Alongwith the happiness, this increase of tenderness is oftennoted in narratives of conversion. “I began to workfor others”;—”I had more tender feeling for my familyand friends”;—”I spoke at once to a person withwhom I had been angry”;—”I felt for every one, andloved my friends better”;—”I felt every one to be myfriend”;—these are so many expressions from therecords collected by Professor Starbuck.[165]“When,” says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrativefrom which I made quotation a moment ago, “Iarose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to[162] Paris, 1900.[163] Page 130.274[164] Page 167.[165] Op. cit., p. 127.

William Jamesall mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness,far beyond all that I had ever felt before. Thepower of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought,if I were surrounded by enemies, who were ventingtheir malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me,it would still be impossible that I should cherish anyfeelings towards them but those of love, and pity, andardent desires for their happiness. I never before feltso far from a disposition to judge and censure others,as I did that morning. I realized also, in an unusualand very lively manner, how great a part of Christianitylies in the performance of our social and relativeduties to one another. The same joyful sense continuedthroughout the day—a sweet love to God andall mankind.”Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it mayefface all usual human barriers.[166][166] The barrier between men and animals also. Weread of Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot andmystic, that “one day one of his friends met him inthe rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping uponhim and covering him horribly with mud. On beingasked why he permitted the animal thus to dirty hisclothes, Towianski replied: ‘This dog, whom I am nowmeeting for the first time, has shown a great fellowfeelingfor me, and a great joy in my recognition andacceptance of his greetings. Were I to drive him off, Ishould wound his feelings and do him a moral injury.It would be an offense not only to him, but to all thespirits of the other world who are on the same levelwith him. The damage which he does to my coat is asnothing in comparison with the wrong which I shouldinflict upon him, in case I were to remain indifferentto the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,’ headded, ‘both to lighten the condition of animals, wheneverwe can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselvesthat union of the world of all spirits, which thesacrifice of Christ has made possible.’” AndreTowianski, Traduction de l’Italien, Turin, 1897 (privatelyprinted). I owe my knowledge of this book andof Towianski to my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski,author of “Plato’s Logic.”275

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceHere, for instance, is an example of Christian nonresistancefrom Richard Weaver’s autobiography.Weaver was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist inhis younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist.Fighting, after drinking, seems to have beenthe sin to which he originally felt his flesh most perverselyinclined. After his first conversion he had abacksliding, which consisted in pounding a man whohad insulted a girl. Feeling that, having once fallen,he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of anotherman who had lately challenged him to fight andtaunted him with cowardice for refusing as a Christianman;—I mention these incidents to show howgenuine a change of heart is implied in the later conductwhich he describes as follows:—“I went down the drift and found the boy cryingbecause a fellow-workman was trying to take thewagon from him by force. I said to him:—“‘Tom, you mustn’t take that wagon.’“He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. Itold him that God did not tell me to let him rob me.He cursed again, and said he would push the wagonover me.“‘Well,’ I said, ‘let us see whether the devil and theeare stronger than the Lord and me.’“And the Lord and I proving stronger than the deviland he, he had to get out of the way, or the wagonwould have gone over him.So I gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:—“‘I’ve a good mind to smack thee on the face.’“‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that will do thee any good, thoucanst do it.’ So he struck me on the face.“I turned the other cheek to him, and said, ‘Strikeagain.’“He struck again and again, till he had struck mefive times. I turned my cheek for the sixth stroke;but he turned away cursing.I shouted after him: ‘The Lord forgive thee, for Ido, and the Lord save thee.’“This was on a Saturday; and when I went home fromthe coal-pit my wife saw my face was swollen, and276

William Jamesasked what was the matter with it. I said: ‘I’ve been “Love your enemies!” Mark you, not simply thosefighting, and I’ve given a man a good thrashing.’ who happen not to be your friends, but your enemies,“She burst out weeping, and said, ‘O Richard, whatyour positive and active enemies. Either this is a meremade you fight?’ Then I told her all about it; and sheOriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance,thanked the Lord I had not struck back.meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate“But the Lord had struck, and his blows have moreour animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outsideof certain cases of intimate individual relation, iteffect than man’s. Monday came. The devil began totempt me, saying: ‘The other men will laugh at theefor allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.’ seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one askI cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan;’—and went on the question: Can there in general be a level of emotionso unifying, so obliterative of differences betweenmy way to the coal-pit.“Tom was the first man I saw. I said ‘Good-morning,’but got no reply.irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friend-man and man, that even enmity may come to be an“He went down first. When I got down, I was surprisedto see him sitting on the wagon-road waitinglier interests aroused? If positive well-wishing couldattain so supreme a degree of excitement, those whofor me. When I came to him he burst into tears andwere swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings.Their life would be morally discrete from thesaid: ‘Richard, will you forgive me for striking you?’“‘I have forgiven thee,’ said I; ‘ask God to forgivethee. The Lord bless thee.’ I gave him my hand, and life of other men, and there is no saying, in the absenceof positive experience of an authentic kind—we went each to his work.”[167][167] J. Patterson’s Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66- for there are few active examples in our scriptures,68, abridged.277

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand the Buddhistic examples are legendary,[168]— not only by the showing of love to enemies, but bywhat the effects might be: they might conceivably the showing of it to any one who is personally loathsome.In the annals of saintliness we find a curioustransform the world.Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticismplays its part; and along with charity pure andyour enemies” is not self-contradictory. It is merelythe extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim distinctionand to grovel on the common level beforewhich, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors,we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed,it would involve such a breach with our in-Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged theirGod. Certainly all three principles were at work whenstinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the garments with those of filthy beggars. All three arepresent world’s arrangements, that a critical point at work when religious persons consecrate their liveswould practically be passed, and we should be born to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasantinto another kingdom of being. Religious emotion diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to whichmakes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart fromwithin our reach.the fact that church traditions set that way. But inThe inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excessesof devotion recorded which are only explicable[168] As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a by the frenzy of self-immolation simultaneouslyhare, jumps into the fire to cook himself for a meal aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaretfor a beggar—having previously shaken himself three Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St. John of God, andtimes, so that none of the insects in his fur should others are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcersperish with him.278

William Jamesof their patients with their respective tongues; andthe lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary andMadame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling inhospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and whichmakes us admire and shudder at the same time.So much for the human love aroused by the faithstate.Let me next speak of the Equanimity, Resignation,Fortitude, and Patience which it brings.“A paradise of inward tranquillity” seems to befaith’s usual result; and it is easy, even without beingreligious one’s self, to understand this. A momentback, in treating of the sense of God’s presence, Ispoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which onemay then have. And, indeed, how can it possibly failto steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appeasethe fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matterwhat one’s difficulties for the moment may appear tobe, one’s life as a whole is in the keeping of a powerwhom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religiousmen the abandonment of self to this power is passionate.Whoever not only says, but feels, “God’s willbe done,” is mailed against every weakness; and thewhole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, andreligious reformers is there to prove the tranquilmindedness,under naturally agitating or distressingcircumstances, which self-surrender brings.The temper of the tranquil-mindedness differs, ofcourse, according as the person is of a constitutionallysombre or of a constitutionally cheerful cast ofmind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignationand submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent.As an example of the former temper, I quote part ofa letter from Professor Lagneau, a venerated teacherof philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, atParis:—“My life, for the success of which you send goodwishes, will be what it is able to be. I ask nothing fromit, I expect nothing from it. For long years now I exist,think, and act, and am worth what I am worth,only through the despair which is my sole strengthand my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, evenin these last trials to which I am coming, the courage279

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto do without the desire of deliverance. I ask nothingmore from the Source whence all strength cometh,and if that is granted, your wishes will have been accomplished.”[169]There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this,but the power of such a tone as a protection againstoutward shocks is manifest. Pascal is another Frenchmanof pessimistic natural temperament. He expressesstill more amply the temper of self-surrenderingsubmissiveness:—“Deliver me, Lord,” he writes in his prayers, “fromthe sadness at my proper suffering which self-lovemight give, but put into me a sadness like your own.Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make theman occasion for my conversion and salvation. I askyou neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor fordeath; but that you may dispose of my health andmy sickness, my life and my death, for your glory,for my salvation, and for the use of the Church and of[169] Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale, September,1894.your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one.You alone know what is expedient for me; you arethe sovereign master; do with me according to yourwill. Give to me, or take away from me, only conformmy will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it isgood to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart fromthat, I know not what is good or bad in anything. Iknow not which is most profitable to me, health orsickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in theworld. That discernment is beyond the power of menor angels, and is hidden among the secrets of yourProvidence, which I adore, but do not seek tofathom.”[170]When we reach more optimistic temperaments, theresignation grows less passive. Examples are sownso broadcast throughout history that I might well passon without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first thatoccurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creaturephysically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She[170] B. Pascal: Prieres pour les Maladies, Sectionsxiii., xiv., abridged.280

went through many perils with admirable serenity ofsoul. After being sent to prison for heresy—“Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly atthe hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescenceand resignation that it failed to draw any tearsfrom me… . There appeared to be in me then, as I findit to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regardsmyself, that any of my own interests gave me littlepain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myselfonly the very thing which God does.” In anotherplace she writes: “We all of us came near perishing in ariver which we found it necessary to pass. The carriagesank in the quicksand. Others who were with usthrew themselves out in excessive fright. But I foundmy thoughts so much taken up with God that I had nodistinct sense of danger. It is true that the thought ofbeing drowned passed across my mind, but it cost noother sensation or reflection in me than this—that Ifelt quite contented and willing it were so, if it weremy heavenly Father’s choice.” Sailing from Nice toGenoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea.William James“As the irritated waves dashed round us,” shewrites, “I could not help experiencing a certain degreeof satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself withthinking that those mutinous billows, under the commandof Him who does all things rightly, might probablyfurnish me with a watery grave. Perhaps I carriedthe point too far, in the pleasure which I took inthus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swellingwaters. Those who were with me took notice ofmy intrepidity.”[171]The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasmproduces may be even more buoyant still. I takean example from that charming recent autobiography,“With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen. A coupleof days after he went through the conversion on shipboardof which he there gives an account—“It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we werecarrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad[171] From Thomas C. Upham’s Life and ReligiousOpinions and Experiences of Madame de la MotheGuyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413, abridged.281

The Varieties of Religious Experienceweather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the ferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV:—flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. “They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes,I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave “and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willowway with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long.I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’ which Iseething tumult of shining foam under the ship’s bows, did. He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you mustsuspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation take it off.’ They had so little patience that they tookin my certainty of eternal life. Although death was dividedfrom me by a hair’s breadth, and I was acutely They brought a cord with which they tied me to ait off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up.conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight withsuppose I could have hung there no longer than five all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt you?’seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaimingas they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.’But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnasticeffort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail It was the Roulette woman who held this language.I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my But at this moment I received the greatest consolationthat I can ever receive in my life, since I had thevoice praises to God that went pealing out over thedark waste of waters.”[172]honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and inThe annals of martyrdom are of course the signal addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations.Why can I not write down the inconceiv-field of triumph for religious imperturbability. Let mecite as an example the statement of a humble sufableinfluences, consolations, and peace which I feltinteriorly? To understand them one must have[172] Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 230.282

[173] Claparede et Goty: Deux Heroines de la Foi,Paris, 1880, p. 112.William James283passed by the same trial; they were so great that Iwas ravished, for there where afflictions abound graceis given superabundantly. In vain the women cried,‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them,for she neither speaks nor cries.’ And how should Ihave cried, since I was swooning with happinesswithin?”[173]The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility,and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, isthe most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium,those changes of the personal centre of energy,which I have analyzed so often; and the chiefwonder of it is that it so often comes about, not bydoing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burdendown. This abandonment of self-responsibilityseems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious,as distinguished from moral practice. It antedatestheologies and is independent of philosophies.Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurologicalhygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianitydoes, and it is capable of entering into closest marriagewith every speculative creed.[174] Christianswho have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,”and are never anxious about the future, norworry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharineof Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance of things,only as they were presented to her in succession,moment by moment.” To her holy soul, “the divinemoment was the present moment, … and when thepresent moment was estimated in itself and in its relations,and when the duty that was involved in it wasaccomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if ithad never been, and to give way to the facts and dutiesof the moment which came after.”[175] Hindu-[174] Compare these three different statements ofit: A. P. Call: As a Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H.W. Dresser: Living by the Spirit, New York and London,1900; H. W. Smith: The Christian’s Secret of aHappy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository,and now in thousands of hands.[175] T. C. Upham: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,3d ed., New York, 1864, pp. 158, 172-74.

The Varieties of Religious Experienceism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasisupon this concentration of the consciousness uponthe moment at hand.The next religious symptom which I will note is whathave called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomesexceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord,and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. Allthe mind’s objects and occupations must be orderedwith reference to the special spiritual excitementwhich is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritualtaints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant.Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilitiesthere is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloveddeity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimesthe spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity isachieved at a stroke —we have seen examples. Usuallyit is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray’s accountof his abandonment of tobacco is a good example ofthe latter form of achievement.“I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and Iused to love my tobacco as much as I loved my meat,and I would rather go down into the mine withoutmy dinner than without my pipe. In the days of old,the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, theprophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son.I had not only the feeling part of religion, but I couldhear the small, still voice within speaking to me. WhenI took the pipe to smoke, it would be applied within,‘It is an idol, a lust; worship the Lord with clean lips.’So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The Lord also senta woman to convince me. I was one day in a house,and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and MaryHawke—for that was the woman’s name—said, ‘Doyou not feel it is wrong to smoke?’ I said that I feltsomething inside telling me that it was an idol, a lust,and she said that was the Lord. Then I said, ‘Now, Imust give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside,and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, loveit as I may.’ There and then I took the tobacco out ofmy pocket, and threw it into the fire, and put the pipeunder my foot, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ And Ihave not smoked since. I found it hard to break off284

William Jamesold habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and hegave me strength, for he has said, ‘Call upon me inthe day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.’ The dayafter I gave up smoking I had the toothache so badthat I did not know what to do. I thought this wasowing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would neversmoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burdenis light,’ and when I said that, all the pain left me.Sometimes the thought of the pipe would come backto me very strong; but the Lord strengthened meagainst the habit, and, bless his name, I have notsmoked since.”Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given upsmoking, he thought that he would chew a little, buthe conquered this dirty habit, too. “On one occasion,”Bray said, “when at a prayer-meeting at Hicks Mill, Iheard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me with cleanlips.’ So, when we got up from our knees, I took thequid out of my mouth and ‘whipped ‘en’ [threw it]under the form.But, when we got on our knees again, I put anotherquid into my mouth. Then the Lord said tome again, ‘Worship me with clean lips.’ So I took thequid out of my mouth, and whipped ‘en under theform again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From thattime I gave up chewing as well as smoking, and havebeen a free man.”The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracityand purity of life may take are often pathetic enough.The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles towage against the worldliness and insincerity of theecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battlethat cost them most wounds was probably that whichthey fought in defense of their own right to social veracityand sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, innot doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It waslaid on George Fox that these conventional customswere a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followersthereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice totruth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professedmight be more in accord.285

The Varieties of Religious Experience“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Foxin his Journal, “he forbade me to put off my hat toany, high or low: and I was required to ‘thee’ and‘thou’ all men and women, without any respect to richor poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down,I was not to bid people Good-morning or Goodevening,neither might I bow or scrape with my legto any one. This made the sects and professions rage.Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors,and people of all sorts: and especially inpriests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a singleperson was according to their accidence and grammarrules, and according to the Bible, yet they couldnot bear to hear it: and because I could not put offmy hat to them, it set them all into a rage… . Oh! thescorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows,punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwentfor not putting off our hats to men! Somehad their hats violently plucked off and thrown away,so that they quite lost them. The bad language andevil usage we received on this account is hard to beexpressed, besides the danger we were sometimesin of losing our lives for this matter, and that by thegreat professors of Christianity, who thereby discoveredthey were not true believers. And though it wasbut a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderfulconfusion it brought among all professors and priests:but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanityof that custom of putting off hats to men, and feltthe weight of Truth’s testimony against it.”In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an earlyQuaker, who at one time was secretary to JohnMilton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid accountof the trials he underwent both at home andabroad, in following Fox’s canons of sincerity. Theanecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood setsdown his manner of feeling about these things in ashorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristicutterance of spiritual sensibility:—“By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw thatthough I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness,debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the286

William Jamesworld to put away, because I had, through the greatgoodness of God and a civil education, been preservedout of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evilsto put away and to cease from; some of which werenot by the world, which lies in wickedness (I John v.19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ weremade manifest to me to be evils, and as such condemnedin me.“As particularly those fruits and effects of pride thatdiscover themselves in the vanity and superfluity ofapparel; which I took too much delight in. This evil ofmy doings I was required to put away and cease from;and judgment lay upon me till I did so.“I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmingsof lace, ribbons, and useless buttons, which hadno real service, but were set on only for that which wasby mistake called ornament; and I ceased to wear rings.“Again, the giving of flattering titles to men betweenwhom and me there was not any relation to whichsuch titles could be pretended to belong. This was anevil I had been much addicted to, and was accounteda ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I requiredto put away and cease from. So that thenceforwardI durst not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam(or My Dame); or say Your Servant to any one towhom I did not stand in the real relation of a servant,which I had never done to any.“Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the headand bowing the knee or body in salutation, was a practiceI had been much in the use of; and this, being oneof the vain customs of the world, introduced by thespirit of the world, instead of the true honor whichthis is a false representation of, and used in deceit asa token of respect by persons one to another, whobear no real respect one to another; and besides this,being a type and a proper emblem of that divine honorwhich all ought to pay to Almighty God, and which allof all sorts, who take upon them the Christian name,appear in when they offer their prayers to him, andtherefore should not be given to men;—I found thisto be one of those evils which I had been too longdoing; therefore I was now required to put it away287

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand cease from it.“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speakingin the plural number to a single person, you to one,instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and singlelanguage of truth, thou to one, and you to more thanone, which had always been used by God to men, andmen to God, as well as one to another, from the oldestrecord of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends,in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and workupon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that falseand senseless way of speaking you to one, which hassince corrupted the modern languages, and hathgreatly debased the spirits and depraved the mannersof men;—this evil custom I had been as forwardin as others, and this I was now called out of and requiredto cease from.“These and many more evil customs which hadsprung up in the night of darkness and general apostasyfrom the truth and true religion were now, bythe inshining of this pure ray of divine light in myconscience, gradually discovered to me to be what Iought to cease from, shun, and stand a witnessagainst.”[176]These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. Theslightest inconsistency between profession and deedjarred some of them to active protest. John Woolmanwrites in his diary:—“In these journeys I have been where much clothhath been dyed; and have at sundry times walked overground where much of their dyestuffs has drainedaway. This hath produced a longing in my mind thatpeople might come into cleanness of spirit, cleannessof person, and cleanness about their houses and garments.Dyes being invented partly to please the eye,and partly to hide dirt, I have felt in this weak state,when traveling in dirtiness, and affected with unwholesomescents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeingcloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.“Washing our garments to keep them sweet iscleanly, but it is the opposite to real cleanliness to[176] The History of Thomas Elwood, written by Himself,London, 1885, pp. 32-34.288

William Jameshide dirt in them. Through giving way to hiding dirtin our garments a spirit which would conceal thatwhich is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanlinessbecometh a holy people; but hiding that which isnot clean by coloring our garments seems contraryto the sweetness of sincerity. Through some sorts ofdyes cloth is rendered less useful. And if the value ofdyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damagedone to cloth, were all added together, and that costapplied to keeping all sweet and clean, how muchmore would real cleanliness prevail.“Thinking often on these things, the use of hats andgarments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, and wearingmore clothes in summer than are useful, grewmore uneasy to me; believing them to be customswhich have not their foundation in pure wisdom. Theapprehension of being singular from my belovedfriends was a strait upon me; and thus I continued inthe use of some things, contrary to my judgment,about nine months. Then I thought of getting a hatthe natural color of the fur, but the apprehension ofbeing looked upon as one affecting singularity feltuneasy to me. On this account I was under close exerciseof mind in the time of our general spring meetingin 1762, greatly desiring to be rightly directed;when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the Lord, Iwas made willing to submit to what I apprehendedwas required of me; and when I returned home, gota hat of the natural color of the fur.“In attending meetings, this singularity was a trialto me, and more especially at this time, as white hatswere used by some who were fond of following thechangeable modes of dress, and as some friends, whoknew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy ofme, I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise ofthe ministry. Some friends were apprehensive thatmy wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity:those who spoke with me in a friendly way, Igenerally informed in a few words, that I believedmy wearing it was not in my own will.”When the craving for moral consistency and purityis developed to this degree, the subject may well find289

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and canunify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawingfrom it. That law which impels the artist toachieve harmony in his composition by simply droppingout whatever jars, or suggests a discord, rulesalso in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, isthe one art in literature: “If I knew how to omit, Ishould ask no other knowledge.” And life, when fullof disorder and slackness and vague superfluity, canno more have what we call character than literaturecan have it under similar conditions. So monasteriesand communities of sympathetic devotees open theirdoors, and in their changeless order, characterizedby omissions quite as much as constituted of actions,the holy-minded person finds that inner smoothnessand cleanness which it is torture to him to feel violatedat every turn by the discordancy and brutalityof secular existence.That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to afantastic extreme must be admitted. In this it resemblesAsceticism, to which further symptom ofsaintliness we had better turn next. The adjective“ascetic” is applied to conduct originating on diversepsychological levels, which I might as well begin bydistinguishing from one another.1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organichardihood, disgusted with too much ease.2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel,chastity, and non-pampering of the body generally,may be fruits of the love of purity, shocked bywhatever savors of the sensual.3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they mayappeal to the subject in the light of sacrifices whichhe is happy in making to the Deity whom he acknowledges.4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may bedue to pessimistic feelings about the self, combinedwith theological beliefs concerning expiation. The290

William Jamesdevotee may feel that he is buying himself free, orescaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penancenow.5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may beentered on irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixedidea which comes as a challenge and must be workedoff, because only thus does the subject get his interiorconsciousness feeling right again.6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances beprompted by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility,in consequence of which normally pain-givingstimuli are actually felt as pleasures.I will try to give an instance under each of theseheads in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, forin cases pronounced enough to be immediately classedas ascetic, several of the assigned motives usuallywork together. Moreover, before citing any examplesat all, I must invite you to some general psychologicalconsiderations which apply to all of them alike.A strange moral transformation has within the pastcentury swept over our Western world. We no longerthink that we are called on to face physical pain withequanimity. It is not expected of a man that he shouldeither endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen tothe recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morallyas well as physically. The way in which our ancestorslooked upon pain as an eternal ingredient ofthe world’s order, and both caused and suffered it asa matter-of-course portion of their day’s work, fillsus with amazement. We wonder that any human beingscould have been so callous. The result of this historicalteration is that even in the Mother Churchherself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditionalprestige as a factor of merit, it has largelycome into desuetude, if not discredit. A believer whoflagellates or “macerates” himself today arouses morewonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writerswho admit that the times have changed in thisrespect do so resignedly; and even add that perhaps291

The Varieties of Religious Experienceit is as well not to waste feelings in regretting thematter, for to return to the heroic corporeal disciplineof ancient days might be an extravagance.Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive—and instinctive it appears to be in man; anydeliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful assuch and for their own sakes might well strike one aspurely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degreesit is natural and even usual to human nature to courtthe arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations ofthe tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface.When we drop abstractions and take what wecall our will in the act, we see that it is a very complexfunction. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions;it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflectivecriticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste ofitself behind, according to the manner of the performance.The result is that, quite apart from the immediatepleasure which any sensible experience maygive us, our own general moral attitude in procuringor undergoing the experience brings with it a secondarysatisfaction or distaste. Some men andwomen, indeed, there are who can live on smiles andthe word “yes” forever. But for others (indeed formost), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate.Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon growsmawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintrynegativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, andeffort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to producethe sense of an existence with character and textureand power. The range of individual differences in thisrespect is enormous; but whatever the mixture ofyeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly awarewhen he has struck it in the right proportion for him.This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the optimum,the law, the life for me to live. Here I find thedegree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure whichI need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight,and hardship without which my soul’s energy expires.Every individual soul, in short, like every individualmachine or organism, has its own best conditions of292

William Jamesefficiency. A given machine will run best under a certainsteam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organismunder a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seemto do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about140 millimeters of arterial tension. And it is just sowith our sundry souls: some are happiest in calmweather; some need the sense of tension, of strongvolition, to make them feel alive and well. For theselatter souls, whatever is gained from day to day mustbe paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comestoo cheap and has no zest.Now when characters of this latter sort become religious,they are apt to turn the edge of their need ofeffort and negativity against their natural self; andthe ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tellsus that Thomas Carlyle put him into his bath-tubevery morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he proclaimedone of the lowest grades of asceticism. Evenwithout Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to oursoul’s health to start the day with a rather cool immersion.A little farther along the scale we get suchstatements as this, from one of my correspondents,an agnostic:—“Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamedto depend so on the warmth, and whenever the thoughtwould come over me I would have to get up, no matterwhat time of night it was, and stand for a minute inthe cold, just so as to prove my manhood.”Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. Inthe next case we probably have a mixture of heads 2and 3— the asceticism becomes far more systematicand pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whosesense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified onno lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck’smanuscript collection.“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. Isecretly made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next theskin, and wore pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nightsflat on my back on the floor without any covering.”The Roman Church has organized and codified all thissort of thing, and given it a market-value in the shape293

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof “merit.” But we see the cultivation of hardship croppingout under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneousneed of character. Thus we read of Channing,when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that—“He was now more simple than ever, and seemed tohave become incapable of any form of self-indulgence.He took the smallest room in the house for his study,though he might easily have commanded one morelight, airy, and in every way more suitable; and chosefor his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared witha younger brother. The furniture of the latter mighthave answered for the cell of an anchorite, and consistedof a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plainwooden chairs and table, with matting on the floor. Itwas without fire, and to cold he was throughout lifeextremely sensitive; but he never complained or appearedin any way to be conscious of inconvenience. ‘Irecollect,’ says his brother, ‘after one most severe night,that in the morning he sportively thus alluded to hissuffering: “If my bed were my country, I should besomewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control exceptover the part which I occupy, the instant I move, frosttakes possession.”’ In sickness only would he changefor the time his apartment and accept a few comforts.The dress too that he habitually adopted was of mostinferior quality; and garments were constantly wornwhich the world would call mean, though an almostfeminine neatness preserved him from the least appearanceof neglect.”[177]Channing’s asceticism, such as it was, was evidentlya compound of hardihood and love of purity. The democracywhich is an offshoot of the enthusiasm ofhumanity, and of which I will speak later under thehead of the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also ashare. Certainly there was no pessimistic element inhis case.In the next case we have a strongly pessimistic element,so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennickwas Methodism’s first lay preacher. In 1735 he wasconvicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside—“And at once left off sing-singing, card-playing, and[177] Memoirs of W. E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.294

William Jamesattending theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to apopish monastery, to spend his life in devout retirement.At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleepingon fallen leaves, and feeding on forest fruits. Hefasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day… .Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so greata sinner as himself, he began to feed on potatoes,acorns, crabs, and grass; and often wished that he couldlive on roots and herbs. At length, in 1737, he foundpeace with God, and went on his way rejoicing.”[178]In this poor man we have morbid melancholy andfear, and the sacrifices made are to purge out sin, andto buy safety. The hopelessness of Christian theologyin respect of the flesh and the natural man generallyhas, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendousincentive to self-mortification. It would bequite unfair, however, in spite of the fact that thisincentive has often been worked in a mercenary wayfor hortatory purposes, to call it a mercenary incen-[178] L. Tyerman: The Life and Times of the Rev.John Wesley, i. 274.tive. The impulse to expiate and do penance is, in itsfirst intention, far too immediate and spontaneous anexpression of self-despair and anxiety to be obnoxiousto any such reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice,of spending all we have to show our devotion,ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruitof highly optimistic religious feeling.M. Vianney, the cure of Ars, was a French countrypriest, whose holiness was exemplary. We read in hislife the following account of his inner need of sacrifice:—“‘On this path,’ M. Vianney said, “it is only the firststep that costs. There is in mortification a balm and asavor without which one cannot live when once onehas made their acquaintance. There is but one wayin which to give one’s self to God— that is, to giveone’s self entirely, and to keep nothing for one’s self.The little that one keeps is only good to trouble oneand make one suffer.’ Accordingly he imposed it onhimself that he should never smell a flower, neverdrink when parched with thirst, never drive away afly, never show disgust before a repugnant object,295

never complain of anything that had to do with hispersonal comfort, never sit down, never lean uponhis elbows when he was kneeling. The Cure of Arswas very sensitive to cold, but he would never takemeans to protect himself against it. During a verysevere winter, one of his missionaries contrived a falsefloor to his confessional and placed a metal case ofhot water beneath. The trick succeeded, and the Saintwas deceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion.‘This year, through all the cold, my feet havealways been warm.’”[179]In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrificesfor the pure love of God was probably the uppermostconscious motive. We may class it, then,under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulseto sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon.It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly,and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance,is what seems to be a spontaneous example[179] A. Mounin: Le Cure d’Ars, vie de M. J. B. M.Vianney, 1864, p. 545, abridged.The Varieties of Religious Experienceof it, simply expressing what seemed right at the timebetween the individual and his Maker. Cotton Mather,the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputeda rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchinglysimple than his relation of what happened whenhis wife came to die?“When I saw to what a point of resignation I wasnow called of the Lord,” he says, “I resolved, with hishelp, therein to glorify him. So, two hours before mylovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, andI took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest inthe world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly andsincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and in token ofmy real resignation, I gently put her out of my hands,and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that Iwould never touch it more. This was the hardest, andperhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She … toldme that she signed and sealed my act of resignation.And though before that she called for me continually,she after this never asked for me any more.”[180][180] B. Wendell: Cotton Mather, New York, no date,p. 198.296

William JamesFather Vianney’s asceticism taken in its totality was of meeting them. Hence there are always in thesesimply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritualenthusiasm, longing to make proof of itself. The a procedure is codified, the more delicate spirit of itbooks chapters on self-mortification. But wheneverRoman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collectedall the motives towards asceticism together, spirit—the passion of self-contempt wreaking itselfevaporates, and if we wish the undiluted asceticand so codified them that any one wishing to pursue on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotionChristian perfection may find a practical system making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities,mapped out for him in any one of a number of readymademanuals.[181] The dominant Church notion of autobiographies, or other individual documents.namely) to the object of its adoration—we must go toperfection is of course the negative one of avoidance Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished—orrather who existed, for there was little thatof sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, andconcupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations,chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its tury, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.suggested flourishing about him—in the sixteenth cen-forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession.All these sources of sin must be resisted; and affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ.“First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitualdiscipline and austerities are a most efficacious mode If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yetdoes not at the same time tend purely to the honor[181] That of the earlier Jesuit, Rodriguez, which hasand glory of God, renounce it and separate yourselfbeen translated into all languages, is one of the bestfrom it for the love of Christ, who all his life long hadknown. A convenient modern manual, very well putno other taste or wish than to do the will of his Fathertogether, is L’Ascetique Chretienne, by M. J. Ribet,whom he called his meat and nourishment. For ex-Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle edition, 1898.297

The Varieties of Religious Experienceample, you take satisfaction in hearing of things inwhich the glory of God bears no part. Deny yourselfthis satisfaction, mortify your wish to listen. You takepleasure in seeing objects which do not raise yourmind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turnaway your eyes. The same with conversations andall other things. Act similarly, so far as you are able,with all the operations of the senses, striving to makeyourself free from their yokes.“The radical remedy lies in the mortification of thefour great natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief.You must seek to deprive these of every satisfactionand leave them as it were in darkness and the void.Let your soul therefore turn always:“Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;“Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;“Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts;“Not to matter of consolation, but to matter fordesolation rather;“Not to rest, but to labor;“Not to desire the more, but the less;“Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious,but to what is lowest and most contemptible;“Not to will anything, but to will nothing;“Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek theworst, so that you may enter for the love of Christinto a complete destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit,and an absolute renunciation of everything in thisworld.“Embrace these practices with all the energy of yoursoul and you will find in a short time great delightsand unspeakable consolations.“Despise yourself, and wish that others should despiseyou;“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire othersto do the same;“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it goodwhen others hold the same;“To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste foranything.“To know all things, learn to know nothing.298

William James“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing. rest. Profoundly established in the centre of its own“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.nothingness, it can be assailed by naught that comes“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go from below; and since it no longer desires anything,through whatever experiences you have no taste for. what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desiresalone are the causes of its woes.”[182]“To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever and 5, in fact of all our heads together, and of theyou own nothing.irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual“To be what you are not, experience what you are may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote thenot.”sincere Suso’s account of his own self-tortures. Suso,These later verses play with that vertigo of selfcontradictionwhich is so dear to mysticism. Those tury German mystics; his autobiography, written inyou will remember, was one of the fourteenth cen-that come next are completely mystical, for in them the third person, is a classic religious document.Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysicalnotion of the All.and life; and when this began to make itself felt, it“He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire“When you stop at one thing, you cease to open was very grievous to him; and he sought by manyyourself to the All.devices how he might bring his body into subjection.“For to come to the All you must give up the All. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain,“And if you should attain to owning the All, you must until the blood ran from him, so that he was obligedown it, desiring Nothing.“In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and[182] Saint Jean de la Croix, vie et Oeuvres, Paris,1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged.299

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarmentto be made for him; and in the undergarmenthe had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundredand fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, weredriven, and the points of the nails were always turnedtowards the flesh. He had this garment made verytight, and so arranged as to go round him and fastenin front in order that it might fit the closer to his body,and the pointed nails might be driven into his flesh;and it was high enough to reach upwards to his navel.In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer,when it was hot, and he was very tired and ill fromhis journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer,he would sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, andoppressed with toil, and tormented also by noxiousinsects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, andtwist round and round in agony, as a worm does whenrun through with a pointed needle. It often seemedto him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from thetorture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep,or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.[183]Sometimes he cried to Almighty God inthe fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what adying is this! When a man is killed by murderers orstrong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dyinghere under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die. Thenights in winter were never so long, nor was the summerso hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. Onthe contrary, he devised something farther —twoleathern loops into which he put his hands, and fastenedone on each side his throat, and made the fasteningsso secure that even if his cell had been on fire[183] “Insects,” i.e. lice, were an unfailing token ofmediaeval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi’ssheepskin that “often a companion of the saint wouldtake it to the fire to clean and dispediculate it, doingso, as he said, because the seraphic father himself wasno enemy of pedocchi, but on the contrary kept themon him (le portava adosso) and held it for an honorand a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit.Quoted by P. Sabatier: Speculum Perfectionis, etc.,Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.300

William Jamesabout him, he could not have helped himself. This hecontinued until his hands and arms had become almosttremulous with the strain, and then he devisedsomething else: two leather gloves; and he caused abrazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brasstacks, and he used to put them on at night, in orderthat if he should try while asleep to throw off the hairundergarment, or relieve himself from the gnawingsof the vile insects, the tacks might then stick into hisbody. And so it came to pass. If ever he sought tohelp himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove thesharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so thathis flesh festered. When after many weeks thewounds had healed, he tore himself again and madefresh wounds.“He continued this tormenting exercise for aboutsixteen years. At the end of this time, when his bloodwas now chilled, and the fire of his temperament destroyed,there appeared to him in a vision onWhitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told himthat God required this of him no longer. Whereuponhe discontinued it, and threw all these things awayinto a running stream.”Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of hiscrucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirtyprotruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on hisbare back between his shoulders day and night. “Thefirst time that he stretched out this cross upon hisback his tender frame was struck with terror at it,and blunted the sharp nails slightly against a stone.But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, hepointed them all again with a file, and placed oncemore the cross upon him. It made his back, wherethe bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he satdown or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin wereon him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushedagainst his clothes, it tore him.”Suso next tells of his penitences by means of strikingthis cross and forcing the nails deeper into theflesh, and likewise of his self-scourgings—a dreadfulstory—and then goes on as follows: “At this sameperiod the Servitor procured an old castaway door,301

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothesto make him comfortable, except that he tookoff his shoes and wrapped a thick cloak round him.He thus secured for himself a most miserable bed;for hard pea-stalks lay in humps under his head, thecross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his armswere locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarmentwas round his loins, and the cloak too was heavyand the door hard. Thus he lay in wretchedness, afraidto stir, just like a log, and he would send up many asigh to God.“In winter he suffered very much from the frost. Ifhe stretched out his feet they lay bare on the floorand froze, if he gathered them up the blood becameall on fire in his legs, and this was great pain. His feetwere full of sores, his legs dropsical, his knees bloodyand seared, his loins covered with scars from thehorsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched withintense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness.Amid these torments he spent his nights anddays; and he endured them all out of the greatness ofthe love which he bore in his heart to the Divine andEternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizingsufferings he sought to imitate. After a time hegave up this penitential exercise of the door, and insteadof it he took up his abode in a very small cell,and used the bench, which was so narrow and shortthat he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed.In this hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in hisusual bonds, for about eight years. It was also his custom,during the space of twenty-five years, providedhe was staying in the convent, never to go aftercompline in winter into any warm room, or to the conventstove to warm himself, no matter how cold itmight be, unless he was obliged to do so for otherreasons. Throughout all these years he never took abath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this hedid in order to mortify his comfort-seeking body. Hepracticed during a long time such rigid poverty thathe would neither receive nor touch a penny, eitherwith leave or without it. For a considerable time hestrove to attain such a high degree of purity that he302

William Jameswould neither scratch nor touch any part of his body,save only his hands and feet.”[184]I spare you the recital of poor Suso’s self-inflictedtortures from thirst. It is pleasant to know that afterhis fortieth year, God showed him by a series of visionsthat he had sufficiently broken down the naturalman, and that he might leave these exercises off.His case is distinctly pathological, but he does notseem to have had the alleviation, which some asceticshave enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capableof actually turning torment into a perverse kind ofpleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order,for example, we read that“Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable… . Shesaid that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment,provided she might always have matter forsuffering for God; but that to live a single day withoutsuffering would be intolerable. She said again thatshe was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, onefor the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation,and annihilation. ‘Nothing but pain,’ shecontinually said in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable.’”[185]So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulsewill in certain persons give rise. In the ecclesiasticallyconsecrated character three minor branchesof self-mortification have been recognized as indispensablepathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity,obedience, and poverty which the monk vows toobserve; and upon the heads of obedience and povertyI will make a few remarks.First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentiethcentury opens with this virtue held in no high esteem.The duty of the individual to determine his own[184] The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself,[185] Bougaud: Hist de la bienheureuse Margueritetranslated by T. F. Knox, London, 1865, pp. 56- Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 265, 171. Compare, also, pp.80, abridged.386, 387.303

The Varieties of Religious Experienceconduct and profit or suffer by the consequencesseems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rootedcontemporary Protestant social ideals. So much sothat it is difficult even imaginatively to comprehendhow men possessed of an inner life of their own couldever have come to think the subjection of its will tothat of other finite creatures recommendable. I confessthat to myself it seems something of a mystery.Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interiorneed of many persons, and we must do our best tounderstand it.On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediencyof obedience in a firm ecclesiastical organizationmust have led to its being viewed as meritorious.Next, experience shows that there are times inevery one’s life when one can be better counseled byothers than by one’s self. Inability to decide is one ofthe commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves; friendswho see our troubles more broadly, often see themmore wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act ofexcellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner,or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential regions,we find, in the nature of some of the spiritualexcitements which we have been studying, good reasonsfor idealizing obedience. Obedience may springfrom the general religious phenomenon of inner softeningand self-surrender and throwing one’s self onhigher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt tobe that in themselves, apart from utility, they becomeideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whosefallibility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless,may feel much as we do when we resign our willto that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and thepassion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomesan ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespectiveof whatever prudential uses it might have.It is as a sacrifice, a mode of “mortification,” thatobedience is primarily conceived by Catholic writers,a “sacrifice which man offers to God, and of which heis himself both the priest and the victim. By povertyhe immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity heimmolates his body; by obedience he completes the304

William Jamessacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his ceived, and if you can furnish a clear account in thatown, his two most precious goods, his intellect and respect, you are absolved entirely. Whether thehis will. The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, things you did were opportune, or whether there werea genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumedfor the honor of God.”[186] Accordingly, in these are questions not asked of you, but rather ofnot something better that might have been done,Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere your Superior. The moment what you did was doneman, but as the representative of Christ. Obeying God obediently, God wipes it out of your account, andin him by our intention, obedience is easy. But when charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome wellthe text-book theologians marshal collectively all their exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience,reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to ‘Oh, sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed securityour ears rather odd.by which one become almost impeccable!’“One of the great consolations of the monastic life,” “Saint John Climachus is of the same sentimentsays a Jesuit authority, “is the assurance we have when he calls obedience an excuse before God. In fact,that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior when God asks why you have done this or that, andmay commit a fault in commanding you to do this you reply, it is because I was so ordered by my Superiors,God will ask for no other excuse. As a pas-thing or that, but you are certain that you commit nofault so long as you obey, because God will only ask senger in a good vessel with a good pilot need giveyou if you have duly performed what orders you re-himself no farther concern, but may go to sleep inpeace, because the pilot has charge over all, and[186] Lejuene: Introduction a la Vie Mystique, 1899, ‘watches for him’; so a religious person who lives underthe yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if whilep. 277. The holocaust simile goes back at least as faras Ignatius Loyola.305

sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conductof his Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel,and keep watch for him continually. It is no small thing,of a truth, to be able to cross the stormy sea of life onthe shoulders and in the arms of another, yet that isjust the grace which God accords to those who liveunder the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bearsall their burdens… . A certain grave doctor said thathe would rather spend his life in picking up straws byobedience, than by his own responsible choice busyhimself with the loftiest works of charity, because oneis certain of following the will of God in whatever onemay do from obedience, but never certain in the samedegree of anything which we may do of our ownproper movement.”[187]One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyolarecommends obedience as the backbone of his order,if one would gain insight into the full spirit of itscult.[188] They are too long to quote; but Ignatius’s[187] Alfonso Rodriguez, S. J.: Pratique de la PerfectionChretienne, Part iii., Treatise v., ch. x.[188] Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translatedinto French by Bouix, Paris, 1870.The Varieties of Religious Experience306belief is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayingsreported by companions that, though they have beenso often cited, I will ask your permission to copy themonce more:—“I ought,” an early biographer reports him as saying,“on entering religion, and thereafter, to place myselfentirely in the hands of God, and of him who takesHis place by His authority. I ought to desire that mySuperior should oblige me to give up my own judgment,and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up nodifference between one Superior and another, … butrecognize them all as equal before God, whose placethey fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spiritof obedience. In the hands of my Superior, I must be asoft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whateverpleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speakor not to speak to such a person, or the like; and Imust put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactlywhat I am ordered. I must consider myself as acorpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like amass of matter which without resistance lets itself be

William Jamesplaced wherever it may please any one; like a stick inthe hand of an old man, who uses it according to hisneeds and places it where it suits him. So must I beunder the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way itjudges most useful.“I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to aparticular place, to be employed in a particular duty…. I must consider nothing as belonging to me personally,and as regards the things I use, be like a statuewhich lets itself be stripped and never opposes resistance.”[189]The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in thechapter from which I a moment ago made quotations.When speaking of the Pope’s authority, Rodriguezwrites:—“Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company,that if the Holy Father were to order him to set sail inthe first bark which he might find in the port of Ostia,near Rome, and to abandon himself to the sea, withouta mast, without sails, without oars or rudder or[189] Bartoli-Michel, ii. 13.any of the things that are needful for navigation orsubsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, butwithout anxiety or repugnance, and even with a greatinternal satisfaction.”[190]With a solitary concrete example of the extravaganceto which the virtue we are considering has beencarried, I will pass to the topic next in order.“Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatlyimbued with the holiness and excellence of M. deLangres. This prelate, soon after he came to PortRoyal, said to her one day, seeing her so tenderly attachedto Mother Angelique, that it would perhapsbe better not to speak to her again. Marie Claire,greedy of obedience, took this inconsiderate word foran oracle of God, and from that day forward remainedfor several years without once speaking to her sister.”[191]Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times andunder all creeds as one adornment of a saintly life.[190] Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.[191] Sainte-Beuve: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.307

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceSince the instinct of ownership is fundamental inman’s nature, this is one more example of the asceticparadox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectlyreasonable, the moment one recollects howeasily higher excitements hold lower cupidities incheck. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez onthe subject of obedience, I will, to give immediately aconcrete turn to our discussion of poverty, also readyou a page from his chapter on this latter virtue. Youmust remember that he is writing instructions formonks of his own order, and bases them all on thetext, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”“If any one of you,” he says, “will know whether ornot he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whetherhe loves the ordinary consequences and effects ofpoverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, andthe denudation of all conveniences. See if you are gladto wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if youare glad when something is lacking to your meal, whenyou are passed by in serving it, when what you receiveis distasteful to you, when your cell is out ofrepair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead ofloving them you avoid them, then there is proof thatyou have not attained the perfection of poverty ofspirit.” Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practiceof poverty in more detail. “The first point is thatwhich Saint Ignatius proposes in his constitutions,when he says, ‘Let no one use anything as if it werehis private possession.’ ‘A religious person,’ he says,‘ought in respect to all the things that he uses, to belike a statue which one may drape with clothing, butwhich feels no grief and makes no resistance whenone strips it again. It is in this way that you shouldfeel towards your clothes, your books, your cell, andeverything else that you make use of; if ordered toquit them, or to exchange them for others, have nomore sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered.In this way you will avoid using them as if theywere your private possession. But if, when you giveup your cell, or yield possession of this or that objector exchange it for another, you feel repugnance andare not like a statue, that shows that you view these308

William Jamesthings as if they were your private property.’“And this is why our holy founder wished the superiorsto test their monks somewhat as God testedAbraham, and to put their poverty and their obedienceto trial, that by this means they may becomeacquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain achance to make ever farther progress in perfection,… making the one move out of his room when he findsit comfortable and is attached to it; taking away fromanother a book of which he is fond; or obliging a thirdto exchange his garment for a worse one. Otherwisewe should end by acquiring a species of property inall these several objects, and little by little the wall ofpoverty that surrounds us and constitutes our principaldefense would be thrown down. The ancient fathersof the desert used often thus to treat their companions…. Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse, desireda certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, notfor his private use, but for employment in the infirmaryof which he had charge. Whereupon SaintDorotheus answered him: ‘Ha! Dositheus, so that knifepleases you so much! Will you be the slave of a knifeor the slave of Jesus Christ! Do you not blush withshame at wishing that a knife should be your master?I will not let you touch it.’ Which reproach andrefusal had such an effect upon the holy disciple thatsince that time he never touched the knife again.’ …“Therefore, in our rooms,” Father Rodriguez continues,“there must be no other furniture than a bed,a table, a bench, and a candlestick, things purely necessary,and nothing more. It is not allowed among usthat our cells should be ornamented with pictures oraught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, norany sort of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neitheris it allowed us to keep anything to eat, eitherfor ourselves or for those who may come to visit us.We must ask permission to go to the refectory evenfor a glass of water; and finally we may not keep abook in which we can write a line, or which we maytake away with us. One cannot deny that thus we arein great poverty.But this poverty is at the same time a great repose309

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand a great perfection. For it would be inevitable, in for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, ofcase a religious person were allowed to own those which lie closest to common human nature.supernuous possessions, that these things would The opposition between the men who have and thegreatly occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preservethem, or to increase them; so that in not per-in the old- fashioned sense of the man who is wellmen who are is immemorial. Though the gentleman,mitting us at all to own them, all these inconveniences born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous andare remedied. Among the various good reasons why reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identifiedhis essence with these possessions, but ratherthe company forbids secular persons to enter our cells,the principal one is that thus we may the easier be with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity,and pride supposed to be his birthright. To cer-kept in poverty. After all, we are all men, and if wewere to receive people of the world into our rooms, tain huckstering kinds of consideration he thankedwe should not have the strength to remain within the God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life’s vicissitudeshe should become destitute through their lack,bounds prescribed, but should at least wish to adornthem with some books to give the visitors a better he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he wasopinion of our scholarship.”[192]all the freer to work out his salvation. “Wer nur selbstSince Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedandervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans Wise, “mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!” Thiswas hatte,” says Lessing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan thein idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it ideal of the well-born man without possessions wasis worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds embodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and,hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still[192] Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii, Treatise iii., chaps. dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the milivi.,vii.310

tary and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldieras the man absolutely unincumbered. Owningnothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up atany moment when the cause commands him, he isthe representative of unhampered freedom in idealdirections. The laborer who pays with his person dayby day, and has no rights invested in the future, offersalso much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage,he may make his bed wherever his right armcan support him, and from his simple and athletic attitudeof observation, the property-owner seemsburied and smothered in ignoble externalities andtrammels, “wading in straw and rubbish to his knees.”The claims which things make are corrupters of manhood,mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor onour progress towards the empyrean.“Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seemsto carry this voice with it—’Go thou and preach theGospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have no party or certaindwelling place.’ My heart echoes back, ‘LordJesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thouWilliam James311seest me in danger of nestling—in pity—in tenderpity—put a thorn in my nest to prevent me fromit.’”[193]The loathing of “capital” with which our laboringclasses today are growing more and more infectedseems largely composed of this sound sentiment ofantipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchistpoet writes:—“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving awaythat which you have,“Shall you become beautiful;“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourselfin fresh ones;“Not by multiplying clothes shall you make yourbody sound and healthy, but rather by discardingthem …“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does notseek what fresh furniture he can carry on his back,but rather what he can leave behind;“Knowing well that every additional thing which he[193] R. Philip: The Life and Times of GeorgeWhitefield, London, 1842, p. 366.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencecannot freely use and handle is an impediment.”[194]In short, lives based on having are less free thanlives based either on doing or on being, and in theinterest of action people subject to spiritual excitementthrow away possessions as so many clogs. Onlythose who have no private interests can follow an idealstraight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with everydollar or guinea we have to guard. When a brothernovice came to Saint Francis, saying: “Father, it wouldbe a great consolation to me to own a psalter, buteven supposing that our general should concede tome this indulgence, still I should like also to have yourconsent,” Francis put him off with the examples ofCharlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidelsin sweat and labor, and finally dying on the fieldof battle. “So care not,” he said, “for owning booksand knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.”And when some weeks later the novice cameagain to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis[194] Edward Carpenter: Towards Democracy, p.362, abridged.said: “After you have got your psalter you will cravea breviary; and after you have got your breviary youwill sit in your stall like a grand prelate, and will sayto your brother: “Hand me my breviary.”… Andthenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: Aman possesses of learning only so much as comes outof him in action, and a monk is a good preacher onlyso far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every treeis known by its fruits.”[195]But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involvedin doing and being, there is, in the desire ofnot having, something profounder still, somethingrelated to that fundamental mystery of religious experience,the satisfaction found in absolute surrenderto the larger power. So long as any secular safeguardis retained, so long as any residual prudentialguarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete,the vital crisis is not passed, fear still standssentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold[195] Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. Sabatier, Paris,1898, pp. 10, 13.312

William Jamesby two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after a fashion,but also holding by our proper machinations. Incertain medical experiences we have the same criticalpoint to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine orcocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appealsto the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but hedares not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drugis still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of itamong his clothing; arranges secretly to have itsmuggled in in case of need. Even so an incompletelyregenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. Hismoney is like the sleeping potion which the chronicallywakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throwshimself on God, but if he should need the other help,there it will be also. Every one knows cases of thisincomplete and ineffective desire for reform-drunkardswhom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves,one perceives to be quite unwilling seriouslyto contemplate never being drunk again! Really togive up anything on which we have relied, to give itup definitely, “for good and all” and forever, signifiesone of those radical alterations of character whichcame under our notice in the lectures on conversion.In it the inner man rolls over into an entirely differentposition of equilibrium, lives in a new centre ofenergy from this time on, and the turning-point andhinge of all such operations seems usually to involvethe sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses anddestitutions.Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintlylife, we find this ever-recurring note: Fling yourselfupon God’s providence without making any reservewhatever—take no thought for the morrow—sell allyou have and give it to the poor—only when the sacrificeis ruthless and reckless will the higher safetyreally arrive. As a concrete example let me read apage from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, agood woman, much persecuted in her day by bothProtestants and Catholics, because she would not takeher religion at second hand. When a young girl, in herfather’s house—“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating:313

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLord, what wilt thou have me to do? And being onenight in a most profound penitence, she said from thebottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What must I do toplease thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speakto my soul and it will hear thee.’ At that instant sheheard, as if another had spoke within her: Forsake allearthly things. Separate thyself from the love of thecreatures. Deny thyself. She was quite astonished,not understanding this language, and mused long onthese three points, thinking how she could fulfill them.She thought she could not live without earthly things,nor without loving the creatures, nor without lovingherself. Yet she said, ‘By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!’But when she would perform her promise, she knewnot where to begin. Having thought on the religiousin monasteries, that they forsook all earthly thingsby being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselvesby subjecting of their wills, she asked leave ofher father to enter into a cloister of the barefootCarmelites, but he would not permit it, saying hewould rather see her laid in her grave. This seemedto her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in thecloister the true Christians she had been seeking, butshe found afterwards that he knew the cloisters betterthan she, for after he had forbidden her, and toldher he would never permit her to be a religious, norgive her any money to enter there, yet she went toFather Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve inthe monastery and work hard for her bread, and becontent with little, if he would receive her. At whichhe smiled and said: That cannot be. We must havemoney to build; we take no maids without money;you must find the way to get it, else there is no entryhere.“This astonished her greatly, and she was therebyundeceived as to the cloisters, resolving to forsake allcompany and live alone till it should please God toshow her what she ought to do and whither to go. Sheasked always earnestly, ‘When shall I be perfectlythine, O my God?’ And she thought he still answeredher, When thou shalt no longer possess anything, andshalt die to thyself. ‘And where shall I do that, Lord?’314

William JamesHe answered her, In the desert. This made so strongan impression on her soul that she aspired after this;but being a maid of eighteen years only, she was afraidof unlucky chances, and was never used to travel, andknew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said,‘Lord, thou wilt guide me how and where it shall pleasethee. It is for thee that I do it. I will lay aside myhabit of a maid, and will take that of a hermit that Imay pass unknown.’ Having then secretly made readythis habit, while her parents thought to have marriedher, her father having promised her to a richFrench merchant, she prevented the time, and onEaster evening, having cut her hair, put on the habit,and slept a little, she went out of her chamber aboutfour in the morning, taking nothing but one penny tobuy bread for that day. And it being said to her ingoing out, Where is thy faith? in a penny? she threwit away, begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying,‘No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in theealone.’ Thus she went away wholly delivered fromthe heavy burthen of the cares and good things ofthis world, and found her soul so satisfied that she nolonger wished for anything upon earth, resting entirelyupon God, with this only fear lest she should bediscovered and be obliged to return home; for shefelt already more content in this poverty than shehad done for all her life in all the delights of theworld.”[196]Another example from Starbuck’s MS. collection:—“At a meeting held at six the next morning, I hearda man relate his experience. He said: The Lord askedhim if he would confess Christ among the quarrymenwith whom he worked, and he said he would. Thenhe asked him if he would give up to be used of theLord the four hundred dollars he had laid up, and hesaid he would and thus the Lord saved him. Thethought came to me at once that I had never made areal consecration either of myself or of my propertyto the Lord, but had always tried to serve the Lord inmy way. Now the Lord asked me if I would serve[196] An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London,1699, pp. 269, 270, abridged.315

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehim in HIS way, and go out alone and penniless if heso ordered. The question was pressed home, and Imust decide: To forsake all and have him, or have alland lose him! I soon decided to take him; and theblessed assurance came, that he had taken me for hisown, and my joy was full. I returned home from themeeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thoughtall would be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord thatpossessed me, and so I began to tell the simple story.But to my great surprise, the pastors (for I attendedmeetings in three churches) opposed the experienceand said it was fanaticism, and one told the membersof his church to shun those that professed it, and Isoon found that my foes were those of my own household.”The penny was a small financial safeguard, but aneffective spiritual obstacle. Not till it was thrown awaycould the character settle into the new equilibriumcompletely.Over and above the mystery of self-surrender,there are in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries.There is the mystery of veracity: “Naked cameI into the world,” etc.— whoever first said that, possessedthis mystery. My own bare entity must fightthe battle—shams cannot save me. There is also themystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equalitybefore God of all his creatures. This sentiment (whichseems in general to have been more widespread inMohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to nullifyman’s usual acquisitiveness. Those who have itspurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages,preferring, as I said in a former lecture, to grovel onthe common level before the face of God. It is notexactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes soclose to it in practice. It is humanity, rather, refusingto enjoy anything that others do not share. A profoundmoralist, writing of Christ’s saying, “Sell all thouhast and follow me,” proceeds as follows:—“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutelyyou will as a result not care for any possessionswhatever, and this seems a very likely proposition.But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is316

William Jamesprobably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. Ifyou loved mankind as Christ loved them, you wouldsee his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. Youwould sell your goods, and they would be no loss toyou. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to anymind that has Christ’s love for mankind, becomeparables to lesser natures. There are in every generationpeople who, beginning innocently, with no predeterminedintention of becoming saints, find themselvesdrawn into the vortex by their interest in helpingmankind, and by the understanding that comesfrom actually doing it. The abandonment of their oldmode of life is like dust in the balance. It is donegradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the wholequestion of the abandonment of luxury is no questionat all, but a mere incident to another question,namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselvesto the remorseless logic of our love for others.”[197]But in all these matters of sentiment one must have[197] J. J. Chapman, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv.p. 4, April, 1900, abridged.“been there” one’s self in order to understand them.No American can ever attain to understanding theloyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towardshis emperor; nor can a Briton or German everunderstand the peace of heart of an American in havingno king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, betweenhim and the common God of all. If sentiments assimple as these are mysteries which one must receiveas gifts of birth, how much more is this the casewith those subtler religious sentiments which we havebeen considering! One can never fathom an emotionor divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In theglowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilitiesare solved, and what was so enigmaticalfrom without becomes transparently obvious. Eachemotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductionswhich no other logic can draw. Piety and charitylive in a different universe from worldly lusts andfears, and form another centre of energy altogether.As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may becomea consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sac-317

The Varieties of Religious Experiencerifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render commonsafeguards odious, and in certain glows of generousexcitement it may appear unspeakably meanto retain one’s hold of personal possessions. The onlysound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale ofsuch emotions, is to observe as well as we are ablethose who feel them, and to record faithfully what weobserve; and this, I need hardly say, is what I havestriven to do in these last two descriptive lectures,which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficientlyfor our present needs.Lectures XIV and XVTHE VALUE OF SAINTLINESSWE HAVE NOW passed in review the more importantof the phenomena which are regarded as fruits ofgenuine religion and characteristics of men who aredevout. Today we have to change our attitude fromthat of description to that of appreciation; we have toask whether the fruits in question can help us to judgethe absolute value of what religion adds to humanlife. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a “Critiqueof pure Saintliness” must be our theme.If, in turning to this theme, we could descend uponour subject from above like Catholic theologians, withour fixed definitions of man and man’s perfection andour positive dogmas about God, we should have aneasy time of it. Man’s perfection would be the fulfillmentof his end; and his end would be union with hisMaker. That union could be pursued by him alongthree paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, re-318

William Jamesspectively; and progress along either path would bea simple matter to measure by the application of alimited number of theological and moral conceptionsand definitions. The absolute significance and valueof any bit of religious experience we might hear ofwould thus be given almost mathematically into ourhands.If convenience were everything, we ought now togrieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirablyconvenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselvesoff from it deliberately in those remarks which youremember we made, in our first lecture, about theempirical method; and it must be confessed that afterthat act of renunciation we can never hope forclean-cut and scholastic results. We cannot divide mansharply into an animal and a rational part. We cannotdistinguish natural from supernatural effects; noramong the latter know which are favors of God, andwhich are counterfeit operations of the demon. Wehave merely to collect things together without anyspecial a priori theological system, and out of an aggregateof piecemeal judgments as to the value of thisand that experience—judgments in which our generalphilosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our commonsense are our only guides—decide that on thewhole one type of religion is approved by its fruits,and another type condemned. “On the whole”—I fearwe shall never escape complicity with that qualification,so dear to your practical man, so repugnant toyour systematizer!I also fear that as I make this frank confession, Imay seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard,and to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticismor wayward choice, you may think, can be the onlyresults of such a formless method as I have taken up.A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, andin farther explanation of the empiricist principleswhich I profess, may therefore appear at this pointto be in place.Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measurethe worth of a religion’s fruits in merely humanterms of value. How can you measure their worth319

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewithout considering whether the God really existswho is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists,then all the conduct instituted by men to meet hiswants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of hisreligion—it would be unreasonable only in case he didnot exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religionof human or animal sacrifices by virtue of yoursubjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity werereally there demanding such sacrifices, you would bemaking a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming thatthe deity must be non-existent; you would be settingup a theology of your own as much as if you were ascholastic philosopher.To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorilyin certain types of deity, I frankly confessthat we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be saidto constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts,and common sense which I chose as our guides maketheological partisans of us whenever they make certainbeliefs abhorrent.But such common-sense prejudices and instincts arethemselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothingis more striking than the secular alteration thatgoes on in the moral and religious tone of men, astheir insight into nature and their social arrangementsprogressively develop. After an interval of a few generationsthe mental climate proves unfavorable tonotions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectlysatisfactory: the older gods have fallen belowthe common secular level, and can no longer be believedin. Today a deity who should require bleedingsacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary tobe taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentialswere put forward in his favor, we would notlook at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetiteswere of themselves credentials.They positively recommended him to men’simaginations in ages when such coarse signs ofpower were respected and no others could be understood.Such deities then were worshiped becausesuch fruits were relished.Doubtless historic accidents always played some320

William Jameslater part, but the original factor in fixing the figureof the gods must always have been psychological. Thedeity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees whofounded the particular cult bore witness was worthsomething to them personally. They could use him.He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes,and controlled their will—or else they required himas a safeguard against the demon and a curber ofother people’s crimes. In any case, they chose himfor the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield.So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless;so soon as they conflicted with indispensablehuman ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values;so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible,or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited,and was erelong neglected and forgotten. Itwas in this way that the Greek and Roman godsceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thusthat we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, andMohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealtwith the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestantswith older Protestant notions; it is thus thatChinamen judge of us, and that all of us now livingwill be judged by our descendants. When we cease toadmire or approve what the definition of a deity implies,we end by deeming that deity incredible.Few historic changes are more curious than thesemutations of theological opinion. The monarchicaltype of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicablyplanted in the mind of our own forefathers that adose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seemspositively to have been required by their imagination.They called the cruelty “retributive justice,” anda God without it would certainly have struck them asnot “sovereign” enough. But today we abhor the verynotion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrarydealing-out of salvation and damnation to selectedindividuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuadehimself that he had not only a conviction, but a“delightful conviction,” as of a doctrine “exceedingpleasant, bright, and sweet,” appears to us, if sovereignlyanything, sovereignly irrational and mean. Not321

The Varieties of Religious Experienceonly the cruelty, but the paltriness of character ofthe gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikeslater centuries with surprise. We shall see examplesof it from the annals of Catholic saintship which makesus rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in generalappears to the modern transcendentalist, as well asto the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed toa deity of an almost absurdly childish character, takingdelight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel,costume and mumbling and mummery, and findinghis “glory” incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousnessof pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures,and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seemsintolerably bald and chalky and bleak.Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his righthand rather than nail his theses to the door atWittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destinedto lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.So far, then, although we are compelled, whatevermay be our pretensions to empiricism, to employsome sort of a standard of theological probability ofour own whenever we assume to estimate the fruitsof other men’s religion, yet this very standard hasbeen begotten out of the drift of common life. It is thevoice of human experience within us, judging and condemningall gods that stand athwart the pathwayalong which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience,if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent ofthose disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistentwith the experiential method. The inconsistency,you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seemsto me that there is not even a formal inconsistency tobe laid against our method. The gods we stand by arethe gods we need and can use, the gods whose demandson us are reinforcements of our demands onourselves and on one another. What I then proposeto do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by commonsense, to use human standards to help us decide how322

William Jamesfar the religious life commends itself as an ideal kindof human activity. If it commends itself, then anytheological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forthwill stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited,and all without reference to anything buthuman working principles. It is but the elimination ofthe humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanlyfittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look athistory candidly and without prejudice, we have toadmit that no religion has ever in the long run establishedor proved itself in any other way. Religions haveapproved themselves; they have ministered to sundryvital needs which they found reigning. When theyviolated other needs too strongly, or when other faithscame which served the same needs better, the firstreligions were supplanted.The needs were always many, and the tests werenever sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivityand “on the whole”-ness, which can withperfect legitimacy be addressed to the empiricalmethod as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproachto which the entire life of man in dealing withthese matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yetowed its prevalence to “apodictic certainty.” In a laterlecture I will ask whether objective certainty can everbe added by theological reasoning to a religion thatalready empirically prevails.One word, also, about the reproach that in followingthis sort of an empirical method we are handingourselves over to systematic skepticism.Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations inour sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirmthat one’s own age of the world can be beyondcorrection by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore,be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibilityagainst which their conclusions are secure; and noempiricist ought to claim exemption from this universalliability. But to admit one’s liability to correctionis one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wantondoubt is another. Of willfully playing into the handsof skepticism we cannot be accused. He who acknowledgesthe imperfectness of his instrument, and makes323

The Varieties of Religious Experienceallowance for it in discussing his observations, is in amuch better position for gaining truth than if heclaimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmaticor scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact forclaiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable?And if not, what command over truth wouldthis kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolutecertainty, she only claimed reasonable probability forher conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability,it will be as much as men who love the truthcan ever at any given moment hope to have withintheir grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than wecould have had, if we were unconscious of our liabilityto err.Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue tocondemn us for this confession. The mere outwardform of inalterable certainty is so precious to someminds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out ofthe question. They will claim it even where the factsmost patently pronounce its folly. But the safe thingis surely to recognize that all the insights of creaturesof a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisestof critics is an altering being, subject to the betterinsight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only“up to date” and “on the whole.” When larger rangesof truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselvesto their reception, unfettered by our previouspretensions. “Heartily know, when half-gods go, thegods arrive.”The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomenais therefore entirely unescapable, whatevermay be one’s own desire to attain the irreversible.But apart from that fact, a more fundamental questionawaits us, the question whether men’s opinionsought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in thisfield. Ought all men to have the same religion? Oughtthey to approve the same fruits and follow the sameleadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that,for hard and soft, for proud and humble, for strenuousand lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing, exactlythe same religious incentives are required? Orare different functions in the organism of humanity324

William Jamesallotted to different types of man, so that some mayreally be the better for a religion of consolation andreassurance, whilst others are better for one of terrorand reproof? It might conceivably be so; and weshall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as wego on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge orcritic help being biased in favor of the religion by whichhis own needs are best met? He aspires to impartiality;but he is too close to the struggle not to be tosome degree a participant, and he is sure to approvemost warmly those fruits of piety in others which tastemost good and prove most nourishing to him.I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I saymay sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly andbriefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion oftruth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgmentuntil we see it applied to the details which lie beforeus. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortalmen can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigibleand unimprovable truth about such mattersof fact as those with which religions deal. But I rejectthis dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight inintellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder anddoubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by thispretension to possess it already wholly. That we cangain more and more of it by moving always in theright direction, I believe as much as any one, and Ihope to bring you all to my way of thinking beforethe termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, Ipray you, harden your minds irrevocably against theempiricism which I profess.I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justificationof my method, but seek immediately to use itupon the facts.In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena,it is very important to insist on the distinctionbetween religion as an individual personal function,and religion as an institutional, corporate, ortribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember,in my second lecture. The word “religion,”as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of historyshows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract325

The Varieties of Religious Experiencedisciples, and produce groups of sympathizers.When these groups get strong enough to “organize”themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutionswith corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit ofpolitics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt toenter and to contaminate the originally innocentthing; so that when we hear the word “religion”nowadays, we think inevitably of some “church” orother; and to some persons the word “church” suggestsso much hypocrisy and tyranny and meannessand tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerningway they glory in saying that they are“down” on religion altogether. Even we who belongto churches do not exempt other churches than ourown from the general condemnation.But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutionshardly concern us at all. The religious experiencewhich we are studying is that which lives itselfout within the private breast. First-hand individualexperience of this kind has always appeared as a hereticalsort of innovation to those who witnessed itsbirth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; andit has always, for a time at least, driven him who hadit into the wilderness, often into the literal wildernessout of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus,Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so manyothers had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation;and I can do no better at this point than readto you a page from his Journal, referring to the periodof his youth when religion began to fermentwithin him seriously.“I fasted much,” Fox says, “walked abroad in solitaryplaces many days, and often took my Bible, andsat in hollow trees and lonesome places until nightcame on; and frequently in the night walked mournfullyabout by myself; for I was a man of sorrows inthe time of the first workings of the Lord in me.“During all this time I was never joined in professionof religion with any, but gave up myself to theLord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leaveof father and mother, and all other relations, and traveledup and down as a stranger on the earth, which326

William Jamesway the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber tomyself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimesmore, sometimes less in a place: for I durst notstay long in a place, being afraid both of professorand profane, lest, being a tender young man, I shouldbe hurt by conversing much with either. For whichreason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenlywisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; andwas brought off from outward things, to rely on theLord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I left theseparate preachers also, and those called the mostexperienced people; for I saw there was none amongthem all that could speak to my condition. And whenall my hopes in them and in all men were gone so thatI had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tellwhat to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said,‘There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak tothy condition.’ When I heard it, my heart did leap forjoy. Then the Lord let me see why there was noneupon the earth that could speak to my condition. Ihad not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors,nor any sort of separated people. I was afraidof all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothingbut corruptions. When I was in the deep, under allshut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome;my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptationswere so great that I often thought I should have despaired,I was so tempted. But when Christ openedto me how he was tempted by the same devil, andhad overcome him, and had bruised his head; andthat through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit,I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If Ihad had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all wouldhave been as nothing, for nothing gave me comfortbut the Lord by his power. I saw professors, priests,and people were whole and at ease in that conditionwhich was my misery, and they loved that which Iwould have been rid of. But the Lord did stay mydesires upon himself, and my care was cast upon himalone.”[198][198] George Fox: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp.59-61, abridged.327

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceA genuine first-hand religious experience like thisis bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, theprophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If hisdoctrine prove contagious enough to spread to anyothers, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. Butif it then still prove contagious enough to triumphover persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; andwhen a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day ofinwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithfullive at second hand exclusively and stone the prophetsin their turn. The new church, in spite of whateverhuman goodness it may foster, can be henceforthcounted on as a staunch ally in every attemptto stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stopall later bubblings of the fountain from which in purerdays it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless,indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit itcan make capital out of them and use them for itsselfish corporate designs! Of protective action of thispolitic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealingsof the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individualsaints and prophets yield examples enoughfor our instruction.The plain fact is that men’s minds are built, as hasbeen often said, in water-tight compartments. Religiousafter a fashion, they yet have many other thingsin them beside their religion, and unholy entanglementsand associations inevitably obtain. Thebasenesses so commonly charged to religion’s accountare thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all toreligion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practicalpartner, the spirit of corporate dominion. Andthe bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeableto religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spiritof dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down thelaw in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoreticsystem. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sumof these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech younever to confound the phenomena of mere tribal orcorporate psychology which it presents with thosemanifestations of the purely interior life which arethe exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews,328

William Jamesthe hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoningof Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murderingof Mormons and the massacring of Armenians,express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia,that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges,and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentricand non-conforming men as aliens, than they expressthe positive piety of the various perpetrators. Pietyis the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believeas little as I do, in spite of the Christian unctionwith which the German emperor addressed his troopsupon their way to China, that the conduct which hesuggested, and in which other Christian armies wentbeyond them, had anything whatever to do with theinterior religious life of those concerned in the performance.Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocityshould we make piety responsible. At most wemay blame piety for not availing to check our naturalpassions, and sometimes for supplying them withhypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations,and with the pretext usually couples somerestriction; and when the passion gust is over, thepiety may bring a reaction of repentance which theirreligious natural man would not have shown.For many of the historic aberrations which havebeen laid to her charge, religion as such, then, is notto blame. Yet of the charge that over-zealousness orfanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot whollyacquit her, so I will next make a remark upon thatpoint. But I will preface it by a preliminary remarkwhich connects itself with much that follows.Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionablyproduced in your minds an impressionof extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you haveasked, as one example after another came before us,to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who haveno vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity willsurely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism,and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort.This practically amounts to saying that much that itis legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless329

not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, likeall other human phenomena, are subject to the law ofthe golden mean. Political reformers accomplish theirsuccessive tasks in the history of nations by beingblind for the time to other causes. Great schools ofart work out the effects which it is their mission toreveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which otherschools must make amends. We accept a JohnHoward, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, witha kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to showus that way, but we are glad there are also other waysof seeing and taking life. So of many of the saintswhom we have looked at. We are proud of a humannature that could be so passionately extreme, but weshrink from advising others to follow the example.The conduct we blame ourselves for not following liesnearer to the middle line of human effort. It is lessdependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It issuch as wears well in different ages, such as underdifferent skies all judges are able to commend.The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like allThe Varieties of Religious Experience330human products, liable to corruption by excess. Commonsense must judge them. It need not blame thevotary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally,as one who acts faithfully according to hislights. He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionallygood way is that for which no indulgenceneed be asked.We find that error by excess is exemplified by everysaintly virtue. Excess, in human faculties, means usuallyone-sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard toimagine an essential faculty too strong, if only otherfaculties equally strong be there to cooperate with it inaction. Strong affections need a strong will; strong activepowers need a strong intellect; strong intellectneeds strong sympathies, to keep life steady. If thebalance exist, no one faculty can possibly be toostrong—we only get the stronger all-round character.In the life of saints, technically so called, the spiritualfaculties are strong, but what gives the impression ofextravagance proves usually on examination to be arelative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitementtakes pathological forms whenever other interests aretoo few and the intellect too narrow. We find this ex-

emplified by all the saintly attributes in turn—devoutlove of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may leadastray. I will run over these virtues in succession.First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced,one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism(when not a mere expression of ecclesiasticalambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.When an intensely loyal and narrow mind isonce grasped by the feeling that a certain superhumanperson is worthy of its exclusive devotion, oneof the first things that happens is that it idealizes thedevotion itself. To adequately realize the merits ofthe idol gets to be considered the one great merit ofthe worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities bywhich savage tribesmen have from time immemorialexhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbidin favor of the deity. Vocabularies are exhaustedand languages altered in the attempt to praise himenough; death is looked on as gain if it attract hisgrateful notice; and the personal attitude of being hisdevotee becomes what one might almost call a newand exalted kind of professional specialty within theWilliam James331tribe.[199] The legends that gather round the lives[199] Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion,Saint Francis to Christ’s wounds; Saint Anthony ofPadua to Christ’s childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity;Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite Mohammedansvenerate Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, instead ofAbu-bekr, his brother-in-law. Vambery describes a dervishwhom he met in Persia, “who had solemnly vowed,thirty years before, that he would never employ his organsof speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly,the name of his favorite, Ali, Ali. He thus wished to signifyto the world that he was the most devoted partisan ofthat Ali who had been dead a thousand years. In his ownhome, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, noother word but ‘Ali!’ ever passed his lips. If he wantedfood or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants stillby repeating ‘Ali!’ Begging or buying at the bazaar, it wasalways ‘Ali!’ Treated ill or generously, he would still harpon his monotonous ‘Ali!’ Latterly his zeal assumed suchtremendous proportions that, like a madman, he wouldrace, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town,throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek our, allthe while, at the top of his voice, ‘Ali!’ This dervish wasvenerated by everybody as a saint, and received everywherewith the greatest distinction.” Arminius Vambery,his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889,p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali’sson, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound withcries of his name and Ali’s.

of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrateand glorify. The Buddha[200] and Mohammed[201]and their companions and many Christian saints areincrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes whichare meant to be honorific, but are simplyabgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expressionof man’s misguided propensity to praise.An immediate consequence of this condition of mindis jealousy for the deity’s honor. How can the devoteeshow his loyalty better than by sensitiveness inthis regard? The slightest affront or neglect must beresented, the deity’s enemies must be put to shame.In exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such acare may become an engrossing preoccupation; andcrusades have been preached and massacres instigatedfor no other reason than to remove a fanciedslight upon the God. Theologies representing the gods[200] Compare H. C. Warren: Buddhism in Translation,Cambridge, U.S., 1898, passim.[201] Compare J. L. Merrick: The Life and Religionof Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditionsof the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston. 1850, passim.The Varieties of Religious Experience332as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialisticpolicies, have conspired to fan this temper to aglow, so that intolerance and persecution have cometo be vices associated by some of us inseparably withthe saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besettingsins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, anda moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisantemper, and that is cruel. Between his own andJehovah’s enemies a David knows no difference; aCatherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare amongChristians which was the scandal of her epoch, canthink of no better method of union among them thana crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds noword of protest or regret over the atrocious tortureswith which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death;and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering hisenemies into his hands for “execution.” Politics comein in all such cases; but piety finds the partnershipnot quite unnatural. So, when “freethinkers” tell usthat religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot makean unqualified denial of the charge.

William James333Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrongside of religion’s account, so long as the religiousperson’s intellect is on the stage which the despotickind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is representedas less intent on his own honor and glory, itceases to be a danger.Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterfuland aggressive. In gentle characters, wheredevoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we havean imaginative absorption in the love of God to theexclusion of all practical human interests, which,though innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable.A mind too narrow has room but for one kindof affection. When the love of God takes possession ofsuch a mind, it expels all human loves and humanuses. There is no English name for such a sweet excessof devotion, so I will refer to it as a theopathiccondition.The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serveas an example.“To be loved here upon the earth,” her recent biographerexclaims: “to be loved by a noble, elevated,distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, withdevotion—what enchantment! But to be loved byGod! and loved by him to distraction [aime jusqu’a lafolie]!—Margaret melted away with love at thethought of such a thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri informer times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said toGod: ‘Hold back, O my God, these torrents whichoverwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for theirreception.”[202]The most signal proofs of God’s love which MargaretMary received were her hallucinations of sight,touch, and hearing, and the most signal in turn ofthese were the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart,“surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun,and transparent like a crystal. The wound which hereceived on the cross visibly appeared upon it. Therewas a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart,and a cross above it.” At the same time Christ’s voicetold her that, unable longer to contain the flames of[202] Bougaud: Hist. de la bienheureuse MargueriteMarie, Paris, 1894, p. 145.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehis love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracleto spread the knowledge of them. He thereupon tookout her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own andinflamed it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding:“Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave,hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved discipleof my Sacred Heart.”In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detailthe “great design” which he wished to establishthrough her instrumentality. “I ask of thee to bring itabout that every first Friday after the week of holySacrament shall be made into a special holy day forhonoring my Heart by a general communion and byservices intended to make honorable amends for theindignities which it has received. And I promise theethat my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance theinfluences of its love upon all those who pay to it thesehonors, or who bring it about that others do the same.”“This revelation,” says Mgr. Bougaud, “is unquestionablythe most important of all the revelationswhich have illumined the Church since that of the Incarnationand of the Lord’s Supper… . After the Eucharist,the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.”[203]Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary’slife? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayersand absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. Shebecame increasingly useless about the convent, herabsorption in Christ’s love—“which grew upon her daily, rendering her moreand more incapable of attending to external duties.They tried her in the infirmary, but without muchsuccess, although her kindness, zeal, and devotionwere without bounds, and her charity rose to acts ofsuch a heroism that our readers would not bear therecital of them. They tried her in the kitchen, butwere forced to give it up as hopeless—everythingdropped out of her hands. The admirable humilitywith which she made amends for her clumsiness couldnot prevent this from being prejudicial to the orderand regularity which must always reign in a commu-[203] Bougaud: Hist. de la bienheureuse MargueriteMarie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241.334

[204] Bougaud: Op. cit., p. 267.William Jamesnity. They put her in the school, where the little girlscherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [forrelics] as if she were already a saint, but where shewas too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary attention.Poor dear sister, even less after her visionsthan before them was she a denizen of earth, and theyhad to leave her in her heaven.”[204]Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but sofeeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too muchto ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education,to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kindof saintship which she embodies. A lower examplestill of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude,a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose“Revelations,” a well-known mystical authority, consistmainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeservingperson. Assurances of his love, intimaciesand caresses and compliments of the most absurd andpuerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as anindividual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.[205]In reading such a narrative, we realize thegap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century,and we feel that saintliness of character mayyield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associatedwith such inferior intellectual sympathies. Whatwith science, idealism, and democracy, our own imaginationhas grown to need a God of an entirely differenttemperament from that Being interested exclusivelyin dealing out personal favors, with whom ourancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are withthe vision of social righteousness, a God indifferentto everything but adulation, and full of partiality for[205] Examples: “Suffering from a headache, shesought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holdingcertain odoriferous substances in her mouth, whenthe Lord appeared to her to lean over towards herlovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors.After having gently breathed them in, He arose, andsaid with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contentedwith what He had done: ‘see the new present whichmy betrothed has given Me!’335

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehis individual favorites, lacks an essential element oflargeness; and even the best professional sainthoodof former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception,seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.“One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sungthe words ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.’ The son of Godleaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving toher soul the softest kiss, said to her at the secondSanctus: ‘In this Sanctus addressed to my person,receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinityand of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficientpreparation for approaching the communion table.’And the next following Sunday, while she was thankingGod for this favor, behold the Son of God, morebeauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in Hisarms as if He were proud of her and presents her toGod the Father, in that perfection of sanctity withwhich He had dowered her. And the Father took suchdelight in this soul thus presented by His only son,that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gaveher, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the sanctityattributed to each by His own Sanctus—and thus sheremained endowed with the plenary fullness of theblessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence,by Wisdom, and by Love.” Revelations deSainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablestwomen, in many respects, of whose life we have therecord. She had a powerful intellect of the practicalorder. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology,possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talentfor politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and afirst-rate literary style. She was tenaciously aspiring,and put her whole life at the service of her religiousideals. Yet so paltry were these, according toour present way of thinking, that (although I knowthat others have been moved differently) I confessthat my only feeling in reading her has been pity thatso much vitality of soul should have found such pooremployment.In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there336

William Jamesthe Mind, 1898.337is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius.A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has dividedthe human race into two types, whom he calls“shrews” and “nonshrews” respectively.[206] Theshrew-type is defined as possessing an “active unimpassionedtemperament.” In other words, shrews arethe “motors,” rather than the “sensories,”[207] andtheir expressions are as a rule more energetic thanthe feelings which appear to prompt them. SaintTeresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound,was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. Thebustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Notonly must she receive unheard-of personal favors andspiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediatelywrite about them and exploiter them pro-[206] Furneaux Jordan: Character in Birth and Parentage,first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature.[207] As to this distinction, see the admirably practicalaccount in J. M. Baldwin’s little book, The Story offessionally, and use her expertness to give instructionto those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; hersense, not of radical bad being, as the really contritehave it, but of her “faults” and “imperfections” in theplural; her stereotyped humility and return uponherself, as covered with “confusion” at each new manifestationof God’s singular partiality for a person sounworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountlyfeeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude,and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true;she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church’striumph over them; but in the main her idea of religionseems to have been that of an endless amatoryflirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the devotee and the deity; and apart fromhelping younger nuns to go in this direction by theinspiration of her example and instruction, there isabsolutely no human use in her, or sign of any generalhuman interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far fromrebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole

notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who, onthe one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minuteaccount of individual shortcomings, and on the othercan feel such partialities, and load particular creatureswith such insipid marks of favor, is too small-mindeda God for our credence. When Luther, in his immensemanly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the verynotion of a debit and credit account kept with individualsby the Almighty, he stretched the soul’s imaginationand saved theology from puerility.So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectualconceptions which might guide it towardsbearing useful human fruit.The Varieties of Religious Experienceconfusion are too much for their powers of comfortableadaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietistreaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stampingdisorder and divergence out, your retiring pietistreaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the worldat large, but making a smaller world in which he dwellshimself and from which he eliminates it altogether.Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons,dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we havethe church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages,monasteries, and sectarian organizations,both churches pursuing the same object—to unify thelife,[208] and simplify the spectacle presented to theThe next saintly virtue in which we find excess is [208] On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (LesMaladies du sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makesPurity. In theopathic characters, like those whom weinner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life.have just considered, the love of God must not be But all strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unifythe mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves.mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters,brothers, and friends are felt as interfering dis-condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and thatOne would infer from M. Murisier’s pages that this formalone might in comparison almost neglect material content, intractions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, whenstudying the latter. I trust that the present work will convincethe reader that religion has plenty of material contentthey occur together, as they often do, require abovewhich is characteristic and which is more important by farall things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety andthan any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism,I find M. Murisier’s book highly instructive.338

soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discordswill drop one external relation after another, as interferingwith the absorption of consciousness in spiritualthings. Amusements must go first, then conventional“society,” then business, then family duties,until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the dayinto hours for stated religious acts, is the only thingthat can be borne. The lives of saints are a history ofsuccessive renunciations of complication, one form ofcontact with the outer life being dropped after another,to save the purity of inner tone.[209] “Is it not[209] Example: “At the first beginning of the Servitor’s[Suso’s] interior life, after he had purified his soul properlyby confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, threecircles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritualintrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, andthe choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himselfin complete security. The second circle was the wholemonastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermostcircle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him tostand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles,it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animalwhich is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, andtherefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” TheLife of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated byKnox, London, 1865, p. 168.William James339better,” a young sister asks her Superior, “that Ishould not speak at all during the hour of recreation,so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling intosome sin of which I might not be conscious?”[210] Ifthe life remains a social one at all, those who takepart in it must follow one identical rule.Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purityfeels clean and free once more. The minuteness ofuniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities,whether monastic or not, is something almostinconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology,hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped,and there is no doubt that some persons are so madeas to find in this stability an incomparable kind ofmental rest.We have no time to multiply examples, so I will letthe case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type ofexcess in purification.I think you will agree that this youth carried theelimination of the external and discordant to a point[210] Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregationde St. Dominique, a Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age often, his biographer says:—“The inspiration came to him to consecrate to theMother of God his own virginity—that being to herthe most agreeable of possible presents. Without delay,then, and with all the fervor there was in him,joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made hisvow of perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offeringof his innocent heart, and obtained for him fromGod, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace ofnever feeling during his entire life the slightest touchof temptation against the virtue of purity. This wasan altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded evento Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous inthat Louis dwelt always in courts and among greatfolks, where danger and opportunity are so unusuallyfrequent. It is true that Louis from his earliestchildhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatevermight be impure or unvirginal, and even for relationsof any sort whatever between persons of oppositesex. But this made it all the more surprisingthat he should, especially since this vow, feel it necessaryto have recourse to such a number of expedientsfor protecting against even the shadow of dangerthe virginity which he had thus consecrated. Onemight suppose that if any one could have contentedhimself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed forall Christians, it would assuredly have been he. Butno! In the use of preservatives and means of defense,in flight from the most insignificant occasions, fromevery possibility of peril, just as in the mortificationof his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints.He, who by an extraordinary protection of God’s gracewas never tempted, measured all his steps as if hewere threatened on every side by particular dangers.Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either whenwalking in the streets, or when in society. Not onlydid he avoid all business with females even more scrupulouslythan before, but he renounced all conversationand every kind of social recreation with them,although his father tried to make him take part; andhe commenced only too early to deliver his innocent340

ody to austerities of every kind.”[211]At the age of twelve, we read of this young manthat “if by chance his mother sent one of her maids ofhonor to him with a message, he never allowed her tocome in, but listened to her through the barely openeddoor, and dismissed her immediately. He did not liketo be alone with his own mother, whether at table orin conversation; and when the rest of the companywithdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring… .Several great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learningto know even by sight; and he made a sort of treatywith his father, engaging promptly and readily to accedeto all his wishes, if he might only be excusedfrom all visits to ladies.” [212]When he was seventeen years old Louis joined theWilliam JamesJesuit order,[213] against his father’s passionate en-etc., from the hands of his companions. He avoided[211] Meschler’s Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn everytranslation by Lebrequier, 1891, p. 40.[212] Ibid., p. 71.conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained[213] In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic silent. He systematically refused to notice his surroundings.Being ordered one day to bring a book fromlife for its freedom from sin, and for the imperishabletreasures, which it enables us to store up, “of merit inGod’s eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all Eternity.”Loc. cit., p. 62.the rector’s seat in the refectory, he had to ask where341treaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and whena year later the father died, he took the loss as a “particularattention” to himself on God’s part, and wroteletters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior,to his grieving mother. He soon became so gooda monk that if any one asked him the number of hisbrothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count themover before replying. A Father asked him one day ifhe were never troubled by the thought of his family,to which, “I never think of them except when prayingfor them,” was his only answer. Never was he seento hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed,that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, inthe hospital, he used to seek for whatever was mostdisgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers,

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten letters may be seen at its foot, written to the Saint bybread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that young men and women, and directed to ‘Paradiso.’he had not noticed the place. One day, during recess, They are supposed to be burnt unread except by Sanhaving looked by chance on one of his companions, Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these prettyhe reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty.He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of pressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic oflittle missives, tied up now with a green ribbon, ex-the tongue; and his greatest penance was the limit love,” etc.[214]which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He I cannot resist the temptation to quote fromsought after false accusations and unjust reprimands Starbuck’s book, p. 388, another case of purificationas opportunities of humility; and such was his obediencethat, when a room-mate, having no more pa-“The signs of abnormality which sanctified personsby elimination. It runs as follows:—per, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give show are of frequent occurrence. They get out of tuneit to him without first obtaining the permission of the with other people; often they will have nothing to dosuperior, who, as such, stood in the place of God, and with churches, which they regard as worldly; theytransmitted his orders.become hypercritical towards others; they grow carelessof their social, political, and financial obligations.I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis’ssaintship. He died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, As an instance of this type may be mentioned aand is known in the Church as the patron of all young woman of sixty-eight of whom the writer made a specialstudy. She had been a member of one of the mostpeople. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devotedto him in a certain church in Rome “is embosomed inflowers, arranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of [214] Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in Hare’sWalks in Rome, 1900, i. 55.342

William Jamesactive and progressive churches in a busy part of alarge city. Her pastor described her as having reachedthe censorious stage. She had grown more and moreout of sympathy with the church; her connection withit finally consisted simply in attendance at prayermeeting,at which her only message was that of reproofand condemnation of the others for living on alow plane. At last she withdrew from fellowship withany church. The writer found her living alone in alittle room on the top story of a cheap boarding-housequite out of touch with all human relations, but apparentlyhappy in the enjoyment of her own spiritualblessings. Her time was occupied in writing bookletson sanctification—page after page of dreamy rhapsody.She proved to be one of a small group of personswho claim that entire salvation involves threesteps instead of two; not only must there be conversionand sanctification, but a third, which they call‘crucifixion’ or ‘perfect redemption,’ and which seemsto bear the same relation to sanctification that thisbears to conversion. She related how the Spirit hadsaid to her, ‘Stop going to church. Stop going to holinessmeetings. Go to your own room and I will teachyou.’ She professes to care nothing for colleges, orpreachers, or churches, but only cares to listen to whatGod says to her. Her description of her experienceseemed entirely consistent; she is happy and contented,and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself.While listening to her own story, one was tempted toforget that it was from the life of a person who couldnot live by it in conjunction with her fellows.”Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as thiswill depend largely on our conception of God, and ofthe sort of conduct he is best pleased with in his creatures.The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paidlittle heed to social righteousness; and to leave theworld to the devil whilst saving one’s own soul wasthen accounted no discreditable scheme. To-day,rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairsis, in consequence of one of those secular mutationsin moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemedan essential element of worth in character; and to be343

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof some public or private use is also reckoned as aspecies of divine service. Other early Jesuits, especiallythe missionaries among them, the Xaviers,Brebeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and foughtin their way for the world’s welfare; so their lives todayinspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louis,is originally no larger than a pin’s head, and cherishesideas of God of corresponding smallness, theresult, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is onthe whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson,is not the one thing needful; and it is better thata life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeitusefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance,we next come upon excesses of Tendernessand Charity. Here saintliness has to face thecharge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasitesand beggars. “Resist not evil,” “Love your enemies,”these are saintly maxims of which men of thisworld find it hard to speak without impatience. Arethe men of this world right, or are the saints in possessionof the deeper range of truth?No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere,one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousnessof the way in which facts and ideals areinterwoven.Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms:the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipientsof the action. In order that conduct shouldbe abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution,and reception, should be suited to one another.The best intention will fail if it either work byfalse means or address itself to the wrong recipient.Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conductcan confine himself to the actor’s animus alone, apartfrom the other elements of the performance. As thereis no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by thosewho hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges tomagnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, arefolly when we are dealing with human crocodiles andboa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universeinto the hands of the enemy by his trustful-344

William Jamesness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conductwill appear perfect only when the environmentis perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitablyadapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admittingthat saintly conduct would be the most perfectconduct conceivable in an environment where allwere saints already; but by adding that in an environmentwhere few are saints, and many the exactreverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We mustfrankly confess, then, using our empirical commonsense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in theworld that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity,and non-resistance may be, and often have been,manifested in excess.The powers of darkness have systematically takenadvantage of them. The whole modern scientific organizationof charity is a consequence of the failure ofsimply giving alms. The whole history of constitutionalgovernment is a commentary on the excellence ofresisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smitingback and not turning the other cheek also.You will agree to this in general, for in spite of theGospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, youbelieve in fighting fire with fire, in shooting downusurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabondsand swindlers.And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were theworld confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted,and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there noone prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwardswhether he were worthy; no one willing todrown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger’sperson; no one ready to be duped many a time ratherthan live always on suspicion; no one glad to treatindividuals passionately and impulsively rather thanby general rules of prudence; the world would be aninfinitely worse place than it is now to live in. Thetender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a dayyet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grownnatural, would be cut out from the perspective of our345

The Varieties of Religious Experienceimaginations.The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagancesof human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay,innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic.Treating those whom they met, in spite of thepast, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they havestimulated them to BE worthy, miraculously transformedthem by their radiant example and by thechallenge of their expectation.From this point of view we may admit the humancharity which we find in all saints, and the great excessof it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinelycreative social force, tending to make real a degreeof virtue which it alone is ready to assume aspossible. The saints are authors, auctores, increasers,of goodness. The potentialities of developmentin human souls are unfathomable. So many whoseemed irretrievably hardened have in point of factbeen softened, converted, regenerated, in ways thatamazed the subjects even more than they surprisedthe spectators, that we never can be sure in advanceof any man that his salvation by the way of love ishopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodilesand boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings.We know not the complexities of personality,the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets ofthe character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminalregion. St. Paul long ago made our ancestorsfamiliar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred.Since Christ died for us all without exception,St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief inthe essential sacredness of every one expresses itselfto-day in all sorts of humane customs and reformatoryinstitutions, and in a growing aversion to thedeath penalty and to brutality in punishment. Thesaints, with their extravagance of human tenderness,are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip ofthe wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like thesingle drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flungfar ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or ofa flood, they show the way and are forerunners. Theworld is not yet with them, so they often seem in the346

William Jamesmidst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yetthey are impregnators of the world, vivifiers andanimaters of potentialities of goodness which but forthem would lie forever dormant. It is not possible tobe quite as mean as we naturally are, when they havepassed before us. One fire kindles another; and withoutthat over-trust in human worth which they show,the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.Momentarily considered, then, the saint may wastehis tenderness and be the dupe and victim of his charitablefever, but the general function of his charity insocial evolution is vital and essential. If things are everto move upward, some one must be ready to takethe first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who isnot willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as thesaint is always willing, can tell whether these methodswill or will not succeed. When they do succeed,they are far more powerfully successful than force orworldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and thebest that can be said of prudence is that it keeps whatwe already have in safety. But non-resistance, whensuccessful, turns enemies into friends; and charityregenerates its objects. These saintly methods are,as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find inthe elevated excitement with which their faith endowsthem an authority and impressiveness whichmakes them irresistible in situations where men ofshallower nature cannot get on at all without the useof worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldlywisdom may be safely transcended is the saint’s magicgift to mankind.[215] Not only does his vision of abetter world console us for the generally prevailingprose and barrenness; but even when on the wholewe have to confess him ill adapted, he makes someconverts, and the environment gets better for hisministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness, aslow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenlyorder.[215] The best missionary lives abound in the victoriouscombination of non-resistance with personalauthority. John G. Paton, for example, in the NewHebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, pre-347

The Varieties of Religious Experienceserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes tothe point, no one ever dares actually to strike him.Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogousvirtue. “One of our chiefs, full of the Christ-kindleddesire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inlandchief, that he and four attendants would comeon Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God.The reply came back sternly forbidding their visit,and threatening with death any Christian that approachedtheir village. Our chief sent in response aloving message, telling them that Jehovah had taughtthe Christians to return good for evil, and that theywould come unarmed to tell them the story of howthe Son of God came into the world and died in orderto bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sentback a stern and prompt reply once more: ‘If youcome, you will be killed.’ On Sabbath morn the Christianchief and his four companions were met outsidethe village by the heathen chief, who implored andthreatened them once more. But the former said:—“‘We come to you without weapons of war! We comeonly to tell you about Jesus. We believe that He willprotect us to-day.’“As they pressed steadily forward towards the village,spears began to be thrown at them. Some theyevaded, being all except one dexterous warriors; andothers they literally received with their bare hands,and turned them aside in an incredible manner. Theheathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thusapproaching them without weapons of war, and noteven flinging back their own spears which they hadcaught, after having thrown what the old chief called‘a shower of spears,’ desisted from mere surprise. OurChristian chief called out, as he and his companionsdrew up in the midst of them on the village publicground:—“‘Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all yourspears! Once we would have thrown them back atyou and killed you. But now we come, not to fight butto tell you about Jesus. He has changed our darkhearts. He asks you now to lay down all these yourother weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell348

William Jamesyou about the love of God, our great Father, the onlyliving God.’“The heathen were perfectly overawed. Theymanifestly looked on these Christians as protectedby some Invisible One. They listened for the firsttime to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. Welived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in theschool of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island inthese southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ,where similar acts of heroism on the part of convertscannot be recited.” John G. Paton, Missionary to theNew Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London,1890, p. 243.In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice inwhich many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulgeare, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptationto present environmental conditions, analogousto the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven.They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardnessand are slow leavens of a better order.The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancyyou are all ready to consider without argument a virtueliable to extravagance and excess. The optimismand refinement of the modern imagination has, as Ihave already said elsewhere, changed the attitude ofthe church towards corporeal mortification, and aSuso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara[216] appear to us[216] Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography(French translation, p. 333), “had passedforty years without ever sleeping more than an hourand a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was theone that had cost him the most. To compass it, hekept always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleephe allowed nature to take was snatched in a sittingposture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixedin the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it wouldhave been impossible, because his cell was only fourfeet and a half long. In the course of all these years henever raised his hood, no matter what the ardor ofthe sun or the rain’s strength. He never put on a shoe.He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth, with nothing349

The Varieties of Religious Experienceelse upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible,and over it a little cloak of the same stuff. Whenthe cold was great he took off the cloak and openedfor a while the door and little window of his cell. Thenhe closed them and resumed the mantle—his way, ashe told us, of warming himself, and making his bodyfeel a better temperature. It was a frequent thingwith him to eat once only in three days; and when Iexpressed my surprise, he said that it was very easyif one once had acquired the habit. One of his companionshas assured me that he has gone sometimeseight days without food… . His poverty was extreme;and his mortification, even in his youth, was such thathe told me he had passed three years in a house ofhis order without knowing any of the monks otherwisethan by the sound of their voice, for he neverraised his eyes, and only found his way about by followingthe others. He showed this same modesty onpublic highways. He spent many years without everlaying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to methat at the age he had reached it was indifferent tohim whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was veryold when I first came to know him, and his body soattenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so muchas of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity hewas very affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned,but his intellectual right-mindedness andgrace gave to all his words an irresistible charm.”to-day rather in the light of tragic mountebanks thanof sane men inspiring us with respect. If the innerdispositions are right, we ask, what need of all thistorment, this violation of the outer nature? It keepsthe outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinelyemancipated from the flesh will look on pleasuresand pains, abundance and privation, as alikeirrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actionsand experience enjoyments without fear of corruptionor enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, onlythose need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardlyattached thereto. If one be really unattachedto the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with350

William Jamesequanimity. I quoted in a former lecture Saint teachers have always professed the rule that, sinceAugustine’s antinomian saying: If you only love God health is needed for efficiency in God’s service, healthenough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general“He needs no devotional practices,” is one of optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestantcircles to-day makes mortification forRamakrishna’s maxims, “whose heart is moved totears at the mere mention of the name of Hari.”[217] mortification’s sake repugnant to us. We can no longerAnd the Buddha, in pointing out what he called “the sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that Godmiddle way” to his disciples, told them to abstain from can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings selfinflictedin his honor is abhorrent. In consequence ofboth extremes, excessive mortification being as unrealand unworthy as mere desire and pleasure. The all these motives you probably are disposed, unlessonly perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which some special utility can be shown in some individual’smakes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticismthus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvana.[218] as pathological.We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have Yet I believe that a more careful consideration ofgrown older, and directors of conscience more experienced,they usually have shown a tendency to lay eral good intention of asceticism and the uselessnessthe whole matter, distinguishing between the gen-less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty,ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritualmeaning asceticism stands for nothing less than[217] F. Max Muller: Ramakrishna, his Life and sayings,1899, p. 180.for the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes,lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the[218] Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey,London, 1882, p. 127.351

The Varieties of Religious Experiencebelief that there is an element of real wrongness inthis world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded,but which must be squarely met and overcome by anappeal to the soul’s heroic resources, and neutralizedand cleansed away by suffering. As against this view,the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophythinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring.Let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances,escapes the suffering of any great amount ofevil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as itexists in the wider universe outside his private experience,and he will be quit of it altogether, and cansail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis.But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precariousthis attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is butfor the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him,unredeemed and unprovided for in his philosophy.No such attempt can be a general solution of theproblem; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturallyfeel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is ashallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of areal deliverance, what is a lucky personal accidentmerely, a cranny to escape by. It leaves the generalworld unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan. Thereal deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must beof universal application. Pain and wrong and deathmust be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement,or else their sting remains essentially unbroken.If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalenceof tragic death in this world’s history fairly into hismind—freezing, drowning entombment alive, wildbeasts, worse men, and hideous diseases—he can withdifficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career ofworldly prosperity without suspecting that he mayall the while not be really inside the game, that hemay lack the great initiation.Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and itvoluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farcenor genteel comedy, it says, but something we mustsit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter tastewill purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic areindeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-352

William Jamesmindedness pure and simple, with its sentimentaloptimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinkingman as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness,cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to thesphinx’s riddle.In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’scommon instinct for reality, which in point of fact hasalways held the world to be essentially a theatre forheroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mysteryis hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacitywhatever for it in any direction. On the other hand,no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, ifhe be willing to risk death, and still more if he sufferit heroically, in the service he has chosen, the factconsecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in thisor that way, if yet we cling to life, and he is able “tofling it away like a flower” as caring nothing for it, weaccount him in the deepest way our born superior.Each of us in his own person feels that a high-heartedindifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by commonsense, that he who feeds on death that feeds onmen possesses life supereminently and excellently,and meets best the secret demands of the universe,is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithfulchampion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable bythe intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning.Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apartfrom the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellectof former times may have let it wander, asceticismmust, I believe, be acknowledged to go withthe profounder way of handling the gift of existence.Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flatteryand sponge-cake in comparison. The practical courseof action for us, as religious men, would therefore, itseems to me, not be simply to turn our backs uponthe ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day turn them,but rather to discover some outlet for it of which thefruits in the way of privation and hardship might beobjectively useful. The older monastic asceticism occupieditself with pathetic futilities, or terminated inthe mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own353

The Varieties of Religious Experienceperfection.[219] But is it not possible for us to discardmost of these older forms of mortification, and for the energy with which they make for heroic stan-These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkableyet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired dards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkablethem?for the way in which it neglects them.[220] War andDoes not, for example, the worship of material adventure assuredly keep all who engage in themluxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portionof the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exer-from treating themselves too tenderly. They demandeffeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively tion, both in degree and in duration, that the wholesympathetic and facetious way in which most childrenare brought up to-day—so different from the hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, ceasescale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance,education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelicalcircles—in danger, in spite of its many advan-turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual powerto have any deterrent operation whatever. Deathtages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are to check our action vanishes. With the annulling ofthere not hereabouts some points of application for a these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energyrenovated and revised ascetic discipline?are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher planeMany of you would recognize such dangers, but of power.would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and [220] “When a church has to be run by oysters, icecream,and fun,” I read in an American religious pa-national enterprise and adventure as the remedies.[219] “The vanities of all others may die out, but the per, “you may be sure that it is running away fromvanity of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeedto wear away.” Ramakrishna his Life and Say-the present plight of many of our churches.Christ.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, isings, 1899, p. 172.354

William JamesThe beauty of war in this respect is that it is so thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is hiscongruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral possible use in war. War, and even peace, require ofevolution has made us all potential warriors; so the the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality.most insignificant individual, when thrown into an The recruit brings with him common moral notions,army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of which he must seek immediately to get rid. Forof tenderness toward his precious person he may him victory, success, must be everything. The mostbring with him, and may easily develop into a monsterof insensibility.and for war’s uses they are incommensurablybarbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war,But when we compare the military type of self-severitywith that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-These words are of course literally true. The im-good.”[221]wide difference in all their spiritual concomitants. mediate aim of the soldier’s life is, as Moltke said,“‘Live and let live,’” writes a clear-headed Austrian destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whateverconstructions wars result in are remote and non-officer, “is no device for an army. Contempt for one’sown comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himselfto be too feelingless to all those usual sympathiesabove all, fierce contempt for one’s own person, arewhat war demands of every one. Far better is it for and respects, whether for persons or for things, thatan army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, make for conservation. Yet the fact remains that warthan to possess too much sentimentality and human is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, beingreasonableness.If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, [221] C. V. B. K.: Friedens-und Kriegs-moral derhe must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and Heere. Quoted by Hamon: Psychologie du Militaireprofessional, 1895, p. xli.355

The Varieties of Religious Experiencein the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school thatas yet is universally available. But when we gravelyask ourselves whether this wholesale organization ofirrationality and crime be our only bulwark againsteffeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and thinkmore kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanicalequivalent of heat. What we now need to discoverin the social realm is the moral equivalent ofwar: something heroic that will speak to men as universallyas war does, and yet will be as compatiblewith their spiritual selves as war has proved itself tobe incompatible. I have often thought that in the oldmonkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantrywhich infested it, there might be something like thatmoral equivalent of war which we are seeking. Maynot voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuouslife,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?Poverty indeed is the strenuous life—without brassbands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause orlies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way inwhich wealth- getting enters as an ideal into the verybone and marrow of our generation, one wonderswhether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthyreligious vocation may not be “the transformationof military courage,” and the spiritual reformwhich our time stands most in need of.Among us English-speaking peoples especially dothe praises of poverty need once more to be boldlysung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. Wedespise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplifyand save his inner life. If he does not join thegeneral scramble and pant with the money-makingstreet, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.We have lost the power even of imagining whatthe ancient idealization of poverty could have meant:the liberation from material attachments, the unbribedsoul, the manlier indifference, the paying ourway by what we are or do and not by what we have,the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—themore athletic trim, in short, the moralfighting shape. When we of the so-called better classesare scared as men were never scared in history at356

William Jamesmaterial ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriageuntil our house can be artistic, and quake at thethought of having a child without a bank-account anddoomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking mento protest against so unmanly and irreligious a stateof opinion.It is true that so far as wealth gives time for idealends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is betterthan poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth doesthis in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewherethe desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it areour chief breeders of cowardice and propagators ofcorruption. There are thousands of conjunctures inwhich a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst aman for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.Think of the strength which personal indifferenceto poverty would give us if we were devoted tounpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tonguesor fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatoryticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotionvanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in ourfaces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbablybear witness to the spirit, and our example would helpto set free our generation. The cause would need itsfunds, but we its servants would be potent in proportionas we personally were contented with ourpoverty.I recommend this matter to your serious pondering,for it is certain that the prevalent fear of povertyamong the educated classes is the worst moral diseasefrom which our civilization suffers.I have now said all that I can usefully say about theseveral fruits of religion as they are manifested insaintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass tomy more general conclusions.Our question, you will remember, is as to whetherreligion stands approved by its fruits, as these areexhibited in the saintly type of character. Single attributesof saintliness may, it is true, be temperamentalendowments, found in non-religious individuals.But the whole group of them forms a combinationwhich, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow357

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefrom the sense of the divine as from its psychologicalcentre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comesnaturally to think that the smallest details of thisworld derive infinite significance from their relationto an unseen divine order. The thought of this orderyields him a superior denomination of happiness, anda steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare.In social relations his serviceability is exemplary;he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inwardas well as outward, for his sympathy reachessouls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected facultiestherein. Instead of placing happiness wherecommon men place it, in comfort, he places it in ahigher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomfortsinto sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness.So he turns his back upon no duty, howeverthankless; and when we are in need of assistance, wecan count upon the saint lending his hand with morecertainty than we can count upon any other person.Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendenciessave him from the petty personal pretensionswhich so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, andhis purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion.Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity—these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of allmen shows them in the completest possible measure.But, as we saw, all these things together do not makesaints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow,they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticismor theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery,scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability tomeet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelityto the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellectmay inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionableand damnable than a superficial carnal manwould be in the same situation. We must judge himnot sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but usingour own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment,and estimating his total function.Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we mustbear in mind that it is unfair, where we find narrownessof mind, always to impute it as a vice to the indi-358

William Jamesvidual, for in religious and theological matters he probablyabsorbs his narrowness from his generation.Moreover, we must not confound the essentials ofsaintliness, which are those general passions of whichI have spoken, with its accidents, which are the specialdeterminations of these passions at any historical moment.In these determinations the saints will usuallybe loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Takingrefuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribein the middle ages, as bearing a hand in the world’swork is to-day. Saint Francis or Saint Bernard, werethey living to-day, would undoubtedly be leading consecratedlives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedlythey would not lead them in retirement. Our animosityto special historic manifestations must not lead usto give away the saintly impulses in their essential natureto the tender mercies of inimical critics.The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whomI know is Nietzsche. He contrasts them with theworldly passions as we find these embodied in thepredaceous military character, altogether to the advantageof the latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed,has something about him which often makesthe gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth whileto consider the contrast in question more fully.Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negativeresult of the biologically useful instinct of welcomingleadership, and glorifying the chief of the tribe. Thechief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant, the masterful,overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiorityand grovel before him. We quail under hisglance, and are at the same time proud of owning sodangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissivehero-worship must have been indispensable in primevaltribal life. In the endless wars of those times,leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe’s survival.If there were any tribes who owned no leaders,they can have left no issue to narrate their doom. Theleaders always had good consciences, for consciencein them coalesced with will, and those who looked ontheir face were as much smitten with wonder at theirfreedom from inner restraint as with awe at the en-359

The Varieties of Religious Experienceergy of their outward performances.Compared with these beaked and taloned graspersof the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tameand harmless barn-yard poultry. There are saintswhose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull withimpunity. Such a man excites no thrills of wonderveiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples andreturns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedomnor his outward power; and unless he found withinus an altogether different faculty of admiration toappeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty.Reenacted in human nature is the fable of thewind, the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embodythe discrepancy. The woman loves the man the moreadmiringly the stormier he shows himself, and theworld deifies its rulers the more for being willful andunaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates theman by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and thesaint has always charmed the world by somethingsimilar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible inopposite directions, and the rivalry of influences isunsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursuetheir feud in literature as much as in real life.For Nietzsche the saint represents little butsneakingness and slavishness. He is the sophisticatedinvalid, the degenerate par excellence, the man ofinsufficient vitality. His prevalence would put thehuman type in danger.“The sick are the greatest danger for the well. Theweaker, not the stronger, are the strong’s undoing.It is not fear of our fellow-man, which we should wishto see diminished; for fear rouses those who arestrong to become terrible in turn themselves, andpreserves the hard-earned and successful type ofhumanity. What is to be dreaded by us more thanany other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust,not fear, but rather the great pity—disgust andpity for our human fellows… . The morbid are ourgreatest peril—not the ‘bad’ men, not the predatorybeings. Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken—theyit is, the weakest who are undermining360

the vitality of the race, poisoning our trust in life, andputting humanity in question. Every look of them is asigh—’Would I were something other! I am sick andtired of what I am.’ In this swamp-soil of self-contempt,every poisonous weed flourishes, and all sosmall, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten.Here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment,here the air smells odious with secrecy, withwhat is not to be acknowledged; here is woven endlesslythe net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracyof those who suffer against those who succeedand are victorious; here the very aspect of thevictorious is hated—as if health, success, strength,pride, and the sense of power were in themselvesthings vicious, for which one ought eventually to makebitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselveslike to inflict the expiation, how they thirst tobe the hangmen! And all the while their duplicitynever confesses their hatred to be hatred.”[222][222] Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung,Section 14. I have abridged, and in one place transposed,a sentence.William James361Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough,but we all know what he means, and he expresseswell the clash between the two Ideals. The carnivorous-minded“strong man,” the adult male and cannibal,can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidnessin the saint’s gentleness and self-severity, andregards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolvesessentially upon two pivots: Shall the seenworld or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation?and must our means of adaptation in thisseen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?The debate is serious. In some sense and to somedegree both worlds must be acknowledged and takenaccount of; and in the seen world both aggressivenessand non-resistance are needful. It is a questionof emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint’s type or thestrong-man’s type the more ideal?It has often been supposed, and even now, I think,it is supposed by most persons, that there can be oneintrinsically ideal type of human character. A certainkind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man

The Varieties of Religious Experienceabsolutely and apart from the utility of his function,apart from economical considerations. The saint’stype, and the knight’s or gentleman’s type, have alwaysbeen rival claimants of this absolute ideality;and in the ideal of military religious orders both typeswere in a manner blended. According to the empiricalphilosophy, however, all ideals are matters of relation.It would be absurd, for example, to ask for adefinition of “the ideal horse,” so long as draggingdrays and running races, bearing children, and joggingabout with tradesmen’s packages all remain asindispensable differentiations of equine function. Youmay take what you call a general all-round animal asa compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse ofa more specialized type, in some one particular direction.We must not forget this now when, in discussingsaintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type ofmanhood. We must test it by its economical relations.I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses inhis Data of Ethics will help to fix our opinion. Idealityin conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation. A societywhere all were invariably aggressive would destroyitself by inner friction, and in a society wheresome are aggressive, others must be non-resistant,if there is to be any kind of order. This is the presentconstitution of society, and to the mixture we owemany of our blessings. But the aggressive membersof society are always tending to become bullies, robbers,and swindlers; and no one believes that such astate of things as we now live in is the millennium. Itis meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginarysociety in which there should be no aggressiveness,but only sympathy and fairness—any small communityof true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractlyconsidered, such a society on a large scalewould be the millennium, for every good thing mightbe realized there with no expense of friction. To sucha millennial society the saint would be entirelyadapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficaciousover his companions, and there would be noone extant to take advantage of his non-resistance.The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man362

than the “strong man,” because he is adapted to thehighest society conceivable, whether that society everbe concretely possible or not. The strong man wouldimmediately tend by his presence to make that societydeteriorate. It would become inferior in everythingsave in a certain kind of bellicose excitement,dear to men as they now are.But if we turn from the abstract question to the actualsituation, we find that the individual saint maybe well or ill adapted, according to particular circumstances.There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellenceof sainthood. It must be confessed that asfar as this world goes, anyone who makes an out-andoutsaint of himself does so at his peril. If he is not alarge enough man, he may appear more insignificantand contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he hadremained a worldling.[223] Accordingly religion has[223] We all know daft saints, and they inspire a queer kindof aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we mustchoose individuals on the same intellectual level. The under-wittedstrong man homologous in his sphere with theunder-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan orrowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certainsuperiority.William James363seldom been so radically taken in our Western worldthat the devotee could not mix it with some worldlytemper. It has always found good men who could followmost of its impulses, but who stopped short whenit came to non-resistance. Christ himself was fierceupon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons,Gordons, show that Christians can be strong men also.How is success to be absolutely measured whenthere are so many environments and so many waysof looking at the adaptation? It cannot be measuredabsolutely; the verdict will vary according to the pointof view adopted. From the biological point of viewSaint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded.Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environmentof history; and so far as any saint’s exampleis a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws itin the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness,he is a success, no matter what his immediatebad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritualheroes whom every one acknowledges, theFrancises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas, Wesleys,

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceChannings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses,the Agnes Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and DoraPattisons, are successes from the outset. They showthemselves, and there is no question; every one perceivestheir strength and stature. Their sense of mysteryin things, their passion, their goodness, irradiateabout them and enlarge their outlines while theysoften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphereand background; and, placed alongside ofthem, the strong men of this world and no other seemas dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stoneor brick-bats.In a general way, then, and “on the whole,” our abandonmentof theological criteria, and our testing of religionby practical common sense and the empiricalmethod, leave it in possession of its towering place inhistory. Economically, the saintly group of qualities isindispensable to the world’s welfare. The great saintsare immediate successes; the smaller ones are at leastheralds and harbingers, and they may be leavens also,of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, ifwe can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally.But in our Father’s house are many mansions,and each of us must discover for himself the kind ofreligion and the amount of saintship which best comportswith what he believes to be his powers and feelsto be his truest mission and vocation. There are nosuccesses to be guaranteed and no set orders to begiven to individuals, so long as we follow the methodsof empirical philosophy.This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some ofyour minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such amethod should have been applied to such a subject,and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricismwhich I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.How, you say, can religion, which believes in twoworlds and an invisible order, be estimated by theadaptation of its fruits to this world’s order alone? Itis its truth, not its utility, you insist, upon which ourverdict ought to depend. If religion is true, its fruitsare good fruits, even though in this world they shouldprove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but364

William Jamespathos. It goes back, then, after all, to the question ofthe truth of theology. The plot inevitably thickensupon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations.I propose, then, that to some degree we face the responsibility.Religious persons have often, though notuniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner.That manner is known as mysticism. I will consequentlynow proceed to treat at some length ofmystical phenomena, and after that, though morebriefly, I will consider religious philosophy.Lectures XVI and XVIIMYSTICISMOVER AND OVER AGAIN in these lectures I have raisedpoints and left them open and unfinished until weshould have come to the subject of Mysticism. Someof you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiteratedpostponements. But now the hour has comewhen mysticism must be faced in good earnest, andthose broken threads wound up together. One maysay truly, I think, that personal religious experiencehas its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness;so for us, who in these lectures are treating personalexperience as the exclusive subject of our study,such states of consciousness ought to form the vitalchapter from which the other chapters get their light.Whether my treatment of mystical states will shedmore light or darkness, I do not know, for my ownconstitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almostentirely, and I can speak of them only at second365

The Varieties of Religious Experiencehand. But though forced to look upon the subject soexternally, I will be as objective and receptive as Ican; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincingyou of the reality of the states in question, and of theparamount importance of their function.First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression“mystical states of consciousness” mean? How do wepart off mystical states from other states?The words “mysticism” and “mystical” are oftenused as terms of mere reproach, to throw at any opinionwhich we regard as vague and vast and sentimental,and without a base in either facts or logic. Forsome writers a “mystic” is any person who believesin thought-transference, or spirit-return. Employedin this way the word has little value: there are toomany less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it usefulby restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of theword “religion,” and simply propose to you four markswhich, when an experience has them, may justify usin calling it mystical for the purpose of the presentlectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation,and the recriminations that generally go therewith.1. Ineffability.—The handiest of the marks by whichI classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. Thesubject of it immediately says that it defies expression,that no adequate report of its contents can begiven in words. It follows from this that its qualitymust be directly experienced; it cannot be impartedor transferred to others. In this peculiarity mysticalstates are more like states of feeling than like statesof intellect. No one can make clear to another whohas never had a certain feeling, in what the quality orworth of it consists. One must have musical ears toknow the value of a symphony; one must have beenin love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind.Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret themusician or the lover justly, and are even likely toconsider him weak-minded or absurd. The mysticfinds that most of us accord to his experiences anequally incompetent treatment.2. Noetic quality.—Although so similar to states of366

William Jamesfeeling, mystical states seem to those who experiencethem to be also states of knowledge. They are statesof insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursiveintellect. They are illuminations, revelations,full of significance and importance, all inarticulatethough they remain; and as a rule they carry withthem a curious sense of authority for after-time.These two characters will entitle any state to becalled mystical, in the sense in which I use the word.Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but areusually found. These are:—3. Transiency.—Mystical states cannot be sustainedfor long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or atmost an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyondwhich they fade into the light of common day. Often,when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproducedin memory; but when they recur it is recognized;and from one recurrence to another it is susceptibleof continuous development in what is felt asinner richness and importance.4. Passivity.—Although the oncoming of mysticalstates may be facilitated by preliminary voluntaryoperations, as by fixing the attention, or going throughcertain bodily performances, or in other ways whichmanuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristicsort of consciousness once has set in, themystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, andindeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held bya superior power. This latter peculiarity connectsmystical states with certain definite phenomena ofsecondary or alternative personality, such as propheticspeech, automatic writing, or the mediumistictrance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced,however, there may be no recollection whateverof the phenomenon, and it may have no significancefor the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as itwere, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states,strictly so-called, are never merely interruptive.Some memory of their content always remains, anda profound sense of their importance. They modifythe inner life of the subject between the times of theirrecurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, how-367

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich the religious pretensions are extreme.ever, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradationsand mixtures.The simplest rudiment of mystical experience wouldThese four characteristics are sufficient to mark out seem to be that deepened sense of the significance ofa group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps overdeserve a special name and to call for careful study. one. “I’ve heard that said all my life,” we exclaim,Let it then be called the mystical group.“but I never realized its full meaning until now.”Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with“When a fellow-monk,” said Luther, “one day repeatedthe words of the Creed: ‘I believe in the forgivenessof sins,’ I saw the Scripture in an entirelysome typical examples. Professional mystics at theheight of their development have often elaboratelynew light; and straightway I felt as if I were bornorganized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon.But you remember what I said in my first lec-anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradisethrown wide open.”[224] This sense of deeper significanceis not confined to rational propositions.ture: phenomena are best understood when placedwithin their series, studied in their germ and in theirSingle words,[225] and conjunctions of words, effectsover-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggeratedand degenerated kindred. The range of mystical[224] Newman’s Securus judicat orbis terrarum is anotherinstance.experience is very wide, much too wide for us to [225] “Mesopotamia” is the stock comic instance.—An ex-cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method ofcellent Old German lady, who had done some traveling inher day, used to describe to me her Sehnsucht that she mightserial study is so essential for interpretation that if yet visit “Philadelphia,” whose wondrous name had alwayswe really wish to reach conclusions we must use it. Ihaunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is said that “singlewords (as chalcedony), or the names of ancient heroes, hadwill begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no a mighty fascination over him. ‘At any time the word hermitspecial religious significance, and end with those ofwas enough to transport him.’ The words woods and forestswould produce the most powerful emotion.” Foster’s Life,by Ryland, New York, 1846, p. 3.368

William Jamesof light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, allbring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us canremember the strangely moving power of passagesin certain poems read when we were young, irrationaldoorways as they were through which the mysteryof fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stoleinto our hearts and thrilled them. The words havenow perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us;but lyric poetry and music are alive and significantonly in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas ofa life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting,yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or deadto the eternal inner message of the arts according aswe have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.A more pronounced step forward on the mysticalladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon,that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimessweeps over us, of having “been here before,” as if atsome indefinite past time, in just this place, with justthese people, we were already saying just thesethings. As Tennyson writes:“Moreover, something is or seemsThat touches me with mystic gleams,Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—“Of something felt, like something here;Of something done, I know not where;Such as no language may declare.”[226]“I have never had any revelations throughanaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance—this forlack of a better word—I have frequently had, quiteup from boyhood, when I have been all alone. Thishas come upon me through repeating my own nameto myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of theintensity of the consciousness of individuality, individualityitself seemed to dissolve and fade away intoboundless being, and this not a confused state butthe clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyondwords—where death was an almost laughable impos-[226] The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood,Tennyson reports of himself as follows:—369

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seemingno extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed perception which seems imminent but which neverduality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement ofof my feeble description. Have I not said the state is completes itself. In Dr. Crichton-Browne’s opinionutterly beyond words?”they connect themselves with the perplexed andProfessor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson sayingof this condition: “By God Almighty! there is no casionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that thisscared disturbances of self-consciousness which oc-delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist viewa state of transcendent wonder, associated with absoluteclearness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred lows it along the downward ladder, to insanity; ourof an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He fol-Tennyson, ii. 473.path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The divergenceshows how important it is to neglect no part ofSir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical a phenomenon’s connections, for we make it appearname of “dreamy states” to these sudden invasions admirable or dreadful according to the context byof vaguely reminiscent consciousness.[227] They which we set it off.bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousnessare met with in yet other dreamy states. Such[227] The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as feelings as these which Charles Kingsley describes arethe Cavendish Lecture, on Dreamy Mental States, surely far from being uncommon, especially inLondon, Bailliere, 1895. They have been a good deal youth:—discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example, “When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now andBernard-Leroy: L’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, then with an innate feeling that everything I see hasParis, 1898.370

William Jamesa meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feelingof being surrounded with truths which I cannot swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sen-to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual butgrasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes… . sation, and the multitudinous factors of experienceHave you not felt that your real soul was imperceptibleto your mental vision, except in a few hallowed Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinarywhich seem to qualify what we are pleased to call ourmoments?”[238]consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlyingor essential consciousness acquired inten-A much more extreme state of mystical consciousnessis described by J. A. Symonds; and probably sity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute,more persons than we suspect could give parallels to abstract Self. The universe became without form andit from their own experience.void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its“Suddenly,” writes Symonds, “at church, or in company,or when I was reading, and always, I think, reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence breakvivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt aboutwhen my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then?the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grimand will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappearedin a series of rapid sensations which resembled scious Self, the sense that I had followed the lastconviction that this state was the last state of the con-the awakening from anaesthetic influence. One reasonwhy I disliked this kind of trance was that I could arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion,thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and hadnot describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return toordinary conditions of sentient existence began by[238] Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by Inge: my first recovering the power of touch, and then byChristian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341.371

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressionsand diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once In a recital like this there is certainly something sug-reached?”[229]more a human being; and though the riddle of what gestive of pathology.[230] The next step into mysticalstates carries us into a realm that public opinionis meant by life remained unsolved I was thankfulfor this return from the abyss—this deliverance from and ethical philosophy have long since branded asso awful an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism. pathological, though private practice and certain lyric“This trance recurred with diminishing frequency strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality.I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxi-until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served toimpress upon my growing nature the phantasmal cants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. Theunreality of all the circumstances which contributeto a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have [229] H. F. Brown: J. A. Symonds. a Biography, London,1895, pp. 29-31, abridged.I asked myself with anguish, on waking from thatformless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, [230] Crichton-Browne expressly says thatWhich is the unreality—the trance of fiery, vacant, Symonds’s “highest nerve centres were in some degreeenfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mentalapprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, orthese surrounding phenomena and habits which veil states which afflicted him so grievously.” Symondsthat inner Self and build a self of flesh-and- blood was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebralefficiency, and his critic gives no objectiveconventionality? Again, are men the factors of somedream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save thatthey comprehend at such eventful moments? What Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptiblewould happen if the final stage of the trance were and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertaintyas to his life’s mission.372

William Jamessway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably dueto its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of humannature, usually crushed to earth by the cold factsand dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes,discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands,unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciterof the yes function in man. It brings its votaryfrom the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.It makes him for the moment one with truth. Notthrough mere perversity do men run after it. To thepoor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphonyconcerts and of literature; and it is part of thedeeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs andgleams of something that we immediately recognizeas excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of usonly in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totalityis so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousnessis one bit of the mystic consciousness, andour total opinion of it must find its place in our opinionof that larger whole.Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide,when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mysticalconsciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depthbeyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler.This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at themoment of coming to; and if any words remain overin which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to bethe veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of aprofound meaning having been there persists; and Iknow more than one person who is persuaded that inthe nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysicalrevelation.Some years ago I myself made some observationson this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reportedthem in print. One conclusion was forced uponmy mind at that time, and my impression of its truthhas ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normalwaking consciousness, rational consciousness aswe call it, is but one special type of consciousness,whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest ofscreens, there lie potential forms of consciousnessentirely different. We may go through life without373

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesuspecting their existence; but apply the requisite itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its oppositeinto itself. This is a dark saying, I know, whenstimulus, and at a touch they are there in all theircompleteness, definite types of mentality which probablysomewhere have their field of application and not wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it mustthus expressed in terms of common logic, but I can-adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality mean something, something like what the hegeliancan be final which leaves these other forms of consciousnessquite disregarded. How to regard them is clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear;philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it morethe question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinaryconsciousness. Yet they may determine atti-artificial mystic state of mind.[231]to me the living sense of its reality only comes in thetudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaestheticrevelation. For them too it is a monistic in-a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate,they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with sight, in which the other in its various forms appearsreality. Looking back on my own experiences, theyall converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannothelp ascribing some metaphysical significance. The of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up[231] What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sensekeynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy,the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness must have come from the prominence in his consciousnessof mystical moods like this, in most per-and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles,were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrastedspecies, belong to one and the same genus, acteristic of the mystical level and the Aufgabe ofsons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly char-but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is making it articulate was surely set to Hegel’s intellectby mystical feeling.374

William Jamesabsorbed into the One.“Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them,“we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thencefortheach is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, noother, than the life in which we are founded. ‘The Oneremains, the many change and pass;’ and each andevery one of us IS the One that remains… . This isthe ultimatum… . As sure as being—whence is all ourcare—so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis,or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitudethat God is not above.”[232][232] Benjamin Paul Blood: The Anaesthetic Revelationand the Gist of Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y.,1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made several attemptsto adumbrate the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphletsof rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributedby himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, aphilosopher, who died young at Amherst in the ‘80’s,much lamented by those who knew him, was alsoimpressed by the revelation. “In the first place,” heonce wrote to me, “Mr. Blood and I agree that therevelation is, if anything non-emotional. It is utterlyflat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, ‘the one sole and sufficientinsight why, or not why, but how, the present ispushed on by the past, and sucked forward by thevacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats allattempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedenceand presupposition, and questioning is in regardto it forever too late. It is an initiation of thepast.’ The real secret would be the formula by whichthe ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes.What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?The formal being of anything, the logical definitionof it, is static. For mere logic every questioncontains its own answer—we simply fill the hole withthe dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because,in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life nopropulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it isa-going. But the revelation adds: it goes because it isand was a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourselfin the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like ahound hunting his own tail. The more he hunts the375

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefarther he has to go, and his nose never catches upwith his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. Sothe present is already a foregone conclusion, and Iam ever too late to understand it. But at the momentof recovery from anaesthesis, just then, before startingon life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels,a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.The truth is that we travel on a journey that wasaccomplished before we set out; and the real end ofphilosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at,but when we remain in, our destination (being alreadythere)—which may occur vicariously in this life whenwe cease our intellectual questioning. That is whythere is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as weview it. It tells us that we are forever half a secondtoo late— that’s all. ‘You could kiss your own lips, andhave all the fun to yourself,’ it says, if you only knewthe trick. It would be perfectly easy if they wouldjust stay there till you got round to them. Why don’tyou manage it somehow?”Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will atleast recognize the region of thought of which Mr.Clark writes, as familiar. In his latest pamphlet,“Tennyson’s Trances and the Anaesthetic Revelation,”Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:—“The Anaesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Maninto the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret ofBeing, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity.Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent—itis what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor forjoy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, orpurpose, it knows not of.“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and varietyof things but it fills appreciation of the historicaland the sacred with a secular and intimately personalillumination of the nature and motive of existence,which then seems reminiscent—as if it should haveappeared, or shall yet appear, to every participantthereof.“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, itbecomes directly such a matter of course—so old-fash-376

William Jamesioned, and so akin to proverbs that it inspires exultationrather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identifiedwith the aboriginal and the universal. But nowords may express the imposing certainty of the patientthat he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surpriseof Life.“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same,and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subjectresumes his normal consciousness only to partiallyand fitfully remember its occurrence, and to tryto formulate its baffling import—with only this consolatoryafterthought: that he has known the oldesttruth, and that he has done with human theories asto the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He isbeyond instruction in ‘spiritual things.’“The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom iswithin. All days are judgment days: but there can beno climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme ofthe whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewilderingfigures by increasing his unit of measurement:so may we reduce the distracting multiplicityof things to the unity for which each of us stands.“This has been my moral sustenance since I haveknown of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared:‘The world is no more the alien terror thatwas taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and stillsultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thundersboomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against thenightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearlesseye.’ And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience,the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearlessstill, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration.I know—as having known—the meaning ofExistence: the sane centre of the universe— at oncethe wonder and the assurance of the soul—for whichthe speech of reason has as yet no name but the AnaestheticRevelation.” —I have considerably abridgedthe quotation.This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I justnow quoted J. A. Symonds. He also records a mysticalexperience with chloroform, as follows:—‘After the choking and stifling had passed away, I377

The Varieties of Religious Experienceseemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and thenflashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and to find that I had after all had no revelation, but thatwith a keen vision of what was going on in the room I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement ofaround me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that my brain.I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became “Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that theaware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my fleshhandling me, so to speak, in an intense personal was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinarysense of physical relations, was not a delusionpresent reality. I felt him streaming in like light uponme… . I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in thatgradually awoke from the influence of the moment, felt what some of the saints have said theyanaesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certaintyof God?”[233]began to return, the new sense of my relation to Godbegan to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair “I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, andwhere I was sitting, and shrieked out, ‘It is too horrible,it is too horrible, it is too horrible,’ meaning that ‘learn through suffering,’ and in view of what I waswhy I remembered having heard it said that peopleI could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me somyself on the ground, and at last awoke covered withblood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened),‘Why did you not kill me? Why would you not abridging it, another interesting anaesthetic revela-[233] Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, alsolet me die?’ Only think of it. To have felt for that long tion communicated to me in manuscript by a frienddateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was takingether for a surgical operation.378

William Jamesmuch that I said, aloud, ‘to suffer is to learn.’“With that I became unconscious again, and my lastdream immediately preceded my real coming to. Itonly lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid andreal to me, though it may not be clear in words.“A great Being or Power was traveling through thesky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is ona rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was madeentirely of the spirits of innumerable people close toone another, and I was one of them. He moved in astraight line, and each part of the streak or flash cameinto its short conscious existence only that he mighttravel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God,and I thought he was grinding his own life up out ofmy pain. Then I saw that what he had been tryingwith all his might to do was to change his course, tobend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in thedirection in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibilityand helplessness, and knew that he would succeed.He bended me, turning his corner by means ofmy hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurtin my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed,I saw. I understood for a moment things that I havenow forgotten, things that no one could rememberwhile retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle,and I remember thinking as I woke that had he madeit a right or acute angle, I should have both sufferedand ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.“He went on and I came to. In that moment thewhole of my life passed before me, including each littlemeaningless piece of distress, and I understood them.This was what it had all meant, this was the piece ofwork it had all been contributing to do. I did not seeGod’s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entirerelentlessness towards his means. He thought nomore of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork whenhe is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he isfiring. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and itcame with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna,’ for I hadbeen lifted into a position for which I was too small. Irealized that in that half hour under ether I had servedGod more distinctly and purely than I had ever done379

The Varieties of Religious Experiencein my life before, or than I am capable of desiring todo. I was the means of his achieving and revealingsomething, I know not what or to whom, and that, tothe exact extent of my capacity for suffering.“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why,since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of whatthe saints call the love of God, nothing but his relentlessness.And then I heard an answer, which I couldonly just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One,and the measure is suffering’—I give the words asthey came to me. With that I came finally to (intowhat seemed a dream world compared with the realityof what I was leaving), and I saw that what wouldbe called the ‘cause’ of my experience was a slightoperation under insufficient ether, in a bed pushedup against a window, a common city window in a commoncity street. If I had to formulate a few of thethings I then caught a glimpse of, they would runsomewhat as follows:—“The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternalvicariousness. The veiled and incommunicable natureof the worst sufferings;—the passivity of genius, howit is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved,not moving, it must do what it does;—the impossibilityof discovery without its price;—finally, the excessof what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over whathis generation gains. (He seems like one who sweatshis life out to earn enough to save a district from famine,and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied,bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God liftsthe lac away, dropping one rupee, and says, ‘Thatyou may give them. That you have earned for them.The rest is for me.’) I perceived also in a way neverto be forgotten, the excess of what we see over whatwe can demonstrate.“And so on!—these things may seem to you delusions,or truisms; but for me they are dark truths,and the power to put them into even such words asthese has been given me by an ether dream.”With this we make connection with religious mysticismpure and simple. Symonds’s question takes usback to those examples which you will remember my380

William Jamesquoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of this fact in many passages of great beauty—this extract,for example, from Amiel’s Journal Intime:—sudden realization of the immediate presence of God.The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.God until I stood at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls,“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity of what Iforce who has told me that many times when off duty, saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom tooand on his way home in the evening, there comes to small for the notice of Almighty God.”him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of InfinitePeace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems “In that time the consciousness of God’s nearnessas if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe whatbuoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reasonof this inflowing tide.”[234]too suggestive of personality, and the moments ofis indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that isCertain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality,but something in myself made me feel my-power of awakening such mystical moods.[235] Mostof the striking cases which I have collected have occurredout of doors. Literature has commemorated trolling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees,self a part of something bigger than I, that was con-birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the[234] In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the[235] The larger God may then swallow up the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the treetrunks,and so on. In the years following, such mo-smaller one. I take this from Starbuck’s manuscriptcollection:—381

The Varieties of Religious Experiencements continued to come, but I wanted them constantly.I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self ina perception of supreme power and love, that I wasunhappy because that perception was not constant.”The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp. 65, 66, 69,are still better ones of this type. In her essay, TheLoss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that thevanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediateunity with the object, is due to the disappearance,in these rapturous experiences, of the motoradjustments which habitually intermediate betweenthe constant background of consciousness(which is the Self) and the object in the foreground,whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to thehighly instructive article, which seems to me to throwlight upon the psychological conditions, though it failsto account for the rapture or the revelation-value ofthe experience in the Subject’s eyes.“Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reverieswhich sometimes came to me in former days?One day, in youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins ofthe castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains,under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the footof a tree and visited by three butterflies; once moreat night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean,my back upon the sand and my vision ranging throughthe Milky Way;—such grand and spacious, immortal,cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars,when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatichours; in which our thought flies from world to world,pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respirationbroad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of theocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; …instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one’sself great as the universe, and calm as a god… . Whathours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behindare enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm,as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost.”[236]Here is a similar record from the memoirs of thatinteresting German idealist, Malwida von[236] Op cit., i. 43-44.382

William JamesMeysenbug:—classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical“I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts experience.flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and nowagain, as once before in distant days in the Alps of “I believe in you, my Soul …Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from yourbefore the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I throat;…felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.knew now what prayer really is: to return from the I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summermorning.solitude of individuation into the consciousness ofunity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace andaway, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, knowledge that pass all the argument of theheaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encirclingharmony. It was as if the chorus of all the And I know that the hand of God is the promise ofearth,great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myselfone with them, and it appeared as if I heard their And I know that the spirit of God is the brother ofmy own,greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those my own,who overcome.’”[237]And that all the men ever born are also my brothersand the women my sisters and lovers,The well known passage from Walt Whitman is aAnd that a kelson of the creation is love.”[238][237] Memoiren einer Idealistin, Ste Auflage, 1900, [238] Whitman in another place expresses in a quieterway what was probably with him a chronic mys-iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owingto materialistic belief.383

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetical perception: “There is,” he writes, “apart frommere intellect, in the make-up of every superior humanidentity, a wondrous something that realizeswithout argument, frequently without what is callededucation (though I think it the goal and apex of alleducation deserving the name), an intuition of theabsolute balance, in time and space, of the whole ofthis multifariousness this revel of fools, and incrediblemake-believe and general unsettiedness, we callthe world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseenthread which holds the whole congeries of things, allhistory and time, and all events, however trivial, howevermomentous, like a leashed dog in the hand ofthe hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre forthe mind mere optimism explains only the surface.”Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked thisperception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia,1882, p. 174.I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice.I take it from the Autobiography of J.Trevor.[239]“One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boyswent to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt itimpossible to accompany them—as though to leavethe sunshine on the hills, and go down there to thechapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide.And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansionin my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, Ileft my wife and boys to go down into the town, whileI went further up into the hills with my stick and mydog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beautyof the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadnessand regret. For nearly an hour I walked alongthe road to the ‘Cat and Fiddle,’ and then returned.On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I feltthat I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace andjoy and assurance indescribably intense, accompa-384[239] My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269,abridged.

William Jamesnied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow oflight, as though the external condition had broughtabout the internal effect—a feeling of having passedbeyond the body, though the scene around me stoodout more clearly and as if nearer to me than before,by reason of the illumination in the midst of which Iseemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, thoughwith decreasing strength, until I reached home, andfor some time after, only gradually passing away.”The writer adds that having had further experiencesof a similar sort, he now knows them well.“The spiritual life,” he writes, “justifies itself to thosewho live it; but what can we say to those who do notunderstand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a lifewhose experiences are proved real to their possessor,because they remain with him when brought closestinto contact with the objective realities of life. Dreamscannot stand this test. We wake from them to find thatthey are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwroughtbrain do not stand this test. These highest experiencesthat I have had of God’s presence have been rare andbrief—flashes of consciousness which have compelledme to exclaim with surprise—God is here!—or conditionsof exaltation and insight, less intense, and onlygradually passing away. I have severely questionedthe worth of these moments. To no soul have I namedthem, lest I should be building my life and work onmere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after everyquestioning and test, they stand out to-day as themost real experiences of my life, and experiences whichhave explained and justified and unified all past experiencesand all past growth. Indeed, their reality andtheir far-reaching significance are ever becoming moreclear and evident. When they came, I was living thefullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seekingthem. What I was seeking, with resolute determination,was to live more intensely my own life, asagainst what I knew would be the adverse judgmentof the world. It was in the most real seasons that theReal Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersedin the infinite ocean of God.”[240][240] Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.385

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceEven the least mystical of you must by this time be moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation,elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of theconvinced of the existence of mystical moments asstates of consciousness of an entirely specific quality, moral sense, which is fully as striking, and more importantthan is the enhanced intellectual power. Withand of the deep impression which they make on thosewho have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. these come what may be called a sense of immortality,a consciousness of eternal life, not a convictionBucke, gives to the more distinctly characterized ofthese phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he“Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances has it already.”[241]is not,” Dr. Bucke says, “simply an expansion or extensionof the self-conscious mind with which we are set of cosmic consciousness in his own person whichIt was Dr. Bucke’s own experience of a typical on-all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinctfrom any possessed by the average man as self-conclusions In a highly interesting volume, from whichled him to investigate it in others. He has printed hisconsciousness is distinct from any function possessed I take the following account of what occurred to him:—by one of the higher animals.”“I had spent the evening in a great city, with two“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy.We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in ais a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the lifeand order of the universe. Along with the consciousnessof the cosmos there occurs an intellectual en-influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called uphansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under thelightenment which alone would place the individual by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I wason a new plane of existence—would make him almosta member of a new species. To this is added a state of [241] Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolutionof the human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.386

William Jamesin a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actuallythinking, but letting ideas, images, and emo-all is in the long run absolutely certain. The visionwhat we call love, and that the happiness of each andtions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memoryAll at once, without warning of any kind, I found myselfwrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant remained during the quarter of a century which hasof it and the sense of the reality of what it taught hasI thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhereclose by in that great city; the next, I knew was true. I had attained to a point of view from whichsince elapsed. I knew that what the vision showedthat the fire was within myself. Directly afterward I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction,I may say that consciousness, has never, eventhere came upon me a sense of exultation, of immensejoyousness accompanied or immediately followed by during periods of the deepest depression, beenan intellectual illumination impossible to describe. lost.”[242]Among other things, I did not merely come to believe,but I saw that the universe is not composed of consciousness, as it comes sporadically. We must nextWe have now seen enough of this cosmic or mysticdead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence;I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, andpass to its methodical cultivation as an element of thewas not a conviction that I would have eternal life, Christians all have cultivated it methodically.but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; In India, training in mystical insight has been knownI saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic orderis such that without any peradventure all things [242] Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privatelyprinted pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’swork together for the good of each and all; that thefoundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is larger work, and differs verbally a little from the textof the latter.387

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefrom time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless,bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its fullmeans the experimental union of the individual withthe divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and effulgence, and we know ourselves—for Samadhi liesthe diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration,and moral discipline vary slightly in the differmortal,omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and itspotential in us all—for what we truly are, free, imentsystems which teach it. The yogi, or disciple, who contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identicalhas by these means overcome the obscurations of his with the Atman or Universal Soul.”[243]lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition The Vedantists say that one may stumble intotermed samadhi, “and comes face to face with facts superconsciousness sporadically, without the previousdiscipline, but it is then impure. Their test of itswhich no instinct or reason can ever know.” Helearns—purity, like our test of religion’s value, is empirical:“That the mind itself has a higher state of existence,beyond reason, a superconscious state, and that out of Samadhi, they assure us that he remains “en-its fruits must be good for life. When a man comeswhen the mind gets to that higher state, then this lightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole charknowledgebeyond reasoning comes… . All the differentsteps in yoga are intended to bring us scientificallyto the superconscious state or Samadhi… . Justas unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so [243] My quotations are from Vivekananda, Rajathere is another work which is above consciousness, Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of informationon Yoga is the work translated by Vihari Lalaand which, also, is not accompanied with the feelingof egoism … . There is no feeling of I, and yet the Mtra: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana. 4 vols.Calcutta, 1891-99.388

William Jamesacter changed, his life changed, illumined.”[244] tual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unityThe Buddhists used the word “samadhi” as well as remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs,the Hindus; but “dhyana” is their special word for and indifference begins, along with memory a selfconsciousness.In the fourth stage the indifference,higher states of contemplation. There seem to be fourstages recognized in dhyana. The first stage comes memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. [Justthrough concentration of the mind upon one point. It what “memory” and “self-consciousness” mean in thisexcludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it connection is doubtful. They cannot be the facultiesis still intellectual. In the second stage the intellec-familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher stages still ofcontemplation are mentioned—a region where there[244] A European witness, after carefully comparing exists nothing, and where the mediator says: “Therethe results of Yoga with those of the hypnotic or exists absolutely nothing,” and stops. Then he reachesdreamy states artificially producible by us, says: “It another region where he says: “There are neithermakes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy ideas nor absence of ideas,” and stops again. Thenmen… . Through the mastery which the yogi attains another region where, “having reached the end ofover his thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’By the subjection of his impulses and propen-seem to be, not yet Nirvana, but as close an approachboth idea and perception, he stops finally.” This wouldsities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the to it as this life affords.[245]ideal of goodness, he becomes a ‘personality’ hard to In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and variousdervish bodies are the possessors of the mysti-influence by others, and thus almost the opposite ofwhat we usually imagine a medium so-called, or psychicsubject to be. Karl Kellner: Yoga: Eine Skizze, [245] I follow the account in C. F. Koeppen: Die Religiondes Buddha, Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.Munchen, 1896, p. 21.389

The Varieties of Religious Experiencecal tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from Ghazzali’s autobiography into French:[246]—the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at “The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author,variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God,Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditationhave been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. of the divine being. Theory being more easy for meWe Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets than practice, I read [certain books] until I understoodall that can be learned by study and hearsay.are disclosed only to those initiated. To give its existencea certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusivelyto their method is just what no study can grasp,a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformationAl-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, of the soul. How great, for example, is the differencewho flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety,one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem church, has with their causes and conditions, and being reallyleft us one of the few autobiographies to be found healthy or filled. How different to know in whatoutside of Christian literature. Strange that a species drunkenness consists—as being a state occasioned byof book so abundant among ourselves should be so a vapor that rises from the stomach—and being drunklittle represented elsewhere—the absence of strictly effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knowspersonal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makesliterary student who would like to become acquaintedwith the inwardness of religions other than the Christian.M. Schmolders has translated a part of Al- The Life Of Al-Ghazzali, in the Journal of the Ameri-[246] For a full account of him, see D. B. Macdonald:can Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx., p. 71.390

William Jamesit interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing;whilst the physician, although not drunk knowswell in what drunkenness consists, and what are itspredisposing conditions. Similarly there is a differencebetween knowing the nature of abstinence, andbeing abstinent or having one’s soul detached fromthe world.—Thus I had learned what words couldteach of Sufism, but what was left could be learnedneither by study nor through the ears, but solely bygiving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.“Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied downby a multitude of bonds—temptations on every side.Considering my teaching, I found it was impure beforeGod. I saw myself struggling with all my mightto achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here followsan account of his six months’ hesitation to breakaway from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at theend of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.]Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirelygiven up my own will, I repaired to God like a man indistress who has no more resources. He answered,as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heartno longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory,wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, andreserving from my fortune only what was indispensablefor my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I wentto Syria, where I remained about two years, with noother occupation than living in retreat and solitude,conquering my desires, combating my passions, trainingmyself to purify my soul, to make my characterperfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God—all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had readof them.“This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude,and to complete the purification of my heartand fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudes of thetimes, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence,changed in some respects my primitive resolve,and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life.I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy,save in a few single hours; nevertheless, I kept thehope of attaining this state. Every time that the acci-391

The Varieties of Religious Experiencedents led me astray, I sought to return; and in thissituation I spent ten years. During this solitary statethings were revealed to me which it is impossible eitherto describe or to point out. I recognized for certainthat the Sufis are assuredly walking in the pathof God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whetherinternal or external, they are illumined by the lightwhich proceeds from the prophetic source. The firstcondition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of allthat is not God. The next key of the contemplativelife consists in the humble prayers which escape fromthe fervent soul, and in the meditations on God inwhich the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in realitythis is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end ofSufism being total absorption in God. The intuitionsand all that precede are, so to speak, only the thresholdfor those who enter. From the beginning revelationstake place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufissee before them, whilst wide awake, the angels andthe souls of the prophets. They hear their voices andobtain their favors. Then the transport rises from theperception of forms and figures to a degree whichescapes all expression, and which no man may seekto give an account of without his words involving sin.“Whosoever has had no experience of the transportknows of the true nature of prophetism nothingbut the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence,both by experience and by what he hears theSufis say. As there are men endowed only with thesensitive faculty who reject what is offered them inthe way of objects of the pure understanding, so thereare intellectual men who reject and avoid the thingsperceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man canunderstand nothing of colors save what he has learnedby narration and hearsay. Yet God has broughtprophetism near to men in giving them all a stateanalogous to it in its principal characters. This stateis sleep. If you were to tell a man who was himselfwithout experience of such a phenomenon that thereare people who at times swoon away so as to resembledead men, and who [in dreams] yet perceive thingsthat are hidden, he would deny it [and give his rea-392

sons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refutedby actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understandingis a stage of human life in which an eye opensto discern various intellectual objectsuncomprehended by sensation; just so in the propheticthe sight is illumined by a light which uncovershidden things and objects which the intellect failsto reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptibleonly during the transport, by those who embracethe Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualitiesto which you possess nothing analogous, and whichconsequently you cannot possibly understand.How should you know their true nature, since oneknows only what one can comprehend? But the transportwhich one attains by the method of the Sufis islike an immediate perception, as if one touched theobjects with one’s hand.”[247]This incommunicableness of the transport is thekeynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the[247] A. Schmolders: Essai sur les ecolesphilosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged.William James393individual who has the transport, but for no one else.In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledgegiven to us in sensations more than that given by conceptualthought. Thought, with its remoteness andabstractness, has often enough in the history of philosophybeen contrasted unfavorably with sensation.It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God’sknowledge cannot be discursive but must be intuitive,that is, must be constructed more after the patternof what in ourselves is called immediate feeling,than after that of proposition and judgment. But ourimmediate feelings have no content but what the fivesenses supply; and we have seen and shall see againthat mystics may emphatically deny that the sensesplay any part in the very highest type of knowledgewhich their transports yield.In the Christian church there have always beenmystics. Although many of them have been viewedwith suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes ofthe authorities. The experiences of these have beentreated as precedents, and a codified system of mys-

tical theology has been based upon them, in whicheverything legitimate finds its place.[248] The basisof the system is “orison” or meditation, the methodicalelevation of the soul towards God. Through thepractice of orison the higher levels of mystical experiencemay be attained. It is odd that Protestantism,especially evangelical Protestantism, should seeminglyhave abandoned everything methodical in thisline. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestantmystical experience appears to have been almostexclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mindcurersto reintroduce methodical meditation into ourreligious life.The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’sdetachment from outer sensations, for these interferewith its concentration upon ideal things. SuchThe Varieties of Religious Experiencemanuals as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommendthe disciple to expel sensation by a graduatedseries of efforts to imagine holy scenes. The acmeof this kind of discipline would be a semi-hallucinatorymono-ideism—an imaginary figure of Christ, forexample, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorialimages of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, playan enormous part in mysticism.[249] But in certaincases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the veryhighest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousnessbecomes then insusceptible of any verbaldescription. Mystical teachers are unanimous as tothis. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of thebest of them, thus describes the condition called the“union of love,” which, he says, is reached by “dark[249] M. ReCeJac, in a recent volume, makes them[248] Gorres’s Christliche Mystik gives a full account essential. Mysticism he defines as “the tendency toof the facts. So does Ribet’s Mystique Divine, 2 vols., draw near to the Absolute morally and by the aid ofParis, 1890. A still more methodical modern work is symbols.” See his Fondements de la Connaissancemystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionablymystical conditions in which sensible sym-the Mystica Theologia of Vallgornera, 2 vols., Turin,1890.bols play no part.394

William Jamescontemplation.” In this the Deity compenetrates thesoul, but in such a hidden way that the soul—“finds no terms, no means, no comparison wherebyto render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacyof the spiritual feeling with which she is filled… .We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed innone of the kinds of images, in none of the sensiblerepresentations, which our mind makes use of in othercircumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, sincethe senses and the imagination are not employed, weget neither form nor impression, nor can we give anyaccount or furnish any likeness, although the mysteriousand sweet-tasting wisdom comes home soclearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a manseeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in hislife. He can understand it, use and enjoy it, but hecannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any ideaof it, even though all the while it be a mere thing ofsense. How much greater will be his powerlessnesswhen it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarityof the divine language. The more infused, intimate,spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceedthe senses, both inner and outer, and imposesilence upon them… .The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profoundsolitude, to which no created thing has access,in an immense and boundless desert, desert the moredelicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyssof wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in fromthe well-springs of the comprehension of love, … andrecognizes, however sublime and learned may be theterms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, andimproper they are, when we seek to discourse of divinethings by their means.”[250][250] Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of theSoul, book ii. ch. xvii., in Vie et Oeuvres, 3me edition,Paris, 1893, iii. 428-432. Chapter xi. of book ii. of SaintJohn’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing theharmfulness for the mystical life of the use of sensibleimagery.395

I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stagesof the Christian mystical life.[251] Our time wouldnot suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess thatthe subdivisions and names which we find in theCatholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectivelydistinct. So many men, so many minds: Iimagine that these experiences can be as infinitelyvaried as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.The cognitive aspects of them, their value in theway of revelation, is what we are directly concernedwith, and it is easy to show by citation how strong animpression they leave of being revelations of newdepths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of expertsThe Varieties of Religious Experiencein describing such conditions, so I will turn immediatelyto what she says of one of the highest of them,the “orison of union.”“In the orison of union,” says Saint Teresa, “the soulis fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep asregards things of this world and in respect of herself.During the short time the union lasts, she is as it weredeprived of every feeling, and even if she would, shecould not think of any single thing. Thus she needs toemploy no artifice in order to arrest the use of her understanding:it remains so stricken with inactivity thatshe neither knows what she loves, nor in what mannershe loves, nor what she wills. In short, she is utterlydead to the things of the world and lives solely in[251] In particular I omit mention of visual and auditoryhallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms,God… . I do not even know whether in this state sheand such marvels as “levitation,” stigmatization, andhas enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she hasthe healing of disease. These phenomena, which mysticshave often presented (or are believed to have of it. Her intellect would fain understand something ofnot; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unawarepresented), have no essential mystical significance,what is going on within her, but it has so little forcefor they occur with no consciousness of illuminationwhatever, when they occur, as they often do, in personsof non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumi-who falls into a deep faint appears as if dead… .now that it can act in no way whatsoever. So a personnation is for us the essential mark of “mystical” states.396

William James“Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with presence, by power, or by essence, but who, afterhimself, suspend the natural action of all her faculties.She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long believed this truth in the most unshakable manner.having received the grace of which I am speaking,as she is united with God. But this time is always short, So much so that, having consulted a half-learned manand it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes who was as ignorant on this point as she had beenhimself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that before she was enlightened, when he replied that Godwhen she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible is in us only by ‘grace,’ she disbelieved his reply, sofor her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in sure she was of the true answer; and when she cameher. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her to ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief,which much consoled her… .that, even though many years should pass withoutthe condition returning, she can neither forget the “But how, you will repeat, can one have such certaintyin respect to what one does not see? This ques-favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can tion, I am powerless to answer. These are secrets ofsee and understand that she has been in God, since God’s omnipotence which it does not appertain to meduring the union she has neither sight nor understanding,I reply that she does not see it then, but and I shall never believe that any soul who does notto penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth;that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned possess this certainty has ever been really united toto herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which God.”[252]abides with her and which God alone can give her. The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways,I knew a person who was ignorant of the truth thatGod’s mode of being in everything must be either by [252] The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, Ch. i., inOeuvres, translated by Bouix, iii. 421-424.397

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhether these be sensible or supersensible, are various.Some of them relate to this world—visions of thei. 34-36. Others have had illuminations about the createdworld, Jacob Boehme for instance. At the age oftwenty-five he was “surrounded by the divine light,future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understandingof texts, the knowledge of distant events, for ex-insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green,and replenished with the heavenly knowledge,ample; but the most important revelations are theologicalor metaphysical.at Gorlitz, he there sat down and viewing the herbsand grass of the field, in his inward light he saw intotheir essences, use, and properties, which was discoveredto him by their lineaments, figures, and sig-“Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynezthat a single hour of meditation at Manresa had taught natures.” Of a later period of experience he writes:him more truths about heavenly things than all the “In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more thanif I had been many years together at an university.teachings of all the doctors put together could haveFor I saw and knew the being of all things, the Bysstaught him… . One day in orison, on the steps of the and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holychoir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct Trinity, the descent and original of the world and ofmanner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew andsaw in myself all the three worlds, the external andthe world. On another occasion, during a procession,visible world being of a procreation or extern birthhis spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I sawto contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the and knew the whole working essence, in the evil andweak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the in the good, and the mutual original and existence,and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternitybrought forth. So that I did not only greatly won-deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last visionflooded his heart with such sweetness, that the mere der at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I couldmemory of it in after times made him shed abundant very hardly apprehend the same in my external mantears.”[253]and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough[253] Bartoli-Michel: vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things398

are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible forme to explicate the same.” Jacob Behmen’sTheosophic Philosophy, etc., by Edward Taylor, London,1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged.So George Fox: “I was come up to the state of Adamin which he was before he fell. The creation wasopened to me; and it was showed me, how all thingshad their names given to them, according to theirnature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind,whether I should practice physic for the good of mankind,seeing the nature and virtues of the creatureswere so opened to me by the Lord.” Journal, Philadelphia,no date, p. 69. Contemporary “Clairvoyance”abounds in similar revelations. Andrew JacksonDavis’s cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiencesrelated in the delectable “Reminiscences andMemories of Henry Thomas Butterworth,” Lebanon,Ohio, 1886.Similarly with Saint Teresa. “One day, being inorison,” she writes, “it was granted me to perceive inone instant how all things are seen and contained inGod. I did not perceive them in their proper form,and nevertheless the view I had of them was of a sovereignclearness, and has remained vividly impressedWilliam James399upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all thegraces which the Lord has granted me… . The viewwas so subtile and delicate that the understandingcannot grasp it.”[254]She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were anenormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in whichall our actions were contained in such a way that theirfull sinfulness appeared evident as never before. Onanother day, she relates, while she was reciting theAthanasian Creed—“Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it isthat one God can be in three persons. He made mesee it so clearly that I remained as extremely surprisedas I was comforted, … and now, when I thinkof the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understandhow the three adorable Persons form only one Godand I experience an unspeakable happiness.”On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresato see and understand in what wise the Mother ofGod had been assumed into her place in Heaven.[255][254] Vie, pp. 581, 582.[255] Loc. cit., p. 574.

The Varieties of Religious Experience[258] Saint Teresa discriminates between pain inwhich the body has a part and pure spiritual pain (InteriorCastle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As for the bodilypart in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as “penetratingto the marrow of the bones, whilst earthlypleasures affect only the surface of the senses. I think,”she adds, “that this is a just description, and I cannotmake it better.” Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i. [257] Vie, p. 198.400The deliciousness of some of these states seems tobe beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness.It evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spokenof as something too extreme to be borne, and asverging on bodily pain.[256] But it is too subtle andpiercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God’stouches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebrietyand to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseologyby which it is shadowed forth. Intellect andsenses both swoon away in these highest states ofecstasy. “If our understanding comprehends,” saysSaint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains unknownto it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends.For my own part, I do not believe that itdoes comprehend, because, as I said, it does not understanditself to do so. I confess that it is all a mysteryin which I am lost.”[257] In the condition calledraptus or ravishment by theologians, breathing andcirculation are so depressed that it is a question amongthe doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarilydissevered from the body. One must read SaintTeresa’s descriptions and the very exact distinctionswhich she makes, to persuade one’s self that one isdealing, not with imaginary experiences, but withphenomena which, however rare, follow perfectlydefinite psychological types.To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothingbut suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectualbasis of superstition, and a corporeal one ofdegeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathologicalconditions have existed in many and possiblyin all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing aboutthe value for knowledge of the consciousness whichthey induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon thesestates, we must not content ourselves with superfi-

William Jamescial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life.Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction,for one thing, seems not to have been altogetherabsent as a result. You may remember thehelplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poorMargaret Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics wouldhave perished but for the care taken of them by admiringfollowers. The “other-worldliness” encouragedby the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstractionfrom practical life peculiarly liable to befallmystics in whom the character is naturally passiveand the intellect feeble; but in natively strong mindsand characters we find quite opposite results. Thegreat Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasyas far as it has often been carried, appear forthe most part to have shown indomitable spirit andenergy, and all the more so for the trances in whichthey indulged.Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism madehim assuredly one of the most powerfully practicalhuman engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross,writing of the intuitions and “touches” by which Godreaches the substance of the soul, tells us that—“They enrich it marvelously. A single one of themmay be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfectionsof which the soul during its whole life hadvainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned withvirtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A singleone of these intoxicating consolations may reward itfor all the labors undergone in its life—even were theynumberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filledwith an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, thesoul then is seized with a strange torment—that ofnot being allowed to suffer enough.”[258]Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed.You may perhaps remember a passage Iquoted from her in my first lecture.[259] There aremany similar pages in her autobiography. Where inliterature is a more evidently veracious account ofthe formation of a new centre of spiritual energy, than[258] Oeuvres, ii. 320.[259] Above, p. 22.401

The Varieties of Religious Experienceis given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasieswhich in departing leave the soul upon a higherlevel of emotional excitement?“Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful painsbefore the ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full ofhealth and admirably disposed for action … as if Godhad willed that the body itself, already obedient tothe soul’s desires, should share in the soul’s happiness…. The soul after such a favor is animated with adegree of courage so great that if at that moment itsbody should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, itwould feel nothing but the liveliest comfort. Then itis that promises and heroic resolutions spring up inprofusion in us, soaring desires, horror of the world,and the clear perception of our proper nothingness…. What empire is comparable to that of a soul who,from this sublime summit to which God has raisedher, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, andis captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she isof her former attachments! How amazed at her blindness!What lively pity she feels for those whom sherecognizes still shrouded in the darkness! … Shegroans at having ever been sensitive to points ofhonor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honorwhat the world calls by that name. Now she sees inthis name nothing more than an immense lie of whichthe world remains a victim. She discovers, in the newlight from above, that in genuine honor there is nothingspurious, that to be faithful to this honor is to giveour respect to what deserves to be respected really,and to consider as nothing, or as less than nothing,whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God… .She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons oforison, caring for points of honor for which she nowfeels profoundest contempt. It is suitable to the dignityof their rank to act thus, they pretend, and itmakes them more useful to others. But she knowsthat in despising the dignity of their rank for the purelove of God they would do more good in a single daythan they would effect in ten years by preserving it…. She laughs at herself that there should ever havebeen a time in her life when she made any case of402

William Jamesmoney, when she ever desired it… . Oh! if humanbeings might only agree together to regard it as somuch useless mud, what harmony would then reignin the world! With what friendship we would all treateach other if our interest in honor and in money couldbut disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel asif it would be a remedy for all our ills.”[260]Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soulmore energetic in the lines which their inspirationfavors. But this could be reckoned an advantage onlyin case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspirationwere erroneous, the energy would be all the moremistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once morebefore that problem of truth which confronted us atthe end of the lectures on saintliness. You will rememberthat we turned to mysticism precisely to get somelight on truth. Do mystical states establish the truthof those theological affections in which the saintly lifehas its root?In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description,mystical states in general assert a prettydistinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give the outcomeof the majority of them in terms that point indefinite philosophical directions. One of these directionsis optimism, and the other is monism. We passinto mystical states from out of ordinary consciousnessas from a less into a more, as from a smallnessinto a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrestto a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifyingstates. They appeal to the yes-function more than tothe no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbsthe limits and peacefully closes the account. Theirvery denial of every adjective you may propose asapplicable to the ultimate truth—He, the Self, theAtman, is to be described by “No! no!” only, say theUpanishads[261]—though it seems on the surface tobe a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of adeeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular,or says that it is this, seems implicitly to shutit off from being this—it is as if he lessened it. So we[260] Vie, pp. 229, 230, 231-233, 243. [261] Muller’s translation, part ii. p. 180.403

deny the “this,” negating the negation which it seemsto us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmativeattitude by which we are possessed. The fountain-headof Christian mysticism is Dionysius theAreopagite.He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively.“The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect;nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence;nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spokenor thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude,nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, norsimilarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, normoves, nor rests… . It is neither essence, nor eternity,nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belongto it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not evenroyalty or wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity orgoodness; nor even spirit as we know it,” etc., ad libitum.[262][262] T. Davidson’s translation, in Journal of SpeculativePhilosophy, 1893, vol. xxii., p. 399.The Varieties of Religious ExperienceBut these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, notbecause the truth falls short of them, but because itso infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is super-lucent,super-splendent, super-essential, supersublime,super everything that can be named. LikeHegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positivepole of truth only by the “Methode der AbsolutenNegativitat.”[263]Thus come the paradoxical expressions that soabound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells ofthe still desert of the Godhead, “where never was seendifference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost,where there is no one at home, yet where the sparkof the soul is more at peace than in itself.”[264] Aswhen Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that “it mayfitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper thanany Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things,[263] “Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihilvocatur.” Scotus Erigena, quoted by Andrew Seth:Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55.[264] J. Royce: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.404

forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any of them.And because it is nothing respectively, it is thereforefree from all things, and is that only good, which aman cannot express or utter what it is, there beingnothing to which it may be compared, to express itby.”[265] Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:—“Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn ruhrt kein Nun nochHier;Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind erdir.”[266]To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation asa mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation,there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterpartsin the sphere of the personal will. Since denialof the finite self and its wants, since asceticism ofsome sort, is found in religious experience to be the[265] Jacob Bellmen’s Dialogues on the Supersensual Life,translated by Bernard Holland, London, 1901, p. 48.[266] Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.William Jamesonly doorway to the larger and more blessed life, thismoral mystery intertwines and combines with theintellectual mystery in all mystical writings.“Love,” continues Behmen, is Nothing, for “whenthou art gone forth wholly from the Creature and fromthat which is visible, and art become Nothing to allthat is Nature and Creature, then thou art in thateternal One, which is God himself, and then thou shaltfeel within thee the highest virtue of Love… . Thetreasure of treasures for the soul is where she goethout of the Somewhat into that Nothing out of whichall things may be made. The soul here saith, I havenothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked; I cando nothing, for I have no manner of power, but amas water poured out; I am nothing, for all that I am isno more than an image of Being, and only God is tome I AM; and so, sitting down in my own Nothingness,I give glory to the eternal Being, and will nothingof myself, that so God may will all in me, beingunto me my God and all things.”[267][267] Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.405

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIn Paul’s language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of thein me. Only when I become as nothing can God enter Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions,and I did not find him on my path. To-dayin and no difference between his life and mine remainoutstanding.[268]he is with me; and the light cloudiness which covers“Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. things is not an obstacle to my communion with him.It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a I feel the pressure of his hand, I feel something elsesort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life! life which becomeseach day more luminous… . The wall before it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I ex-which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare to speakme, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour perience. The Holy Spirit is not merely making me abecause the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may fromthey light up a conflagration of glory; the smallest one moment to another spread its wings and leavespeck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; me in my night, it is a permanent habitation. He caneven so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart depart only if he takes me with him. More than that;because the Lord is there. My days succeed each he is not other than myself: he is one with me. It isother; yesterday a blue sky; to day a clouded sun; a not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profoundnight filled with strange dreams; but as soon as the modification of my nature, a new manner of my being.”Quoted from the ms. of an old man by Wilfredeyes open, and I regain consciousness and seem tobegin life again, it is always the same figure before Monod: II Vit: six meditations sur le mystereme, always the same presence filling my heart… . chretien, pp. 280-283.This overcoming of all the usual barriers between[268] From a French book I take this mystical expressionof happiness in God’s indwelling presence:—the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic406

William Jamesachievement. In mystic states we both become onewith the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.This is the everlasting and triumphant mysticaltradition, hardly altered by differences of clime orcreed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, inChristian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find thesame recurring note, so that there is about mysticalutterances an eternal unanimity which ought to makea critic stop and think, and which brings it about thatthe mystical classics have, as has been said, neitherbirthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of theunity of man with God, their speech antedates languages,and they do not grow old.[269]“That art Thou!” say the Upanishads, and theVedantists add: “Not a part, not a mode of That, butidentically That, that absolute Spirit of the World.”“As pure water poured into pure water remains thesame, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker whoknows. Water in water, fire in fire, ether in ether, noone can distinguish them: likewise a man whose mindhas entered into the Self.”[270] “‘Every man,’ saysthe Sufi Gulshan-Raz, whose heart is no longer shakenby any doubt, knows with certainty that there is nobeing save only One… . In his divine majesty the me,and we, the thou, are not found, for in the One therecan be no distinction. Every being who is annulledand entirely separated from himself, hears resoundoutside of him this voice and this echo: I am God: hehas an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subjectto death.’”[271] In the vision of God, saysPlotinus, “what sees is not our reason, but somethingprior and superior to our reason… . He who thus seesdoes not properly see, does not distinguish or imaginetwo things. He changes, he ceases to be himself,preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, hemakes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coin-[269] Compare M. Maeterlinck: L’Ornement des [270] Upanishads, M. Muller’s translation, ii. 17, 334.Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, [271] Schmolders: Op. cit., p. 210.Introduction, p. xix.407

The Varieties of Religious Experienceciding with another centre.”[272] “Here,” writes Suso, nature of Dharana… . When to himself his form appearsunreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in“the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels ofthe Godhead … and is lost in the stillness of the gloriousdazzling obscurity and of the naked simple unity. may discern the one—the inner sound which kills thedreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, heIt is in this modeless where that the highest bliss is outer… . For then the soul will hear, and will remember.And then to the inner ear will speak the voice ofto be found.”[273] “Ich bin so gross als Gott,” singsAngelus Silesius again, “Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann the silence… . And now thy self is lost in self, thyselfnicht uber mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein.”[274] unto thyself, merged in that self from which thou firstIn mystical literature such self-contradictory didst radiate… . Behold! thou hast become the Light,phrases as “dazzling obscurity,” “whispering silence,” thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and“teeming desert,” are continually met with. They thy God. Thou art theyself the object of thy search:prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, the voice unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities,exempt from change, from sin exempt, theis the element through which we are best spoken toby mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeedlittle more than musical compositions.Sat.”[275]seven sounds in one, the voice of the silence. Om tat“He who would hear the voice of Nada, ‘the SoundlessSound,’ and comprehend it, he has to learn the receive them, probably stir chords within you whichThese words, if they do not awaken laughter as youmusic and language touch in common. Music gives us[272] Enneads, Bouillier’s translation. Paris, 1861, iii.ontological messages which non-musical criticism is561. Compare pp. 473-477, and vol. i. p. 27.unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our fool-[273] Autobiography, pp. 309, 310.[274] Op. cit., Strophe 10. [275] H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence.408

William Jamesishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind is not so much future as already now and here, whichwhich these things haunt; and whispers therefrom we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophiccircles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” ormingle with the operations of our understanding, evenas the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves an “amen,” which floats up from that mysteriouslyto break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. deeper level.[277] We recognize the passwords to themystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use“Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s them ourselves; it alone has the keeping of “the passwordprimeval.”[278]end. Where we stand,Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency,but as fairly as I am able in the time al-these waves that gleam,We should know what never man hath known, nor lowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness.It is on the whole pantheistic and opti-eye of man hath scanned… .Ah, but here man’s heart leaps, yearning towards mistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is antinaturalistic,and harmonizes best with twice-bornnessthe gloom with venturous glee,From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in and so-called other-worldly states mind.all the sea.”[276][277] Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quotedThat doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless,that our “immortality,” if we live in the eternal, [278] As serious an attempt as I know to mediateon pp. 398, 399.between the mystical region and the discursive life is[276] Swinburne: On the Verge, in “A Midsummer contained in an article on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover,vacation.”by F. C. S. Schiller, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900.409

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceMy next task is to inquire whether we can invoke itas authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for thetruth of the twice-bornness and supernaturality andpantheism which it favors?I must give my answer to this question as conciselyas I can. In brief my answer is this—and I will divideit into three parts:—(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are,and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative overthe individuals to whom they come.(2) No authority emanates from them which shouldmake it a duty for those who stand outside of them toaccept their revelations uncritically.(3) They break down the authority of the non-mysticalor rationalistic consciousness, based upon theunderstanding and the senses alone. They show it tobe only one kind of consciousness.They open out the possibility of other orders oftruth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally respondsto them, we may freely continue to have faith.I will take up these points one by one.1. As a matter of psychological fact, mystical statesof a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usuallyauthoritative over those who have them.[279] Theyhave been “there,” and know. It is vain for rationalismto grumble about this. If the mystical truth thatcomes to a man proves to be a force that he can liveby, what mandate have we of the majority to orderhim to live in another way? We can throw him into aprison or a madhouse, but we cannot change hismind—we commonly attach it only the more stubbornlyto its beliefs.[280] It mocks our utmost ef-[279] I abstract from weaker states, and from thosecases of which the books are full, where the director(but usually not the subject) remains in doubtwhether the experience may not have proceededfrom the demon.[280] Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonmentfor preaching Methodism: “My soul was410

William Jamesas a watered garden, and I could sing praises to Godall day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, andgave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had beenon a bed of down. Now could I say, ‘God’s service isperfect freedom,’ and I was carried out much inprayer that my enemies might drink of the same riverof peace which my God gave so largely to me.” Journal,London, no date, p. 172.forts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutelyescapes our jurisdiction. Our own more “rational”beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar innature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Oursenses, namely, have assured us of certain states offact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptionsof fact for those who have them as any sensationsever were for us. The records show that eventhough the five senses be in abeyance in them, theyare absolutely sensational in their epistemologicalquality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression—thatis, they are face to face presentations ofwhat seems immediately to exist.The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must beleft, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoymentof his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that bywhich men live. And faith-state and mystic state arepractically convertible terms.2. But I now proceed to add that mystics have noright to claim that we ought to accept the deliveranceof their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsidersand feel no private call thereto. The utmost theycan ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establisha presumption. They form a consensus andhave an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd,mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experienceshould prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom,however, this would only be an appeal to numbers,like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and theappeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledgeit, it is for “suggestive,” not for logical reasons:we follow the majority because to do so suits our life.411

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceBut even this presumption from the unanimity ofmystics is far from being strong. In characterizingmystic states an pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I amafraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expositoryreasons, and to keep the closer to the classicmystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, itnow must be confessed, is only a “privileged case.”It is an extract, kept true to type by the selectionof the fittest specimens and their preservation in“schools.” It is carved out from a much larger mass;and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religiousmysticism has historically taken itself, we findthat the supposed unanimity largely disappears. Tobegin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kindthat accumulates traditions and makes schools, ismuch less unanimous than I have allowed. It has beenboth ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent withinthe Christian church.[281] It is dualistic in Sankhya,[281] Ruysbroeck, in the work which Maeterlinck hastranslated, has a chapter against the antinomianism ofdisciples. H. Delacroix’s book (Essai sur le mysticismespeculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siecle, Paris, 1900) isfull of antinomian material. compare also A. Jundt: LesAmis de Dieu au XIV Siecle, These de Strasbourg, 1879.and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic;but the great Spanish mystics are anythingbut pantheists. They are with few exceptions nonmetaphysicalminds, for whom “the category of personality”is absolute. The “union” of man with God isfor them much more like an occasional miracle thanlike an original identity.[282] How different again,apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticismof Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, RichardJefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from themore distinctively Christian sort.[283] The fact is thatthe mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipationhas no specific intellectual content whateverof its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial allianceswith material furnished by the most diversephilosophies and theologies, provided only they canfind a place in their framework for its peculiar emotionalmood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke[282] Compare Paul Rousselot: Les MystiquesEspagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii.[283] see Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, especiallythe latter parts, and Jefferies’s wonderful and splendidmystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.412

William Jamesits prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief,such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolutemonistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, ofthe world. It is only relatively in favor of all thesethings—it passes out of common human consciousnessin the direction in which they lie.So much for religious mysticism proper. But moreremains to be told, for religious mysticism is only onehalf of mysticism. The other half has no accumulatedtraditions except those which the text-books on insanitysupply. Open any one of these, and you willfind abundant cases in which “mystical ideas” are citedas characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deludedstates of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, asthey sometimes call it, we may have a diabolicalmysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upsidedown. The same sense of ineffable importance inthe smallest events, the same texts and words comingwith new meanings, the same voices and visionsand leadings and missions, the same controlling byextraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic:instead of consolations we have desolations;the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemiesto life. It is evident that from the point of viewof their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticismand these lower mysticisms spring from the samemental level, from that great subliminal ortransmarginal region of which science is beginning toadmit the existence, but of which so little is reallyknown. That region contains every kind of matter:“seraph and snake” abide there side by side. To comefrom thence is no infallible credential. What comesmust be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet ofconfrontation with the total context of experience, justlike what comes from the outer world of sense. Itsvalue must be ascertained by empirical methods, solong as we are not mystics ourselves.Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are underno obligation to acknowledge in mystical states asuperior authority conferred on them by their intrinsicnature.[284][284] In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration,“Max Nordau” seeks to undermine all mysti-413

cism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds.Mysticism for him means any sudden perception ofhidden significance in things. He explains such perceptionby the abundant uncompleted associationswhich experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain.These give to him who has the experience a vagueand vast sense of its leading further, yet they awakenno definite or useful consequent in his thought. Theexplanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feelingof significance, and other alienists (Wernicke, forexample, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii.,Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac” conditionsby a laming of the association-organ. But the highermystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness,are surely products of no such merely negativecondition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribethem to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebralactivity correlative to which we as yet knownothing.The Varieties of Religious Experience3. Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mysticalstates absolutely overthrows the pretension ofnon-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictatorsof what we may believe. As a rule, mysticalstates merely add a supersensuous meaning to theordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitementslike the emotions of love or ambition, giftsto our spirit by means of which facts already objectivelybefore us fall into a new expressiveness andmake a new connection with our active life. They donot contradict these facts as such, or deny anythingthat our senses have immediately seized.[285] It isthe rationalistic critic rather who plays the part ofdenier in the controversy, and his denials have nostrength, for there never can be a state of facts towhich new meaning may not truthfully be added, providedthe mind ascend to a more enveloping point of[285] They sometimes add subjective audita et visato the facts, but as these are usually interpreted astransmundane, they oblige no alteration in the factsof sense.414

William Jamesview. It must always remain an open questionwhether mystical states may not possibly be suchsuperior points of view, windows through which themind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusiveworld. The difference of the views seen from the differentmystical windows need not prevent us fromentertaining this supposition. The wider world wouldin that case prove to have a mixed constitution likethat of this world, that is all. It would have its celestialand its infernal regions, its tempting and its savingmoments, its valid experiences and its counterfeitones, just as our world has them; but it would bea wider world all the same. We should have to use itsexperiences by selecting and subordinating and substitutingjust as is our custom in this ordinary naturalisticworld; we should be liable to error just as weare now; yet the counting in of that wider world ofmeanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, inspite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages inour approach to the final fullness of the truth.In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject.Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simplyto their being mystical states. But the higher onesamong them point in directions to which the religioussentiments even of non-mystical men incline. Theytell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union,of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheseswhich we may voluntarily ignore, butwhich as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalismand optimism to which they wouldpersuade us may, interpreted in one way or another,be after all the truest of insights into the meaning ofthis life.“Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and thelittle less, and what worlds away!” It may be that possibilityand permission of this sort are all that are religiousconsciousness requires to live on. In my lastlecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this isthe case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that formany of my readers this diet is too slender. If supernaturalismand inner union with the divine are true,415

The Varieties of Religious Experienceyou think, then not so much permission, as compulsionto believe, ought to be found. Philosophy has alwaysprofessed to prove religious truth by coerciveargument; and the construction of philosophies of thiskind has always been one favorite function of the religiouslife, if we use this term in the large historicsense. But religious philosophy is an enormous subject,and in my next lecture I can only give that briefglance at it which my limits will allow.Lecture XVIIIPHILOSOPHYTHE SUBJECT OF SAINTLINESS left us face to face withthe question, Is the sense of divine presence a senseof anything objectively true? We turned first to mysticismfor an answer, and found that although mysticismis entirely willing to corroborate religion, it istoo private (and also too various) in its utterances tobe able to claim a universal authority. But philosophypublishes results which claim to be universallyvalid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with ourquestion to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrantof veracity upon the religious man’s sense of thedivine?I imagine that many of you at this point begin toindulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending. Ihave undermined the authority of mysticism, you say,and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek todiscredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to416

William Jameshear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith,based either on vague sentiment, or on that vividsense of the reality of things unseen of which in mysecond lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gaveso many examples. It is essentially private and individualistic;it always exceeds our powers of formulation;and although attempts to pour its contents intoa philosophic mould will probably always go on, menbeing what they are, yet these attempts are alwayssecondary processes which in no way add to the authority,or warrant the veracity, of the sentimentsfrom which they derive their own stimulus and borrowwhatever glow of conviction they may themselvespossess.In short, you suspect that I am planning to defendfeeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate theprimitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you fromthe hope of any Theology worthy of the name.To a certain extent I have to admit that you guessrightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper sourceof religion, and that philosophic and theological formulasare secondary products, like translations of atext into another tongue. But all such statements aremisleading from their brevity, and it will take thewhole hour for me to explain to you exactly what Imean.When I call theological formulas secondary products,I mean that in a world in which no religious feelinghad ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophictheology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionateintellectual contemplation of the universe,apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliveranceon the one hand and mystical emotion on theother, would ever have resulted in religious philosophiessuch as we now possess. Men would have begunwith animistic explanations of natural fact, andcriticised these away into scientific ones, as they actuallyhave done. In the science they would have lefta certain amount of “psychical research,” even as theynow will probably have to re-admit a certain amount.But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmaticor idealistic theology, these they would have417

had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commercewith such deities. These speculations must, itseems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildingsoutperformed by the intellect into directions of whichfeeling originally supplied the hint.But even if religious philosophy had to have its firsthint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superiorway with the matter which feeling suggested?Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an accountof itself. It allows that its results are mysteriesand enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, andon occasion is willing that they should even pass forparadoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the oppositeattitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mysteryand paradox whatever territory she touches. Tofind an escape from obscure and wayward personalpersuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinkingmen has ever been the intellect’s most cherished ideal.To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, andto give public status and universal right of way to itsdeliverances, has been reason’s task.The Varieties of Religious ExperienceI believe that philosophy will always have opportunityto labor at this task.[286] We are thinking beings,and we cannot exclude the intellect from participatingin any of our functions. Even in soliloquizingwith ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually.Both our personal ideals and our religious andmystical experiences must be interpreted congruouslywith the kind of scenery which our thinkingmind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our timeinevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover,we must exchange our feelings with one another, andin doing so we have to speak, and to use general andabstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructionsare thus a necessary part of our religion; and asmoderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediatoramong the criticisms of one man’s constructionsby another, philosophy will always have much to do.It would be strange if I disputed this, when thesevery lectures which I am giving are (as you will see[286] Compare Professor W. Wallace’s Gifford Lectures,in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.418

William Jamesmore clearly from now onwards) a laborious attemptto extract from the privacies of religious experiencesome general facts which can be defined in formulasupon which everybody may agree.Religious experience, in other words, spontaneouslyand inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas,creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticismsof one set of these by the adherents of another.Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons havebecome possible, alongside of the denunciations andanathemas by which the commerce between creedsused exclusively to be carried on. We have the beginningsof a “Science of Religions,” so-called; and ifthese lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-likecontribution to such a science, I should be made veryhappy.But all these intellectual operations, whether theybe constructive or comparative and critical, presupposeimmediate experiences as their subject-matter.They are interpretative and inductive operations, operationsafter the fact, consequent upon religious feeling,not coordinate with it, not independent of what itascertains.The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discreditpretends to be something altogether differentfrom this. It assumes to construct religious objectsout of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logicalreason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjectivefacts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology,or philosophy of the absolute, as the case maybe; it does not call them science of religions. It reachesthem in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiringsouls. All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean,luminous, stable, rigorous, true;—what more idealrefuge could there be than such a system would offerto spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentalityof the world of sensible things? Accordingly, we findinculcated in the theological schools of to-day, almostas much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain formerely possible or probable truth, and of results thatonly private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and ide-419

The Varieties of Religious Experiencealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird,for example, writes as follows in his Introduction tothe Philosophy of Religion:—“Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart, but inorder to elevate it from the region of subjective capriceand waywardness, and to distinguish betweenthat which is true and false in religion, we must appealto an objective standard. That which enters theheart must first be discerned by the intelligence tobe true. It must be seen as having in its own nature aright to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principleby which feeling must be judged.[287] In estimatingthe religious character of individuals, nations,or races, the first question is, not how they feel, butwhat they think and believe—not whether their religionis one which manifests itself in emotions, moreor less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are theconceptions of God and divine things by which theseemotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion,but it is by the content or intelligent basis of a[287] Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.religion, and not by feeling, that its character andworth are to be determined.”[288]Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University,gives more emphatic expression still to thisdisdain for sentiment.[289] Theology, he says, is ascience in the strictest sense of the word. I will tellyou, he says, what it is not—not “physical evidences”for God, not “natural religion,” for these are but vaguesubjective interpretations:—“If,” he continues, “the Supreme Being is powerfulor skillful, just so far as the telescope shows power,or the microscope shows skill, if his moral law is to beascertained simply by the physical processes of theanimal frame, or his will gathered from the immediateissues of human affairs, if his Essence is just ashigh and deep and broad as the universe and no moreif this be the fact, then will I confess that there is nospecific science about God, that theology is but aname, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy. Then,[288] Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.[289] Discourse II. Section 7.420

William Jamespious as it is to think of Him while the pageant of experimentor abstract reasoning passes by, still suchpiety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or anornament of language, a certain view taken of Naturewhich one man has and another has not, whichgifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirableand ingenious, and which all would be the betterfor adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, justas we talk of the philosophy or the romance of history,or the poetry of childhood, or the picturesqueor the sentimental or the humorous, or any other abstractquality which the genius or the caprice of theindividual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent ofthe world, recognizes in any set of objects which aresubjected to its contemplation. I do not see much differencebetween avowing that there is no God, andimplying that nothing definite can be known for certainabout Him.”What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, isnone of these things: “I simply mean the science ofGod, or the truths we know about God, put into asystem, just as we have a science of the stars and callit astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call itgeology.”In both these extracts we have the issue clearly setbefore us: Feeling valid only for the individual is pittedagainst reason valid universally. The test is a perfectlyplain one of fact. Theology based on pure reasonmust in point of fact convince men universally. Ifit did not, wherein would its superiority consist? If itonly formed sects and schools, even as sentiment andmysticism form them, how would it fulfill itsprogramme of freeing us from personal caprice andwaywardness? This perfectly definite practical testof the pretensions of philosophy to found religion onuniversal reason simplifies my procedure to-day. Ineed not discredit philosophy by laborious criticismof its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as amatter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be“objectively” convincing. In fact, philosophy does sofail. It does not banish differences; it founds schoolsand sects just as feeling does. I believe, in fact, that421

the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinityexactly as it has always operated in love, or inpatriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wideraffairs of life, in which our passions or our mysticalintuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds argumentsfor our conviction, for indeed it has to find them.It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it andlends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engendersit; it cannot now secure it.[290][290] As regards the secondary character of intellectualconstructions, and the primacy of feeling andinstinct in founding religious beliefs see the strikingwork of H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London,1902, which came into my hands after my text waswritten. “Creeds,” says the author, “are the grammarof religion, they are to religion what grammar isto speech. Words are the expression of our wantsgrammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speechnever proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. Asspeech progresses and changes from unknowncauses, grammar must follow” (p. 313). The wholebook, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts,is little more than an amplification of this text.The Varieties of Religious Experience422Lend me your attention while I run through someof the points of the older systematic theology. Youfind them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals,best of all in the innumerable text-books publishedsince Pope Leo’s Encyclical recommending the studyof Saint Thomas. I glance first at the arguments bywhich dogmatic theology establishes God’s existence,after that at those by which it establishes his nature.[291]The arguments for God’s existence have stood forhundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticismbreaking against them, never totally discreditingthem in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole[291] For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A.Stockl’s Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Autlage,Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. Boedder’s Natural Theology,London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual;but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestanttheologians as C. Hodge: Systematic Theology,New York, 1873, or A. H. Strong: Systematic Theology,5th edition, New York, 1896.

William Jamesslowly and surely washing out the mortar from betweentheir joints. If you have a God already whomyou believe in, these arguments confirm you. If youare atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs arevarious. The “cosmological” one, so-called, reasonsfrom the contingence of the world to a First Causewhich must contain whatever perfections the worlditself contains. The “argument from design” reasons,from the fact that Nature’s laws are mathematical,and her parts benevolently adapted to each other,that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent.The “moral argument” is that the moral law presupposesa lawgiver. The “argument ex consensu gentium”is that the belief in God is so widespread as tobe grounded in the rational nature of man, and shouldtherefore carry authority with it.As I just said, I will not discuss these argumentstechnically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kanthave felt entitled either to scout or to neglect themshows that they are not solid enough to serve asreligion’s all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonalreasons would be in duty bound to show moregeneral convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscurea principle to bear the weight of the whole structureof theology. As for the argument from design,see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceivedas we now conceive them, as so many fortunateescapes from almost limitless processes of destruction,the benevolent adaptations which we findin Nature suggest a deity very different from the onewho figured in the earlier versions of the argument.[292]The fact is that these arguments do butfollow the combined suggestions of the facts and ofour feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They onlycorroborate our preexistent partialities.[292] It must not be forgotten that any form ofDISorder in the world might, by the design argument,suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truthis that any state of things whatever that can be namedis logically susceptible of teleological interpretation.The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example:the whole of past history had to be planned exactly423

The Varieties of Religious Experienceas it was to bring about in the fullness of time justthat particular arrangement of debris of masonry,furniture, and once living bodies. No other train ofcauses would have been sufficient. And so of any otherarrangement, bad or good, which might as a matterof fact be found resulting anywhere from previousconditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequencesand save its beneficent designer, the design argumentaccordingly invokes two other principles, restrictivein their operation. The first is physical: Nature’sforces tend of their own accord only to disorder anddestruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems,in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable.The second principle is one of anthropomorphicinterpretation. No arrangement that for us is “disorderly”can possibly have been an object of design atall. This principle is of course a mere assumption inthe interests of anthropomorphic Theism.When one views the world with no definite theologicalbias one way or the other, one sees that orderand disorder, as we now recognize them, are purelyhuman inventions. We are interested in certain typesof arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral—so interestedthat whenever we find them realized, the factemphatically rivets our attention. The result is thatwe work over the contents of the world selectively.It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements fromour point of view, but order is the only thing we carefor and look at, and by choosing, one can always findsome sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of anychaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans atrandom upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminatinga sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almostany geometrical pattern you might propose tome, and you might then say that that pattern wasthe thing prefigured beforehand, and that the otherbeans were mere irrelevance and packing material.Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is avast plenum in which our attention draws capricious424

William Jameslines in innumerable directions. We count and namewhatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilstthe other things and the untraced lines are neithernamed nor counted. There are in reality infinitelymore things “unadapted” to each other in this worldthan there are things “adapted”; infinitely more thingswith irregular relations than with regular relationsbetween them. But we look for the regular kind ofthing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserveit in our memory. It accumulates with otherregular kinds, until the collection of them fills ourencyclopaedias. Yet all the while between and aroundthem lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects thatno one ever thought of together, of relations thatnever yet attracted our attention.The facts of order from which the physico-theologicalargument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretationas arbitrary human products. So long asthis is the case, although of course no argumentagainst God follows, it follows that the argument forhim will fail to constitute a knockdown proof of hisexistence. It will be convincing only to those who onother grounds believe in him already.If philosophy can do so little to establish God’s existence,how stands it with her efforts to define hisattributes? It is worth while to look at the attemptsof systematic theology in this direction.Since God is First Cause, this science of sciencessays, he differs from all his creatures in possessingexistence a se. From this “a-se-ity” on God’s part,theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections.For instance, he must be both necessary andabsolute, cannot not be, and cannot in any way bedetermined by anything else. This makes Him absolutelyunlimited from without, and unlimited also fromwithin; for limitation is non-being; and God is beingitself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect.Moreover, God is one, and only, for the infinitelyperfect can admit no peer. He is spiritual, for wereHe composed of physical parts, some other powerwould have to combine them into the total, and hisaseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore425

The Varieties of Religious Experienceboth simple and non-physical in nature. He is simplemetaphysically also, that is to say, his nature and hisexistence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substanceswhich share their formal natures with oneanother, and are individual only in their material aspect.Since God is one and only, his essentia and hisesse must be given at one stroke. This excludes fromhis being all those distinctions, so familiar in the worldof finite things, between potentiality and actuality,substance and accidents, being and activity, existenceand attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God’s powers,acts, and attributes, but these discriminations areonly “virtual,” and made from the human point ofview. In God all these points of view fall into an absoluteidentity of being.This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Himto be immutable. He is actuality, through and through.Were there anything potential about Him, He wouldeither lose or gain by its actualization, and either lossor gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot,therefore, change. Furthermore, He is immense,boundless; for could He be outlined in space, He wouldbe composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility.He is therefore omnipresent, indivisibly there,at every point of space. He is similarly wholly presentat every point of time—in other words eternal. For ifHe began in time, He would need a prior cause, andthat would contradict his aseity. If He ended it wouldcontradict his necessity. If He went through any succession,it would contradict his immutability.He has intelligence and will and every other creature-perfection,for we have them, and effectus nequitsuperare causam. In Him, however, they are absolutelyand eternally in act, and their object, since Godcan be bounded by naught that is external, can primarilybe nothing else than God himself. He knowshimself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and willshimself with an infinite self-pleasure.[293] Since Hemust of logical necessity thus love and will himself,He cannot be called “free” ad intra, with the freedom[293] For the scholastics the facultas appetendi embracesfeeling, desire, and will.426

William Jamesof contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures. Adextra, however, or with respect to his creation, Godis free. He cannot need to create, being perfect in beingand in happiness already. He wills to create, then,by an absolute freedom.Being thus a substance endowed with intellect andwill and freedom, God is a person; and a living personalso, for He is both object and subject of his ownactivity, and to be this distinguishes the living fromthe lifeless. He is thus absolutely self-sufficient: hisself-knowledge and self-love are both of them infiniteand adequate, and need no extraneous conditionsto perfect them.He is omniscient, for in knowing himself as CauseHe knows all creature things and events by implication.His knowledge is previsive, for He is present toall time. Even our free acts are known beforehand toHim, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successivemoments of enrichment, and this would contradicthis immutability. He is omnipotent for everythingthat does not involve logical contradiction. Hecan make being —in other words his power includescreation. If what He creates were made of his ownsubstance, it would have to be infinite in essence, asthat substance is; but it is finite; so it must be nondivinein substance. If it were made of a substance,an eternally existing matter, for example, which Godfound there to his hand, and to which He simply gaveits form, that would contradict God’s definition as FirstCause, and make Him a mere mover of somethingcaused already. The things he creates, then, He createsex nihilo, and gives them absolute being as somany finite substances additional to himself. Theforms which he imprints upon them have their prototypesin his ideas. But as in God there is no suchthing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us aremanifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they arein God and the way in which our minds externallyimitate them. We must attribute them to Him only ina terminative sense, as differing aspects, from thefinite point of view, of his unique essence.God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no427

The Varieties of Religious Experienceevil, for He is positive being’s fullness, and evil is negation.It is true that He has created physical evil inplaces, but only as a means of wider good, for bonumtotius praeeminet bonum partis. Moral evil He cannotwill, either as end or means, for that would contradicthis holiness. By creating free beings He permitsit only, neither his justice nor his goodness obligingHim to prevent the recipients of freedom frommisusing the gift.As regards God’s purpose in creating, primarily itcan only have been to exercise his absolute freedomby the manifestation to others of his glory. From thisit follows that the others must be rational beings, capablein the first place of knowledge, love, and honor,and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledgeand love of God is the mainspring of felicity. Inso far forth one may say that God’s secondary purposein creating is love.I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysicaldeterminations farther, into the mysteries of God’sTrinity, for example. What I have given will serve asa specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology ofboth Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled withenthusiasm at God’s list of perfections, continues thepassage which I began to quote to you by a couple ofpages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardlyrefrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad theywould make upon our time.[294] He first enumeratesGod’s attributes sonorously, then celebrates hisownership of everything in earth and Heaven, andthe dependence of all that happens upon his permissivewill. He gives us scholastic philosophy “touchedwith emotion,” and every philosophy should betouched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally,then, dogmatic theology is worth somethingto minds of the type of Newman’s. It will aid us toestimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this pointI make a short digression.What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.The Continental schools of philosophy have toooften overlooked the fact that man’s thinking is or-[294] Op. cit., Discourse III. Section 7.428

William Jamesganically connected with his conduct. It seems to meto be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkersto have kept the organic connection in view. The guidingprinciple of British philosophy has in fact been thatevery difference must make a difference, every theoreticaldifference somewhere issue in a practical difference,and that the best method of discussing pointsof theory is to begin by ascertaining what practicaldifference would result from one alternative or theother being true. What is the particular truth in questionknown as? In what facts does it result? What isits cash-value in terms of particular experience? Thisis the characteristic English way of taking up a question.In this way, you remember, Locke takes up thequestion of personal identity. What you mean by it isjust your chain of particular memories, says he. Thatis the only concretely verifiable part of its significance.All further ideas about it, such as the oneness ormanyness of the spiritual substance on which it isbased, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; andpropositions touching such ideas may be indifferentlyaffirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his “matter.”The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations.That is what it is known as, all that we concretelyverify of its conception. That, therefore, is the wholemeaning of the term “matter”—any other pretendedmeaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the samething with causation. It is known as habitualantecedence, and as tendency on our part to look forsomething definite to come. Apart from this practicalmeaning it has no significance whatever, and booksabout it may be committed to the flames, says Hume.Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, JohnMill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or lessconsistently the same method; and ShadworthHodgson has used the principle with full explicitness.When all is said and done, it was English and Scotchwriters, and not Kant, who introduced “the criticalmethod” into philosophy, the one method fitted tomake philosophy a study worthy of serious men. Forwhat seriousness can possibly remain in debatingphilosophic propositions that will never make an ap-429

preciable difference to us in action? And what couldit matter, if all propositions were practically indifferent,which of them we should agree to call true orwhich false?An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr.Charles Sanders Peirce, has rendered thought a serviceby disentangling from the particulars of its applicationthe principle by which these men were instinctivelyguided, and by singling it out as fundamentaland giving to it a Greek name. He calls it theprinciple of pragmatism, and he defends it somewhatas follows:[295]—Thought in movement has for its only conceivablemotive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest.Only when our thought about a subject has found itsrest in belief can our action on the subject firmly andsafely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; andthe whole function of thinking is but one step in theproduction of active habits. If there were any part of[295] In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, inthe Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol.xii. p. 286.The Varieties of Religious Experience430a thought that made no difference in the thought’spractical consequences, then that part would be noproper element of the thought’s significance. To developa thought’s meaning we need therefore onlydetermine what conduct it is fitted to produce; thatconduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangiblefact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is thatthere is no one of them so fine as to consist in anythingbut a possible difference of practice. To attainperfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we needthen only consider what sensations, immediate orremote, we are conceivably to expect from it, andwhat conduct we must prepare in case the objectshould be true. Our conception of these practical consequencesis for us the whole of our conception of theobject, so far as that conception has positive significanceat all.This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism.Such a principle will help us on this occasionto decide, among the various attributes set down inthe scholastic inventory of God’s perfections, whether

William Jamessome be not far less significant than others.If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism toGod’s metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, asdistinguished from his moral attributes, I think that,even were we forced by a coercive logic to believethem, we still should have to confess them to be destituteof all intelligible significance. Take God’s aseity,for example; or his necessariness; his immateriality;his “simplicity” or superiority to the kind of innervariety and succession which we find in finite beings,his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions ofbeing and activity, substance and accident, potentialityand actuality, and the rest; his repudiation ofinclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his “personality,”apart from the moral qualities which it maycomport; his relations to evil being permissive andnot positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolutefelicity in himself:—candidly speaking, how dosuch qualities as these make any definite connectionwith our life? And if they severally call for no distinctiveadaptations of our conduct, what vital differencecan it possibly make to a man’s religion whether theybe true or false?For my own part, although I dislike to say aughtthat may grate upon tender associations, I mustfrankly confess that even though these attributeswere faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its beingof the smallest consequence to us religiously thatany one of them should be true. Pray, what specificact can I perform in order to adapt myself the betterto God’s simplicity? Or how does it assist me to planmy behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhowabsolutely complete? In the middle of the centuryjust past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of booksof out-of-door adventure. He was forever extollingthe hunters and field-observers of living animals’ habits,and keeping up a fire of invective against the“closet-naturalists,” as he called them, the collectorsand classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins.When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-naturalistmust be the vilest type of wretch under the sun.But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-431

The Varieties of Religious Experiencenaturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’ssense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributesbut a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives,aloof from morals, aloof from humanneeds, something that might be worked out fromthe mere word “God” by one of those logical machinesof wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrivedas well as by a man of flesh and blood. Theyhave the trail of the serpent over them. One feelsthat in the theologians’ hands, they are only a set oftitles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms;verbality has stepped into the place of vision,professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread wehave a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such aconglomeration of abstract terms give really the gistof our knowledge of the deity, schools of theologymight indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vitalreligion, would have taken its flight from this world.What keeps religion going is something else than abstractdefinitions and systems of concatenated adjectives,and something different from faculties oftheology and their professors. All these things areafter-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomenaof vital conversation with the unseen divine,of which I have shown you so many instances, renewingthemselves in saecula saeculorum in the livesof humble private men.So much for the metaphysical attributes of God!From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysicalmonster which they offer to our worship isan absolutely worthless invention of the scholarlymind.What shall we now say of the attributes calledmoral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely differentfooting. They positively determine fear andhope and expectation, and are foundations for thesaintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show howgreat is their significance.God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God canwill nothing but the good. Being omnipotent, he cansecure its triumph. Being omniscient, he can see us inthe dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he432

William Jamessees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable,we can count on him securely. These qualitiesenter into connection with our life, it is highly importantthat we should be informed concerning them.That God’s purpose in creation should be the manifestationof his glory is also an attribute which hasdefinite relations to our practical life. Among otherthings it has given a definite character to worship inall Christian countries. If dogmatic theology reallydoes prove beyond dispute that a God with characterslike these exists, she may well claim to give asolid basis to religious sentiment. But verily, howstands it with her arguments?It stands with them as ill as with the arguments forhis existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists rejectthem root and branch, but it is a plain historicfact that they never have converted any one who hasfound in the moral complexion of the world, as heexperienced it, reasons for doubting that a good Godcan have framed it. To prove God’s goodness by thescholastic argument that there is no non-being in hisessence would sound to such a witness simply silly.No! the book of Job went over this whole matteronce for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relativelysuperficial and unreal path to the deity: “I willlay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Theeby the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seethThee.” An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustfulsense of presence—such is the situation of the manwho is sincere with himself and with the facts, butwho remains religious still.[296][296] Pragmatically, the most important attribute ofGod is his punitive justice. But who, in the present stateof theological opinion on that point, will dare maintainthat hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is renderedcertain by pure logic? Theology herself haslargely based this doctrine upon revelation, and, in discussingit, has tended more and more to substituteconventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principlesof reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe,with planets and winds, and laughing sky andocean, should have been conceived and had its beamsand rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredibleto our modern imagination. It weakens a religionto hear it argued upon such a basis.433

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceWe must therefore, I think, bid a definitive goodbyto dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith mustdo without that warrant. Modern idealism, I repeat,has said goodby to this theology forever. Can modernidealism give faith a better warrant, or must shestill rely on her poor self for witness?The basis of modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine ofthe Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidableterm Kant merely meant the fact that theconsciousness “I think them” must (potentially oractually) accompany all our objects. Former skepticshad said as much, but the “I” in question had remainedfor them identified with the personal individual.Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, andmade it the most universal of all his categories, althoughfor Kant himself the Transcendental Ego hadno theological implications.It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant’snotion of Bewusstsein uberhaupt, or abstract consciousness,into an infinite concrete self-consciousnesswhich is the soul of the world, and in which oursundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being.It would lead me into technicalities to show youeven briefly how this transformation was in point offact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelianschool, which to-day so deeply influences both Britishand American thinking, two principles have bornethe brunt of the operation.The first of these principles is that the old logic ofidentity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissectionof disjecta membra, and that the fullness oflife can be construed to thought only by recognizingthat every object which our thought may propose toitself involves the notion of some other object whichseems at first to negate the first one.The second principle is that to be conscious of a negationis already virtually to be beyond it. The mereasking of a question or expression of a dissatisfactionproves that the answer or the satisfaction is alreadyimminent; the finite, realized as such, is already theinfinite in posse.Applying these principles, we seem to get a propul-434

William Jamessive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of abare, stark self-identity in each thing never attainsto. The objects of our thought now ACT within ourthought, act as objects act when given in experience.They change and develop. They introduce somethingother than themselves along with them; and thisother, at first only ideal or potential, presently provesitself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at firstsupposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developingthe fullness of its meaning.The program is excellent; the universe is a placewhere things are followed by other things that bothcorrect and fulfill them; and a logic which gave ussomething like this movement of fact would expresstruth far better than the traditional school-logic,which never gets of its own accord from anything toanything else, and registers only predictions andsubsumptions, or static resemblances and differences.Nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatictheology than those of this new logic. Let mequote in illustration some passages from the Scottishtranscendentalist whom I have already named.“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes,“of the reality in which all intelligence rests?” He replies:“Two things may without difficulty be proved,viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit, and converselythat it is only in communion with this absoluteSpirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit canrealize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movementof human intelligence would be arrested, if it did notpresuppose the absolute reality of intelligence, ofthought itself. Doubt or denial themselves presupposeand indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce anythingto be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relativeto thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or tothe thought of any other individual mind. From theexistence of all individual minds as such I can abstract;I can think them away. But that which I cannot thinkaway is thought or self-consciousness itself, in its independenceand absoluteness, or, in other words, anAbsolute Thought or Self-Consciousness.”Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition435

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich Kant did not make: he converts the omnipresenceof consciousness in general as a condition of“truth” being anywhere possible, into an omnipresentuniversal consciousness, which he identifies withGod in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use theprinciple that to acknowledge your limits is in essenceto be beyond them; and makes the transition to thereligious experience of individuals in the followingwords:—“If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensationsand impulses, of an ever coming and going successionof intuitions, fancies, feelings, then nothingcould ever have for him the character of objectivetruth or reality. But it is the prerogative of man’sspiritual nature that he can yield himself up to athought and will that are infinitely larger than his own.As a thinking self-conscious being, indeed, he may besaid, by his very nature, to live in the atmosphere ofthe Universal Life.As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppressand quell in my consciousness every movement ofself-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merelymine, every desire that belongs to me as this particularSelf, and to become the pure medium of athought that is universal—in one word, to live no moremy own life, but let my consciousness be possessedand suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit.And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that Itruly gain myself, or realize the highest possibilitiesof my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give upself to live the universal and absolute life of reason,yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is inreality our truer self. The life of absolute reason isnot a life that is foreign to us.”Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so faras we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, thebalm it offers remains incomplete. Whatever we maybe in posse, the very best of us in actu falls very shortof being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, andself-sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some otherfinite self or selves. They do not quite identify it withthe Infinite. Man’s ideal destiny, infinite in abstract436

William Jameslogic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable.“Is there, then,” our author continues, “no solutionof the contradiction between the ideal and the actual?We answer, There is such a solution, but in order toreach it we are carried beyond the sphere of moralityinto that of religion. It may be said to be the essentialcharacteristic of religion as contrasted withmorality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipationinto realization; that instead of leaving manin the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, itmakes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinitelife. Whether we view religion from the human sideor the divine—as the surrender of the soul to God, oras the life of God in the soul—in either aspect it is ofits very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be afar-off vision, and has become a present reality. Thevery first pulsation of the spiritual life, when werightly apprehend its significance, is the indicationthat the division between the Spirit and its object hasvanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finitehas reached its goal and become suffused withthe presence and life of the Infinite.“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind andwill is not the future hope and aim of religion, but itsvery beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on thereligious life is to terminate the struggle. In that actwhich constitutes the beginning of the religious life—call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatevername you will—there is involved the identificationof the finite with a life which is eternally realized.It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive;but understood in the light of the foregoing idea, religiousprogress is not progress towards, but withinthe sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attemptby endless finite additions or increments to becomepossessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor,by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriatethat infinite inheritance of which we are alreadyin possession. The whole future of the religiouslife is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly.The position of the man who has entered on the reli-437

The Varieties of Religious Experiencegious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not reallybelong to him: they are excrescences which haveno organic relation to his true nature: they are alreadyvirtually, as they will be actually, suppressedand annulled, and in the very process of being annulledthey become the means of spiritual progress.Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict,[yet] in that inner sphere in which his true lifelies, the struggle is over, the victory already achieved.It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spiritlives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expressionand realization of the life of God.”[297]You will readily admit that no description of the phenomenaof the religious consciousness could be betterthan these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher.They reproduce the very rapture of thosecrises of conversion of which we have been hearing;they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to com-[297] John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophyof Religion London and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250,and 291-299, much abridged.municate; and the saint, in hearing them, recognizeshis own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find thecontent of religion reported so unanimously. But whenall is said and done, has Principal Caird—and I onlyuse him as an example of that whole mode of thinking—transcendedthe sphere of feeling and of the directexperience of the individual, and laid the foundationsof religion in impartial reason? Has he made religionuniversal by coercive reasoning, transformed itfrom a private faith into a public certainty? Has herescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery?I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, butthat he has simply reaffirmed the individual’s experiencesin a more generalized vocabulary. And again,I can be excused from proving technically that thetranscendentalist reasonings fail to make religionuniversal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majorityof scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornlyrefuse to treat them as convincing. The wholeof Germany, one may say, has positively rejected theHegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only438

William Jamesmention Professor Fraser’s and Professor Pringle- admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures,which are cast throughout in a popular mould,Pattison’s memorable criticisms, with which so manyof you are familiar.[298] Once more, I ask, if transcendentalidealism were as objectively and absolutely cussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient thethere seemed no room for subtle metaphysical dis-rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, thategregiously to be persuasive?religion can be transformed into a universally convincingscience), to point to the fact that no religiousThe most persuasive arguments in favor of a concreteindividual Soul of the world, with which I am philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the presentacquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce,in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885; volume may be followed by another, if I am sparedin his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; to write it, in which not only Professor Royce’s arguments,but others for monistic absolutism shall beand lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, TheWorld and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London,1901-02. I doubtless seem to some of my read-great importance calls for. At present I resign myselfconsidered with all the technical fullness which theirers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting What religion reports, you must remember, alwaysto meet Professor Royce’s arguments articulately. I purports to be a fact of experience: the divine is actuallypresent, religion says, and between it and ourselvesrelations of give and take are actual. If definite[298] A. C. Fraser: Philosophy of Theism, second edition,Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii, perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon theirchaps. vii. and viii. A. Seth [Pringle-Pattison]: own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give themHegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim.439

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe support they are in need of. Conceptual processescan class facts, define them, interpret them; but theydo not produce them, nor can they reproduce theirindividuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, whichfeeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphereis thus a secondary function, unable to warrant faith’sveracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announcedat the beginning of this lecture.In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude thatthe attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processesthe truth of the deliverances of direct religiousexperience is absolutely hopeless.It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leaveher under this negative sentence. Let me close, then,by briefly enumerating what she can do for religion.If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction forcriticism and induction, and frankly transform herselffrom theology into science of religions, she canmake herself enormously useful.The spontaneous intellect of man always defines thedivine which it feels in ways that harmonize with itstemporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy canby comparison eliminate the local and the accidentalfrom these definitions. Both from dogma and fromworship she can remove historic incrustations. Byconfronting the spontaneous religious constructionswith the results of natural science, philosophy can alsoeliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientificallyabsurd or incongruous.Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, shecan leave a residuum of conceptions that at least arepossible. With these she can deal as hypotheses, testingthem in all the manners, whether negative or positive,by which hypotheses are ever tested. She canreduce their number, as some are found more opento objection. She can perhaps become the championof one which she picks out as being the most closelyverified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definitionof this hypothesis, distinguishing between whatis innocent over-belief and symbolism in the expressionof it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result,she can offer mediation between different believers,440

William Jamesand help to bring about consensus of opinion. She cando this the more successfully, the better she discriminatesthe common and essential from the individualand local elements of the religious beliefs which shecompares.I do not see why a critical Science of Religions ofthis sort might not eventually command as general apublic adhesion as is commanded by a physical science.Even the personally non-religious might acceptits conclusions on trust, much as blind persons nowaccept the facts of optics—it might appear as foolishto refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to befed in the first instance, and continually verified later,by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the scienceof religions would depend for its original materialon facts of personal experience, and would haveto square itself with personal experience through allits critical reconstructions. It could never get awayfrom concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum.It would forever have to confess, as every scienceconfesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it,and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophylives in words, but truth and fact well up intoour lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.There is in the living act of perception always somethingthat glimmers and twinkles and will not becaught, and for which reflection comes too late. Noone knows this as well as the philosopher. He mustfire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptualshotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry,but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy.His formulas are like stereoscopic orkinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument;they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality.In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulasare true can never wholly take the place ofpersonal experience.In my next lecture I will try to complete my roughdescription of religious experience; and in the lectureafter that, which is the last one, I will try my hand atformulating conceptually the truth to which it is awitness.441

Lecture XIXOTHER CHARACTERISTICSThe Varieties of Religious Experience442WE HAVE WOUND our way back, after our excursionthrough mysticism and philosophy, to where we werebefore: the uses of religion, its uses to the individualwho has it, and the uses of the individual himself tothe world, are the best arguments that truth is in it.We return to the empirical philosophy: the true iswhat works well, even though the qualification “onthe whole” may always have to be added. In this lecturewe must revert to description again, and finishour picture of the religious consciousness by a wordabout some of its other characteristic elements. Then,in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a generalreview and draw our independent conclusions.The first point I will speak of is the part which theaesthetic life plays in determining one’s choice of areligion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualizetheir religious experience. They need formulas,just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke,therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessnessof the famous scholastic list of attributes ofthe deity, for they have one use which I neglected toconsider. The eloquent passage in which Newmanenumerates them[299] puts us on the track of it. Intoningthem as he would intone a cathedral service,he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enrichesour bare piety to carry these exalted and mysteriousverbal additions just as it enriches a church to havean organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes andstained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere andovertones to our devotion. They are like a hymn ofpraise and service of glory, and may sound the moresublime for being incomprehensible. Minds likeNewman’s[300] grow as jealous of their credit as heathenpriests are of that of the jewelry and ornamentsthat blaze upon their idols.[299] Idea of a University, Discourse III. Section 7.[300] Newman’s imagination so innately craved anecclesiastical system that he can write: “From the age offifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle ofmy religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enterinto the idea of any other sort of religion.” And againspeaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: “Iloved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s sight, as if itwere the sight of God.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.

William JamesAmong the buildings-out of religion which the mind type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose.spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive mustThe inner need is rather of something institu-never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiasticaltional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interre-systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, latedness of its parts, with authority descending fromhowever, to put in a word at this point on the way in stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectiveswhich their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributesof mystery and splendor, derived in the last re-to their hold on human nature. Although some sort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culminationpersons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification,of the system. One feels then as if in presencefor others richness is the supreme imaginative of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture;requirement.[301] When one’s mind is strongly of thisone hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one[301] The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter.Compared with such a noble complexity, in whichimportance with the analogous difference in character. Wesaw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resentconfusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicityascending and descending movements seem in no way(above, p. 275 ff.). For others, on the contrary, super-to jar upon stability, in which no single item, howeverabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficialrelations, are indispensable. There are men who would sufferhumble, is insignificant, because so many august institutionsa very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring ithold it in its place, how flat does evangelicalabout that their engagements had been kept, their lettersanswered their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled,Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere ofdown to one which lay on a clean table under theirthose isolated religious lives whose boast it is that “maneyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance.A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them in the bush with God may meet.”[302] What a pulappalling.So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social[302] In Newman’s Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII.recognitions—some of us require amounts of these thingsSection 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this aestheticway of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunatelywhich to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.too long to quote.443

The Varieties of Religious Experienceverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-upstructure! To an imagination used to the perspectivesof dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seemsto offer an almshouse for a palace.It is much like the patriotic sentiment of thosebrought up in ancient empires. How many emotionsmust be frustrated of their object, when one gives upthe titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare ofbrass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, thefear and trembling, and puts up with a president in ablack coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, itmay be, from a “home” upon a veldt or prairie withone sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. Itpauperizes the monarchical imagination!The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makesit rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism,however superior in spiritual profundity itmay be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeedin making many converts from the more venerableecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richerpasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cellswith so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgentin its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantismwill always show to Catholic eyes thealmshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of itis to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectualCatholics many of the antiquated beliefs andpractices to which the Church gives countenance are,if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants.But they are childish in the pleasing sense of“childlike”—innocent and amiable, and worthy to besmiled on in consideration of the undeveloped conditionof the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant,on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of beingidiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicateand lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic toshudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter asmorose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonouskind of reptile. The two will never understandeach other—their centres of emotional energyare too different. Rigorous truth and human nature’sintricacies are always in need of a mutual inter-444

preter.[303] So much for the aesthetic diversities inthe religious consciousness.In most books on religion, three things are representedas its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice,Confession, and Prayer. I must say a word inturn of each of these elements, though briefly. Firstof Sacrifice.Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship;but, as cults have grown refined, burnt offeringsand the blood of he-goats have been superseded byWilliam Jamessacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam,and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice;so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preservedin transfigured form in the mystery of Christ’satonement. These religions substitute offerings of theheart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vainoblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism,and the older Christianity encourage we seehow indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of somesort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism Ispoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices[303] Compare the informality of Protestantism,which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.where the “meek lover of the good,” alone with his But, as I said my say about those, and as these lecturesexpressly avoid earlier religious usages and ques-God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with theelaborate “business” that goes on in Catholic devotion,and carries with it the social excitement of alltions of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrificealtogether and turn to that of Confession.more complex businesses. An essentially worldlymindedCatholic woman can become a visitor of the In regard to Confession I will also be most brief,sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessorand director, her “merit” storing up, her patronsaying my word about it psychologically, not historically.Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it correspondsto a more inward and moral stage of senti-saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawinghis attention as a professional devote, her definite“exercises,” and her definitely recognized social ment. It is part of the general system of purgationpose in the organization.445

and cleansing which one feels one’s self in need of, inorder to be in right relations to one’s deity. For himwho confesses, shams are over and realities have begun;he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has notactually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears itover with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives atleast upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay ofthe practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communitiesis a little hard to account for. Reaction againstpopery is of course the historic explanation, for inpopery confession went with penances and absolution,and other inadmissible practices. But on the sideof the sinner himself it seems as if the need ought tohave been too great to accept so summary a refusalof its satisfaction. One would think that in more menThe Varieties of Religious Experiencethe shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pentin[304] A fuller discussion of confession is contained in theabscess to burst and gain relief, even though theexcellent work by Frank Granger: The Soul of a Christian,London, 1900, ch. xii.ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The [305] Example: “The minister at Sudbury, being at the ThursdayCatholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman pray-ing for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to thesubstituted auricular confession to one priest for the petitioner and said ‘You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulipmore radical act of public confession. We English-wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain,until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.’” R. W.Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.446speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance andunsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough ifwe take God alone into our confidence.[304]The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer—and this time it must be less briefly. We have heardmuch talk of late against prayer, especially againstprayers for better weather and for the recovery ofsick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if anymedical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is thatin certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery,and should be encouraged as a therapeuticmeasure. Being a normal factor of moral health in theperson, its omission would be deleterious. The caseof the weather is different. Notwithstanding therecency of the opposite belief,[305] every one now

William Jamesknows that droughts and storms follow from physicalantecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert repetition of certain sacred formula, but the veryterm I understand no vain exercise of words, no merethem. But petitional prayer is only one department movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personalrelation of contact with the mysterious powerof prayer; and if we take the word in the wider senseas meaning every kind of inward communion or conversationwith the power recognized as divine, we can it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this inte-of which it feels the presence—it may be even beforeeasily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. rior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever,Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essenceof religion. “Religion,” says a liberal French even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we haveon the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul,theologian, “is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntaryrelation, entered into by a soul in distress with gion, so-called, is not properly a religion. It cuts manliving religion. One sees from this why “natural reli-the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend,and upon which its fate is contingent. This inmoteness,with no intimate commerce, no interioroff from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual retercoursewith God is realized by prayer. Prayer is dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, noreligion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religionis only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rational-prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenonfrom such similar or neighboring phenomena as ism, of critical investigations, it never was anythingpurely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Religion is nothingif it be not the vital act by which the entire mind reveals to its examiner hardly one of the charactersbut an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, itseeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from proper to religion.”[306]which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which [306] Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d’une Philosophiede la Religion. 2me ed., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.447

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIt seems to me that the entire series of our lecturesproves the truth of M. Sabatier’s contention. The religiousphenomenon, studied as in Inner fact, and apartfrom ecclesiastical or theological complications, hasshown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages,in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercoursebetween themselves and higher powers withwhich they feel themselves to be related. This intercourseis realized at the time as being both active andmutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and takerelation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; ifthe world is in no whit different for its having takenplace; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of asense that something is transacting, is of course a feelingof what is illusory, and religion must on the wholebe classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion—theseundoubtedly everywhere exist—but asbeing rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialistsand atheists have always said it was. At most theremight remain, when the direct experiences of prayerwere ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential beliefthat the whole order of existence must have a divinecause. But this way of contemplating nature,pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a pioustaste, would leave to them but the spectators’ part ata play, whereas in experimental religion and theprayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and notin a play, but in a very serious reality.The genuineness of religion is thus indissolublybound up with the question whether the prayerfulconsciousness be or be not deceitful. The convictionthat something is genuinely transacted in this consciousnessis the very core of living religion. As towhat is transacted, great differences of opinion haveprevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed,and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightenedman can nowadays believe in. It may well provethat the sphere of influence in prayer is subjectiveexclusively, and that what is immediately changed isonly the mind of the praying person. But howeverour opinion of prayer’s effects may come to be limitedby criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which448

William Jamesthese lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasionthat effects of some sort genuinely do occur.Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannotbe realized in any other manner come about: energywhich but for prayer would be bound is by prayer setfree and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective,of the world of facts.This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letterwritten by the late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend,who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independentthe prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications.Mr. Myers writes:—“I am glad that you have asked me about prayer,because I have rather strong ideas on the subject.First consider what are the facts. There exists aroundus a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actualrelation with the material. From the spiritual universecomes the energy which maintains the material; theenergy which makes the life of each individual spirit.Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal ofthis energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetuallychanging, much as the vigor of our absorption ofmaterial nutriment changes from hour to hour.“I call these ‘facts’ because I think that somescheme of this kind is the only one consistent withour actual evidence; too complex to summarize here.How, then, should we act on these facts? Plainly wemust endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life aspossible, and we must place our minds in any attitudewhich experience shows to be favorable to suchindrawal. Prayer is the general name for that attitudeof open and earnest expectancy. If we then askto whom to pray, the answer (strangely enough) mustbe that that does not much matter. The prayer is notindeed a purely subjective thing;—it means a real increasein intensity of absorption of spiritual power orgrace;—but we do not know enough of what takesplace in the spiritual world to know how the prayeroperates;—who is cognizant of it, or through whatchannel the grace is given. Better let children pray toChrist, who is at any rate the highest individual spiritof whom we have any knowledge. But it would be rash449

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto say that Christ himself hear us; while to say that eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, andGod hears us is merely to restate the first principle— tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and thethat grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.” keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally,the establishment of schools in which over aLet us reserve the question of the truth or falsehoodof the belief that power is absorbed until the hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adultnext lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr.have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confineitself to the description of phenomena; and as a a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hun-Muller received and administered nearly a million andconcrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in dred thousand miles of sea and land.[307] During thewhich the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a sixty-eight years of his ministry, he never owned anycase with which most of you must be acquainted, that property except his clothes and furniture, and cashof George Muller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Muller’s in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estateworth only a hundred and sixty pounds.prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Earlyin life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in His method was to let his general wants be publiclyliteral sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by known, but not to acquaint other people with the detailsof his temporary necessities. For the relief of thehis own worldly foresight, but by the Lord’s hand. Hehad an extraordinarily active and successful career, latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing thatamong the fruits of which were the distribution of over sooner or later prayers are always answered if onetwo million copies of the Scripture text, in different have trust enough. “When I lose such a thing as alanguages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries;the circulation of more than a hundred and[307] My authority for these statistics is the little workon Muller, by Frederic G. Warne, New York, 1898.450

William Jameskey,” he writes, “I ask the Lord to direct me to it, andI look for an answer to my prayer; when a personwith whom I have made an appointment does notcome, according to the fixed time, and I begin to beinconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased tohasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when Ido not understand a passage of the word of God, I liftup my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased byhis Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to betaught, though I do not fix the time when, and themanner how it should be; when I am going to ministerin the Word, I seek help from the Lord, and … amnot cast down, but of good cheer because I look forhis assistance.”Muller’s custom was to never run up bills, not evenfor a week. “As the Lord deals out to us by the day, …the week’s payment might become due and we haveno money to meet it; and thus those with whom wedeal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be foundacting against the commandment of the Lord: ‘Oweno man anything.’ From this day and henceforwardwhilst the Lord gives to us our supplies by the day,we purpose to pay at once for every article as it ispurchased, and never to buy anything except we canpay for it at once, however much it may seem to beneeded, and however much those with whom we dealmay wish to be paid only by the week.”The articles needed of which Muller speaks werethe food, fuel, etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, nearas they often come to going without a meal, theyhardly ever seem actually to have done so. “Greaterand more manifest nearness of the Lord’s presence Ihave never had than when after breakfast there wereno means for dinner for more than a hundred persons;or when after dinner there were no means forthe tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and allthis without one single human being having been informedabout our need… . Through Grace my mindis so fully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, thatin the midst of the greatest need, I am enabled inpeace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not theLord give me this, which is the result of trusting in451

him, I should scarcely be able to work at all; for it isnow comparatively a rare thing that a day comeswhen I am not in need for one or another part of thework.”[308]In building his orphanages simply by prayer andfaith, Muller affirms that his prime motive was “tohave something to point to as a visible proof that ourGod and Father is the same faithful God that he everwas—as willing as ever to prove himself the livingGod, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trustin him.”[309] For this reason he refused to borrowmoney for any of his enterprises. “How does it workwhen we thus anticipate God by going our own way?We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing it; andeach time we work thus a deliverance of our own wefind it more and more difficult to trust in God, till atlast we give way entirely to our natural fallen reason[308] The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of theLord’s Dealings with George Muller, New AmericanThe Varieties of Religious Experience452and unbelief prevails. How different if one is enabledto wait God’s own time, and to look alone to him forhelp and deliverance! When at last help comes, aftermany seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is,and what a present recompense! Dear Christianreader, if you have never walked in this path of obediencebefore, do so now, and you will then know experimentallythe sweetness of the joy which resultsfrom it.”[310]When the supplies came in but slowly, Muller alwaysconsidered that this was for the trial of his faithand patience When his faith and patience had beensufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means.“And thus it has proved,”—I quote from his diary—”for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, ofwhich 2000 are for the building fund [of a certainhouse], and 50 for present necessities. It is impossibleto describe my joy in God when I received thisdonation. I was neither excited nor surprised; for Ilook out for answers to my prayers. I believe thatedition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219.[309] Ibid., p. 126. [310] Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.

God hears me. Yet my heart was so full of joy that Icould only SIT before God, and admire him, like Davidin 2 Samuel vii. At last I cast myself flat down uponmy face and burst forth in thanksgiving to God andin surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessedservice.”[311]George Muller’s is a case extreme in every respect,and in no respect more so than in the extraordinarynarrowness of the man’s intellectual horizon. His Godwas, as he often said, his business partner. He seemsto have been for Muller little more than a sort of supernaturalclergyman interested in the congregationof tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints,and in the orphanages and other enterprises, butunpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder andmore ideal attributes with which the human imaginationelsewhere has invested him. Muller, in short,was absolutely unphilosophical. His intensely privateand practical conception of his relations with the Deitycontinued the traditions of the most primitive[311] Ibid., p. 323.William James453human thought.[312] When we compare a mind likehis with such a mind as, for example, Emerson’s orPhillips Brooks’s, we see the range which the religiousconsciousness covers.[312] I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expressionof an even more primitive style of religiousthought, which I find in Arber’s English Garland, vol.vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along withan English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689,set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, madethe other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lydethus describes how in this feat he found his God a verypresent help in time of trouble:—“With the assistance of God I kept my feet when theythree and one more did strive to throw me down. Feelingthe Frenchman which hung about my middle hangvery heavy, I said to the boy, ‘Go round the binnacle,and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.’So the boy did strike him one blow on the head whichmade him fall… . Then I looked about for a marlin spikeor anything else to strike them withal. But seeing nothing,I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do?’ Then casting up myeye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging,I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck thepoint four times about a quarter of an inch deep into theskull of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One ofthe Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away fromhim.] But through God’s wonderful providence! it either

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at thistime the Almighty God gave me strength enough to takeone man in one hand, and throw at the other’s head:and looking about again to see anything to strike themwithal, but seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall Ido now?’ And then it pleased God to put me in mind ofmy knife in my pocket. And although two of the menhad hold of my right arm, yet God Almighty strengthenedme so that I put my right hand into my right pocket,drew out the knife and sheath, … put it between my legsand drew it out, and then cut the man’s throat with itthat had his back to my breast: and he immediately droptdown, and scarce ever stirred after.”—I have slightlyabridged Lyde’s narrative.There is an immense literature relating to answersto petitional prayer. The evangelical journals are filledwith such answers, and books are devoted to the subject,[313]but for us Muller’s case will suffice.[313] As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by theBishop of Ripon and others, London, 1898; TouchingIncidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg,Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. Hastings: The GuidingHand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by AuthenticInstances, Boston, 1898(?).A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading theprayerful life is followed by innumerable other Christians.Persistence in leaning on the Almighty for supportand guidance will, such persons say, bring withit proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presenceand active influence. The following descriptionof a “led” life, by a German writer whom I have alreadyquoted, would no doubt appear to countlessChristians in every country as if transcribed fromtheir own personal experience. One finds in thisguided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty—“That books and words (and sometimes people)come to one’s cognizance just at the very moment inwhich one needs them; that one glides over greatdangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant ofwhat would have terrified one or led one astray, untilthe peril is past—this being especially the case withtemptations to vanity and sensuality; that paths onwhich one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedgedoff with thorns; but that on the other side great obstaclesare suddenly removed; that when the time454

William Jameshas come for something, one suddenly receives a couragethat formerly failed, or perceives the root of amatter that until then was concealed, or discoversthoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of knowledge andinsight, in one’s self, of which it is impossible to saywhence they come; finally, that persons help us ordecline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they hadto do so against their will, so that often those indifferentor even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest serviceand furtherance. (God takes often their worldlygoods, from those whom he leads, at just the rightmoment, when they threaten to impede the effortafter higher interests.)“Besides all this, other noteworthy things come topass, of which it is not easy to give account. There isno doubt whatever that now one walks continuallythrough ‘open doors’ and on the easiest roads, withas little care and trouble as it is possible to imagine.“Furthermore one finds one’s self settling one’s affairsneither too early nor too late, whereas they werewont to be spoiled by untimeliness, even when thepreparations had been well laid. In addition to this,one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind, almostas if they were matters of no consequence, likeerrands done by us for another person, in which casewe usually act more calmly than when we act in ourown concerns. Again, one finds that one can wait foreverything patiently, and that is one of life’s great arts.One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thingafter the other, so that one gains time to make one’sfooting sure before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the right moment, just what weought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way, justas if a third person were keeping watch over thosethings which we are in easy danger of forgetting.“Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time,to offer or ask for what is needed, and what we shouldnever have had the courage or resolution to undertakeof our own accord.“Through all these experiences one finds that oneis kindly and tolerant of other people, even of such asare repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are455

The Varieties of Religious Experienceinstruments of good in God’s hand, and often mostefficient ones. Without these thoughts it would be hardfor even the best of us always to keep our equanimity.But with the consciousness of divine guidance, onesees many a thing in life quite differently from whatwould otherwise be possible.“All these are things that every human beingknows, who has had experience of them; and of whichthe most speaking examples could be brought forward.The highest resources of worldly wisdom areunable to attain that which, under divine leading,comes to us of its own accord.”[314]Such accounts as this shade away into others wherethe belief is, not that particular events are temperedmore towardly to us by a superintending providence,as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivatingthe continuous sense of our connection with the powerthat made things as they are, we are tempered moretowardly for their reception. The outward face of natureneed not alter, but the expressions of meaning[314] C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like thedifference between looking on a person without love,or upon the same person with love. In the latter caseintercourse springs into new vitality. So when one’saffections keep in touch with the divinity of the world’sauthorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in theequanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as theysucceed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities.It is as if all doors were opened, and allpaths freshly smoothed. We meet a new world whenwe meet the old world in the spirit which this kind ofprayer infuses.Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius andEpictetus.[315] It is that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists,and of the so-called “liberal” Christians.As an expression of it, I will quote a page fromone of Martineau’s sermons:—[315] “Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “any one thingin the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence,to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibilityof producing milk from grass, cheese from milk,456

William Jamesand wool from skins; who formed and planned it?Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, tosing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has suppliedus with these instruments to till the ground;great is God, who has given us hands and instrumentsof digestion, who has given us to grow insensibly andto breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever tocelebrate… . But because the most of you are blindand insensible, there must be some one to fill this station,and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God;for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymnsto God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part ofa nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. Butsince I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty topraise God … and I call on you to join the same song.”Works, book i. ch. xvi., Carter-Higginson (translation)abridged.“The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as itdid a thousand years ago: and the morning hymn ofMilton does but tell the beauty with which our ownfamiliar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardensof the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And ifwe cannot find God in your house or in mine, uponthe roadside or the margin of the sea; in the burstingseed or opening flower; in the day duty or the nightmusing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; inthe procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnlypassing by and dropping off; I do not think weshould discern him any more on the grass of Eden, orbeneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend uponit, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of thesoul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makesus push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannotreach. The devout feel that wherever God’s handis, there is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutnesswhich imagines that only where miracle is, can therebe the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven oughtsurely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies;the dear old ways, of which the Most High isnever tired, than the strange things which he doesnot love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will457

The Varieties of Religious Experiencebut discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning,the supporting finger of the Almighty, may re-“If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mer-which I take from a friend’s letter:—cover the sweet and reverent surprise with which cies and bounties we are privileged to have, we areAdam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no overwhelmed by their number (so great that we canoutward change, no shifting in time or place; but only imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time eventhe loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can to begin to review the things we may imagine wereawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: have not). We sum them and realize that we are actuallykilled with God’s kindness; that we are sur-that can render him a reality again, and reassert forhim once more his ancient name of ‘the Living rounded by bounties upon bounties, without whichGod.’”[316]all would fall. Should we not love it; should we notWhen we see all things in God, and refer all things feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?”to him, we read in common matters superior expressionsof meaning. The deadness with which custom sending, instead of being habitual, is casual, like aSometimes this realization that facts are of divineinvests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole mystical experience. Father Gratry gives this instanceappears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakenedfrom torpor is well expressed in these words, “One day I had a moment of consolation, because Ifrom his youthful melancholy period:—met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect.It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the[316] James Martineau: end of the sermon “HelpThou Mine Unbelief,” in Endeavours after a ChristianLife, 2d series. Compare with this page the ex-the school on the evening of a holiday. His drum gavestreets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning totract from Voysey on p. 270, above, and those from out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment atPascal and Madame Guyon on p. 281.458

William Jamesleast, however peevish I were, I could find no pretextfor fault-finding. It was impossible to conceivemore nerve or spirit, better time or measure, moreclearness or richness, than were in this drumming.Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. Iwas enchanted and consoled; the perfection of thiswretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, Isaid. since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied.”[317]In Senancour’s novel of Obermann a similar transientlifting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets,on a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, ajonquil:“It was the strongest expression of desire: it wasthe first perfume of the year. I felt all the happinessdestined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls,the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete.I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. Iknow not what shape, what analogy, what secret ofrelation it was that made me see in this flower a lim-[317] Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.itless beauty… . I shall never inclose in a conceptionthis power, this immensity that nothing will express;this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a betterworld which one feels, but which, it seems, naturehas not made actual.”[318]We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face ofthe world as it may appear to converts after theirawakening.[319] As a rule, religious persons generallyassume that whatever natural facts connectthemselves in any way with their destiny are significantof the divine purposes with them. Throughprayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comeshome to them, and if it be “trial,” strength to endurethe trial is given. Thus at all stages of the prayerfullife we find the persuasion that in the process of communionenergy from on high flows in to meet demand,and becomes operative within the phenomenal world.So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it[318] Op. cit., Letter XXX.[319] Above, p. 243 ff. Compare the withdrawal ofexpression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 148.459

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemakes no essential difference whether its immediateeffects be subjective or objective. The fundamentalreligious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, whichotherwise would slumber, does become active, andspiritual work of some kind is effected really.So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of anykind of communion. As the core of religion, we mustreturn to it in the next lecture.The last aspect of the religious life which remainsfor me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestationsso frequently connect themselves with the subconsciouspart of our existence. You may rememberwhat I said in my opening lecture[320] about theprevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religiousbiography. You will in point of fact hardly find areligious leader of any kind in whose life there is norecord of automatisms. I speak not merely of savagepriests and prophets, whose followers regard automaticutterance and action as by itself tantamount toinspiration, I speak of leaders of thought and sub-[320] Above, pp. 25, 26.jects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had hisvisions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as wasthe importance he attached to the latter. The wholearray of Christian saints and heresiarchs, includingthe greatest, the Barnards, the Loyolas, the Luthers,the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, raptconditions, guiding impressions, and “openings.” Theyhad these things, because they had exalted sensibility,and to such things persons of exalted sensibilityare liable. In such liability there lie, however, consequencesfor theology. Beliefs are strengthened whereverautomatisms corroborate them. Incursions frombeyond the transmarginal region have a peculiarpower to increase conviction. The inchoate sense ofpresence is infinitely stronger than conception, butstrong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidenceof hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear theirSaviour reach the acme of assurance. Motorautomatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even moreconvincing than sensations. The subjects here actuallyfeel themselves played upon by powers beyond460

William Jamestheir will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spiritmoves the very organs of their body.[324][324] A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who isa subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearanceof independent actuation in the movements ofhis arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct thatit obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory whichhe had previously believed in, the theory, namely, thatwe have no feeling of the discharge downwards of ourvoluntary motor-centres. We must normally have sucha feeling, he thinks, or the sense of an absence wouldnot be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphicautomatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religioushistory, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statementsas Antonia Bourignon’s, that “I do nothing but lend myhand and spirit to another power than mine,” is shownby the context to indicate inspiration rather than directlyautomatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latteroccurs. The most striking instance of it is probably thebulky volume called, “Oahspe, a new Bible in the Wordsof Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,” Boston andLondon, 1891, written and illustrated automatically byDr. Newbrough of New York, whom I understand to benow, or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritisticcommunity of Shalam in New Mexico. The latest automaticallywritten book which has come under my noticeis “Zertouhem’s Wisdom of the Ages,” by George A.Fuller, Boston, 1901.The great field for this sense of being the instrumentof a higher power is of course “inspiration.” It iseasy to discriminate between the religious leaderswho have been habitually subject to inspiration andthose who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha,of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from his gift of tongues),of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of Wesley, automaticor semi-automatic composition appears tohave been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets,on the contrary, in Mohammed, in some of theAlexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in Fox,in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to havebeen frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinctprofessions of being under the direction of a foreignpower, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards theHebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an authorwho has made a careful study of them, to see—“How, one after another, the same features are reproducedin the prophetic books. The process is alwaysextremely different from what it would be ifthe prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things461

The Varieties of Religious Experienceby the tentative efforts of his own genius. There issomething sharp and sudden about it. He can lay hisfinger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. Andit always comes in the form of an overpowering forcefrom without, against which he struggles, but in vain.Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of the book ofJeremiah. Read through in like manner the first twochapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.“It is not, however, only at the beginning of his careerthat the prophet passes through a crisis which isclearly not self-caused. Scattered all through the propheticwritings are expressions which speak of somestrong and irresistible impulse coming down upon theprophet, determining his attitude to the events of histime, constraining his utterance, making his wordsthe vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. Forinstance, this of Isaiah’s: ‘The Lord spake thus to mewith a strong hand,’—an emphatic phrase which denotesthe overmastering nature of the impulse—’andinstructed me that I should not walk in the way ofthis people.’ … Or passages like this from Ezekiel: ‘Thehand of the Lord God fell upon me,’ ‘The hand of theLord was strong upon me.’ The one standing characteristicof the prophet is that he speaks with the authorityof Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophetsone and all preface their addresses so confidently,‘The Word of the Lord,’ or ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ Theyhave even the audacity to speak in the first person,as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah:‘Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; Iam He, I am the First, I also am the last,’—and so on.The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into thebackground; he feels himself for the time being themouthpiece of the Almighty.”[322]“We need to remember that prophecy was a profession,and that the prophets formed a professionalclass. There were schools of the prophets, in whichthe gift was regularly cultivated. A group of youngmen would gather round some commanding figure—a Samuel or an Elisha—and would not only record or[322] W. Sanday: The Oracles of God, London, 1892,pp. 49-56, abridged.462

William Jamesspread the knowledge of his sayings and doings, but known neither the place in which I was, nor thoseseek to catch themselves something of his inspiration.It seems that music played its part in their exing,nor what I was writing, for then I have been con-who were present, nor myself, nor what I was sayercises…. It is perfectly clear that by no means all of scious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoymentthese Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiringmore than a very small share in the gift which energy in all that was to be done; having such effectof light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifestthey sought. It was clearly possible to ‘counterfeit’ on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstrationprophecy. Sometimes this was done deliberately… . would have on the eyes.”[324]But it by no means follows that in all cases where a If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed’s revelationsall came from the subconscious sphere. Tofalse message was given, the giver of it was altogetherconscious of what he was doing.[323]the question in what way he got them—Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in “Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimeshe heard a knell as from a bell, and that thiswhich Philo of Alexandria describes his inspiration:—“Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, had the strongest effect on him; and when the angelI have suddenly become full; ideas being in an invisiblemanner showered upon me, and implanted in me times again he held converse with the angel as with awent away, he had received the revelation. Some-from on high; so that through the influence of divineinspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have [324] Quoted by Augustus Clissold: The PropheticSpirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold[323] Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses’s is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s case is of courseand Isaiah’s commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. the palmary one of audita et visa, serving as a basisiii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi.of religious revelation.463

The Varieties of Religious Experienceman, so as easily to understand his words. The later phetic revelations innumerable in addition to the revealedtranslation of the gold plates which resultedauthorities, however, … distinguish still other kinds.In the Itgan (103) the following are enumerated: 1, in the Book of Mormon), although there may haverevelations with sound of bell, 2, by inspiration of the been a motor element, the inspiration seems to haveholy spirit in M.’s heart, 3, by Gabriel in human form, been predominantly sensorial. He began his translationby the aid of the “peep-stones” which he found,4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in hisjourney to heaven) or in dream… . In Almawahib or thought or said that he found, with the gold platesalladuniya the kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspirationof Gabriel in the Prophet’s heart, 3, Gabriel the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but—apparently a case of “crystal gazing.” For some oftaking Dahya’s form, 4, with the bell-sound, etc., 5, seems generally to have asked the Lord for more directinstruction.[326]Gabriel in propria persona (only twice), 6, revelationin heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8, 7[326] The Mormon theocracy has always been governedby direct revelations accorded to the PresidentGod revealing himself immediately without veil. Othersadd two other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letterwritten to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, Iform of still another man, 2, God showing himselfpersonally in dream.”[325]quote the following extract:—In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly “It may be very interesting for you to know thatmotor. In the case of Joseph Smith (who had pro-the President [Mr. Snow] of the Mormon Churchclaims to have had a number of revelations very recentlyfrom heaven. To explain fully what these rev-[325] Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1860, p. 16.Compare the fuller account in Sir William Muir’s: Life elations are, it is necessary to know that we, as aof Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii.464

William Jamespeople, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ hasagain been established through messengers sent fromheaven. This Church has at its head a prophet seer,and revelator, who gives to man God’s holy will. Revelationis the means through which the will of God isdeclared directly and in fullness to man. These revelationsare got through dreams of sleep or in wakingvisions of the mind, by voices without visional appearanceor by actual manifestations of the Holy Presencebefore the eye. We believe that God has come inperson and spoken to our prophet and revelator.”Other revelations are described as “openings”—Fox’s, for example, were evidently of the kind knownin spiritistic circles of to-day as “impressions.” As alleffective initiators of change must needs live to somedegree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perceptionor conviction of new truth, or of impulse toaction so obsessive that it must be worked off, I willsay nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration,we take religious mysticism into the account,when we recall the striking and sudden unificationsof a discordant self which we saw in conversion, andwhen we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness,purity, and self-severity met with in saintliness,we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that inreligion we have a department of human nature withunusually close relations to the transmarginal or subliminalregion. If the word “subliminal” is offensive toany of you, as smelling too much of psychical researchor other aberrations, call it by any other name youplease, to distinguish it from the level of full sunlitconsciousness. Call this latter the A-region of personality,if you care to, and call the other the B-region.The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of eachof us, for it is the abode of everything that is latentand the reservoir of everything that passes unrecordedor unobserved. It contains, for example, suchthings as all our momentarily inactive memories, andit harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived465

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepassions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Ourintuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions,convictions, and in general all our non-rationaloperations, come from it. It is the source of ourdreams, and apparently they may return to it. In itarise whatever mystical experiences we may have,and our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life inhypnotic and “hypnoid” conditions, if we are subjectsto such conditions; our delusions, fixed ideas, andhysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; oursupra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if weare telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain-head ofmuch that feeds our religion. In persons deep in thereligious life, as we have now abundantly seen—andthis is my conclusion—the door into this region seemsunusually wide open; at any rate, experiences makingtheir entrance through that door have had emphaticinfluence in shaping religious history.With this conclusion I turn back and close the circlewhich I opened in my first lecture, terminating thusthe review which I then announced of inner religiousphenomena as we find them in developed and articulatehuman individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed,multiply both my documents and my discriminations,but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itselfbetter, and the most important characteristics of thesubject lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture,which is also the last one, we must try to drawthe critical conclusions which so much material maysuggest.466

William JamesLecture XXCONCLUSIONSTHE MATERIAL of our study of human nature is nowspread before us; and in this parting hour, set freefrom the duty of description, we can draw our theoreticaland practical conclusions. In my first lecture,defending the empirical method, I foretold that whateverconclusions we might come to could be reachedby spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the significancefor life of religion, taken “on the whole.” Ourconclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusionswould be, but I will formulate them, when thetime comes, as sharply as I can.Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristicsof the religious life, as we have found them,it includes the following beliefs:—1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritualuniverse from which it draws its chief significance;2. That union or harmonious relation with that higheruniverse is our true end;3. That prayer or inner communion with the spiritthereof— be that spirit “God” or “law”—is a processwherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flowsin and produces effects, psychological or material,within the phenomenal world.Religion includes also the following psychologicalcharacteristics:—4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, andtakes the form either of lyrical enchantment or ofappeal to earnestness and heroism.5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, inrelation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.In illustrating these characteristics by documents,we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In rereadingmy manuscript, I am almost appalled at theamount of emotionality which I find in it.467

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceAfter so much of this, we can afford to be dryer andless sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies beforeus.The sentimentality of many of my documents is aconsequence of the fact that I sought them amongthe extravagances of the subject. If any of you areenemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm,and are, nevertheless, still listening to menow, you have probably felt my selection to have beensometimes almost perverse, and have wished I mighthave stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I tookthese extremer examples as yielding the profounderinformation. To learn the secrets of any science, wego to expert specialists, even though they may beeccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. Wecombine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom,and form our final judgment independently.Even so with religion. We who have pursued suchradical expressions of it may now be sure that weknow its secrets as authentically as anyone can knowthem who learns them from another; and we havenext to answer, each of us for himself, the practicalquestion: what are the dangers in this element of life?and in what proportion may it need to be restrainedby other elements, to give the proper balance?But this question suggests another one which I willanswer immediately and get it out of the way, for ithas more than once already vexed us.[327] Ought itto be assumed that in all men the mixture of religionwith other elements should be identical? Ought it,indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men shouldshow identical religious elements? In other words, isthe existence of so many religious types and sectsand creeds regrettable?To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. Andmy reason is that I do not see how it is possible thatcreatures in such different positions and with suchdifferent powers as human individuals are, shouldhave exactly the same functions and the same duties.No two of us have identical difficulties, nor shouldwe be expected to work out identical solutions. Each,[327] For example, on pages 135, 160, 326 above.468

from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certainsphere of fact and trouble, which each must dealwith in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself,another must harden himself; one must yield apoint, another must stand firm—in order the betterto defend the position assigned him. If an Emersonwere forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be aWhitman, the total human consciousness of the divinewould suffer. The divine can mean no single quality,it must mean a group of qualities, by being championsof which in alternation, different men may allfind worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllablein human nature’s total message, it takes the wholeof us to spell the meaning out completely. So a “godof battles” must be allowed to be the god for one kindof person, a god of peace and heaven and home, thegod for another. We must frankly recognize the factthat we live in partial systems, and that parts are notinterchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevishand jealous, destruction of the self must be an elementof our religion; why need it be one if we areWilliam James469good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sicksouls, we require a religion of deliverance; but whythink so much of deliverance, if we are healthyminded?[328]Unquestionably, some men have thecompleter experience and the higher vocation, herejust as in the social world; but for each man to stay inhis own experience, whate’er it be, and for others totolerate him there, is surely best.[328] From this point of view, the contrasts betweenthe healthy and the morbid mind, and between theonce-born and the twice-born types, of which I spokein earlier lectures (see pp. 159-164), cease to be theradical antagonisms which many think them. Thetwice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousnessof life of the once-born as being “mere morality,”and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” anorthodox minister is reported to have said, “is excludedfrom the highest form of religious life by theextraordinary rectitude of his character.” It is indeedtrue that the outlook upon life of the twice-born—holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution—isthe wider and completer. The “heroic” or “solemn”way in which life comes to them is a “highersynthesis” into which healthy- mindedness and morbidnessboth enter and combine. Evil is not evaded,

ut sublated in the higher religious cheer of thesepersons (see pp. 47-52, 354-357). But the final consciousnesswhich each type reaches of union with thedivine has the same practical significance for the individual;and individuals may well be allowed to getto it by the channels which lie most open to their severaltemperaments. In the cases which were quotedin Lecture IV, of the mind-cure form of healthymindedness,we found abundant examples of regenerativeprocess. The severity of the crisis in this processis a matter of degree. How long one shall continueto drink the consciousness of evil, and when oneshall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are alsomatters of amount and degree, so that in many instancesit is quite arbitrary whether we class the individualas a once-born or a twice-born subject.But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidednessbe cured if we should all espouse the science of religionsas our own religion? In answering this questionI must open again the general relations of the theoreticto the active life.Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. Youremember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture onMysticism—that to understand the causes of drunkenness,as a physician understands them, is not to beThe Varieties of Religious Experience470drunk. A science might come to understand everythingabout the causes and elements of religion, and mighteven decide which elements were qualified, by theirgeneral harmony with other branches of knowledge,to be considered true; and yet the best man at thisscience might be the man who found it hardest to bepersonally devout. Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner.The name of Renan would doubtless occur to manypersons as an example of the way in which breadth ofknowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities,and blunt the acuteness of one’s living faith. Ifreligion be a function by which either God’s cause orman’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who livesthe life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant thanhe who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledgeabout life is one thing; effective occupation of aplace in life, with its dynamic currents passing throughyour being, is another.For this reason, the science of religions may not bean equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to theinner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point

William Jamescomes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude,and either let her knots remain uncut, or havethem cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that wehave our science of religions constituted as a matterof fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the necessaryhistorical material and distilled out of it as itsessence the same conclusions which I myself a fewmoments ago pronounced. Suppose that she agreesthat religion, wherever it is an active thing, involvesa belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in ourprayerful communion with them, work is done, andsomething real comes to pass. She has now to exerther critical activity, and to decide how far, in the lightof other sciences and in that of general philosophy,such beliefs can be considered true.Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task.Not only are the other sciences and the philosophystill far from being completed, but in their presentstate we find them full of conflicts. The sciences ofnature know nothing of spiritual presences, and onthe whole hold no practical commerce whatever withthe idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophyinclines. The scientist, so-called, is, during hisscientific hours at least, so materialistic that one maywell say that on the whole the influence of sciencegoes against the notion that religion should be recognizedat all. And this antipathy to religion finds anecho within the very science of religions itself. Thecultivator of this science has to become acquaintedwith so many groveling and horrible superstitionsthat a presumption easily arises in his mind that anybelief that is religious probably is false. In the “prayerfulcommunion” of savages with such mumbo-jumbosof deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us tosee what genuine spiritual work—even though it werework relative only to their dark savage obligations—can possibly be done.The consequence is that the conclusions of the scienceof religions are as likely to be adverse as theyare to be favorable to the claim that the essence ofreligion is true. There is a notion in the air about usthat religion is probably only an anachronism, a case471

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof “survival,” an atavistic relapse into a mode ofthought which humanity in its more enlightened exampleshas outgrown; and this notion our religiousanthropologists at present do little to counteract.This view is so widespread at the present day thatI must consider it with some explicitness before I passto my own conclusions. Let me call it the “Survivaltheory,” for brevity’s sake.The pivot round which the religious life, as we havetraced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual inhis private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is amonumental chapter in the history of human egotism.The gods believed in—whether by crude savagesor by men disciplined intellectually—agree witheach other in recognizing personal calls. Religiousthought is carried on in terms of personality, this being,in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact.To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, thereligious individual tells you that the divine meets himon the basis of his personal concerns.Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiatingthe personal point of view. She cataloguesher elements and records her laws indifferent as towhat purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructsher theories quite careless of their bearing onhuman anxieties and fates. Though the scientist mayindividually nourish a religion, and be a theist in hisirresponsible hours, the days are over when it couldbe said that for Science herself the heavens declarethe glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seennow as but one passing case of a certain sort of movingequilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accidentin an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life canexist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval willcount but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. TheDarwinian notion of chance production, and subsequentdestruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largestas well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in thepresent temper of the scientific imagination, to find inthe driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they workon the universal or on the particular scale, anything472

William Jamesbut a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,achieving no proper history, and leaving no result.Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendencywith which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vastrhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind nowfollows them, she appears to cancel herself. The booksof natural theology which satisfied the intellects of ourgrandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,[329] representing,as they did, a God who conformed the largestthings of nature to the paltriest of our private wants.The God whom science recognizes must be a God ofuniversal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale,not a retail business. He cannot accommodate hisprocesses to the convenience of individuals. Thebubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floatingepisodes, made and unmade by the forces of thewind and water. Our private selves are like thosebubbles—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniouslycalled them; their destinies weigh nothing anddetermine nothing in the world’s irremediable currentsof events.[329] How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that aman like Christian Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust headall the learning of the early eighteenth century wasconcentrated, should have preserved such a babylikefaith in the personal and human character of Natureas to expound her operations as he did in hiswork on the uses of natural things? This, for example,is the account he gives of the sun and its utility:—“We see that God has created the sun to keep thechangeable conditions on the earth in such an orderthat living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit itssurface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures,and able to infer God’s invisible being from thecontemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributesto the primary purpose of creation: without itthe race of man could not be preserved or continued…. The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, butalso on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmostutility to us, for by its means we can commodiouslycarry on those occupations which in the night-timewould either be quite impossible. Or at any rate im-473

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepossible without our going to the expense of artificiallight. The beasts of the field can find food by day whichthey would not be able to find at night. Moreover weowe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everythingthat is on the earth’s surface, not only near by,but also at a distance, and to recognize both near andfar things according to their species, which again is ofmanifold use to us not only in the business necessaryto human life, and when we are traveling, but also forthe scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledgefor the most part depends on observations made withthe help of sight, and without the sunshine, would havebeen impossible. If any one would rightly impress onhis mind the great advantages which he derives fromthe sun, let him imagine himself living through onlyone month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings,if it were not day but night. He would then besufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especiallyif he had much work to carry on in the street orin the fields… . From the sun we learn to recognizewhen it is midday, and by knowing this point of timeexactly, we can set our clocks right, on which accountastronomy owes much to the sun… . By help of the sunone can find the meridian… . But the meridian is thebasis of our sun-dials, and generally speaking, weshould have no sun-dials if we had no sun.” VernunftigeGedanken von den Absichter der naturlichen Dinge,1782. pp.74-84.Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institutionof “the great variety throughout the worldof men’s faces, voices, and hand-writing,” given inDerham’s Physico-theology, a book that had muchvogue in the eighteenth century. “Had Man’s body,”says Dr. Derham, “been made according to any of theAtheistical Schemes, or any other Method than thatof the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Varietywould never have been: but Men’s Faces would havebeen cast in the same, or not a very different Mould,their Organs of Speech would have sounded the sameor not so great a Variety of Notes, and the same Structureof Muscles and Nerves would have given theHand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case474

William Jameswhat Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefswould the world eternally have lain under! No Securitycould have been to our persons; no Certainty, noEnjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice betweenMan and Man, no Distinction between Good and Bad,between Friends and Foes, between Father and Child,Husband and Wife, Male or Female; but all wouldhave been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed tothe Malice of the Envious and ill-Natured, to theFraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to theForgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminateand Debauched, and what not! Our Courtsof Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects ofMistaking Men’s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands,and forging Writings.But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Rulerhath ordered the Matter, every man’s Face can distinguishhim in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark,his Hand-writing can speak for him though absent,and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in futureGenerations. A manifest as well as admirableIndication of the divine Superintendence and Management.”A God so careful as to make provision even for theunmistakable signing of bank checks and deeds wasa deity truly after the heart of eighteenth centuryAnglicanism.I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham’s “Vindicationof God by the Institution of Hills and Valleys,”and Wolff’s altogether culinary account of the institutionof Water:—“The uses,” says Wolff, “which water serves in humanlife are plain to see and need not be described atlength. Water is a universal drink of man and beasts.Even though men have made themselves drinks thatare artificial, they could not do this without water.Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the waterin it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared fromgrapes, which could never have grown without thehelp of water; and the same is true of those drinkswhich in England and other places they produce fromfruit… . Therefore since God so planned the world475

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethat men and beasts should live upon it and find thereeverything required for their necessity and convenience,he also made water as one means whereby tomake the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And thisis all the more manifest when we consider the advantageswhich we obtain from this same water forthe cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing,and of other matters… . When one goes into agrinding-mill one sees that the grindstone must alwaysbe kept wet and then one will get a still greateridea of the use of water.”Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising theirbeauty, discourses as follows: “Some constitutions areindeed of so happy a strength, and so confirmed anhealth, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperatureof the air. But then others are so weaklyand feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can livecomfortably in another place. With some the moresubtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, whoare languishing and dying in the feculent and grosserair of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporousair of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, otherslanguish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong inthe warmer air of the valleys.“So that this opportunity of shifting our abode fromthe hills to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment,and great benefit to the valetudinarian,feeble part of mankind; affording those an easy andcomfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably,languish, and pine away.“To this salutary conformation of the earth we mayadd another great convenience of the hills, and that isaffording commodious places for habitation, serving (asan eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep offthe cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterlywinds, and reflecting the benign and cherishingsunbeams and so rendering our habitations both morecomfortable and more cheerly in winter.“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe theirrise and the rivers their conveyance, and consequentlythose vast masses and lofty piles are not, asthey are charged such rude and useless excrescences476

William Jamesof our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools ofnature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator,to do one of its most useful works. For, was thesurface of the earth even and level, and the middleparts of its islands and continents not mountainousand high as now it is, it is most certain there could beno descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters;but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivitieswhich the higher lands now afford them quitedown to the sea, they would stagnate and perhapsstink, and also drown large tracts of land.“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish andweary traveler they may seem incommodious andtroublesome, yet are a noble work of the great Creator,and wisely appointed by him for the good of oursublunary world.”You see how natural it is, from this point of view, totreat religion as a mere survival, for religion does infact perpetuate the traditions of the most primevalthought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to squarethem and get them on our side, was, during enormoustracts of time, the one great object in our dealingswith the natural world. For our ancestors,dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bullstories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to acomparatively recent date such distinctions as thosebetween what has been verified and what is only conjectured,between the impersonal and the personalaspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.Whatever you imagined in a lively manner,whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmedconfidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comradesbelieved. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted,most things were taken into the mind fromthe point of view of their human suggestiveness, andthe attention confined itself exclusively to the aestheticand dramatic aspects of events.[330][330] Until the seventeenth century this mode ofthought prevailed. One need only recall the dramatictreatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle,as, for example, his explanation of the power of the477

The Varieties of Religious Experiencelever to make a small weight raise a larger one. Thisis due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculouscharacter of the circle and of all circular movement.The circle is both convex and concave; it ismade by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradicteach other; and whatever moves in a circlemoves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movementin a circle is the most “natural” movement; andthe long arm of the lever, moving, as it does, in thelarger circle, has the greater amount of this naturalmotion, and consequently requires the lesser force.Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of the positionof the sun in winter: It moves to the south becauseof the cold which drives it into the warm partsof the heavens over Libya. Or listen to SaintAugustine’s speculations: “Who gave to chaff suchpower to freeze that it preserves snow buried underit, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit?Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself,which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright,and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolorsalmost all that it touches and feeds upon, andturns blazing fuel into grimy cinders? … Then whatwonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which isso brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressurepulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisturerots it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City ofGod, book xxi, ch. iv.Such aspects of things as these, their naturalnessand unnaturalness the sympathies and antipathiesof their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, theirbrightness and strength and destructiveness, wereinevitably the ways in which they originally fastenedour attention.If you open early medical books, you will find sympatheticmagic invoked on every page. Take, for example,the famous vulnerary ointment attributed toParacelsus. For this there were a variety of receipts,including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, awild boar, or a bear, powdered earthworms, the usnia,or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hangedcriminal, and other materials equally unpleasant—the478

William Jameswhole prepared under the planet Venus if possible,but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinterof wood, dipped in the patient’s blood, or the bloodstainedweapon that wounded him, be immersed inthis ointment, the wound itself being tightly boundup, the latter infallibly gets well—I quote now VanHelmont’s account—for the blood on the weapon orsplinter, containing in it the spirit of the woundedman, is roused to active excitement by the contact ofthe ointment, whence there results to it a full commissionor power to cure its cousin-german the bloodin the patient’s body. This it does by sucking out thedolorous and exotic impression from the woundedpart. But to do this it has to implore the aid of thebull’s fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reasonwhy bull’s fat is so powerful is that the bull at thetime of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictivemurmurs, and therefore dies with a higherflame of revenge about him than any other animal.And thus we have made it out, says this author, thatthe admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to beimputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan,but simply to the energy of the posthumous characterof Revenge remaining firmly impressed upon theblood and concreted fat in the unguent. J. B. VanHelmont: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated byWalter Charleton, London, 1650.—I much abridge theoriginal in my citations.The author goes on to prove by the analogy of manyother natural facts that this sympathetic action betweenthings at a distance is the true rationale of thecase. “If,” he says, “the heart of a horse slain by awitch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be impaledupon an arrow and roasted, immediately thewhole witch becomes tormented with the insufferablepains and cruelty of the fire, which could by nomeans happen unless there preceded a conjunctionof the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse.In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of thewitch is kept captive, and the retreat of it preventedby the arrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many amurdered carcase at the coroner’s inquest suffered a479

The Varieties of Religious Experiencefresh haemorrhage or cruentation at the presence ofthe assassin?—the blood being, as in a furious fit ofanger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revengeconceived against the murderer, at the instantof the soul’s compulsive exile from the body. So, ifyou have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including someof your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg,which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with abait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog,the disease shall instantly pass from you into the animal,and leave you entirely. And similarly again, ifyou burn some of the milk either of a cow or of awoman, the gland from which it issued will dry up. Agentleman at Brussels had his nose mowed off in acombat, but the celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzusdigged a new nose for him out of the skin of the armof a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months afterhis return to his own country, the engrafted nose grewcold, putrefied, and in a few days dropped off, and itwas then discovered that the porter had expired, nearabout the same punctilio of time. There are still atBrussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence,” says VanHelmont; and adds, “I pray what is there in this ofsuperstition or of exalted imagination?”Modern mind-cure literature—the works ofPrentice Mulford, for example—is full of sympatheticmagic.How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinaryvalue, for explanation and prevision, of thosemathematical and mechanical modes of conceptionwhich science uses, was a result that could not possiblyhave been expected in advance. Weight, movement,velocity, direction, position, what thin, pallid,uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animisticaspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities thatmake phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive,fail to have been first singled out and followedby philosophy as the more promising avenue to theknowledge of Nature’s life? Well, it is still in thesericher animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delightsto dwell. It is the terror and beauty of phe-480

William Jamesnomena, the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow,the “voice” of the thunder, the “gentleness” of but as soon as we deal with private and personal phe-the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality,the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the stars, and nomena as such, we deal with realities in the completestsense of the term. I think I can easily makenot the physical laws which these things follow, bywhich the religious mind still continues to be most clear what I mean by these words.impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells The world of our experience consists at all times ofyou that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of whichstill feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help the former may be incalculably more extensive thancome in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted orthis unseen reality fill him with security and peace. suppressed. The objective part is the sum total ofPure anachronism! says the survival-theory;— whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of,anachronism for which deanthropomorphization of the subjective part is the inner “state” in which thethe imagination is the remedy required. The less we thinking comes to pass. What we think of may bemix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell enormous—the cosmic times and spaces, for example—whereas the inner state may be the mostin universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs ofScience we become.fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmicIn spite of the appeal which this impersonality of objects, so far as the experience yields them, are butthe scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimityof temper, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly,ideal pictures of something whose existence we dostate my reason in comparatively few words. That while the inner state is our very experience itself; itsreason is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and reality and that of our experience are one. A consciousfield plus its object as felt or thought of plus an atti-481

tude towards the object plus the sense of a self towhom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit ofpersonal experience may be a small bit, but it is asolid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstractelement of experience, such as the “object” iswhen taken all alone. It is a full fact, even though itbe an insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which allrealities whatsoever must belong; the motor currentsof the world run through the like of it; it is on the lineconnecting real events with real events. Thatunsharable feeling which each one of us has of thepinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels itrolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged forits egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but itis the one thing that fills up the measure of our concreteactuality, and any would-be existent that shouldlack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a pieceof reality only half made up.[331][331] Compare Lotze’s doctrine that the only meaningwe can attach to the notion of a thing as it is “initself” is by conceiving it as it is for itself, i.e., as apiece of full experience with a private sense of “pinch”or inner activity of some sort going with it.The Varieties of Religious Experience482If this be true, it is absurd for science to say thatthe egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed.The axis of reality runs solely through theegotistic places—they are strung upon it like so manybeads. To describe the world with all the various feelingsof the individual pinch of destiny, all the variousspiritual attitudes, left out from the description—theybeing as describable as anything else —would besomething like offering a printed bill of fare as theequivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no suchblunder. The individual’s religion may be egotistic,and those private realities which it keeps in touch withmay be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remainsinfinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as itgoes, than a science which prides itself on taking noaccount of anything private at all.A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of theword “raisin,” with one real egg instead of the word“egg,” might be an inadequate meal, but it would atleast be a commencement of reality. The contentionof the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-

William Jamespersonal elements exclusively seems like saying that tarian scientist methodically declining, as he does, towe ought to be satisfied forever with reading the nakedbill of fare. I think, therefore, that however par-of classification as “bosh,” “rot,” “folly,” certainlyrecognize such “facts” as mind-curers and others likethem experience, otherwise than by such rude headsticular questions connected with our individual destiniesmay be answered, it is only by acknowledging dustrious interest of the religious in the more per-leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the insonalaspects of reality, would never have succeededthem as genuine questions, and living in the spherein getting itself recorded at all. We know this to beof thought which they open up, that we become profound.But to live thus is to be religious; so I true in others as well. Miraculous healings have al-true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, beunhesitatingly repudiate the survival-theory of religion,as being founded on an egregious mistake. Itways been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade,and have always been dismissed by the scientist asfigments of the imagination. But the scientist’s tardydoes not follow, because our ancestors made so many education in the facts of hypnotism has recently givenerrors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order,and he consequently now allows that the healingswe should therefore leave off being religious atmay exist, provided you expressly call them effectsall.[332] By being religious we establish ourselves inof “suggestion.” Even the stigmata of the cross onpossession of ultimate reality at the only points at Saint Francis’s hands and feet may on these termswhich reality is given us to guard. Our responsible not be a fable. Similarly, the time-honored phenomenonof diabolical possession is on the point of beingconcern is with our private destiny, after all.[332] Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he hasnot to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We the name of “hystero-demonopathy” by which tosaw in Lecture IV how the religious conception of the apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far thisuniverse seems to many mind-curers “verified” from legitimation of occultist phenomena under newlyday to day by their experience of fact. “Experience of found scientist titles may proceed—even “prophecy,”fact” is a field with so many things in it that the sec-even “levitation,” might creep into the pale.483

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceThus the divorce between scientist facts and religiousfacts may not necessarily be as eternal as it atfirst sight seems, nor the personalism and romanticismof the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking,be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The finalhuman opinion may, in short, in some manner nowimpossible to foresee, revert to the more personalstyle, just as any path of progress may follow a spiralrather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorouslyimpersonal view of science might one day appearas having been a temporarily useful eccentricityrather than the definitively triumphant positionwhich the sectarian scientist at present so confidentlyannounces it to be.You see now why I have been so individualisticthroughout these lectures, and why I have seemedso bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religionand subordinating its intellectual part. Individualityis founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling,the darker, blinder strata of character, are the onlyplaces in the world in which we catch real fact in themaking, and directly perceive how events happen,and how work is actually done.[333] Compared withthis world of living individualized feelings, the worldof generalized objects which the intellect contemplatesis without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic orkinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, thethird dimension, the movement, the vital element,are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an expresstrain supposed to be moving, but where in thepicture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy orthe fifty miles an hour?[334][333] Hume’s criticism has banished causation fromthe world of physical objects, and “Science” is absolutelysatisfied to define cause in terms of concomitantchange-read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The“original” of the notion of causation is in our innerpersonal experience, and only there can causes in theold-fashioned sense be directly observed and described.[334] When I read in a religious paper words likethese: “Perhaps the best thing we can say of God isthat he is the inevitable inference,” I recognize the484

William Jamestendency to let religion evaporate in intellectualterms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for amere inference, however inevitable it might be? Originalreligious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen,have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretensionto meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect,everywhere invasive, shows everywhere itsshallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit ofMethodism evaporates under those wonderfully ablerationalistic booklets (which every one should read)of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The ChristianRevelation, The Christian Life The Atonement: Cincinnatiand New York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See thepositively expulsive purpose of philosophy properlyso called:—“Religion,” writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris,1869, pp. 313, 436, et passim), “answers to a transientstate or condition, not to a permanent determinationof human nature, being merely an expressionof that stage of the human mind which is dominatedby the imagination… . Christianity has but a singlepossible final heir to its estate, and that is scientificphilosophy.”In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot(Psychologie des Sentiments, p. 310) describes theevaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula—theever-growing predominance of the rationalintellectual element, with the gradual fading outof the emotional element, this latter tending to enterinto the group of purely intellectual sentiments. “Ofreligious sentiment properly so called, nothing survivesat last save a vague respect for the unknowablex which is a last relic of the fear, and a certainattraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of thelove, that characterized the earlier periods of religiousgrowth.To state this more simply, religion tends to turninto religious philosophy.—These are psychologicallyentirely different things, the one being a theoretic constructionof ratiocination, whereas the other is theliving work of a group of persons, or of a great inspiredleader, calling into play the entire thinking andfeeling organism of man.”I find the same failure to recognize that the strongholdof religion lies in individuality in attempts likethose of Professor Baldwin (Mental Development,Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x) and Mr. H.R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps. viii. to xii.)to make it a purely “conservative social force.”Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herselfwith personal destinies and keeping thus in contactwith the only absolute realities which we know, must485

The Varieties of Religious Experiencenecessarily play an eternal part in human history. Thenext thing to decide is what she reveals about thosedestinies, or whether indeed she reveals anythingdistinct enough to be considered a general messageto mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries,and our final summing up can now begin.I am well aware that after all the palpitating documentswhich I have quoted, and all the perspectivesof emotion-inspiring institution and belief that myprevious lectures have opened, the dry analysis towhich I now advance may appear to many of you likean anti-climax, a tapering-off and flattening out ofthe subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and result.I said awhile ago that the religious attitude ofProtestants appears poverty-stricken to the Catholicimagination. Still more poverty-stricken, I fear,may my final summing up of the subject appear atfirst to some of you. On which account I pray younow to bear this point in mind, that in the presentpart of it I am expressly trying to reduce religion toits lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, freefrom individualistic excrescences, which all religionscontain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hopedthat all religious persons may agree. That established,we should have a result which might be small, butwould at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddieradditional beliefs on which the different individualsmake their venture might be grafted, and flourishas richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief(which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind,as befits a critical philosopher), and you will, I hope,also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be inthe varied world of concrete religious constructionsonce more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue theanalytic part of the task.Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct,and the same conduct may be determined eitherby feeling or by thought. When we survey thewhole field of religion, we find a great variety in thethoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelingson the one hand and the conduct on the other arealmost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Bud-486

dhist saints are practically indistinguishable in theirlives. The theories which Religion generates, beingthus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to graspher essence, you must look to the feelings and theconduct as being the more constant elements. It isbetween these two elements that the short circuitexists on which she carries on her principal business,while the ideas and symbols and other institutionsform loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements,and may even some day all be unitedinto one harmonious system, but which are not to beregarded as organs with an indispensable function,necessary at all times for religious life to go on. Thisseems to me the first conclusion which we are entitledto draw from the phenomena we have passedin review.The next step is to characterize the feelings. To whatpsychological order do they belong?The resultant outcome of them is in any case whatKant calls a “sthenic” affection, an excitement of thecheerful, expansive, “dynamogenic” order which, likeWilliam James487any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost everylecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversionand on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotionovercomes temperamental melancholy and impartsendurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, oran enchantment and glory to the common objects oflife.[335] The name of “faith-state,” by which ProfessorLeuba designates it, is a good one.[336] It is abiological as well as a psychological condition, andTolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith amongthe forces by which men live.[337] The total absenceof it, anhedonia,[338] means collapse.The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectualcontent. We saw examples of this in those suddenraptures of the divine presence, or in such mysticalseizures as Dr. Bucke described.[339] It may be[335] Compare, for instance, pages 200, 215, 219,222, 244-250, 270-273.[336] American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.[337] Above, p. 181.[338] Above, p. 143.[339] Above, p. 391.

The Varieties of Religious Experiencea mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, acourage, and a feeling that great and wondrous thingsare in the air.[340][340] Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “Ido not know how to deal with the happiness whichyou aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me;I want to do something, yet I can do nothing and amfit for nothing… . I would fain do great things.” Again,after an inspiring interview, he writes: “I went homewards,intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. Iwanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude far fromall men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took amountain path and went on like a madman, lookingat the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinctmade me draw hastily back —I was on the veryedge of a precipice, one step more and I must havefallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.”A. Gratry: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp.92, 89.This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansiveimpulse over direction is well expressed in WaltWhitman’s lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190):—“O to confront night, storms, hunger,ridicule, accidents,rebuffs, as the trees and animals do… .Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onwardwith me, and still urge you, without the leastidea what is our destinationOr whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’dand defeated.”This readiness for great things, and this sense thatthe world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., isapt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiatedgerm of all the higher faiths. Trust in ourown dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansivedestinies, and faith in the providence of God, allhave their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses,and in that sense of the exceedingness of thepossible over the real.488

When, however, a positive intellectual content is associatedwith a faith-state, it gets invincibly stampedin upon belief,[341] and this explains the passionateloyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutestdetails of their so widely differing creeds. Takingcreeds and faith-state together, as forming “religions,”and treating these as purely subjective phenomena,without regard to the question of theirWilliam Jamessometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend,sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himselfuseful, the religious consciousness asks for no morethan that. Does God really exist? How does he exist?What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. NotGod, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfyinglife, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. Thelove of life, at any and every level of development, is“truth,” we are obliged, on account of their extraordinaryinfluence upon action and endurance, to class [343] Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, thisthe religious impulse.”[343]them amongst the most important biological functionswriter’s extraordinarily true criticism of the notionthat religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectualof mankind. Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect ismystery of the world. Compare what W. Bender saysso great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,[342] (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their “Not the question about God, and not the inquiry intoGod, they care very little who he is, or even whetherthe origin and purpose of the world is religion, butthe question about Man. All religious views of life arehe is at all. “The truth of the matter can be put,” saysanthropocentric.” “Religion is that activity of the humanimpulse towards self-preservation by means ofLeuba, “in this way: God is not known, he is not understood;he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposesthrough against the adverse pressure of the world[341] Compare Leuba: Loc. cit., pp. 346-349.by raising himself freely towards the world’s orderingand governing powers when the limits of his own[342] The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The strength are reached.” The whole book is little moreMonist, xi. 536, July 1901.than a development of these words.489

At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religionmust be considered vindicated in a certain way fromthe attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannotbe a mere anachronism and survival, but mustexert a permanent function, whether she be with orwithout intellectual content, and whether, if she haveany, it be true or false.We must next pass beyond the point of view ofmerely subjective utility, and make inquiry into theintellectual content itself.First, is there, under all the discrepancies of thecreeds, a common nucleus to which they bear theirtestimony unanimously?And second, ought we to consider the testimonytrue?I will take up the first question first, and answer itimmediately in the affirmative. The warring gods andformulas of the various religions do indeed cancel eachother, but there is a certain uniform deliverance inwhich religions all appear to meet. It consists of twoparts:—The Varieties of Religious Experience1. An uneasiness; and2. Its solution.1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is asense that there is something worong about us aswe naturally stand.2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from thewrongness by making proper connection with thehigher powers.In those more developed minds which alone we arestudying, the wrongness takes a moral character, andthe salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shallkeep well within the limits of what is common to allsuch minds if we formulate the essence of their religiousexperience in terms like these:—The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongnessand criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyondit, and in at least possible touch with somethinghigher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrongpart there is thus a better part of him, even though itmay be but a most helpless germ. With which part he490

William Jamesshould identify his real being is by no means obvious struggle; they involve the change of personal centreat this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution and the surrender of the lower self; they express theor salvation) arrives,[344] the man identifies his real appearance of exteriority of the helping power andbeing with the germinal higher part of himself; and yet account for our sense of union with it;[346] anddoes so in the following way. He becomes conscious they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. Therethat this higher part is conterminous and continuous is probably no autobiographic document, among allwith a more of the same quality, which is operative those which I have quoted, to which the descriptionin the universe outside of him, and which he can keep will not well apply. One need only add such specificin working touch with, and in a fashion get on boarddetails as will adapt it to various theologies and variouspersonal temperaments, and one will then haveof and save himself when all his lower being has goneto pieces in the wreck.the various experiences reconstructed in their individualforms.It seems to me that all the phenomena are accuratelydescribable in these very simple generalterms.[345] They allow for the divided self and the[346] “When mystical activity is at its height, we findconsciousness possessed by the sense of a being at[344] Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly,for others gradually, whilst others again prac-enough to be God; interior enough to be me. The “ob-once escessive and identical with the self: greattically enjoy it all their life.jectivity” of it ought in that case to be called[345] The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the excessivity, rather, or exceedingness.” ReCeJac: Essaireality” of one’s higher part; 2, to identify one’s self sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897,with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all the p. 46.rest of ideal being.491

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceSo far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiencesare only psychological phenomena. They pos-does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And innotion, or does it really exist? If so, in what shapesess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual what form should we conceive of that “union” with itstrength really increases in the subject when he has of which religious geniuses are so convinced?them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him It is in answering these questions that the varioustheologies perform their theoretic work, anda place of conflux where the forces of two universesmeet; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective that their divergencies most come to light. Theyway of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite all agree that the “more” really exists; though someof the effects produced. I now turn to my second question:What is the objective “truth” of their con-god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceiveof them hold it to exist in the shape of a personaltent?[347]it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in theThe part of the content concerning which the questionof truth most pertinently arises is that “more of moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and thateternal structure of the world. They all agree,the same quality” with which our own higher self appearsin the experience to come into harmonious throw your life into its hands. It is when they treatsomething really is effected for the better when youworking relation. Is such a “more” merely our own of the experience of “union” with it that their speculativedifferences appear most clearly. Over this[347] The word “truth” is here taken to mean somethingadditional to bare value for life, although the birth, works and grace and karma, immortality andpoint pantheism and theism, nature and secondnatural propensity of man is to believe that whateverhas great value for life is thereby certified as inveterate disputes.reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry ontrue.492

William JamesAt the end of my lecture on Philosophy I held outthe notion that an impartial science of religions mightsift out from the midst of their discrepancies a commonbody of doctrine which she might also formulatein terms to which physical science need not object.This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconcilinghypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I alsosaid that in my last lecture I should have to try myown hand at framing such an hypothesis.The time has now come for this attempt. Who says“hypothesis” renounces the ambition to be coercivein his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly,to offer something that may fit the facts so easily thatyour scientific logic will find no plausible pretext forvetoing your impulse to welcome it as true.The “more,” as we called it, and the meaning of our“union” with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Intowhat definite description can these words be translated,and for what definite facts do they stand? Itwould never do for us to place ourselves offhand atthe position of a particular theology, the Christiantheology, for example, and proceed immediately todefine the “more” as Jehovah, and the “union” as hisimputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. Thatwould be unfair to other religions, and, from ourpresent standpoint at least, would be an over-belief.We must begin by using less particularized terms;and, since one of the duties of the science of religionsis to keep religion in connection with the rest of science,we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describingthe “more,” which psychologists may alsorecognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadaysa well-accredited psychological entity; and I believethat in it we have exactly the mediating term required.Apart from all religious considerations, thereis actually and literally more life in our total soul thanwe are at any time aware of. The exploration of thetransmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously493

The Varieties of Religious Experienceundertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his he knows—an individuality which can never expressessay on the Subliminal Consciousness[348] is as true itself completely through any corporeal manifestation.The Self manifests through the organism; butas when it was first written: “Each of us is in realityan abiding psychical entity far more extensive than there is always some part of the Self unmanifested;and always, as it seems, some power of organic expressionin abeyance or reserve.”[349] Much of the[348] Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,vol. vii. p. 305. For a full statement of Mr.Myers’s views, I may refer to his posthumous work, content of this larger background against which our“Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,” conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant.which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive timidities,Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first “dissolutive” phenomena of various sorts, as Myerstime proposed as a general psychological problem the calls them, enters into it for a large part. But in itexploration of the subliminal region of consciousnessmany of the performances of genius seem also to havethroughout its whole extent, and made the first methodicalsteps in its topography by treating as a natu-their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mysticalexperiences, and of prayer, we have seen howral series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto consideredonly as curious isolated facts and subjecting themstriking a part invasions from this region play in theto a systematized nomenclature. How important thisreligious life.exploration will prove, future work upon the pathwhich Myers has opened can alone show. compare [349] Compare the inventory given above on pp. 472-my paper: “Frederic Myers’s services to Psychology,” 4, and also what is said of the subconscious self on pp.in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901. 228-231, 235-236.494

William JamesLet me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateverit may be on its farther side, the “more” withwhich in religious experience we feel ourselves connectedis on its hither side the subconscious continuationof our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognizedpsychological fact as our basis, we seem to preservea contact with “science” which the ordinarytheologian lacks. At the same time the theologian’scontention that the religious man is moved by an externalpower is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiaritiesof invasions from the subconscious region totake on objective appearances, and to suggest to theSubject an external control. In the religious life thecontrol is felt as “higher”; but since on our hypothesisit is primarily the higher faculties of our own hiddenmind which are controlling, the sense of unionwith the power beyond us is a sense of something,not merely apparently, but literally true.This doorway into the subject seems to me the bestone for a science of religions, for it mediates betweena number of different points of view. Yet it is only adoorway, and difficulties present themselves as soonas we step through it, and ask how far ourtransmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow iton its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: heremysticism and the conversion-rapture andVedantism and transcendental idealism bring in theirmonistic interpretations and tell us that the finite selfrejoins the absolute self, for it was always one withGod and identical with the soul of the world.[350]Here the prophets of all the different religions comewith their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings,supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiarfaith.[350] One more expression of this belief, to increasethe reader’s familiarity with the notion of it:—“If this room is full of darkness for thousands ofyears, and you come in and begin to weep and wail,‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the darkness vanish? Bringthe light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment.So what good will it do you to think all yourlives, ‘Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mis-495

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetakes’? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring inthe light, and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthenthe real nature, build up yourselves, the effulgent,the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in everyone whom you see. I wish that every one of us hadcome to such a state that even when we see the vilestof human beings we can see the God within, and insteadof condemning, say, ‘Rise, thou effulgent One,rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless anddeathless, rise almighty, and manifest your nature.’… This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches.This is the one prayer: remembering our nature.”…“Why does man go out to look for a God? … It is yourown heart beating, and you did not know, you weremistaking it for something external. He, nearest ofthe near, my own self, the reality of my own life, mybody and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. Thatis your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to becomepure, you are pure already. You are not to beperfect, you are that already. Every good thoughtwhich you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil,as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind,manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything,the eternal Witness in this universe, your ownSelf. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation.We are It already; how to know It?” SwamiViverananda: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta,part iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, TheReal and the Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.Those of us who are not personally favored withsuch specific revelations must stand outside of themaltogether and, for the present at least, decide that,since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines,they neutralize one another and leave no fixedresults. If we follow any one of them, or if we followphilosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheismon non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exerciseof our individual freedom, and build out our religionin the way most congruous with our personalsusceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities intellectualones play a decisive part. Although the religious496

question is primarily a question of life, of living or notliving in the higher union which opens itself to us as agift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appearsa real one will often fail to be aroused in an individualuntil certain particular intellectual beliefs orideas which, as we say, come home to him, aretouched.[351] These ideas will thus be essential toWilliam Jamesthat individual’s religion;—which is as much as to saythat over-beliefs in various directions are absolutelyindispensable, and that we should treat them withtenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerantthemselves. As I have elsewhere written, themost interesting and valuable things about a man areusually his over-beliefs.Disregarding the over beliefs, and confining ourselves[351] For instance, here is a case where a person exposedfrom her birth to Christian ideas had to wait till they came toto what is common and generic, we have in theher clad in spiritistic formulas before the saving experience fact that the conscious person is continuous with aset in:—1“For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was wider self through which saving experiencesrevealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it come,[352] a positive content of religious experienceI don’t know what I should have done. It has taught me todetach myself from worldly things and to place my hope in which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively truethings to come. Through it I have learned to see in all men, as far as it goes.even in those most criminal, even in those from whom I havemost suffered, undeveloped brothers to whom I owed assistance,If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis aboutlove, and forgiveness. I have learned that I must lose the farther limits of this extension of our personality,my temper over nothing despise no one, and pray for all.Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I have still I shall be offering my own over-belief— though I knowmuch to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me morestrength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever [352] “The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitelythat I have only made a few steps on the long road of progress;but I look at its length without dismay, for I have confidence called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience,that the day will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. as solid a reality as that of electro magnetism.” W. C.So Spiritualism has a great place in my life, indeed it holdsthe first place there.” Flournoy Collection.Brownell, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx. p. 112.497

The Varieties of Religious Experienceit will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you—for which I can only bespeak the same indulgencewhich in a converse case I should accord to yours.The further limits of our being plunge, it seems tome, into an altogether other dimension of existencefrom the sensible and merely “understandable” world.Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region,whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulsesoriginate in this region (and most of them dooriginate in it, for we find them possessing us in away for which we cannot articulately account), webelong to it in a more intimate sense than that inwhich we belong to the visible world, for we belong inthe most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal,for it produces effects in this world. When we communewith it, work is actually done upon our finitepersonality, for we are turned into new men, and consequencesin the way of conduct follow in the naturalworld upon our regenerative change.[353] But thatwhich produces effects within another reality mustbe termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had nophilosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mysticalworld unreal.[353] That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwisecalled prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certainpersons, appears abundantly in the preceding lectures. Iappend another concrete example to rein force the impressionon the reader’s mind:—“Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finitethought] and draw power and wisdom at will… .The divine presence is known through experience. Theturning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness.It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience.It is not an ecstasy, it is not a trance. It is notsuper-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not dueto self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound,rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness fromthe phenomena of sense-perception to the phenomenaof seership, from the thought of self to a distinctivelyhigher realm… . For example, if the lower self be nervous,anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compelit to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again Isay, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power.One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceivedon a hot summer day. The power can be as surelyused as the sun s rays can be focused and made to dowork, to set fire to wood.” The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4,6, Boston, August, 1901.498

William JamesGod is the natural appellation, for us Christians at of energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneousfaith of most of the subjects is that they embraceleast, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higherpart of the universe by the name of God.[354] We a wider sphere than this. Most religious men believeand God have business with each other; and in openingourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom(or “know,” if they be mystical) that not only theyfulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our the God is present, are secure in his parental hands.personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in whichthe worse or for the better in proportion as each one we are all saved, in spite of the gates of hell and allof us fulfills or evades God’s demands. As far as this adverse terrestrial appearances. God’s existence isgoes I probably have you with me, for I only translateinto schematic language what I may call the innentlypreserved. This world may indeed, as sciencethe guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permastinctivebelief of mankind: God is real since he producesreal effects.part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be broughtassures us, some day burn up or freeze; but if it isThe real effects in question, so far as I have as yet elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedyadmitted them, are exerted on the personal centres is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolutionare not the absolutely final things. Only when[354] Transcendentalists are fond of the term “Oversoul,”but as a rule they use it in an intellectualist remote objective consequences are predicted, doesthis farther step of faith concerning God is taken, andsense, as meaning only a medium of communion. religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the“God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion,and that is the aspect which I wish to em-hypothesis into play. A good hypothesis in sciencefirst immediate subjective experience, and bring a realphasize.499

The Varieties of Religious Experiencemust have other properties than those of the phenomenonit is immediately invoked to explain, otherwiseit is not prolific enough. God, meaning onlywhat enters into the religious man’s experience ofunion, falls short of being an hypothesis of this moreuseful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relationsin order to justify the subject’s absolute confidenceand peace.That the God with whom, starting from the hitherside of our own extra-marginal self, we come at itsremoter margin into commerce should be the absoluteworld-ruler, is of course a very considerableover-belief. Over-belief as it is, though, it is an articleof almost every one’s religion. Most of us pretend insome way to prop it upon our philosophy, but thephilosophy itself is really propped upon this faith.What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullestexercise of function, is not a mere illumination of factsalready elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love,which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that,as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more,namely, a postulator of new facts as well. The worldinterpreted religiously is not the materialistic worldover again, with an altered expression; it must have,over and above the altered expression, a natural constitutiondifferent at some point from that which amaterialistic world would have. It must be such thatdifferent events can be expected in it, different conductmust be required.This thoroughly “pragmatic” view of religion hasusually been taken as a matter of course by commonmen. They have interpolated divine miracles into thefield of nature, they have built a heaven out beyondthe grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicianswho think that, without adding any concrete detailsto Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling itthe expression of absolute spirit, you make it moredivine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic wayof taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives itbody as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everythingreal must claim, some characteristic realm of fact asits very own. What the more characteristically divine500

William Jamesfacts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy inthe faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. Butthe over-belief on which I am ready to make my personalventure is that they exist. The whole drift ofmy education goes to persuade me that the world ofour present consciousness is only one out of manyworlds of consciousness that exist, and that thoseother worlds must contain experiences which have ameaning for our life also; and that although in themain their experiences and those of this world keepdiscrete, yet the two become continuous at certainpoints, and higher energies filter in. By being faithfulin my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem tomyself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course,put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, andimagine vividly that the world of sensations and ofscientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever Ido this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K.Clifford once wrote, whispering the word “bosh!”Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientificname, and the total expression of human experience,as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyondthe narrow “scientific” bounds. Assuredly, thereal world is of a different temperament—more intricatelybuilt than physical science allows.So my objective and my subjective conscience bothhold me to the over-belief which I express. Whoknows whether the faithfulness of individuals herebelow to their own poor over-beliefs may not actuallyhelp God in turn to be more effectively faithful tohis own greater tasks?501

The Varieties of Religious ExperiencePOSTSCRIPTIN WRITING my concluding lecture I had to aim somuch at simplification that I fear that my generalphilosophic position received so scant a statement ashardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I thereforeadd this epilogue, which must also be so brief aspossibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later workI may be enabled to state my position more amplyand consequently more clearly.Originality cannot be expected in a field like this,where all the attitudes and tempers that are possiblehave been exhibited in literature long ago, and whereany new writer can immediately be classed under afamiliar head. If one should make a division of allthinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, Ishould undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers,into the supernaturalist branch. But thereis a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, andit is to the refined division that most philosophers atthe present day belong. If not regular transcendentalidealists, they at least obey the Kantian directionenough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causallyin the course of phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalismis universalistic supernaturalism; forthe “crasser” variety “piecemeal” supernaturalismwould perhaps be the better name. It went with thatolder theology which to-day is supposed to reign onlyamong uneducated people, or to be found among thefew belated professors of the dualisms which Kant isthought to have displaced. It admits miracles andprovidential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficultyin mixing the ideal and the real worlds togetherby interpolating influences from the ideal regionamong the forces that causally determine the realworld’s details. In this the refined supernaturaliststhink that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.For them the world of the ideal has no efficientcausality, and never bursts into the world of phenomenaat particular points. The ideal world, for them, isnot a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts;it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to502

a different “-ology,” and inhabits a different dimensionof being altogether from that in which existentialpropositions obtain. It cannot get down upon theflat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemealbetween distinct portions of nature, as those whobelieve, for example, in divine aid coming in responseto prayer, are bound to think it must.Notwithstanding my own inability to accept eitherpopular Christianity or scholastic theism, I supposethat my belief that in communion with the Ideal newforce comes into the world, and new departures aremade here below, subjects me to being classed amongthe supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type.Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seemsto me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts ofphysical science at their face-value, and leaves thelaws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hopeof remedy, in case their fruits are bad.It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole,sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, butwhich need not be so, as the existence of systematicWilliam James503pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of takingthe ideal world, the essence of practical religionseems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and forlogical reasons, I find it hard to believe that principlescan exist which make no difference in facts.[355] Butall facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of[355] Transcendental idealism, of course, insists thatits ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist.We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world offact at all. “A world” of fact!—that exactly is thetrouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with whichthe Absolute can work, whereas to our finite mindswork for the better ought to be done within this world,setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our idealsare all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can dono piecework for us; so that all the interests whichour poor souls compass raise their heads too late. Weshould have spoken earlier, prayed for another worldabsolutely, before this world was born. It is strange,I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner intowhich Christian thought has worked itself at last, withits God who can raise no particular weight whatever,who can help us with no private burden, and who ison the side of our enemies as much as he is on ourown. Odd evolution from the God of David’s psalms!

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe question of God’s existence seems to me to lie inthe consequences for particulars which that existencemay be expected to entail. That no concrete particularof experience should alter its complexion in consequenceof a God being there seems to me an incredibleproposition, and yet it is the thesis to which(implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seemsto cling. It is only with experience en bloc, it says,that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescendsto no transactions of detail.I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction,and merely in order the better to describemy general point of view; but as I apprehend the Buddhisticdoctrine of Karma, I agree in principle withthat. All supernaturalists admit that facts are underthe judgment of higher law; but for Buddhism as Iinterpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remainsunweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics,the word “judgment” here means no such bareacademic verdict or platonic appreciation as it meansin Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries,on the contrary, execution with it, is in rebus as wellas post rem. and operates “causally” as partial factorin the total fact. The universe becomes a gnosticism[356]pure and simple on any other terms. Butthis view that judgment and execution go together isthat of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking,so the present volume must on the whole be classedwith the other expressions of that creed.I state the matter thus bluntly, because the currentof thought in academic circles runs against me,and I feel like a man who must set his back against anopen door quickly if he does not wish to see it closedand locked. In spite of its being so shocking to thereigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid considerationof piecemeal supernaturalism and a completediscussion of all its metaphysical bearings willshow it to be the hypothesis by which the largest numberof legitimate requirements are met. That ofcourse would be a program for other books than this;[356] See my Will to Believe and other Essays inpopular Philosophy. 1897, p. 165.504

William Jameswhat I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophicreader the place where I belong.If asked just where the differences in fact which aredue to God’s existence come in, I should have to saythat in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyondwhat the phenomenon of “prayerful communion,”especially when certain kinds of incursion from thesubconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests.The appearance is that in this phenomenonsomething ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselvesand in another sense is not ourselves, actuallyexerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy,and produces regenerative effects unattainablein other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of beingthan that of our every-day consciousness, if in itthere be forces whose effects on us are intermittent,if one facilitating condition of the effects be the opennessof the “subliminal” door, we have the elementsof a theory to which the phenomena of religious lifelend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importanceof these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesiswhich they so naturally suggest. At these placesat least, I say, it would seem as though transmundaneenergies, God, if you will, produced immediate effectswithin the natural world to which the rest of our experiencebelongs.The difference in natural “fact” which most of uswould assign as the first difference which the existenceof a God ought to make would, I imagine, bepersonal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the greatmajority of our own race means immortality, andnothing else. God is the producer of immortality; andwhoever has doubts of immortality is written downas an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothingin my lectures about immortality or the belieftherein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If ourideals are only cared for in “eternity,” I do not seewhy we might not be willing to resign their care toother hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with theurgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in theconflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet bothof them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to505

The Varieties of Religious Experienceme that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts,I think, are yet lacking to prove “spirit-return,”though I have the highest respect for the patient laborsof Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and amsomewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions.I consequently leave the matter open, with this briefword to save the reader from a possible perplexityas to why immortality got no mention in the body ofthis book.The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection,the “God” of ordinary men, is, both by ordinarymen and by philosophers, endowed with certainof those metaphysical attributes which in the lectureon philosophy I treated with such disrespect. Heis assumed as a matter of course to be “one and only”and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many finite godsis one which hardly any one thinks it worth while toconsider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in theinterests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to saythat religious experience, as we have studied it, cannotbe cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitistbelief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifiesto is that we can experience union with somethinglarger than ourselves and in that union find our greatestpeace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, andmysticism with its monoideistic bent, both “pass tothe limit” and identify the something with a uniqueGod who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popularopinion, respectful to their authority, follows theexample which they set.Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences ofreligion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief thatbeyond each man and in a fashion continuous withhim there exists a larger power which is friendly tohim and to his ideals. All that the facts require is thatthe power should be both other and larger than ourconscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it belarge enough to trust for the next step. It need not beinfinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivablyeven be only a larger and more godlike self, of whichthe present self would then be but the mutilated expression,and the universe might conceivably be a506

William Jamescollection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness,with no absolute unity realized in it at mon sense is less sweeping in its demands than phi-of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Com-all.[357] Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon losophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and canus—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend,for my only aim at present is to keep the testi-partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mindsuffer the notion of this world being partly saved andmony of religious experience clearly within its proper makes the salvation of the world conditional upon thebounds.success with which each unit does its part. Partial andUpholders of the monistic view will say to such a conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notionpolytheism (which, by the way, has always been the when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty beingreal religion of common people, and is so still to-day) to determine the details. Some men are even disinterestedenough to be willing to be in the unsavedthat unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guaranteeof security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, remnant as far as their persons go, if only they canand in the Absolute only, all is saved. If there be differentgods, each caring for his part, some portion of are willing, whenever our activity-excitement risesbe persuaded that their cause will prevail—all of ussome of us might not be covered with divine protection,and our religious consolation would thus fail to phy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hy-sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final philoso-be complete. It goes back to what was said on pages pothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willingto consider it. For practical life at any rate, the129-131, about the possibility of there being portionschance of salvation is enough. No fact in human natureis more characteristic than its willingness to live[357] Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll LectureOn Human Immortality, Boston and London, on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the1899.507

The Varieties of Religious Experiencedifference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life ofwhich the keynote is resignation and a life of whichthe keynote is hope.[358] But all these statementsare unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can onlysay that I hope to return to the same questions inanother book.[358] Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148,149.WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910)A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF“THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUSEXPERIENCE”THE ROAD by which William James arrived at his positionof leadership among American philosopherswas, during his childhood, youth and early maturity,quite as circuitous and unpredictable as were hisfather’s ideas on the training of his children. ThatSwedenborgian theologian foresaw neither the careerof novelist for his son Henry, nor that of pragmatistphilosopher for the older William. The father’s migrationsbetween New York, Europe and Newportmeant that William’s education had variety if it didnot have fixed direction. From 13 to 18 he studied inEurope and returned to Newport, Rhode Island, tostudy painting under the guidance of John La Farge.After a year, he gave up art for science and enteredHarvard University, where his most influential teach-508

William Jamesers were Louis Agassiz and Charles W. Eliot. In 1863,William James began the study of medicine, and in1865 he joined an expedition to the Amazon. Beforelong, he wrote: “If there is anything I hate, it is collecting.”His studies constantly interrupted by illhealth, James returned to Germany and began hearinglectures and reading voluminously in philosophy.He won his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. Forfour years he was an invalid in Cambridge, but finally,in 1873, he passed his gravest physical and spiritualcrises and began the career by which he was toinfluence so profoundly generations of American students.From 1880 to 1907 he was successively assistantprofessor of philosophy, professor of psychologyand professor of philosophy at Harvard. In 1890, thepublication of his Principles of Psycholog brought himthe acknowledged leadership in the field of functionalpsychology. The selection of William James to deliverthe Gifford lectures in Edinburgh was at once a tributeto him and a reward for the university that sponsoredthe undertaking. These lectures, collected inthis volume, have since become famous as the standardscientific work on the psychology of the religiousimpulse. Death ended his career on August 27th, 1910.Henry and William James in London, 1901.509

To return to the Electronic Classics Series page,go tohttp://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htmTo return to the William James page,go tohttp://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/w-james.htm