The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesboundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way sometimesthe other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need.Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, wecan trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world’s balancestraight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gaveutterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: “If youlove and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escapethe remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level,when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt thebeam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the worldin vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore theponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun,must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”11Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences thatunderlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer totheir utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences.The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand,and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individualand the son of response which he makes to them in his life are infact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with,the best Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, fromthe experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godlesscreeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our definition of religionwe speak of the individual’s relation to “what he considers thedivine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly, as denotingany object that is god-like, whether it be a concrete deity or not.But the term “godlike,” if thus treated as a floating general quality,becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religioushistory, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. Whatthen is that essentially godlike quality—be it embodied in a concretedeity or not—our relation to which determines our characteras religious men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this questionbefore we proceed farther.For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way ofbeing and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there11 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.39