The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William James

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The Varieties of Religious Experience
A Study in Human NaturebyWilliam James
To
E.P.G.
IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE

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Table of Contents
Preface
Lecture I : Religion and Neurology
Lecture II : Circumscription of the Topic
Lecture III : The Reality of the Unseen
Lectures IV and V : The Religion of Healthy Mindedness
Lectures VI and VII : The Sick Soul
Lecture VIII : The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification
Lecture IX : Conversion
Lecture X : Conversion—Concluded
Lectures XI, XII, and XIII : Saintliness
Lectures XIV and XV : The Value of Saintliness
Lectures XVI and XVII : Mysticism
Lecture XVIII : Philosophy
Lecture XIX : Other Characteristics
Lecture XX : Conclusions
Postscript

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PrefaceThis book would never have been written had I not been honored with an
appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of
Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten
lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me thatthe first course might well be a descriptive one on “Man’s Religious
Appetites,” and the second a metaphysical one on “Their Satisfaction
through Philosophy.” But the unexpected growth of the psychologicalmatter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being
postponed entirely, and the description of man’s religious constitution
now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather thanstated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires
immediately to know them should turn to pages 501–509, and to the“Postscript” of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express
them in more explicit form.
In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us
wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I haveloaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen theseamong the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To somereaders I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle ofthe book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety,they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience toread to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear;for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles ofcommon sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow theindividual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.
My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D.
Starbuck, of Stanford University, who made over to me his large
collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East
Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious
information; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller of
Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand, for documents; to mycolleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of
New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for importantsuggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations with the lamented
Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at Glenmore, above Keene
Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express.
Harvard University,
March, 1902.

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Lecture I
Religion and Neurology
INTRODUCTION: THE COURSE IS NOT ANTHROPOLOGICAL, BUT DEALS WITHPERSONAL DOCUMENTS— QUESTIONS OF FACT AND QUESTIONS OF VALUE— IN
POINT OF FACT, THE RELIGIOUS ARE OFTEN NEUROTIC— CRITICISM OF
MEDICAL MATERIALISM, WHICH CONDEMNS RELIGION ON THAT ACCOUNT—THEORY THAT RELIGION HAS A SEXUAL ORIGIN REFUTED— ALL STATES OFMIND ARE NEURALLY CONDITIONED— THEIR SIGNIFICANCE MUST BE TESTEDNOT BY THEIR ORIGIN BUT BY THE VALUE OF THEIR FRUITS— THREE CRITERIAOF VALUE; ORIGIN USELESS AS A CRITERION— ADVANTAGES OF THE
PSYCHOPATHIC TEMPERAMENT WHEN A SUPERIOR INTELLECT GOES WITH IT—
ESPECIALLY FOR THE RELIGIOUS LIFE.

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind thisdesk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience ofreceiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, ofEuropean scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard,
not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from
Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science orliterature of their respective countries whom we have either induced tocross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they werevisiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst theEuropeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans
listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes theadventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so
presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil assacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories ofthe philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my
imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, thenjust published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I
well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir
William Hamilton’s classroom therein contained. Hamilton’s own
lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study,
and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown.
Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confessthat to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be
actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague ofthese illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite asmuch as of reality.
But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it
would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic
obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me

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say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun
to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go
by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the
Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the
United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher
matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic
temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goeswith our English speech may more and more pervade and influence theworld.
As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer thislectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in thehistory of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branchof learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist thereligious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any otherof the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,
therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be toinvite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must
confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded
in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, inworks of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and earlystages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its fullsignificance, one must always look to its more completely evolved andperfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will mostconcern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in thereligious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas
and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern
writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The
documents humains which we shall find most instructive need not thenbe sought for in the haunts of special erudition—they lie along the beaten
highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from thecharacter of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer’s lack of
special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences andparagraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at sometime will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no
detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some moreadventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may
unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a moredelectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt
whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-theway material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.

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The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question,
What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different ordersof question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize
this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a
little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I havereferred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders ofinquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did itcome about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once
here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment
or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what
the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate
a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediatelyfrom the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations,and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, andthen adding them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the twoorders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its
derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher
criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential
point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just whatbiographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various
contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in theirseveral individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These
are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how theanswer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use
should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence sodefined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this otherquestion we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory
as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value forpurposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called aspiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, wemight indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible’s worth.
Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, topossess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the freecaprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historicerrors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would
probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory
should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors andpassions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of
the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of

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their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see thatthe existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining thevalue; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly neverconfound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the sameconclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another,of the Bible’s value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment
as to the foundation of values differs.
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because
there are many religious persons—some of you now present, possibly, areamong them—who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, andwho may therefore feel first a little startled at the purely existential pointof view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious
experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically andpsychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual history,
some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject, and may
even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, ofdeliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since sucha prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of muchof what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively
pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak
not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional
observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, orMohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others,
communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms byimitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study thissecond-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original
experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested
feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find inindividuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute
fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line; andlike many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enoughfor commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses
have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps
than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject toabnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of
exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life,and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known nomeasure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they
have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all

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sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often,
moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to givethem their religious authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than isfurnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which hefounded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day ofshams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a
return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had
ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects today are evolving
into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which
Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend fora moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was
unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver
Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to haveacknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his
nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detraque of the deepest
dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:—“As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw threesteeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what placethat was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came tome, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I
wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them ofwhither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by
my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield where,
in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I
commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was
winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off myshoes and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds
trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a mile, and assoon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again,
saying: Cry, ‘Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!’ So I went up and down
the streets, crying with a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It
being market day, I went into the market-place, and to and fro in theseveral parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody
city of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying
through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running
down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood.
When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went outof the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them somemoney, and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was soon my feet, and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes
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the Lord so to do: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes
again. After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I
should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody city! For
though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another,and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between
them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other places. But
afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian’s time athousand Christians were martyr’d in Lichfield. So I was to go, without
my shoes, through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of theirblood in the market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of theblood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years
before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was uponme, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.”
Bent as we are on studying religion’s existential conditions, we cannot
possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.
We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in nonreligious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object
to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by theintellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect doeswith an object is to class it along with something else. But any object thatis infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as
if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled witha sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or
apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing, it
would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which thething originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites ofmen as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” Andelsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and theirproperties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural
things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature
with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its
three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in
the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:“Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always
have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, justas there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice andvirtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read suchproclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditionsof absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate
impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view

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threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath
which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously
explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more
preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritualvalue is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments
which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental
acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because histemperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness
is merely a matter of overinstigated nerves. William’s melancholy about
the universe is due to bad digestion—probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’sdelight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter
would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in
the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of
reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers,of criticizing the religious emotions by showing a connection between
them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty andadolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries,
are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray.
For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but animaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.1
As with many ideas that float in the air of one’s time, this notion shrinks
from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and byinnuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than
this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so
crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that theReformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo
was Luther’s wish to marry a nun:—the effects are infinitely wider than the
alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in
the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly
amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic
feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mystics. But then why
not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove
one’s point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelingsof some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself
in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives
overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression.
Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common inreligious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We “hunger
and thirst” after righteousness; we “find the Lord a sweet savor;” we “taste
and see that he is good.” “Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn fromthe breasts of both testaments,” is a sub-title of the once famous New
England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in
milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of thegreedy babe.

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Saint Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describes the “orison ofquietude”: “In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast,
whose mother to caress him whilst he is still in her arms makes her milk
distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here....
Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk
which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish thesweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord.” Andagain: “Consider the little infants, united and joined to the breasts of
their nursing mothers you will see that from time to time they press
themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking
prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God
oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which
it presses closer upon the divine sweetness.” Chemin de la Perfection, ch.
xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.
In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of therespiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory
oppression: “Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid
from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hotwith my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God:” God’s Breath in Man
is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas
Lake Harris), and in certain non-Christian countries the foundation of all
religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration andexpiration.
These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favorof the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that
their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main
phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will
say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore
synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort
again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as afact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher
mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well
set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic,
philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years
along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual
instinct:—but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument fromsynchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious
age par excellence would seem to be old age, when the uproar of thesexual life is past?
The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at

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the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one
does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from thecontent of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things
differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any
GENERAL assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often iscomplete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory
say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without thechemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the blood, thebrain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, thisfinal proposition may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become
profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences from it which
help us to interpret religion’s meaning or value. In this sense thereligious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, andthe kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its
point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence,
SOMEHOW, of the mind upon the body.
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of
discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it
to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard asoverstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted soulflights by calling them ‘nothing but’ expressions of our organic
disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be ourorganism’s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value
as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical
materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simpleminded system of thought which we are considering. Medical
materialism finishes up 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 an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi
as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of
his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of adisordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by agastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when
you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (autointoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various
glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism thenthinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully
undermined.2
For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article
on “les varietes du Type devot,” by Dr. Binet–Sangle, in the Revue del’Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.

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Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern
psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good,
assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states
upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we
adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists
on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paulcertainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox
was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicatedby some organ or other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask
you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decidein one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to thegeneral postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single oneof our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not someorganic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organicallyconditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew
the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver”
determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does thoseof the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it altersin one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when inanother way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures andour drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs.
They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of nonreligious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogicaland arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some
psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general withdeterminate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of ourthoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our
DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every
one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor’s
body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact nosuch sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man issure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal
to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual
judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its
favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt todiscredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them withnerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily
affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

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Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves
and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior toothers, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic
antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It iseither because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because
we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we
speak disparagingly of “feverish fancies,” surely the fever-process as suchis not the ground of our disesteem—for aught we know to the contrary,
103 degrees or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable
temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the moreordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeablenessitself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of theconvalescent hour. When we praise the thoughts which health brings,
health’s peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do withdetermining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about thesemetabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts whichstamps them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions
and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true inour esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do notalways hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always
agree. What immediately feels most “good” is not always most “true,”
when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference
between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance incorroboration. If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would
be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, howeveracutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment whichrefuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of thisdiscrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails overso many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental
and mystical experience—we shall hereafter hear much of them—that
carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with themwhen they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come toeveryone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or
tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons
follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be
guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of
the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be
brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.
It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely
medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly tothe medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of

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genius promulgated by recent authors. “Genius,” said Dr. Moreau, “is but
one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree.” “Genius,” says Dr.
Lombroso, “is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid
variety, and is allied to moral insanity.” “Whenever a man’s life,” writes
Mr. Nisbet, “is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient
fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into themorbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater
the genius, 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 in establishing to theirown satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease,consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the VALUE of the fruits? Do
they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine ofexistential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire theproductions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that noneuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, andhold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logicalconsistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One
disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works ofgenius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as
he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical
arguments.4 But for the most part the masterpieces are left
unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to suchsecular productions as everyone admits to be intrinsically eccentric, orelse addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations. And then it isbecause the religious manifestations have been already condemned
because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds.
4

Max Nordau, in his bulky book entitled Degeneration.

In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try
to refute opinions by showing up their author’s neurotic constitution.
Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, nomatter what may be their author’s neurological type. It should be nootherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained byspiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on ourown immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we canascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the restof what we hold as true.
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have
had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now saveher theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show
it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand theseother tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off herbalance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles
by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be
guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought fortests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future.
Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately andabsolutely, now and forever, against all mistake—such has been the
darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the ORIGIN of
the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various
origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view,and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been afavorite test. Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority;
origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable
impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing
itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance generally—
these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after
another which we find represented in religious history. The medical
materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly
turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in
a destructive instead of an accreditive way.
They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as
supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but theargument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin
has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr.
Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural
religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:—“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her
work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete
mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the workthat is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that isalone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical
standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective—
if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic.... Home wecome again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude—namely thecommon assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruction andtraining among mankind.”5

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H. Maudsley: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp. 256,257.

5

In other words, not its origin, but THE WAY IN WHICH IT WORKS ON
THE WHOLE, is Dr. Maudsley’s final test of a belief. This is our own
empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on
supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among thevisions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among
the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for
conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as
divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how todiscriminate between such messages and experiences as were reallydivine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able tocounterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child ofhell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all
the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end
it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know
them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on Religious
Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The ROOTS of aman’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are
infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even toourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.
“In forming a judgment of ourselves now,” Edwards writes, we should
certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly makeuse of when we come to stand before him at the last day.... There is not
one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professorof religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The
degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows thedegree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.”
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which avision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are
the only marks by which we {22} may be sure they are not possible
deceptions of the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:—“Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head,
doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of theimagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment andenergy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly
vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an
admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those
who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of
mankind and the sport of my imagination.... I showed them the jewels
which the divine hand had left with me:—they were my actual

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dispositions. All those who knew me saw that I was changed; myconfessor bore witness to the fact; this improvement, palpable in all
respects, far from being hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men. As formyself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon were its author, he
could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an expedient so
contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my vices, and filling mewith masculine courage and other virtues instead, for I saw clearly that asingle one of these visions was enough to enrich me with all that
wealth.”66

Autobiography, ch. xxviii.

I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and thatfewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisenamong some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any
rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results
exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin willscandalize your piety no more.
Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final
spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all withso much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave
pathological questions out?
To this I reply in two ways. First, I say, irrepressible curiosity
imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to abetter understanding of a thing’s significance to consider its
exaggerations and perversions its equivalents and substitutes andnearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in
the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, butrather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its
merits consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers ofcorruption it may also be exposed.
Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors ofthe mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their moreusual surroundings. They play the part in mental anatomy which thescalpel and the microscope play in the anatomy of the body. To
understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment
and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations.
The study of hallucinations has in this way been for psychologists the key
to their comprehension of normal sensation, that of illusions has been
the key to the right comprehension of perception. Morbid impulses andimperative conceptions, “fixed ideas,” so called, have thrown a flood of

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light on the psychology of the normal will; and obsessions and delusions
have performed the same service for that of the normal faculty of belief.
Similarly, the nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, ofwhich I already made mention, to class it with psychopathicalphenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, lossof mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many
synonyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities andliabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an
individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affecthis age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. There is of course no
special affinity between crankiness as such and superior intellect,7 formost psychopaths have feeble intellects, and superior intellects morecommonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic
temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired,often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky
person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixedideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into
belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till heproclaims it, or in some way “works it off.” “What shall I think of it?” acommon person says to himself about a vexed question; but in a “cranky”
mind “What must I do about it?” is the form the question tends to take.
In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I
read the following passage: “Plenty of people wish well to any goodcause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer willrisk anything in its support. ‘Someone ought to do it, but why should I?’
is the ever reechoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. ‘Someone ought to
do it, so why not I?’ is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly
forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these twosentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.” True enough! andbetween these two sentences lie also the different destinies of theordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior
intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce—as in the endlesspermutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound tocoalesce often enough—in the same individual, we have the best possible
condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the {25}biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics andunderstanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict
them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. It is they
who get counted when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke
statistics to defend their paradox.
Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems toconsist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of
association by similarity.

7

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To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as weshall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious
evolution. Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers.
Take the trancelike states of insight into truth which all religious mystics
report.8 These are each and all of them special cases of kinds of humanexperience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever
peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate melancholy.
Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And themoment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away assoon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment weagree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging ofvalues—who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive
significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious
trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can withother varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing toconsider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if
they were outside of nature’s order altogether?
I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this
supposition. As regards the psychopathic origin of so many religious
phenomena, that would not be in the least surprising or disconcerting,even were such phenomena certified from on high to be the mostprecious of human experiences. No one organism can possibly yield to its
owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, oreven diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In thepsychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sinequa non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency toemphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have thelove of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond
the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that
this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, tocorners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous
system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, andthanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition,
would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
I may refer to a criticism of the insanity theory of genius in thePsychological Review, ii. 287 (1895).

8

If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it mightwell be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief conditionof the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I
may let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop.
The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which the

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various religious phenomena must be compared in order to understandthem better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is termed “theapperceiving mass” by which we comprehend them. The only novelty
that I can imagine this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of
the apperceiving mass. I may succeed in discussing religious experiences
in a wider context than has been usual in university courses.

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Lecture II
Circumscription of the Topic
FUTILITY OF SIMPLE DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION— NO ONE SPECIFIC“RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT”— INSTITUTIONAL AND PERSONAL RELIGION— WE
CONFINE OURSELVES TO THE PERSONAL BRANCH— DEFINITION OF RELIGION
FOR THE PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES— MEANING OF THE TERM “DIVINE”—
THE DIVINE IS WHAT PROMPTS SOLEMN REACTIONS— IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKEOUR DEFINITIONS SHARP— WE MUST STUDY THE MORE EXTREME CASES—
TWO WAYS OF ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE— RELIGION IS MORE ENTHUSIASTIC
THAN PHILOSOPHY— ITS CHARACTERISTIC IS ENTHUSIASM IN SOLEMNEMOTION— ITS ABILITY TO OVERCOME UNHAPPINESS— NEED OF SUCH A
FACULTY FROM THE BIOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise
definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be
definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,
and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.
Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one
another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any
single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing
mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. This is theroot of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which bothphilosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately
into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at theoutset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characterswhich may alternately be equally important to religion. If we shouldinquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might tell
us it was authority, another submission, an other police, another anarmy, another an assembly, an other a system of laws; yet all the while itwould be true that no concrete government can exist without all thesethings, one of which is more important at one moment and others at
another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who
troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence.
Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn,
he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were
unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not
religion be a conception equally complex?9
I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended andadmirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion, in anarticle by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, after
my own text was written.

9Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so

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many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In thepsychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors
attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to the feelingof dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect itwith the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling of the infinite;and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves toarouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing; and themoment we are willing to treat the term “religious sentiment” as acollective name for the many sentiments which religious objects may
arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whateverof a psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love,
religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man’snatural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear isonly the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of
the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may
arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest
at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at thethought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various
sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons.
As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling PLUS a specific sort ofobject, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable
from other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming asimple abstract “religious emotion” to exist as a distinct elementary
mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without
exception.
As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only
a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may
draw, so there might conceivably also prove to he no one specific andessential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kindof religious act.
The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that
I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of
the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set up an
abstract definition of religion’s essence, and then proceed to defend thatdefinition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking
my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in FOR THE
PURPOSE OF THESE LECTURES, or, out of the many meanings of theword, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you
particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say “religion” I
mean THAT. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily
seek to mark out the field I choose.

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One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject weleave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides
the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the otherpersonal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps thedivinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and sacrifice,procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology andceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in
the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should haveto define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of thegods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the
inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his
conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And
although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential
feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts towhich this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, theindividual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiasticalorganization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens,
sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct fromheart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as
little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods
themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pureand simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly considered,will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. “Itis a part of religion,” you will say, “but only its unorganized rudiment; if
we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man’s conscience or
morality than his religion. The name ‘religion’ should be reserved for the
fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the
Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but afractional element.”
But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much thequestion of definition tends to become a dispute about names.
Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any
name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it
conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—undereither name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it
will prove to contain some elements which morality pure and simple
does not contain, and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I
will myself continue to apply the word “religion” to it; and in the lastlecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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say something of its relation to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, whenonce established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the
FOUNDERS of every church owed their power originally to the fact of
their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only thesuperhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all theoriginators of Christian sects have been in this case;—so personal
religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who
continue to esteem it incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically moreprimordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism andmagic seem to have preceded inward piety historically—at least ourrecords of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism andmagic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal
religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms
which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But,
quite apart from the fact that many anthropologists—for instance,
Jevons and Frazer —expressly oppose “religion” and “magic” to eachother, it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic,
fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive
science as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal
one again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought andfeeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion
would not be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for
us THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN
IN THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVESTO STAND IN RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER
THE DIVINE. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual,
it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it,theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may
secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, theimmediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shallhardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of ourfield. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word “divine,”
if we take the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems ofthought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not
positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course,

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the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the
Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism,
Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into
abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but
the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of theuniverse, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to thegraduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson
famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws waswhat made the scandal of the performance.
“These laws,” said the speaker, “execute themselves. They are out oftime, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul ofman there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He whodoes a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by
the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on
purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety ofGod, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man
with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goesout of acquaintance with his own being. Character is always known.
Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out ofstone walls. The least admixture of a lie—for example, the taint of vanity,
any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance—will
instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all things alive orbrute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there doseem to stir and move to bear your witness. For all things proceed out of
the same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in
its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on
the several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these ends,
a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks . .. hebecomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute
death. The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which
we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.
Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It
is the embalmer of the world.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is
it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. When he says ‘Iought’; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned from on high,
the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soulfrom supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his
worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressionsof this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity.
[They] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of theolden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And

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the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not somuch written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of thesubtle virtue of this infusion.”10
10

Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).

Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order,
which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But
whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye’sbrilliancy or the skin’s softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life likethe eye’s seeing or the skin’s feeling, is a decision that neverunmistakably appears in Emerson’s pages. It quivers on the boundary ofthese things, sometimes leaning one way sometimes the other, to suit theliterary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it isactive. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all idealinterests and keep the world’s balance straight. The sentences in which
Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine asanything in literature: “If you love and serve men, you cannot by any
hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions arealways restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is
impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors andmonopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar.
Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man andmote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”1111

Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.

Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that
underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to theirutterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sortof appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic
pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the son of response
which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, andin many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response.
We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godlessor quasi-godless creeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our
definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to “what heconsiders the divine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly,
as denoting any 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 inreligious history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. Whatthen is that essentially godlike quality—be it embodied in a concrete
deity or not—our relation to which determines our character as religious
men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we

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proceed farther.
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being
and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no
escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth.
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true mightat this rate be treated as godlike, and a man’s religion might thus beidentified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt tobe the primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever
it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total
reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual
reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional
attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence
and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as aneverlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable orodious, which in some degree everyone possesses. This sense of theworld’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual
temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or
blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction,
involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is thecompletest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character ofthis universe in which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of itin the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion,
no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious as someof these reactions may be, in one sense of the word “religious,” they yet
belong to THE GENERAL SPHERE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, and soshould generically be classed as religious reactions. “He believes in No–
God, and he worships him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who
was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents
of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which,
psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.
But so very broad a use of the word “religion” would be inconvenient,however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There aretrifling, sneering attitudes even toward the whole of life; and in somemen these attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary
use of language too much to call such attitudes religious, even though,from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might
conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire,for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three: “As formyself,” 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

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my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again;
and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it
becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of
the day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over.”
Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in avaletudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for the
moment Voltaire’s reaction on the whole of life. Je me’n fiche is thevulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation “Who cares?” And
the happy term je me’n fichisme recently has been invented to designate
the systematic determination not to take anything in {37} life toosolemnly. “All is vanity” is the relieving word in all difficult crises for thismode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan tookpleasure, in his later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly
sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the “allis vanity” state of mind. Take the following passage, for example—wemust hold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says—but he thengoes on:—“There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy
pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange
ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be completely wrong.
We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the second
hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely duped. If
in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic people whowill be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded whom the theologians
now call frivolous will be those who are really wise.
“In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything—that perhaps is
wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, toskepticism, to optimism, to irony and we may be sure that at certain
moments at least we shall be with the truth.... Good-humor is aphilosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her nomore seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talkof philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous but wehave the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal
reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play
the trick that has been played on us. Saint Augustine’s phrase: Lord, if
we arc deceived, it is by thee! remains a fine one, well suited to ourmodern feeling. Only we wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the
fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advanceto losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not toappear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely.”12

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12Feuilles detachees, pp. 394–398 (abridged).

Surely all the usual associations of the word “religion” would have to be
stripped away if such a systematic parti pris of irony were also to be
denoted by the name. For common men “religion,” whatever more
special meanings it may have, signifies always a SERIOUS state of mind.
If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase wouldbe, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may
suggest.” If it can stop anything, religion as commonly apprehended canstop just such chaffing talk as Renan’s. It favors gravity, not pertness; itsays “hush” to all vain chatter and smart wit.
But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumblingand complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions, but
the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of deliverance is held toexist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture;but melancholy, according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all
title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius’s racy words, thesufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of asacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a lessdegree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—thoughoften an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness runningaway with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German
authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying
rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude
which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad,it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being SOLEMN experiencesthat I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose—
arbitrarily again, if you please—to narrow our definition once more bysaying that the word “divine,” as employed therein, shall mean for us not
merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken
without restriction might prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us
only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond tosolemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit ofvarious shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must atlast be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where
there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The
pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously “scientific” or “exact”
in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of ourtask. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less

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religious, reactions are more or 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 experiences are religious. The divinity of the object
and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt.
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
is weakly characterized, but in that case it will be hardly worthy of ourstudy at all. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious weneed have nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what
nobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else. I said in myformer lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under amicroscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of
religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely tobe profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where
the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its faintermanifestations we may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total
reaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson, whose autobiography,
entitled “Confidences,” proves him to have been a most amiable man.
“I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought of
having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of existence,the sweet fable of life. I would not care to live my wasted life over again,
and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish to be
younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is
the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny. I dread the increase of
infirmities that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear tome. No! let me slip away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end
come, if peace come with it.
“I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or oursojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must
please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimed
happiness—care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baselessexpectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter tomorrow? At best it isbut a froward child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it
quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”13
13

Op. cit., pp. 314, 313.

This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind.
For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole areligious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may
seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what

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matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious ornot? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very
possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unlesshe had been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others,with which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these moreenergetic states that our sole business lies, and we can perfectly wellafford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go. It was theextremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I said that
personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove toembody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain.
You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what thoseelements were. In a general way I can now say what I had in mind.
“I accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of
our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some
one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment issaid to have been: “Gad! she’d better!” At bottom the whole concern ofboth morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of theuniverse. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily andaltogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical andunforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of livingthat must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if
stunned into submission—as Carlyle would have us—“Gad! we’dbetter!”—or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure andsimple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as toacknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest
heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong
and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt
as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome,which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity andenthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one
whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic
resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christiansaints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, asthat between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are thesteps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other,many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals
represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other forcomparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes
confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a “critical point”
has been overcome.

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If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than adifference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood thatparts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that hasordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely
find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The
universe is “accepted” by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or
exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his finesentence: “If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it,”with Job’s cry: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!” and you
immediately see the difference I mean. The anima mundi, to whose
disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to berespected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved;
and the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic
climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting
actual conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to bemuch the same.
“It is a man’s duty,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to comfort himself and wait
for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find refreshment
solely in these thoughts—first that nothing will happen to me which is
not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly that I need
do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man
who can compel me to transgress. He is an abscess on the universe who
withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature,through being displeased with the things which happen. For the same
nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept
everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads
to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity ofZeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has brought if
it were not useful for the whole. The integrity of the whole is mutilated if
thou cuttest off anything. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy
power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anythingout of the way.”1414Book V., ch. ix. (abridged).

Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the
Theologia Germanica:—“Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all desire
and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things to theeternal Goodness, so that every enlightened man could say: ‘I would fain
be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.’ Such men are
in a state of freedom, because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to theeternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man
truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, andfindeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth intosuch a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that all
creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And therefore
he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release; but he iswilling to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not grieve over his
sufferings, for they are right in his eyes, and he hath nothing to say
against them. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he
who in this present time entereth into this hell, none may console him.
Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand
upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard anything but theeternal Good only. And then, when the man neither careth for nor
desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and seeketh not himself
nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker of
all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man ishenceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this heaven are twogood safe ways for a man, and happy is he who truly findeth them.”15
15

Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth’s translation.

How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writerto accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees TO thescheme—the German theologian agrees WITH it. He literally ABOUNDS
in agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees.
Occasionally, it is true, the stoic rises to something like a Christian
warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus
Aurelius:—“Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O
Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time
for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature:from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.
The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say, Dear City of
Zeus?”1616Book IV., 523

But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian
outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitationof Christ:—“Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou

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wilt. Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do withme as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me
where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things.... When
could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sakethan rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth
with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there isheaven; and where thou art not, behold there death and hell.”1717
Benham’s translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix. Compare Mary Moody
Emerson: “Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest the loneliest
sufferer, with one proviso—that I know it is His agency. I will love Him
though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine.” R. W. Emerson:
Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188.

It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of anorgan, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort ofperformance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which noother organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good in ourpresent quest. The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which
we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in themwhich we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course
most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which
are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.
Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiencesof tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call themphilosophical rather than religious, we find a character that is perfectly
distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as thepractically important differentia of religion for our purpose; and justwhat it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an
abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly
conceived.
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as
it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective
ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss
and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for “volunteers.”
And for morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort ofcosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even a sick man,
unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral warfare. He canwillfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in thisworld or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present
drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still
remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with otherpeople’s affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about

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his miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his
philosophy is able to 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 nopining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par
excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundantmeasure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether
different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude,
and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased
conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But
whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, theChristian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of
emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The
moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as
this athletic attitude is possible all goes well—morality suffices. But theathletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break
down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or
when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort
to one all sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediable impotence is tosuggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoledin his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe {47}recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are
all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us areof one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs therobustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of thevanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all
our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, andall our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands.
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, inwhich the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced
by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods andwaterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has
become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death hasturned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul isover, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternalpresent, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fearis not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged
and washed away.

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We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing
religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope,ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it
adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deduciblefrom anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does
come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s
grace, the theologians say —is either there or not there for us, and there
are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fallin love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feelingis thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a
new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outerworld disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which
otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that weought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, thisenthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly socalled can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to mean
nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over,the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting
possession spread before our eyes.18
18
Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in
whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in thewider sense, yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it isreligion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, tostudy first, so as to get at its typical differentia.

This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we findnowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness,
all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which
I have already made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define
abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state ofmind is never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certain measure of
its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its
sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. But
there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is theprerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness, assuch, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion withthe entire field of the soul’s liberation from oppressive moods.
“The simplest functions of physiological life,” he writes may be its
ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics
knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed,

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in all countries and in all ages some form of physical enlargement—
singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement—has been intimately
associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul inlaughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise.... Whenever
an impulse from the world strikes against the organism, and theresultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction ofstrenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the wholesoul—there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride
gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it.”1919

The New Spirit, p. 232.

But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form ofhappiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The
more commonplace happinesses which we get are “reliefs,” occasioned
by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened.
But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is nomere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil
outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardly it knows it to be permanently
overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls on the thorns and faces
death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain thematter, for it is religion’s secret, and to understand it you must yourself
have been a religious man of the extremer type. In our future examples,even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type of religious
consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial constitution, in
which a higher 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 of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s
figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due tohis being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it,
SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. In the religious
consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the negative or
tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious
consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view.20 We shall see
how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form.
There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on
humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death—theirsouls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew
more intolerable. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a
man to this peculiar pass. And it is for that reason that when we ask ourquestion about the value of religion for human life, I think we ought tolook for the answer among these violenter examples rather than among
those of a more moderate hue.
20

I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and Friend,

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Charles Carroll Everett.

Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start
with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in thesecases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, wefind ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion’s value and treat it withrespect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By
subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed
to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.
To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck witheccentricities and extremes. “How CAN religion on the whole be the mostimportant of all human functions,” you may ask, “if every several
manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down andpruned away?”
Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably—yet I
believe that something like it will have to be our final contention. That
personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to take up
towards what he apprehends to be the divine—and you will rememberthat this was our definition—will prove to be both a helpless and asacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at least someamount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some amount ofrenunciation, great or small, to save our souls alive. The constitution of
the world we live in requires it:—
“Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt.”
For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on
the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort,deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into
our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind
which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an
imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best
without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender andsacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are addedin order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy andfelicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that
can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands
vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life,

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performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so
successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call it,
this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably
be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of
demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther
office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.
But to foreshadow the terminus of one’s investigations is one thing, andto arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning theextreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we
begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete
facts.

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Lecture III
The Reality of the Unseen
PERCEPTS VERSUS ABSTRACT CONCEPTS— INFLUENCE OF THE LATTER ON
BELIEF— KANT’S THEOLOGICAL IDEAS— WE HAVE A SENSE OF REALITY OTHER
THAN THAT GIVEN BY THE SPECIAL SENSES— EXAMPLES OF “SENSE OFPRESENCE”— THE FEELING OF UNREALITY— SENSE OF A DIVINE PRESENCE:
EXAMPLES— MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES: EXAMPLES— OTHER CASES OF SENSE OF

GOD’S PRESENCE— CONVINCINGNESS OF UNREASONED EXPERIENCE—
INFERIORITY OF RATIONALISM IN ESTABLISHING BELIEF— EITHERENTHUSIASM OR SOLEMNITY MAY PREPONDERATE IN THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE
OF INDIVIDUALS.

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest andmost general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief
that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies inharmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and thisadjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour
to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an
attitude as this, or belief in an object which we cannot see. All our
attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due tothe “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist,
whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may bepresent to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In
either case they elicit from us a REACTION; and the reaction due tothings of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due tosensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult
may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are
frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the
moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential
and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actuallypresent may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter
facts.
The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom theyworship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, forexample, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of
their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by
way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The wholeforce of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine
personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in
general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in
the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.

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But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,
religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.
God’s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, hisabsoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various
mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,
etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christianbelievers.21 We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images
is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as thesine qua non of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine
truths. Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the
expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer’s subsequent
attitude very powerfully for good.
Example: “I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages
which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from theFather and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out,
but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of thefullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only
thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us.” Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244,
Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare.
21

Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief asGod, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.
These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Ourconceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as thewords soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense-content
whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of
any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning FOR
OUR PRACTICE. We can act AS IF there were a God; feel AS IF we were
free; consider Nature AS IF she were full of special designs; lay plans AS
IF we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make agenuine difference in our moral life. Our faith THAT these unintelligible
objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer
Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for aknowledge of WHAT they might be, in case we were permitted positively
to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assuresus, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set ofthings of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express
any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his
philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature
which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our objectof belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak,by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing,

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for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present toour mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with norepresentative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowedwith an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various
arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its
neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes
and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward
description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly;
yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be
intensely aware through every fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have thispower of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent
articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with themthe same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from
Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete
objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist
writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas,that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through allthings so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength,
significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant,and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all ourfacts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They giveits “nature,” as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is“what” it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We cannever look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless andfootless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handlingthe real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth
as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs andpredicates and heads of classification and conception.
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the
cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us
as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, holdthem, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete
beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they
inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common humanfeeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known
as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, isfor Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is

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aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of theearth. “The true order of going,” he says, in the often quoted passage in
his “Banquet,” “is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one
mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two,and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, andfrom fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions, he arrives at thenotion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beautyis.”22 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a
platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness ofthings, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship.
In those various churches without a God which today are spreading
through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar
worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate
object. “Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the place of areligion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of Nature” asobjective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek
mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only
half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law
and order into which the natural world falls apart—the sky-sphere, theocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may
speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of thecold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actuallywear a human face.23
22

Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.

Example: “Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect sheshows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman
weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is.” B. de
St. Pierre.
23

As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion
something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness asense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we
may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of thespecial and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes
existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might
suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they sohabitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, anyidea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same
prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So
far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, theywould be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be sovague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might

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be such non-entities in point of WHATNESS, as Kant makes the objectsof his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiatedsense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often
happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person
affected will feel a “presence” in the room, definitely localized, facing in
one particular way, real in the most emphatic 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 I pass to the objects with whose presence
religion is more peculiarly concerned.
An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had
several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to myinquiries:—{59}“I have several times within the past few years felt the so— called‘consciousness of a presence.’ The experiences which I have in mind areclearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have hadvery frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the‘consciousness of a presence.’ But the difference for me between the two
sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight
warmth originating I know not where, and standing in the midst of aconflagration with all the ordinary senses alert.
“It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On theprevious night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, avivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me
get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence
properly so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed andblown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night’s
experience, when suddenly I FELT something come into the room andstay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did notrecognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a horribly
unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at theroots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had
something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading
chiefly over the chest, but within the organism—and yet the feeling was
not PAIN so much as ABHORRENCE. At all events, something waspresent with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have everknown the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its
departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going
through the door, and the ‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William James Página 48 de 400“On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some
lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when I
became aware of the actual presence (though not of the COMING) of thething that was there the night before, and of the ‘horrible sensation.’ Ithen mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this ‘thing,’ if it wasevil to depart, if it was NOT evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it
could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it {60} to go. Itwent as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal
state.
“On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same‘horrible sensation.’ Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three
instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood
SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty
of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living
people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real thanany ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so to
speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn’t recognize it as
any individual being or person.”
Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with thereligious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same
correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he
had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness,
only then it was filled with a quality of joy.
“There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in
the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good.
Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or
blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sortof mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one
perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that.”
My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would
clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of thedeity’s existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall havemuch more to say upon this head.
Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture
to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to showthat we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the firstcase, which I {61} take from the Journal of the Society for PsychicalResearch, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a

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distinctly visualized hallucination—but I leave that part of the story out.
“I had read,” the narrator says, “some twenty minutes or so, wasthoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and forthe time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly without amoment’s warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of
tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily
imagined by those who had never experienced it, that another being orpresence was not only in the room, but quite close to me. I put my bookdown, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite collected, andnot conscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my position, andlooking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. wasstanding at my left elbow but so far behind me as to be hidden by thearmchair in which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly
without otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg
became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray-blue material of
trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semitransparent,
reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,”24— and hereupon thevisual hallucination came.
24

Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.

Another informant writes:—“Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had been aroused
intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into thehouse.... I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately
felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it
was not the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence.
This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the facts as theyoccurred to me. I do not know how to better describe my sensations thanby simply stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I
felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious dread, as if
something strange and fearful were about to happen.”25
25

E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.

Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of afriend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary
writing:—“Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is notdue to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of a foreign
presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so definitely characterizedthat I could point to its exact position. This impression of presence is

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impossible to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness according to
the personality from whom the writing professes to come. If it is some
one whom I love, I feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My
heart seems to recognize it.”
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case ofpresence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of agray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself
under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room
towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an
exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual
imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positivethat his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with thefeelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—inother words, a fully objectified and exteriorized IDEA.
Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for
quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general thanthat which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of
the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem—nothing
could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, withthe feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action.
Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or “made our flesh creep”—oursenses are what do so oftenest—might then appear real and present, eventhough it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures wehave no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather
than with its organic seat.
Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its
negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which
persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears
complaint:—“When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident
upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophesof the heavens,” says Madame Ackermann; “when I see myself
surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am
myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange
feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered
and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, ‘I have been
dreaming.’"26

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26

Pensees d’un Solitaire, p. 66.

In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of
the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead tosuicide.
We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious
sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess
the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which
their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible
realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of theseobjects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth andcoldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better
than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The
first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense inquestion. I have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific
man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show
clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation
than an intellectual operation properly so-called.
“Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic
and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that ‘indefinite
consciousness’ which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute
Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pureUnknowable of Spencer’s philosophy, for although I had ceased mychildish prayers to God, and never prayed to IT in a formal manner, yet
my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to IT
which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any
trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either
domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits
or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back forsupport upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to thisfundamental cosmical IT. It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however
you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always
strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its
underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountainof living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned attimes of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know now that it wasa personal relation I was in to it, because of late years the power ofcommunicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a perfectly
definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it. Then camea set of years when sometimes I found it, and then again I would be
wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many occasions
on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of

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worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentallyfor the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always
seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding
support, but there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of
IT: I couldn’t find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power ofgetting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confessthat a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become curiously deadand {65} indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience wasprobably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did
not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as ‘It’ was practicallynot Spencer’s Unknowable, but just my own instinctive and individual
God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I
have lost.”
Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than theway in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described asalternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection ofparticular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a directperception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence, swept in andoverwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell
Lowell’s correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experienceof this kind:—“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening tosay something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often
dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on
spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me
like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt
the Spirit of God in me and around rue. The whole room seemed to me
full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence ofSomething I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of aprophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied
it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it andacknowledge its grandeur.”27
27

Letters of Lowell, i. 75.

{66} Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman—I take it from Starbuck’s manuscript
collection:—“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where
my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing
together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling

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unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being
answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars.
I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of theworld, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him,
but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense ofthings around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy
and exultation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience.
It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes
have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener consciousof nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost
bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was
thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was
all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more havedoubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if
possible, the less real of the two.
“My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I
have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal roundabout me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of theheart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was bornanew 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 were burst
into flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful
unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs
of God’s existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt thepresence of God’s spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My mostassuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of visionin the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained
from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all
who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I
am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any
other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words
rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I havedescribed it as carefully as I now am able to do.”Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, thewriter being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.28
I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy’s permission, from his rich collectionof psychological documents.

28“I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping, and ingood training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I
felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally
healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to no

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anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was
not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best
describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium.
When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I
felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—
as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The
throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to passon and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any
longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in thecourse of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life
and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I
was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to thedoing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will fromday to day in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be
judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more
conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that
God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I wasable to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by theinterior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several
minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see
me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it
seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten
minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty
minutes to join them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had
kept them back for about half an hour. The impression had been so
profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself if it werepossible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate
communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy ofmine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the
feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate
localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by
the presence of a SPIRITUAL SPIRIT. But the more I seek words toexpress this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility ofdescribing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom theexpression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, thoughinvisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness
perceived him.”
The adjective “mystical” is technically applied, most often. to states thatare of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two
persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I
shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of anothermystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed bynature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck’s collection. The lady who

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gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as awriter against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well
how native the sense of God’s presence must be to certain minds. She
relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine,but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, sheread the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon
her like a stream of light.
{69} “To this day,” she writes, “I cannot understand dallying withreligion and the commands of God. The very 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, what should I do? ‘Love me,’ answered my God.
‘I do, I do,’ I cried passionately. ‘Come unto me,’ called my Father. ‘Iwill,’ my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It
never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate
over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or ... towait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not foundmy God and my Father? 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—so significant as to be almost like talking with
God and hearing his answer. The idea of God’s reality has never left mefor one moment.”
Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in
which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly
described:—“I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of
intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked andunexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliterationof the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life....
Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over agashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of oceanthat ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I
could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on
the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on,
seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors.
What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity,
accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper
significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I findmy justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God.

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Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot
conceive of life without its presence.”
Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God’s presence thefollowing sample from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection may
serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine—probably
thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identicalaccount.
“God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his
presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with hislaws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain;
and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes myfeelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and ourcommunion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words
so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone,
but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture,
unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for mysafety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social
problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his neverleaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, ashoreless, trackless waste.”I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.
They are also from Professor Starbuck’s collection, and their number
might be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven years
old:—“God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers. Thoughts
sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining come to my mind
after asking God for his direction. Something over a year ago I was forsome weeks in the direst perplexity. When the trouble first appeared
before me I was dazed, but before long (two or three hours) I could hear
distinctly a passage of Scripture: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee.’ Everytime my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I
don’t think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of
my consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very
perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all the time. But
on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very contrary to
my ambitions and plans.”
Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so
decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:—

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William James Página 57 de 400“Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I
go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me, singing and reading
the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him,and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When I am taking Holy
Communion at the altar, I try 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 thanmy own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being.”—“There are times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk withhim. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and overwhelmingin their revelation of his presence and powers. There are times when God
seems far off, but this is always my own fault.”—“I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing,which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustainingarms.”Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is theconvincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are
realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of anhallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital
attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each ishaunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has notoriously thissense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention isaddressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He
cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through.
I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I mustdwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those
who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, asa rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic everare. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than oneof you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you dohave them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you
cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, asrevelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, howeverunanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.
The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken ofas RATIONALISM. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought
ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for

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rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract
principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses basedon such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague
impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic
system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual
tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physicalscience (amongst other good things) is its result.
Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the lifeof men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and thatthey inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it
of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is thepart that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it canchallenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words.
But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb
intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all,they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level
which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses,
your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, ofwhich your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; andsomething in you absolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than
any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict
it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as
manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against
it. That vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn from the orderof nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing,
today does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason
that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.
Whatever sort of a being God may be, we KNOW today that he isnevermore that mere external inventor of “contrivances” intended tomake manifest his “glory” in which our great-grandfathers took such
satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly makeclear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here
fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a morecosmic and tragic personage than that Being.
The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate
reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality
have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then,
indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great worldruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy,
may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up theoriginal body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but
its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate

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assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface
exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels
the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations,
your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set
themselves to change his faith.
Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is BETTER that thesubconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious
realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as amatter of fact.
So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now
say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
We have already agreed that they are SOLEMN; and we have seen reason
to think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may
result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense of thekind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do withdetermining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole
phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows. In theliterature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each beenemphasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods
was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious
history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy
has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary;sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear.
This latter state of things, being the more complex, is also the more
complete; and as we proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason forrefusing to leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look atreligion with the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in thecompletest possible terms, a man’s religion involves both moods ofcontraction and moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative
mixture and order of these moods vary so much from one age of theworld, from one system of thought, and from one individual to another,that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or on thepeace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remainmaterially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre andthe constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite
aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious
peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion
and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish
after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-

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cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low,rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book ofJob, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God isthe exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; whatcanst thou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” There is anastringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men canfeel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the
feeling of religious joy.
“In Job,” says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford,“God reminds us that man is not the measure of his creation. The worldis immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man
can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT everywhere. This is the burden of
every verse, and is the secret if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or
insufficient, there is nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways.
He takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience,
we MAY pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again.
We may or we may not! ... What more have we to say now than God saidfrom the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?”29
29

Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.

If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find thatdeliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether
overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions
that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking toleave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different frommerely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude might becalled religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission,no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any “habitual andregulated admiration,” says Professor J. R. Seeley,30 “is worthy to becalled a religion”; and accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science,and our so-called “Civilization,” as these things are now organized andadmiringly believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time.
Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that wemust inflict our civilization upon “lower” races, by means of Hotchkiss
guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam
spreading its religion 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-radical opinion of Mr.
Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious
exercise, for it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. I quoted this

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opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores
more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too
complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that we make ofreligious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.

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Lectures IV and V
The Religion of Healthy Mindedness
HAPPINESS IS MAN’S CHIEF CONCERN— “ONCE-BORN” AND “TWICE-BORN”
CHARACTERS— WALT WHITMAN— MIXED NATURE OF GREEK FEELING—
SYSTEMATIC HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS— ITS REASONABLENESS— LIBERALCHRISTIANITY SHOWS IT— OPTIMISM AS 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 POSSIBLE SCHEMES OF ADAPTATION TO THE
UNIVERSE— APPENDIX: TWO MIND-CURE CASES.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life’s chief concern?” oneof the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How togain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all
times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing toendure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly
from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different
kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the
moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which
the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author
whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion,
nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admitthat any persistent enjoyment may PRODUCE the sort of religion which
consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; andwe must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing
religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths
to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural
existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.
With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not
surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious
belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy,
he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it
is true—such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the “immediate inferences” of
the religious logic used by ordinary men.
“The near presence of God’s spirit,” says a German writer,31 “may be
experienced in its reality—indeed ONLY experienced. And the mark bywhich the spirit’s existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to
those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable
FEELING OF HAPPINESS which is connected with the nearness, andwhich is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us

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to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God’s
reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness isthe point from which every efficacious new theology should start.”
31

C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.

In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider thesimpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts tobe treated on a later day.
In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. “Cosmic
emotion” inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I
speak not only of 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 something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age,passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life,in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of thesinister theologies into which they may he born. From the outset theirreligion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before thereformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian
practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies
by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century inwhich the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by asufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed
all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine’s maxim, Dilige etquod vis fac—if you but love [God], you may do as you incline—is morally
one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such
persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality.
According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but theirbelief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite
religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting ofevil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on
the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite
varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint
Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian
movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to acertain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only
trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often
feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this skyblue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and allenchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think
no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in

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possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedentburden.
“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W.
Newman,32 “the once-born and the twice-born,” and the once-born hedescribes as follows: “They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a
Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious
world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The samecharacters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not lookback into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own
imperfections: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for theyhardly think of themselves AT ALL. This childlike quality of their nature
makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no moreshrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent
trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of ANY of the qualities inwhich the severer Majesty of God consists.33 He is to them theimpersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in
the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of
human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not verymuch in the world; and human suffering does but melt them totenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbanceensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain
complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple
worship.”
32

The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.

33
I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she“could always cuddle up to God.”In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to growin than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set byminds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they
have been abundant enough; and in its recent “liberal” developments of
Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order haveplayed and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson
himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another—here are acouple of characteristic passages from Parker’s correspondence.34
34

John Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.

“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no
consciousness of sin.’ It is very true—God be thanked for it. They wereconscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth,
cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the

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deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity against God,’ anddidn’t sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. I havedone wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark,draw bow, and try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man,or right, or love, and I know there is much ‘health in me’, and in mybody, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption
and Saint Paul.” In another letter Parker writes: “I have swum in clear
sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, andthe stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to
be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, when
I went stumbling through the grass, ... up to the gray-bearded manhoodof this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memorythat I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years ... I am
filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things canmake a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of
all my delights is still the religious.”
Another good expression of the “once-born” type of consciousness,developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction
or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, theeminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck’s
circulars. I quote a part of it:—
“I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into
many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I
ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be
estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is
simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, sothat he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious
struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful tohim for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and wasalways glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember perfectlythat when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of thetime had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were
facing the ‘problem of life.’ I had no idea whatever what the problem oflife was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where
there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; tolend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, heenjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himselfthat he ought to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God’schild, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that hehas, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any
difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it,
than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly

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incapable of good.”35
35

Starbuck: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.

One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of atemperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatallyforbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over thedarker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may
become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness ora momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenitalanaesthesia.36“I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the
feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuousof all sensations,” writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a seriesof sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs desTombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude—each of them more
optimistic than the last.
36

This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The
truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:—“In his depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don’t
condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe
it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy
weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as
if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I
want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so
accommodating.
I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased—no, not exactly that—I
know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I findeverything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness,
I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this—my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me
is glad of it all.” 37
37

Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is ofcourse Walt Whitman.
“His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke “seemed to be
strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass,
the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky,and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the

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hundreds of natural sounds.
It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what theygive to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,” continues Dr. Bucke, “ithad not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolutehappiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers,
either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs andsunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who everlived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All
natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds
seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all
the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to saythat he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him orher, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute,and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes
playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself
or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the
opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that hewatched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to
fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur tome as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After longobservation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or
unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any
nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history, or against any
trades or occupations—not even against any animals, insects, orinanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of
those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or
grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He neverswore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger andapparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe
he ever felt it.”38
38

R. M. Bucke: Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182–186, abridged.

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic
expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only
sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order;and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously
conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men,so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words,
and ends 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 today regard Walt Whitman

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as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them withhis own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.
Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its
propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are alreadybeginning to be drawn;39 hymns are written by others in his peculiar
prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of theChristian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
39
I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and publishedmonthly at Philadelphia.

Whitman is often spoken of as a “pagan.” The word nowadays means
sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin;
sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious
consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He
is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree ofgood and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in
his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom fromflexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of
the word would never show.
“I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid andself-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 for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania ofowning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousandsof years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”4040Song of Myself, 32.

No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on theother hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for theirconsciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sadmortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman
resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay
Lycaon, Priam’s young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:—“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too isdead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang death andforceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life
too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow

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from the string.”41
41

Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with his sword, heaves
him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to
eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy
each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the
Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled
and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any
such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as somany of US insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be “goodin the making,” or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and badjust bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature—
Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is called good is 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 and a betterworld” of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent
goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive
reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives apathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman’s
outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; hisgospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,42 and this diminishes
its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism,
and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects
Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.
“God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in mypresence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty andcannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian educationin humility still rankled in his breast.

42

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency whichlooks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must
distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or
systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety,healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately.
In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as
good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect ofthem as their essence for the time being, and disregards the otheraspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as theessential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its
field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seema difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere withhimself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation

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is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, hasblindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive
weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness isactually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feelingof reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy
rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply
cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the
bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush itup.
But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid andhonest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Muchof what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon.
It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple
change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its
sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking
to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man issimply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem atfirst to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit
their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn yourattention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any
rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer.
Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is
the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its
entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful
bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on selfprotection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals
have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only
painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy thanthe pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it
may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What lesshelpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates thetrouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation.
At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought toscout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is
impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without
zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of
the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution
not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within
ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality

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under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its
needs.
In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the
total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion
plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, andwe must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far atpresent. More ordinary non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for myimmediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate
enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common
penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by thelover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually
be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting,the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and illseems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent
excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomesas the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I
exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.
The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitudeis therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and isanything but absurd. In fact. we all do cultivate it more or less, evenwhen our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert
our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and theslaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life isfounded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world
we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far
handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.43“As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child;
I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, tohearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite
surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic—or maenadic—
foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. L.
Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.
43

The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty
years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the
church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was
more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose
preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted
rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternalpunishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity ofman. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned
Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and “muscular”
attitude. which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen,has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am
not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out thechange. The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part
their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of
its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that “theory of
evolution” which, gathering momentum for a century, has within thepast twenty-five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see
the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely
displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation.
The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of generalmeliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthyminded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created fortheir use. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus
optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they wereborn in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been
trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who
had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them
the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As
examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received
in answer to Professor Starbuck’s circular of questions.
The writer’s state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is
his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective
and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize
in him, coarse-meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, asufficiently familiar contemporary type.
Q. What does Religion mean to you?
A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe useless toothers. I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X fifty years,
and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little
experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that themost religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in
uprightness and morality.
The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are
the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious—
they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely
on ourselves. I TEEtotally disbelieve in a God. The God-idea wasbegotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of
Nature. If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age,

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both mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with ahearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As atimepiece stops, we die—there being no immortality in either case.
Q. What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God,
Heaven, Angels, etc?
A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words meanso much mythic bosh.
Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?
A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A little
judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince
any one of this fact.
Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?
A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like Scott,Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc. Of songs, theStar–Spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all moral and soulstirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation. I greatly
enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used towalk Sundays into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, andbicycle forty or fifty. I have dropped the bicycle.
I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones.
All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful
kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I
endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as thedeepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he will havemade a great advance over 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 advanced enough. Morbidness over it
increases the disease. We should think that a million of years hence
equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed andorganized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin.
Q. What is your temperament?
A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that
Nature compels us to sleep at all.

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If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need notlook to this brother. His contentment with the finite incases him like alobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distancefrom the infinite. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism
which may be encouraged by popular science.
To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously
than that which sets in from natural science towards healthymindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to
be gathering force every day—I am ignorant what foothold it may yet
have acquired in Great Britain—and to which, for the sake of having abrief designation, I will give the title of the “Mind-cure movement.”
There are various sects of this “New Thought,” to use another of thenames by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that
their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I willtreat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.
It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and apractical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of acentury, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements,
and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It hasreached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature isgreat enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market,
to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers—a phenomenon neverobserved, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure
beginnings.
One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another isEmersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is
Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of “law” and“progress” and “development”; another the optimistic popular scienceevolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has
contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure
movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faithhave had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded
attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust,and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously
precautionary states of mind.44 Their belief has in a general way been
corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and thisexperience forms today a mass imposing in amount.
44“Cautionary Verses for Children”: this title of a much used work,
published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse ofevangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of
danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-

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cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic
anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelicalcircles of England and America.

The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long invalids have
had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable.
The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved
possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regenerationof character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has
been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been
great. The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that
one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the “Gospel of
Relaxation,” of the “Don’t Worry Movement,” of people who repeat tothemselves, “Youth, health, vigor!” when dressing in the morning, as
their motto for the day.
Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many
households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad formto speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary
inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public
opinion would be good even if the more striking results were nonexistent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook theinnumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them(for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also
overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some ofwhich is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an
academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due topractical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of theAmerican people has never been better shown than by the fact that this,their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy oflife, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To theimportance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the
United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy andprotesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still
farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far
and away the ablest of the group.45 It matters nothing that, just as there
are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who
cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind-curers’ ideas. For
our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number
should exist who CAN be so influenced. They form a psychic type to bestudied with respect.46
45

I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the

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former. Mr. Dresser’s works are published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, NewYork and London; Mr. Wood’s by Lee & Shepard Boston.
Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr.
H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on “the Effects of Mind on
Body as evidenced by Faith Cures” is published in the American Journal of
Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts,
concludes that the cures by mind-cure exist, but are in no respect different
from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion;and the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation
as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of thereprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr.
Goddard writes: “In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports
of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful
influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that havebeen diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which
prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success.
People of culture and education have been treated by this method withsatisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, andeven cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive
medicine and folk-medicine of today, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We
are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of thesepractices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it
must have been the mental element that was effective. The same
argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics— Divine
Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large bodyof intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental
Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is
not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true thatmany failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There
must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures,
otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion.... Christian Science,
Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very natureof things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of thegeneral principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent
disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper
reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that theordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of deathto many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithfuladherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and givethe doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable” (pp. 33,
34 of reprint).
46

To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental
pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all
religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and isconnected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder
sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The
shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts,
and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But
whereas Christian theology has always considered FROWARDNESS to
be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say

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that the mark of the beast in it is FEAR; and this is what gives such anentirely new religious turn to their persuasion.
“Fear,” to quote a writer of the school, “has had its uses in theevolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought inmost animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental
equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear
clement of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons
to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening
and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a
positive deterrent, and should be entirely removed, as dead flesh isremoved from living tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear and in thedenunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word fearthought tostand for the unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined theword ‘worry’ as fearthought in contradistinction to forethought. I havealso defined fearthought as the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestionof inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the categoryof harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable things.”47
Horace Fletcher: Happiness as found in Forethought Minus Fearthought,
Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone. 1897, pp. 21–25,
abridged.

47

The “misery-habit,” the “martyr-habit,” engendered by the prevalent“fearthought,” get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers:—“Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.
There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged
requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the world.
There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, oureducation, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this,
there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain
children’s diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thoughtthat we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become childlike;while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there is a long line ofparticular tears and trouble-bearing expectations, such, for example, asideas associated with certain articles of food, the dread of the east wind,
the terrors of hot weather, the aches and pains associated with cold
weather, the fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of
hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and so on
through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments, anxieties, anticipations,
expectations, pessimisms, morbidities, and the whole ghostly train of
fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and especially physicians, are readyto help us conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Bradley’s ‘unearthly

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ballet of bloodless categories.’“Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable volunteers
from daily life—the fear of accident, the possibility of calamity, the loss ofproperty, the chance of robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war. And it is
not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we
must forth with fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets withsorrow ... sympathy means to enter into and increase the suffering.”48
48

H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.

“Man,” to quote another writer, “often has fear stamped upon him before
his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed
in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality
becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its
shrunken pattern and specification ... Think of the millions of sensitiveand responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under thedominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that healthexists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love? exuberance, andvitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could insome degree neutralize such an ocean of morbidity.”49
Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography. Boston,
1899, p. 54.

49

Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology,
one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man
diverges from that of ordinary Christians.50
Whether it differs so much from Christ’s own notion is for the exegetists
to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as
our mind-curers do. “What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the
Baptist?” asks Harnack, and says it is this: “‘The blind see, and the lame
walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and thegospel is preached to the poor.’ That is the ‘coming of the kingdom,’ orrather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By theovercoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual
effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out ofdevils is only a part of this work of redemption, but Jesus points to that as
the sense and seal of his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did
he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace ofsentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills, henever spends time in asking whether the sick one ‘deserves’ to be cured;and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He
nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has ahealthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, allwretchedness, is for him something 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 weakness is overcome, when sickness is50

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made well.” Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39.

Their notion of man’s higher nature is hardly less divergent, being
decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears in the mind-curephilosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and throughthe subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without
any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this viewis variously expressed by different writers, we find in it traces ofChristian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of themodern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two will put us
at the central point of view:—“The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life andpower that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This
spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care
not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over–
Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so longas we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills
the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there isnothing that is outside. He is the life of our life our very life itself. We arepartakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that weare individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, aswell as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man
are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or
quality; they differ in degree.
“The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital
realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life and the opening ofourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into
a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open
ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities
and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels throughwhich the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In just the degree inwhich you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange
disease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for
abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity, and ourintimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machineryto the powerhouse of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer
than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; andwhen we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine
to help us heavenward.”51
51
R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N.Y. 1899. I havestrung scattered passages together.

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Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more
concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I have
many answers from correspondents—the only difficulty is to choose. The
first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, awoman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with
the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are inspired.
“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is thehuman sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God.
The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as
did the Nazarene: ‘I and my Father are one,’ has no further need ofhealer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and otherfoundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable
divine union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on
this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath. If
one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, howillness assail that indomitable spark?
“This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has beenabundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record ofmany, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs
paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they are today,
although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense andunenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as ahealer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and cantruthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain,
although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness,and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?—since ‘Greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against us.’”
My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following
statement:—“Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking down,
and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, withterrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides having manyother troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent awayfrom home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all
work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I
never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession ofme.
“I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning thefact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this

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word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates
all and which we call God. This is almost unrecognizable unless 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 in us, for
illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth,
and invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that toturn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or
your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which
you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without.
“I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health
AS SUCH, because that comes of itself, as an incidental result, andcannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond
that general attitude of mind I have referred to above. That which weusually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly
seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us
peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory,
and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deepin the bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom ofGod, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all else comes asthat which shall be ‘added unto you’—as quite incidental and as asurprise 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 of our life that which weshould not work for primarily, I mean many things which the worldconsiders praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fameas author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic
undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects. I would also
include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at thetime, and are pursued because many accept them—I mean
conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various
development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they
may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities.”
Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read youthese cases without comment—they express so many varieties of thestate of mind we are studying.
“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year. [Details of
ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in Vermont several months
hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker,
when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in theafternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: ‘You will be healed

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and do a work you never dreamed of.’ These words were impressed upon
my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have putthem there. I believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering andweakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston.
Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer(this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing but Mind;
we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a
man thinketh so is he.’ I could not accept all she said, but I translated allthat was there for ME in this way: ‘There is nothing but God; I am
created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is given
me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought ofright action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance andfear and past experience.’ That day I commenced accordingly to take alittle of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself:‘The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I haveeaten.’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed
and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with God’s Thought ofme,’ and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years[the distress-turns had usually recurred about two o’clock in the night]. I
felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found thesecret that would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I wasable to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began tohave my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to me likestepping-stones. I will note a few 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-footed beast with aprotuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with myown face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I resolutely fixed myattention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in thisform.
“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 with the longing look;
and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the innerconsciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I wasSoul, an expression of God’s Perfect Thought. That was to me the perfectand completed separation between what I was and what I appeared tohttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being, byconstantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me twoyears of hard work to get there) I expressed health continuously
throughout my whole body.
“In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience I have never known thisTruth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I have often failed
to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the simplicity andtrustfulness of the little child.”
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you
back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records ofexperience how impossible it is not to class mind-cure as primarily areligious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s life
is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s
message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by someof your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.52
52
The Cairds, for example. In Edward Caird’s Glasgow Lectures of 1890–92
passages like this abound:—“The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that ‘thetime is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ passes withscarce a break into the announcement that ‘the kingdom of God is amongyou’; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be suchthat it makes, so to speak, a difference IN KIND between the greatest
saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division, and‘the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ The highest ideal is brought close tomen and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be‘perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.’ The sense of alienation anddistance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in
proportion as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national
divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as
certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and thetypical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast
between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews
had continually been growing wider: ‘As in heaven, so on earth.’ The
sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite,
as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost;
but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms‘Son’ and ‘Father’ at once state the opposition and mark its limit. Theyshow that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes anindestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a principle ofreconciliation.” The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147.

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But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of
the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, theexistence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, themind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no
speculative explanation Evil is empirically there for them as it is foreverybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill
agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a
“mystery” or “problem,” or in “laying to heart” the lesson of its
experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don’t reason about it,
as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya,ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left be hind,transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so-called, the sect of Mrs.
Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind-cure in its dealings with evil.
For it evil is simply a LIE, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The
optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of
explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is abad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical
merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a
mind-curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?
After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living
system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all
previous literature of the Diatetit der Seele into the shade. This system iswholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: “Pessimism leads toweakness. Optimism leads to power.” “Thoughts are things,” as one of
the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom ofeach of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, andsuccess, before you know it these things will also be your outward
portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic
thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet
to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic
modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bringin a doctrine that thoughts are “forces,” and that, by virtue of a law thatlike attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all thethoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets,by one’s thinking, reinforcements from 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 own mind to their influx.
On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between themind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To
the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, “What shall
I do to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: “You are saved now, if you
would but believe it.” And the mind-curers come with precisely similar

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words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom theconception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but wholabor nevertheless with the same eternal 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 AREwell, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.” “The whole matter
may be summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I
have already quoted, “GOD IS WELL, AND SO ARE YOU. You must
awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of
mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same
adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may
sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its
therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be
destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance ofmany of its manifestations53) to play a part almost as great in theevolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier
movements in their day.
It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes
more and more the form of mind-cure experience and academic philosophy
mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of theless critical and rational sects.

53

But I here fear that I may begin to “jar upon the nerves” of some of themembers of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you
may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford
lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome ofthese lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of theenormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit.
Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must
be classed under different heads. The result is that we have reallydifferent types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures
closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where
we find it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types ofcharacter has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet—our lectures may
possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The firstthing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clericoacademic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally “correct” type,“the deadly respectable” type, for which to ignore others is a besetting
temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out
phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking
part in anything like them ourselves.

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Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic
conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to provethe existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at a certain
stage in their development—a change of character for the better, so far
from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, willtake place all the more 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 incheck; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.” But
the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing
but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them twofold
more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary
attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Theirmachinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot andthe belts so tight.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched 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, should be now the rule.
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care ofyour destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what
becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfectinward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you
sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation throughself-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage
into NOTHING of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a criticalpoint must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something
must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and thisevent (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden andautomatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been
wrought on by an external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one
fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or
incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic
character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails tocast doubt on its reality. They KNOW; for they have actually FELT thehigher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who foundhimself at night slipping down the side of a precipice.
At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging

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to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold,and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six
inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have beenspared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will
the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and giveup the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its
precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.
The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, byletting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheranjustification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within
the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for
the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self arest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden,
or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, theregenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort,
remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt atheistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of theirultimate causal explanation.54
The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature
within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic
explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of thenarrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of theuniverse (which is your own “subconscious” self), the moment the isolating
barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic
explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they
are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though
in this instance not spiritually) “higher” ones which, seeking to regulate,
only succeed in inhibiting results.—Whether this third explanation might, ina psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of theothers may be left an open question here.
54

When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shalllearn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word
about the mind-curer’s METHODS.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence ofenvironment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education.
But the word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, isunfortunately already beginning to play in many 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 anothername for the power of ideas, SO FAR AS THEY PROVE EFFICACIOUS
OVER BELIEF AND CONDUCT. Ideas efficacious over some people

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prove inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and insome human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The
ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic
direction today, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; andwhen the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or
gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word “suggestion” as if itwere a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychologicalessay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion,
concludes by saying that “Religion [and by this he seems to mean our
popular Christianity] 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 forus that can be done.” And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular
Christianity does absolutely NOTHING, or did nothing until mind-curecame to the rescue.55
55
Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness
as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as
chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, 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 mortification which one has not one’s
self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expressionof his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gay says, ‘this one isof gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of originalsin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from theprovidence 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 longillness is mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph ofmortified souls.’” According to this view, disease should in any case besubmissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be
blasphemous to wish it away.

Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special
miracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale,almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was
one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to bepossible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession andconversion on the patient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, was quite
spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph
Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years.
Blumhardt’s Life by Zundel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chaptersix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which heinvariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a
singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical character, and in this part ofhis work followed no previous model. In Chicago today we have the caseof Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of
Healing” were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who,

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although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as “diabolicalcounterfeits” of his own exclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole
be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles thefundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It iswholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should
not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of arevelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness hascome as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had
left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can theoriginality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,
until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free insome group of human beings?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all theforce of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of
success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, andintrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter
stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church
knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acutereligion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated
into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to themovings of the Spirit. “We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards,“concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may
either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said bysome at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than naturalmen, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind ifthey were all dead.”56
56
Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote thesewords, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that heenjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.

The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large
numbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness forregeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic asregards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic andmoralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way
to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements.
However few 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 protestant countries is an

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unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned
advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic
exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and haveeven invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at
random:—“The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the
New Thought most strongly insists—the development namely fromwithin outward, from small to great.57 Consequently one’s thought
should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be
literally like a step in the dark.58 To attain the ability thus effectively to
direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration,or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One is to learn tomarshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together asa unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times forsilent meditation, by one’s self, preferably in a room where thesurroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms,
this is called ‘entering the silence.’"59
57

H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.

58

Dresser: Living by the spirit, 58.

59

Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 33.

“The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you
can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own
thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit ofInfinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding,
keeping, protecting, leading you. This is the spirit of continual prayer.60
One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city officewhere several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often
talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds abouthim, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity,
draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as
fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually
removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval
wood. Taking his difficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of
a direct question, to which he expected a certain answer, he would
remain utterly passive until the reply came, and never once throughmany years’ experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.”61
60

Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214

61

Trine: p. 117.

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Wherein, I should like to know, does this INTRINSICALLY differ fromthe practice of “recollection” which plays so great a part in Catholic
discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so
known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus
defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on
Contemplation.
“It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places andcircumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune respectfully
and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and affection for him....
Would you escape from every ill? Never lose this recollection of God,neither in prosperity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it
be. Invoke not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or
the importance of your business, for you can always remember that God
sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you
forget him, 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 draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can tothat ardent fire which will warm your soul.”62
62

Quoted by Lejeune: Introd. a la vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.

All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course
unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of theexercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those
who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced intheir own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cureutterances:—“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, andstrengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms
a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the mental
horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, andharmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seemdifficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length renderit easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful.
“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental
states, and imaginations. If we WILL, we can turn our backs upon thelower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of thespiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of statesof expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will

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flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the though;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,and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise
may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has never made any
systematic effort to lift and control the thought-forces will, for a single
month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised
and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back tocareless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons theoutside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one
goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune
and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense arehushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually becomes consciousthat it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing,
loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Thereis soul contact with the Parent— Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue,
health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.”63
63
HENRY Wood: Ideal suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70(abridged).

When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep animmersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all
over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which
this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away—
doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talkand rhetoric set down pour encourager les autres. You will then be
convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of “union” form aperfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionallypartake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense thanthey live by anything else with which they have acquaintance. This brings
me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to passfrom the subject of healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear isalready only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all thissystematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientificmethod and the scientific life.
In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion
to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other.
There are plenty of persons today—“scientists” or “positivists,” they arefond of calling themselves—who will tell you that religious thought is amere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness whichhumanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behindand out-grown. If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they

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will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived ofunder the form of personality. The savage thinks that things operate bypersonal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him, evenexternal nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these wereso many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these
positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being anelementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the reallyelementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psychophysical, which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing
individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as itobeys and exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire ofthem by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, anddiscredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly
say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental
verification. Follow out science’s conceptions practically, they will say,the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always
be corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectations will be
experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms
from which you infer them impersonal and universal.
But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy,
setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says, andevery day will practically prove you right. That the controlling energies ofnature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that thepowers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals
and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental
experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify theseprimeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind-cure
movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply,
but by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science’s
authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientificphilosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own peculiar methods andweapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain
ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely
throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only
not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident
enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet anothercouple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Hereis one:—“One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months
after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had

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done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic
anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since. As soon as I
was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all mybeing): ‘There is nothing but God, and all life comes from him perfectly. I
cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.’ Well, I never
had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.”
The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also
the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made suchaccount.
“I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not beengone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling increased rapidly, until
I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, all thesymptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza. I thought that I
was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or somethingworse. The mind-cure teachings that I had been listening to all thewinter thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was anopportunity to test myself. On my way home I met a friend, I refrainedwith some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step
gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send forthe doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see
how I felt. Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
“I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie down inthe stream of life and let it flow over me.’ I gave up all fear of any
impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no
intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto meeven as thou wilt,’ and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all
WAS well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt
myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace thatpasseth understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jarringbody. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only oflove and happiness and faith.
“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep; butwhen I woke up in the morning, I WAS WELL.”
These are exceedingly trivial instances,64 but in them, if we have anythingat all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For the point I
am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider thepatients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they

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seemed to THEMSELVES to have been cured by the experiments tried
was enough to make them converts to the system. And although it isevident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results(for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any morethan every one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom hecalls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over-scrupulous for those
who CAN get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing
verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word ofcommand for more scientific therapeutics.
What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim?
64

See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.

I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least,premature. The experiences which we have been studying during thishour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are likethem) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any
sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our
verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated
systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But
why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such
system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experienceis that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, andis so handled by different men, and will each time give somecharacteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while atthe same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed.
Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, andsucceeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion
in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, andhappiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does,or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the scienceand the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s
treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as
evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneoususe. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of
many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach inalternation by using different conceptions and assuming different
attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial
facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, orby quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion andscience, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life tolife, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief inindividualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever fromhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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being driven by science from the field today. Numbers of educatedpeople still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carryon their intercourse with reality.65
65
Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into
one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, andhow, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only
the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate
conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, eachverified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.

The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist thetemptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention,
but I must content myself today with this very brief indication. In a later
lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought
will have to receive much more explicit attention.

Appendix
CASE I. “My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of thefirst results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia
which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost
entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any
kind under penalty of immediate and great exhaustion. I had been under
the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America,
men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill
result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground,I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to
make me try it; I had no great hope of getting any good from it—it was a
CHANCE I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new
possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I thencould see. I went to X in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had
got, or thought they had got, great help; the treatment was a silent one;little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind, whatever
influence was exerted was that of another person’s thought or feelingsilently projected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as
it were, as we sat still together. I believed from the start in the
POSSIBILITY of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape,
helping or hindering, the body’s nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy
probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than apossibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faithconnected with my thought of it that might have brought imaginationstrongly into play.
“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no

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result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly
conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power topass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that,though often tried before, had long been 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, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months
later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining groundinstead of losing, it but with this lift the influence seemed in a way tohave spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power
had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped
me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been
the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking
or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, withlittle faith and doubtful expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidencein such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all thatone bases one’s conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had
abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I
came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change whichcame at that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me bya change of mental state; and secondly, that that change of mental state
was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the
influence of an excited imagination, or a CONSCIOUSLY received
suggestion of an hypnotic sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was theresult of my receiving telephathically, and upon a mental stratum quite
below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and moreenergetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was
directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of thisattitude upon me. In my case the disease was distinctly what would beclassed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have
had of observing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing linethat has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling theinternal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believethat the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres,
can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can bebrought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to bring it tobear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the
results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant weare as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to makethem effective. That these results are not due to chance coincidences myobservation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious
mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases isdoubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary

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ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined tothink that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from theplane of the normally UNconscious mind, so the strongest and mosteffective impressions are those which IT receives, in some as yet
unknown subtle way, DIRECTLY from a healthier mind whose state,through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces.”
CASE II. “At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly
any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a
Christian Scientist), our little daughter was placed under the care of ahealer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very
discouraging in his diagnosis. This interested me, and I began studying
earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing.
Gradually an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a waythat my manner changed greatly. My children and friends noticed thechange and commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared.
Even the expression of my face changed noticeably.
“I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both inpublic and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward theviews of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or
three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, bydyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physicaltroubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching
every business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every
one with confidence and inner calm.
“I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination ofselfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms, but
those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express
themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the directionof a practical, working realization of the immanence of God and theDivinity of man’s true, inner self.

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Lectures VI and VII
The Sick Soul
HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS AND REPENTANCE— ESSENTIAL PLURALISM OF THE
HEALTHY-MINDED PHILOSOPHY— MORBID-MINDEDNESS: ITS TWO DEGREES—

THE PAIN-THRESHOLD VARIES IN INDIVIDUALS— INSECURITY OF NATURALGOODS— FAILURE, OR VAIN SUCCESS OF EVERY LIFE— PESSIMISM OF ALL PURE
NATURALISM— HOPELESSNESS OF GREEK AND ROMAN VIEW— PATHOLOGICALUNHAPPINESS— “ANHEDONIA”— QUERULOUS MELANCHOLY— VITAL ZEST IS A
PURE GIFT— LOSS OF IT MAKES PHYSICAL WORLD LOOK DIFFERENT—TOLSTOY— BUNYAN— ALLINE— MORBID FEAR— SUCH CASES NEED A
SUPERNATURAL RELIGION FOR RELIEF— ANTAGONISM OF HEALTHYMINDEDNESS AND MORBIDNESS— THE PROBLEM OF EVIL CANNOT BE ESCAPED.

At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament,
the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged
suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like awater of crystallization in which the individual’s character is set. We saw
how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of
religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world’s life, isregarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. Thisreligion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of theuniverse by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make muchof them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on
occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a disease; and worry
over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to theoriginal complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which comein the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing
impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, andforget that you ever had relations with sin.
Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into theheart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom
Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence
over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an “inadequate” knowledge,
fit only for slavish minds. So Spinoza categorically condemns
repentance. When men make mistakes, he says—“One might perhaps expect gnawings of conscience and repentance tohelp to bring them on the right path, and might thereupon conclude (asevery one does conclude) that these affections are good things. Yet when
we look at the matter closely, we shall find that not only are they not
good, but on the contrary deleterious and evil passions. For it is manifest
that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by

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worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these and evil, inasmuch
as they form a particular kind of sadness; and the disadvantages ofsadness,” he continues, “I have already proved, and shown that weshould strive to keep it from our life. Just so we should endeavor, sinceuneasiness of conscience and remorse are of this kind of complexion, toflee and shun these states of mind.”66
66

Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.

Within the Christian body, for which repentance of sins has from the
beginning been the critical religious act, healthy-mindedness has always
come forward with its milder interpretation. Repentance according tosuch healthy— minded Christians means GETTING AWAY FROM thesin, not groaning and writhing over its commission. The Catholic
practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little morethan a systematic method of keeping healthy— mindedness on top. By it
a man’s accounts with evil are periodically squared and audited, so that
he may start the clean page with no old debts inscribed. Any Catholic willtell us how clean and fresh and free he feels after the purging operation.
Martin Luther by no means belonged to the healthy-minded type in theradical sense in which we have discussed it, and he repudiated priestly
absolution for sin. Yet in this matter of repentance he had some very
healthy— minded ideas, due in the main to the largeness of his
conception of God.
“When I was a monk,” he says “I thought that I was utterly cast away, if
at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil
motion, fleshly lust, wrath, hatred, or envy against any brother. I assayed
many ways to help to quiet my conscience, but It would not be; for the
concupiscence and lust of my flesh did always return, so that I could notrest, but was continually vexed with these thoughts: This or that sin thouhast committed: thou art infected with envy, with impatiency, and suchother sins: therefore thou art entered into this holy order in vain, and all
thy good works are unprofitable. But if then I had rightly understoodthese sentences of Paul: ‘The flesh lusteth contrary to the Spirit, and theSpirit contrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another, sothat ye cannot do the things that ye would do,’ I should not have somiserably tormented myself, but should have thought and said to myself,
as now commonly I do, ‘Martin, thou shalt not utterly be without sin, forthou hast flesh; thou shalt therefore feel the battle thereof.’ I rememberthat Staupitz was wont to say, ‘I have vowed unto God above a thousand
times that I would become a better man: but I never performed thatwhich I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now
learned by experience that I am not able to perform it. Unless, therefore,

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God be favorable and merciful unto me for Christ’s sake, I shall not beable, with all my vows and all my good deeds, to stand before him.’ This(of Staupitz’s) was not only a true, but also a godly and a holydesperation; and this must they all confess, 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 his life for their sins.
Moreover, they know that the remnant of sin which is in their flesh is notlaid to their charge, but freely pardoned. Notwithstanding, in the mean
while they fight in spirit against the flesh, lest they should FULFILL thelusts thereof; and although they feel the flesh to rage and rebel, andthemselves also do fall sometimes into sin through infirmity, yet are they
not discouraged, nor think therefore that their state and kind of life, andthe works which are done according to their calling, displease God; but
they raise up themselves by faith.”67
67

Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510–514 (abridged).

One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius,
Molinos, the founder of Quietism, so abominably condemned was hishealthy-minded opinion of repentance:—“When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be do not trouble
nor afflict thyself for it. For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by
Original Sin. The common enemy will make thee believe, as soon as thoufallest into any fault, that thou walkest in error, and therefore art out of
God and his favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of thedivine Grace, telling thee of thy misery, and making a giant of it; andputting it into thy head that every day thy soul grows worse instead of
better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open thineeyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, knowing thy
misery, and trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool
who, running at tournament with others, and falling in the best of the
career, should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself withdiscourses upon his fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up
and take the course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues
his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen once and athousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I havegiven thee, that is, a loving confidence in the divine mercy. These are theweapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and vain
thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use—not to lose time, not todisturb thyself, and reap no good.”68
68

Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. abridged.

Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat

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them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite
view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on thepersuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and thatthe world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most toheart. We have now to address ourselves to this {129} more morbid wayof looking at the situation. But as I closed our last hour with a generalphilosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of taking life, I
should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it
before turning to that heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.
If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to theinterpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty thathas always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism,
whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of theuniverse, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than AllinAll. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency
to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one
unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular orpractical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly
pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly wellsatisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided
we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme,
and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is notnecessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be
responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or
pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in
God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God
be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy inwhich the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an
INDIVIDUAL, and in it the worst parts must be as essential as the best,
must be as necessary to make the individual what he is; since if any partwhatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be
THAT individual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so
vigorously represented both in Scotland and America today, has tostruggle with this difficulty quite as {130} much as scholastic theism
struggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that
there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fairto say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that the only OBVIOUS
escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption
altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin inpluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower thingsand principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For then evil
would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been,
an independent portion that had no rational or absolute right to live with

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the rest, and which we might conceivably hope to see got rid of at last.
Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its
vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher
finds himself more or less bound to say, as Hegel said, that everythingactual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required, mustbe pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it
in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anythingof the sort.69 Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to bepinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It isa pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, tobe sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible,
wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being co-extensive withthe whole actual, is a mere EXTRACT from the actual, marked by its
deliverance from all contact with this diseased, inferior, andexcrementitious stuff.
I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers;
for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards
disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in theexperiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect
themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute wholeof things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it
as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.

69

Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us,of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational
whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the pointof view of any system which those other elements make up, can only beconsidered so much irrelevance and accident—so much “dirt,” as it were,and matter out of place. I ask you now not to forget this notion; foralthough most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too
much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselvesin the end as containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus
once more appears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen
it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination to
cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be
not unlike the method of all science; and now here we find mind— cureas the champion of a perfectly definite conception of the metaphysicalstructure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will not regret
my having pressed it upon your attention at such length.
Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turntowards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the
consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its
presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower

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and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and moreregenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of themorbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other.
There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with
THINGS, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment.
Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane,
for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, thetwo terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again.
But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject toparticular outer things, but something more radical and general, awrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of theenvironment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, cancure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin
races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as
made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while theGermanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, andwith a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our naturalsubjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal
operations.70 These comparisons of races are always open to exception,
but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more
intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being themore extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.
70

Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf–Arbitre, 1884, passim.

Recent psychology has found great use for the word “threshold” as asymbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes intoanother. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness ingeneral, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer
stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a highthreshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low
threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive
to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low“difference— threshold”—his mind easily steps over it into theconsciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speakof a “pain-threshold,” a “fear-threshold,” a “misery-threshold,” and findit quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying
too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. Thesanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of theirmisery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness
and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with abottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seemto have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest
irritants fatally send them over.

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Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of thepain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who
habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of different
types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point,
and will became a serious problem ere we have done. But before we
confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasanttask of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to thehealthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, theirown peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn ourbacks on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not
simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, “Hurrah for the Universe!—
God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Let us see rather whether
pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may notopen a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key
to the meaning of the situation.
To begin with, how CAN things so insecure as the successful experiencesof this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its
weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links ofillness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly fromthe bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something
bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff ofmelancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, theybring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have anappalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a
piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again—atintervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with anirremediable sense 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 healthy-mindedness as neverto have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals,
still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot
with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just alucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have beenborn to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow
security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you cansay is, “Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!” Is not its
blessedness a fragile fiction? 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

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success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one
most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost
consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of hisachievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves,or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and inregard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in thiswise, how must it be with less successful men? {135}“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “against the course of myexistence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I
can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had fourweeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock thatmust be raised up again forever.”What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther?
Yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an
absolute failure.
“I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carryme hence. Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment: I will stretchout my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest.”—And
having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added: “O
God, grant that it may come without delay. I would readily eat up thisnecklace today, for the Judgment to come tomorrow.”—The Electress
Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him:
“Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come.” “Madam,” replied he,“rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of
Paradise.”
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew itwith our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all thememorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damningemphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology orformal expiation, will satisfy the world’s demands, but every pound offlesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental
to these results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous andeverlasting is evidently an integral part of life. “There is indeed oneelement in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that notblindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we

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are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”71 And our nature
being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians shouldhave held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal
experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life’s
significance is reached?72
He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: “Our business is tocontinue to fail in good spirits.”
71

72
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the
damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world.
To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left overafter our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity of acknowledging
and regretting them is the germ of a better self in posse at least. But theworld deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, notto be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the
All-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who isjust. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy only by an Allknower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely
emerges from this sort of experience of life.

But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the humanbeing’s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over themisery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments
themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods
perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth andhealth and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust anddisappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back ofeverything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing
blackness:—“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun?
I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was
vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which befalleth the sons of men
befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other, all are of the dust,
and all turn to dust again.... The dead know not anything, neither havethey any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also theirlove and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they
any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold
the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him
remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.”
In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if
the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally
essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infectedwith a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

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To a mind attentive to this state of things and rightly subject to the joydestroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief
that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying: “Stuff and nonsense, getout into the open air!” or “Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll be all right erelong,
if you will only drop your morbidness!” But in all seriousness, can suchbald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe
religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one’s brief
chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness andsuperficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for THAT cure. The factthat we CAN die, that we CAN be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the factthat we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that
perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable toillness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond
the Goods of nature.
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “Thetrouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness andgoodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort,“and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled anddisconcerted at its being possible.” And so with most of us: a little
cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal
toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold,will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into fullview, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life andglory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of
hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely
naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure toend in sadness.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or
naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do
its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring andforgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, andthe skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual,
we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on
the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its
significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known
to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its
glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internaldisease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but heknows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge
knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners ofdeath and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

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The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the backgroundof possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped inan eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance;
let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith andhope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass bywith zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Placeround them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence ofall permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popularscience evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and thethrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in aposition similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,
surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little
by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when thelast 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, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the morepoignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of thetotal situation.
The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works asmodels of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature
may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks—Homer’s flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon issteady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,73 and themoment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought ofultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.74 The jealousy of thegods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing
death, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were
the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of
their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys
comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong
see that Ilrahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-bornpeople whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds ofmysticism and renunciation.
E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: “Nothing then is more wretched anywhere thanman of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.”
73

74
E.g., Theognis, 425–428: “Best of all for all things upon earth is it not tobe born nor to behold the splendors of the sun; next best to traverse assoon as possible the gates of Hades.” See also the almost identical passage
in Oedipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthology is full of pessimistic
utterances: “Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—
why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—“How did

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I come to be? Whence am l? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How
can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once
more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race ofmortals.”—“For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogsthat is wantonly butchered.”

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern
variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic
mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their
spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated
or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despiseda life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within theproper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduringemphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure,
was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine
than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all thesame was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.
Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advancewhich the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: “Seeknot to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness isalways linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt
the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and byaiming low; and above all do not fret.” The Stoic said: “The only genuine
good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; allother goods are lies.” Each of these philosophies is in its degree aphilosophy of despair in nature’s boons. Trustful self-abandonment to
the joys that freely offer has entirely departed from both Epicurean andStoic; and what each proposes is a way of rescue from the resultant dustand-ashes state of mind. The Epicurean still awaits results from economy
of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, andgives up natural good altogether. There is dignity in both these forms ofresignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which
man’s primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In
the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite
cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they
were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to
all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplishedin the evolution of the world-sick soul.75 They mark the conclusion ofwhat we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights ofwhat twice-born religion would call the purely natural man —Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion,
showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. Theyleave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seekno higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the

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supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental
pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which
seem almost crude in their simplicity.
75
For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings
me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which
may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: “By
the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something different.
It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied
with the more modest but much more definite term CONTENTMENT. Whateducation should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life.
Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, ofcontentment. Woman’s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a
trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But thewise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.”

Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to JUDGE
any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety. The securest
way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born makereport has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical
pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen how
the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature.
But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may
be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from themental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something
more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The
individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathologicalmelancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’s
very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself
to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have theleast reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rareoccurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one
seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of themost atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic
constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active
entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows.
Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely
private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal
documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost
an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middleof our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at allseriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below
the smooth and lying official conversational surface.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it
is mere passive joylessness and dreariness. discouragement, dejection,

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lack of taste and zest and spring. {143} Professor Ribot has proposed thename anhedonia to designate this condition.
“The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with
analgesia,” he writes, “has been very little studied, but it exists. A young
girl was smitten with a liver disease which for some time altered herconstitution. She felt no longer any affection for her father and mother.
She would have played with her doll, but it was impossible to find theleast pleasure in the act. The same things which formerly convulsed her
with laughter entirely failed to interest her now. Esquirol observed thecase of a very intelligent magistrate who was also a prey to hepaticdisease. Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested
neither perversion nor violence, but complete absence of emotional
reaction. If he went to the theatre, which he did out of habit, he could
find no pleasure there. The thought of his house of his home, of his wife,and of his absent children moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of
Euclid.”76
76

Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.

Prolonged seasickness will in most persons produce a temporary
condition of anhedonia. Every good, terrestrial or celestial, is imagined
only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort,connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character,both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic
philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In
consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic
school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion withsymptoms which he thus describes:—“I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start, thinking
that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school, or that theschool was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring into the Catacombs,
and that Paris was being swallowed up. And when these impressions
were past, all day long without respite I suffered an incurable andintolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact,
rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell.
Before that I had never even thought of hell. My mind had never turnedin that direction. Neither discourses nor reflections had impressed me inthat way. I took no account of hell. Now, and all at once, I suffered in ameasure what is suffered there.
“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea of heaven
was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the

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sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; amythological elysium, an abode of shadows less 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 of sense. Without
doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become
incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about
them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. Therewas my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived
any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven
over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity.”77
77
A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119–121, abridged.
Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any ratewith a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such
examples as the following:—

An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, andleaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents she
writes:—“Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, andthat is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault,
but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three orfour years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an
opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come.... It is a wonder I have
put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put
all thought out of my head.” To her brother she writes: “Good-by forever,
my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever.
I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I
am tired of living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but
death to me is sweeter.” S. A. K. Strahan: Suicide and Insanity, 2d
edition, London, 1894, p. 131.
So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A
much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychicalneuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may partake ofvarious characters, having sometimes more the quality of loathing;sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of self-mistrustand self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation, fear. The patient
may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse outside powers; andhe may or he may not be tormented by the theoretical mystery of why heshould so have to suffer. Most cases are mixed cases, and we should nottreat our classifications with too much respect. Moreover, it is only arelatively small proportion of cases that connect themselves with thereligious sphere of experience at all. Exasperated cases, for instance, as a

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rule do not. I quote now literally from the first case of melancholy on
which I lay my hand. It is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.
“I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally. Besides
the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since I am shutup here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams, and I am wakedwith a jump by night mares dreadful visions, lightning, thunder, and therest), fear, atrocious fear, presses me down, holds me without respite,
never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all! What have I done todeserve this excess of severity? Under what form will this fear crush me?
What would I not owe to any one who would rid me of my life! Eat,
drink, lie awake all night, suffer without interruption—such is the finelegacy I have received from my mother! What I fail to understand is thisabuse of power. There are limits to everything, there is a middle way. But
God knows neither middle way nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have
known so far has been the devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much asof the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but withneither courage nor means here to execute the act. As you read this, itwill easily prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas areincoherent enough—I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself frombeing either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I ask
pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is tightening his
coils around me. I should be no better armed against him even if I saw
him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death,death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long 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; and how true and right I
was when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed the cud ofbitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life thangladness—it is one long agony until the grave. Think how gay it makes
me to remember that this horrible misery of mine, coupled with thisunspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred, who knows how many
more years!”78
78

Roubinovitch et Toulouse: La Melancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.

This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire consciousnessof the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of
there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention
excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly
you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind fromtaking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather
towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever

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in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has
left us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of theattack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions. The
latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents two
characters which make it a typical document for our present purpose.
First it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss of appetite forall life’s values; and second, it shows how the altered and estranged
aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this stimulated
Tolstoy’s intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and effort forphilosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length; but before
doing so, I will make a general remark on each of these two points.
First on our spiritual judgments and the sense of value in general.
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotionalcomments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings indifferent persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is
no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and thesentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in anothersphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of thesubject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all theemotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it
AS IT EXISTS, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,
hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you torealize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of
the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the wholecollection of its things and series of its events would be without
significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value,interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with arethus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the mostfamiliar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it doesnot {148} come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms
the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets thewhole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.
So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are
there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends
almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as theexcited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to theworld, just so are the passions themselves GIFTS—gifts to us, fromsources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always
nonlogical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man

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reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of greatthings with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he wasyoung and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit
bloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface
passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently
whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical
apparatus in the gallery.
Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effective
world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts andemotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert
either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we callpathological ensues.
In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for atime wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the wholeexpression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenon of
conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequentconsequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of
the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a newearth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in thereverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister,
uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in
the eyes it glares with. “It is as if I lived in another century,” says one
asylum patient.—“I see everything through a cloud,” says another,“things are not as they were, and I am changed.”—“I see,” says a third, “Itouch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue andlook of everything.”—“Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem tocome from a distant world.”—“There is no longer any past for me; people
appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in atheatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can nolonger find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes,
but leaves no impression.”—“I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: thethings I see are not real things.”—Such are expressions that naturally riseto the lips of melancholy subjects describing their changed state.79
I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La Tristesse et la Joie,
1900.
79

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the
profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality
cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must
exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, whatworld, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set
up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right

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relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes forhim a satisfying religious solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have momentsof perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not “how to live,” orwhat to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which theexcitement and interest which our functions naturally bring had ceased.
Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than {150} sober,dead. Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been selfevident. The questions “Why?” and “What next?” began to beset him
more and more frequently. At first it seemed as if such questions must be
answerable, and as if he could easily find the answers if he would takethe time; but as they ever became more urgent, he perceived that it was
like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little
attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes
that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous
thing in the world for him, means his death.
These questions “Why?” “Wherefore?” “What for?” found no response.
“I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on which mylife had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that
morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of
my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I
WISHED to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life wasfuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force
like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite
direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.
“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope inorder not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I
went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should
yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
“I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leaveit; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.
“All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances
went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who
loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which
was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by
my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded withpraise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my namealready famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I

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possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met inpersons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could workwith my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.
“And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life.
And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very
beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was
being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one isintoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to
see that it is all a stupid cheat.
What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; itis cruel and stupid, purely and simply.
“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beastis very old.
“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into awell with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon
waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, notdaring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring tojump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings tothe branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of thewell. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way tocertain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the otherblack, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off
its roots“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; butwhile thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of thebush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks
them off with rapture.
“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon
of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am
thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me;
but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouseand the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one
thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice—I cannot turn my gaze awayfrom them.
“This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one mayunderstand. What will be the outcome of what I do today? Of what I shalldo tomorrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I

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live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which theinevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?
“These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child tothe wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without
an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.
“‘But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘there may be something I havefailed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition ofdespair should be natural to mankind.’ And I sought for an explanationin all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully
and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence,but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought likea man who is lost and seeks to save himself—and I found nothing. I
became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought
for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this,but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me
to despair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestableknowledge accessible to man.”
To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, andSchopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own
class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere
animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the
mice—“and from such a way,” he says, “I can learn nothing, after what I
now know;” or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the
day lasts—which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than thefirst; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly andplaintively clinging 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 inme was working too, and kept me from the deed—a consciousness of life,
as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in
another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair.... During
the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking
myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet,
during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas andobservations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I
can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving
for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas—in fact, it was
the direct contrary of that movement—but it came from my heart. It was
like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in
the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of

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dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.”80
My extracts are from the French translation by “Zonia.” In abridging I
have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.

80

Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from thisidea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this lecture,reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest us now is
the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary life, andthe fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man as
powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly amockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitutio
ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of
Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does
come—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its
form is sometimes very acute—is not the simple, ignorance of ill, butsomething vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its
elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror
because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is
one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and thesufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, adeeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.
We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined inliterature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations
were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general waswhat so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over thecondition of his own personal self. He was a typical case of thepsychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree,
beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal
automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of
Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would
come in a half— hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on
his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to thiswere a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.
“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse, now I am farther fromconversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at the
stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, I could neither
hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any of his things.
Sometimes I would tell my condition to 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 reach the Sun with my finger as

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have bidden me receive or rely upon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as
to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now; I durst not takea pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now wassore, and would smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak mywords, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in
all I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but
stir; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all
good things.
“But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than
was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and corruption,
I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble
out of a fountain. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought
none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness andpollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; and thus I
continued a long while, even for some 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 not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hellfire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been
as any of theirs. Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea,
gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew
they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as
mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken
to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not
find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart was at times
exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I
could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.
“I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as
now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly
would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any
condition but my own.”81
Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number ofdetached passages continuously.
81

Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also
postpone that part of his story to another hour. In a later lecture I will
also give the end of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist
who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly
describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed
its beginning. The type was not unlike Bunyan’s.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 122 de 400“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 tobe dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, andeverything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. My sins seemed
to be laid open; so that I thought that every one I saw knew them, andsometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I
thought they knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one waspointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so greata sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew
the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the wholesystem of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought
would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And
when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning. I
would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all myheart I was in their place, that I might have no soul to lose; and when I
have seen birds flying over my head, have often thought within myself,
Oh, that I could fly away from my danger and distress! Oh, how happyshould I be, if I were in their place!”82
82
The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston 1806, pp. 25,
26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin
Rand.

Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in thistype of sadness.
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear.
Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have tothank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject wasevidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, hiscase has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.
“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of
spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room inthe twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there
fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, ahorrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in mymind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, ablack-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all
day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with hisknees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which
was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat
there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving
nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This
image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other

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THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend
me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck forhim. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own
merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something
hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass ofquivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I
awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of mystomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew
before, and that I have never felt since.83 It was like a revelation; andalthough the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has mademe sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the darkalone.
Compare Bunyan. “There was I struck into a very great trembling,
insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body,as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadfuljudgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that mostfearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at mystomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times,
as if my breast-bone would have split asunder.... Thus did I wind, andtwine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also
did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at restor quiet.”83“In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how otherpeople could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pitof insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very
cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousnessof danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by
revelations of my own state of mind (I have always thought that thisexperience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.”
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by
these last words, the answer he wrote was this:—“I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clungto scripture-texts like ‘The eternal God is my refuge,’ etc., ‘Come untome, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,’ etc., ‘I am the resurrection andthe life,’ etc., I think I should have grown really insane.”84
For another case of fear equally sudden, see Henry James: Society the
Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.
84

There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at areenough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another thesense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—

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and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man’s original
optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion
about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of reallyinsane melancholia, with its {159} hallucinations and delusions, it would
be a worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole
universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming
horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or
intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heartpalsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or
sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly
remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral
consolations in presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real coreof the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a
final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in theears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong
a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason
why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles
and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some
constitutions need them too much.
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally
arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way thattakes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way,
the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pureand simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthyminded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanlyand diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in thelight; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every
unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about
these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious
intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order ofthe day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past,
the healthy-minded would {160} at present show themselves the lessindulgent party of the two.
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are
we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say thatmorbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and thatits survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s
attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid aslong as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far moregenerally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of

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its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious
solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes;
and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no
doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine,
because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are agenuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s
significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest
levels of truth.
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of thosewhich insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil
gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are
all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on
the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasmof helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there
yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hardfor our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens.
Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily
through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in
despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful tothe victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us today.
Here on our very {161} hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat playswith the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws.
Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels oflife as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every
day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts
clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitatedmelancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.85
Example: “It was about eleven o’clock at night ... but I strolled on stillwith the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling washeard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger,rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that wasforemost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of theanimal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones in his mouth, and his last
cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarily reechoed by all of us, was over inthree seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to mysenses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as
if prepared to be devoured by our enemy the sovereign of the forest. I findmy pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our
limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently,
and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. In this state
we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the
speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened tocome to a small village.... After this every one of us was attacked withfever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained tillmorning.”—Autobiography of Lutullah a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig,
1857, p. 112.
85

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It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute
totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher
forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as toenter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil,
dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource. This
question must confront us on a later day. But provisionally, and as amere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine
parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should bethat they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthymindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any
positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete thansystems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which thepessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, andChristianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentiallyreligions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he canbe born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some ofthe psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now
onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than thosewhich we have recently been dwelling on.

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Lecture VIIIThe Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification
HETEROGENEOUS PERSONALITY—CHARACTER GRADUALLY ATTAINS UNITY—
EXAMPLES OF DIVIDED SELF—THE UNITY ATTAINED NEED NOT BE RELIGIOUS—“COUNTER CONVERSION” CASES—OTHER CASES—GRADUAL AND SUDDENUNIFICATION—TOLSTOY’S RECOVERY—BUNYAN’S.

The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as apervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we werebrought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking atlife which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthyminded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who mustbe twice-born in order to be happy. The result is two different
conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the onceborn the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose
accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values
which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sumof pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious
peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of
the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery.
Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses andelimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficientin amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled
as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, andcan never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us fromour real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first stepin the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and thespiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in theother.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, thetwo types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current
classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, andthe concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate
varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize thedifference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist
convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise
enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased
subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making ofparadox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God’s
truth.86
86

E.g., “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of

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original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These neverpresented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any
man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are thesoul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs, etc. Emerson: SpiritualLaws.

The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain
discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject,
an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first timethat I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri,when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While
my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry,how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, thisterrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting,living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never beenable to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees
into things, and how it mocks!”87
87

Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.

Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say uponthis point.88 Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is
harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are
consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble theguidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and theirlives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; andare so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result ina merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which theconsequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent
kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s
autobiography.
See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caracteres, 1894, who
contrasts les Equilibres, les Unifies, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, lesIncoherents, les Emiettes, as so many diverse psychic types.

88“I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, andhave paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures ofshyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly thatevery eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink awayfrom strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was fullof eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly, as the young

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mistress of a house I was afraid of my servants, and would let carelesswork pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer; when I
have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I
have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than toring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in defenseof any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in thehouse, and am a coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public.
How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up mycourage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled
me to reprove, and how often have I jeered myself for a fraud as thedoughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad orlass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed tomake me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on theplatform, opposition makes me speak my best.”89
89

Annie Besant: an Autobiography, p. 82.

This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but astronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject’s life.
There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zig-zags,
as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit
wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses
interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long dramaof repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of
inheritance—the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic
ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.90 This
explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs
corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may
be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament,of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament
make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions.
Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe thattemperament to a man at all. A “degenere superieur” is simply a man ofsensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common
in keeping {167} his spiritual house in order and running his furrowstraight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too
discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational
impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset thepsychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we haveexquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had anobsession of the words, “Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him,sell him!” which would run through his mind a hundred times together,

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until one day out of breath with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” heimpulsively said, “Let him go if he will,” and this loss of the battle kept
him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such
blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency ofSatan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconscious
self, so-called, of which we must erelong speak more directly.
90
Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September,
1893.

Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater inproportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified
temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly
psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in
the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and thelower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being acomparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable systemof functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize
the period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tenderconscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the formof moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong,and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being andappointer of one’s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and“conviction of sin” that have played so large a part in the history ofProtestant Christianity. The man’s interior is a battle-ground for what hefeels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor
Hugo makes his Mahomet say:—“Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats:
Tantot l’homme d’en haut, et tantot l’homme d’en bas;
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; butwhat I hate, that do I,” as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; anunintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously theheir.
Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, withmelancholy in the form of self-condemnation and sense of sin. Saint
Augustine’s case is a classic example. You all remember his half-pagan,
half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome andMilan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his
restless search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by
the struggle between the two souls in his breast and ashamed of his own

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weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had
thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves tochastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, “Sume,lege” (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text,“not in chambering and wantonness,” etc., which seemed directly sent to
his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever.91 Augustine’s
psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having adivided self which has never been surpassed.
Louis Gourdon (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris,
Fischbacher, 1900) has shown by an analysis of Augustine’s writings
immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D. 386) that the accounthe gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked adefinitive conversion from his former life, but it was to the neo-platonic
spiritualism and only a halfway stage toward Christianity. The latter heappears not fully and radically to have embraced until four years more had
passed.
91“The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough toovercome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two
wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended witheach other and disturbed my soul. I understood by my own experience
what I had read, ‘flesh lusteth against spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ It
was myself indeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that which I
approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in myself. Yet it was
through myself that habit had attained so fierce a mastery over me,
because I had willingly come whither I willed not. Still bound to earth, I
refused, O God, to fight on thy side, as much afraid to be freed from all
bonds, as I ought to have feared being trammeled by them.
“Thus the thoughts by which I meditated upon thee were like the efforts
of one who would awake, but being overpowered with sleepiness is soon
asleep again. Often does a man when heavy sleepiness is on his limbs
defer to shake it off, and though not approving it, encourage it; even so I
was sure it was better to surrender to thy love than to yield to my own
lusts, yet though the former course convinced me, the latter pleased andheld me bound. There was naught in me to answer thy call ‘Awake, thousleeper,’ but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘Presently; yes, presently; wait
a little while.’ But the ‘presently’ had no ‘present,’ and the ‘little while’
grew long.... For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal
me at once of my disease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than tosee extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own
soul. Yet it shrank back; it refused, though it had no excuse to offer.... I
said within myself: ‘Come, let it be done now,’ 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 not reach it, and did not

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grasp it, hesitating to die to death, and live to life, and the evil to which I
was so wonted held 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 the divided will, when thehigher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive
intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists),that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously
into life and quell the lower tendencies forever. In a later lecture we shallhave much to say about this higher excitability.
I find another good description of the divided will in the autobiographyof Henry Alline, the Nova Scotian evangelist, of whose melancholy I reada brief account in my last lecture. The poor youth’s sins were, as you willsee, of the most harmless order, yet they interfered with what proved tobe his truest vocation, so they gave him great distress.
“I was now very moral in my life, but found no rest of conscience. I now
began to be esteemed in young company, who knew nothing of my mind
all this while, and their esteem began to be a snare to my soul, for I soon
began to be fond of carnal mirth, though I still flattered myself that if I
did not get drunk, nor curse, nor swear, there would be no sin in
frolicking and carnal mirth, and I thought God would indulge young
people with some (what I called simple or civil) recreation. I still kept around of duties, and would not suffer myself to run into any open vices,and so got along very well in time of health and prosperity, but when I
was distressed or threatened by sickness, death, or heavy storms ofthunder, my religion would not do, and I found there was somethingwanting, and would begin to repent my going so much to frolics, butwhen the distress was over, the devil and my own wicked heart, with thesolicitations of my associates, and my fondness for young company, weresuch strong allurements, I would again give way, and thus I got to bevery wild and rude, at the same time kept up my rounds of secret prayer
and reading; but God, not willing I should destroy myself, still followed
me with his calls, and moved with such power upon my conscience, that I
could not satisfy myself with my diversions, and in the midst of my mirthsometimes would have such a sense of my lost and undone condition,that I would wish myself from the company, and after it was over, when I
went home, would make many promises that I would attend no more onthese frolics, and would beg forgiveness for hours and hours; but when I
came to have the temptation again, I would give way: no sooner would I
hear the music and drink a glass of wine, but I would find my mind
elevated and soon proceed to any sort of merriment or diversion, that I

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thought was not debauched or openly vicious; but when I returned frommy carnal mirth I felt as guilty as ever, and could sometimes not close
my eyes for some hours after I had gone to my bed. I was one of the most
unhappy creatures on earth.
“Sometimes I would leave the company (often speaking to the fiddler tocease from playing, as if I was tired), and go out and walk about crying
and praying, as if my very heart would break, and beseeching God that
he would not cut me off, nor give me up to hardness of heart. Oh, what
unhappy hours and nights I thus wore away! When I met sometimes
with merry companions, and my heart was ready to sink, I would labor to
put on as cheerful a countenance as possible, that they might not distrust
anything, and sometimes would begin some discourse with young men
or young women on purpose, or propose a merry song, lest the distress of
my soul would be discovered, or mistrusted, when at the same time I
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 wasin company? I would act the hypocrite and feign a merry heart but at thesame time would endeavor as much as I could to shun their company, ohwretched and unhappy mortal that I was! Everything I did, and wherever
I went, I was still in a storm and yet I continued to be the chief contriverand ringleader of the frolics for many months after; though it was a toiland torment to attend them; but the devil and my own wicked heart
drove me about like a slave, telling me that I must do this and do that,and bear this and bear 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 in my duties, and left no stone unturned topacify my conscience, watching even against my thoughts, and praying
continually wherever I went: for I did not think there was any sin in myconduct, when I was among carnal company, because I did not take any
satisfaction there, but only followed it, I thought, for sufficient reasons.
“But still, all that I did or could do, conscience would roar night andday.”
Saint Augustine and Alline both emerged into the smooth waters of innerunity and peace, and I shall next ask you to consider more closely someof the peculiarities of the process of unification, when it occurs. It may
come gradually, or it may occur abruptly; it may come through alteredfeelings, or through altered powers of action; or it may come throughnew intellectual insights, or through experiences which we shall later
have to designate as ‘mystical.’ However it come, it brings acharacteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it iscast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 134 de 400of the ways in which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, andsuccessfully, it often transforms the most intolerable misery into the
profoundest and most enduring happiness.
But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; andthe process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing innerdiscord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any
sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious
form. In judging of the religious types of regeneration which we areabout to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one speciesof a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth
may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral
scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by theirruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, suchas love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these
instances we have precisely the same psychological form of event,—afirmness, stability, and equilibrium {173} succeeding a period of storm
and stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new man
may also be born either gradually or suddenly.
The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his
own “counter-conversion,” as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity
has been well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy’s doubts had longharassed him; but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his
disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate result wassadness at the illusions he had lost.
“I shall never forget that night of December,” writes Jouffroy, “in which
the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hearagain my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after the hourof sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and down. I see againthat moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated thefrigid window-panes. The hours of the night flowed on and I did not note
their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer
they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and,scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had screened its
windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
“Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to thefragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I
was about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my family,
my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of
my thought was too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced
me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end wasreached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left thatstood erect.
“This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw
myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smilingand so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre
and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal
thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse.
The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life.”93
93
Th. Jouffroy: Nouveaux Melanges philosophiques, 2me edition, p. 83. I
add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment.
The first is from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection, and thenarrator is a woman.

“Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more orless skeptical about ‘God;’ skepticism grew as an undercurrent, allthrough my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by theemotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined
the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied ‘Yes,’ as was customary
and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, ‘No,
you do not.’ I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse formy falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled withfear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in someterrible way.... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had
quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife
down-stairs, and then continued the operation until she became
insensible. I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought
flashed through my mind: ‘I have no use for a God who permits suchthings.’ This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to
the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike anda somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a God.
If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it. I felt
very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any
personal relations with him since this painful experience.”
The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will
overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of
preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like theproverbial last straw added to the camel’s burden, or that touch of aneedle which makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly begin to
crystallize out.
Tolstoy writes: “S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows how

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he ceased to believe:—“He was twenty-six years old when one day on a hunting expedition, thetime for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to thecustom he had held from childhood.
“His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked athim. When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep, thebrother said, ‘Do you still keep up that thing?’ Nothing more was said.
But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has never prayedagain; he never takes communion, and does not go to church. All this,not because he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which
he then and there adopted; not because he made any new resolution in
his soul, but merely because the words spoken by his brother were likethe light push of a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble
by its own weight. These words but showed him that the place wherein
he supposed religion dwelt in him had long been empty, and that thesentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which he made during his
prayer, were actions with no inner sense. Having once seized theirabsurdity, he could no longer keep them up.” Ma Confession, p. 8.
I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession,
and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sortof conversion, if the opposite of ‘falling in love,’ falling out of love, may
be so termed. Falling in love also conforms frequently to this type, alatent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden
awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done. The free andeasy tone in this narrative gives it a sincerity that speaks for itself.
“For two years of this time I went through a very bad experience, whichalmost drove me mad. I had fallen violently in love with a girl who,
young as she was, had a spirit of coquetry like a cat. As I look back on her
now, I hate her, and wonder how I could ever have fallen so low as to beworked upon to such an extent by her attractions. Nevertheless, I fell
into a regular fever, could think of nothing else; whenever I was alone, I
pictured her attractions, and spent most of the time when I should havebeen working, in recalling our previous interviews, and imagining future
conversations. She was very pretty, good humored, and jolly to the lastdegree, and intensely pleased with my admiration. Would give me no
decided answer yes or no and the queer thing about it was that whilst
pursuing her for her hand, I secretly knew all along that she was unfit to
be a wife for me, and that she never would say yes. Although for a year
we took our meals at the same boarding-house, so that I saw her
continually and familiarly, our closer relations had to be largely on the

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sly, and this fact, together with my jealousy of another one of her maleadmirers and my own conscience despising me for my uncontrollable
weakness, made me so nervous and sleepless that I really thought I
should become insane. I understand well those young men murdering
their sweethearts, which appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I
did love her passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it.
“The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all
stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking as
usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power laid
hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost running to myroom, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I possessed,
including some hair, all her notes and letters and ambrotypes on glass.
The former I made a fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel,in a sort of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed anddespised her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of disease had
suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I never spoke to her
or wrote to her again in all the subsequent years, and I have never had asingle moment of loving thought towards one for so many months
entirely filled my heart. In fact, I have always rather hated her memory,
though now I can see that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction.
At any rate, from that happy morning onward I 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 two different levels of
personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so well balanced against
each other as for a long time to fill the life with discord anddissatisfaction. At last, not gradually, but in a sudden crisis, the unstableequilibrium is resolved, and this happens so unexpectedly that it is as if,
to use the writer’s words, “some outside power laid hold.”
Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case of
hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of Religion, p. 141.
Compare the other highly curious instances which he gives on pp. 137–
144, of sudden non-religious alterations of habit or character. He seems
right in conceiving all such sudden changes as results of special cerebral
functions unconsciously developing until they are ready to play acontrolling part when they make irruption into the conscious life. When
we treat of sudden ‘conversion,’ I shall make as much use as I can of thishypothesis of subconscious incubation.
{175} In John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character, there is anaccount of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative
enough to quote:—

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A young man, it appears, “wasted, in two or three years, a large
patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates whocalled themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were
exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt. Reduced toabsolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put
an end to his life, but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, he cameto the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his
estates. Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number ofhours, at the end of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement,
exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution, which was, that all theseestates should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which heinstantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined to
seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain any money,
though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not tospend, if he could help it, a farthing of whatever he might obtain. The
first thing that drew his attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on
the pavement before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel theminto the place where they were to be laid, and was employed.
He received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of thesaving part of his plan requested some small gratuity of meat and drink,which was given {176} him. He then looked out for the next thing thatmight chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through a
succession of servile employments in different places, of longer andshorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as possible, theexpense of a penny. He promptly seized every opportunity which could
advance his design, without regarding the meanness of occupation orappearance. By this method he had gained, after a considerable time,money enough to purchase in order to sell again a few cattle, of which hehad taken pains to understand the value. He speedily but cautiously
turned his first gains into second advantages; retained without a single
deviation his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees intolarger transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or haveforgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result was, that
he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an inveterate
miser, worth L60,000.”94
94

Op. cit., Letter III., abridged.

Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religious case, namely, that
immediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, anaccount of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthymindedness of a man who must already have been naturally of thehealthy-minded type. It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will

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make it fall.
Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that afriend with whom he was talking of the self-control attained by theJapanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:—“‘You must first get rid of anger and worry.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘is thatpossible?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he; ‘it is possible to the Japanese, and ought to bepossible to us.’
“On my way back I could think of nothing else but the words get rid, getrid’; and the idea must have continued to possess me during my sleeping
hours, for the first consciousness in the morning brought back the same
thought, with the revelation of a discovery, which framed itself into thereasoning, ‘If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it
necessary to have them at all?’ I felt the strength of the argument, and atonce accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could walk.
It would scorn to creep any longer.
“From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of 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 different aspect.
“Although from that moment the possibility and desirability of freedom
from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it took me somemonths to feel absolute security in my new position; but, as the usual
occasions for worry and anger have presented themselves over and overagain, and I have been unable to feel them in the slightest degree, I no
longer dread or guard against them, and I am amazed at my increased
energy and vigor of mind, at my strength to meet situations of all kinds
and at my disposition to love and appreciate everything.
“I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by rail sincethat morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor, hotel-waiter,
peddler, book-agent, cabman, and others who were formerly a source ofannoyance and irritation have been met, but I am not conscious of asingle incivility. All at once the 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 a brand-new condition ofmind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest feeling ofannoyance or impatience, I have seen a train that I had planned to takewith a good deal of interested and pleasurable anticipation move out of
the station without me, because my baggage did not arrive. The porter

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from the hotel came running and panting into the station just as the train
pulled out of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding.
and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable to getout. When he had finished, I said to him: ‘It doesn’t matter at all, you
couldn’t help it, so we will try again tomorrow. Here is your fee, I am
sorry you had all this trouble in earning it.’ The look of surprise thatcame over his face was so filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the
spot for the delay in my departure. Next day he would not accept a centfor the service, and he and I are friends for life.
“During the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only against
worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the absence ofthe other depressing and dwarfing passions, I began to trace a
relationship, until I was convinced that they are all growths from the tworoots I have specified. I have felt the freedom now for so long a time that
I am sure of my relation toward it; and I could no more harbor any of thethieving and depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage ofhumanity than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.
“There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pureBuddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions fundamentallyteach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have presented
it in the light of a simple and easy process of elimination. At one time I
wondered if the elimination would not yield to indifference and sloth. In
my experience, the contrary is the result. I feel such an increased desire
to do something useful that it seems as if I were a boy again and theenergy for play had returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than)ever, if there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It can’t,since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the absence of timidity
in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I was standing under a tree
which was struck by lightning, and received a shock from the effects ofwhich I never knew exemption until I had dissolved partnership withworry. Since then, lightning and thunder have been encountered underconditions which would formerly have caused great depression anddiscomfort, without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also
greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by unexpectedsights or noises.
“As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself atpresent as to what the results of this emancipated condition may be. I
have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by Christian Science may
be one of the possibilities, for I note a marked improvement in the way
my stomach does its duty in assimilating the food I give it to handle, andI am sure it works better to the sound of a song than under the friction of

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a frown. Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating anidea of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I havewithin myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or that I canimagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where it will, as long as
the anger and their brood have no part in misguiding it.”95
H. Fletcher: Menticulture, or the A-B-C of True Living, New York andChicago, 1899, pp. 26, 36, abridged.
95

The older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis and crisis, one
gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily
disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, theother sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan
may again serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradualway, though it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow
these windings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do
not reveal their total secret.
Howe’er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, {181}seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his
conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into
account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that ofanother, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate
equations in mathematics which end with infinity. Yet this is as far as thereasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faithbrings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, andlife grows possible again.
“Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been
the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, thatsense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues tolive on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that hemust live for something, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite
God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God—
these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought.
They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which I
myself,” said Tolstoy, “would not exist. I began to see that I had no rightto rely on my individual reasoning and neglect these answers given byfaith, for they are the only answers to the question.”
Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are ingrossest superstition? It is impossible—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—he says it took him

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two years to arrive there—that his trouble had not been with life ingeneral, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of
the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personallyalways led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, andpersonal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To
work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common
wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.
“I remember,” he says, “one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest,
lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went
back to what for these three years it always was busy with—the quest ofGod. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?
“And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards
life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning.... Why do I lookfarther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one
cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing.
God is what life is. Well, then! live, seek God, and there will be no life
without him....
“After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever,and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just
how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly andgradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had
reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did theenergy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy thatcame back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, thebelief that the sole purpose of my life was to be BETTER. I gave up thelife of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody onlife, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,”—andTolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt rightand happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.96
96

I have considerably abridged Tolstoy’s words in my translation.

As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental
vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logicallycalled for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities
and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive
oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities,
complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly
unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with more naturaland animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, thediscovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods

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into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous
personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though notmany of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of theaboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if
it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan’s recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he
was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down,
but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the bloodof Christ.
“My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now andtrouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full ofguilt and fear as ever heart could hold.” When a good text comes home tohim, “This,” he writes, “gave me good encouragement for the space of
two or three hours”; or “This was a good day to me, I hope I shall notforget it”, or “The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that I
was ready to swoon as I sat; yet, not with grief and trouble, but with solid
joy and peace”; or “This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it broughtlight with it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all thosetumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, toroar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that
Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.”
Such periods accumulate until he can write: “And now remained only thehinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, only
some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon me”;—
and at last: “Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed frommy afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that fromthat time, those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now
went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.... Now could I
see myself in Heaven and Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by myHead, by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or
person.... Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could
scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.”
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic
constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his nonconformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker anddoer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought thevery spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called
healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever

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to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories
deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of hissadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heartof the faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that asa matter of fact they could and did find SOMETHING welling up in the
inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness
could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as THAT BY WHICH
MEN LIVE; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, afaith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in fullpresence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable.
For Tolstoy’s perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to haveremained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the wholesystem of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of
empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of theprofessions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; andevery other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all
patience with such things his experience has been for 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 canproperly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, mychildren, my health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead to me, and myself
as dead to them; to trust in God through Christ, as touching the world tocome, and as touching this world, to count the grave my house, to makemy bed in darkness, and to say to corruption, Thou art my father and to
the worm, Thou art my mother and sister.... The parting with my wifeand my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh
from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart
than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like tohave for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer
hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot
now endure that the wind should blow upon thee. But yet I must venture
you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you.”97
In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening
portions of the text.
97

The “hue of resolution” is there, but the full flood of ecstatic liberation
seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan’s soul.
These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with thephenomenon technically called “Conversion.” In the next lecture I shallinvite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.

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Lecture IX
Conversion
CASE OF STEPHEN BRADLEY—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CHARACTER-CHANGES—EMOTIONAL EXCITEMENTS MAKE NEW CENTRES OF PERSONAL ENERGY—SCHEMATIC WAYS OF REPRESENTING THIS— STARBUCK LIKENS CONVERSIONTO NORMAL MORAL RIPENING— LEUBA’S IDEAS— SEEMINGLY UNCONVERTIBLEPERSONS— TWO TYPES OF CONVERSION— SUBCONSCIOUS INCUBATION OF
MOTIVES— SELF-SURRENDER— ITS IMPORTANCE IN RELIGIOUS HISTORY—CASES.

To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience
religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote theprocess, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, andconsciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified andconsciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer holdupon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies ingeneral terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation isneeded to bring such a moral change about.
Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our
understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose thequaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience
is related in a scarce American pamphlet.98
A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to twenty
four years, including his remarkable experience of the power of the Holy
Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison, Connecticut,
1830.
98

I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one mayfind one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities ofcharacter lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence
we have no premonitory knowledge.
Bradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age offourteen.
“I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about one
second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, Come.
The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my happiness was sogreat that I said that I wanted to die; this world had no place in myaffections, as I knew of, and every day appeared as solemn to me as the
Sabbath. I had an ardent desire that all mankind might feel as I did; I
wanted to have them all love God supremely. Previous to this time I was

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mankind, and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I
felt as if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any person,and suffer anything for 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 a revival of religion that
had begun in his neighborhood. “Many of the young converts,” he says,“would come to me when in meeting and ask me if I had religion, and myreply generally was, I hope I have. This did not appear to satisfy them;
they said they KNEW THEY had it. I requested them to pray for me,
thinking with myself, that if I had not got religion now, after so long atime professing to be a Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped theirprayers would be answered in my behalf.
“One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He spoke ofthe ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he set it forth in sucha solemn and terrible manner as I never heard before. The scene of thatday appeared to be taking place, and so awakened were all the powers of
my mind that, like Felix, I trembled involuntarily on the bench where I
was sitting, though I felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went tohear him again. He took his text from Revelation: ‘And I saw the dead,small and great, stand before God.’ And he represented the terrors ofthat day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt the heart ofstone. When he finished his discourse, an old gentleman turned to me
and said ‘This is what I call preaching.’ I thought the same, but myfeelings were still unmoved by what he said, and I did not enjoy religion,
but I believe he did.
“I will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit which
took place on the same night. Had any person told me previous to thisthat I could have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in the manner
which I did, I could not have believed it, and should have thought theperson deluded that told me so. I went directly home after the meeting,
and when I got home I wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired
to rest soon after I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion
until I began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about fiveminutes after, in the following manner:—“At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a sudden, which
made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though
I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating,which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it
had on me. I began to feel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a

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sense of unworthiness as I never felt before. I could not very well help
speaking out, which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve thishappiness, or words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling
air in feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible mannerthan that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I could
judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause of such a
palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of my 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 I had got.
My heart seemed as if it would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I
was unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the mean time whilethus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it mean? and all at
once, as if to answer it, my memory became exceedingly clear, and it
appeared to me just as if the New Testament was placed open before me,
eighth chapter of Romans, and as light as if some candle lighted was held
for me to read the 26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read thesewords: ‘The Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot
be uttered.’ And all the time that my heart was a-beating, it made me
groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop, though I
was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in another room cameand opened the door, and asked me if I had got the toothache. I told him
no, and that he might get to sleep. I tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go tosleep myself, I was so happy, fearing I should lose it—thinking within
myself‘My willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this.’
And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating, feeling as if mysoul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that perhaps there might beangels hovering round my bed. I felt just as if I wanted to converse withthem, and finally I spoke, saying ‘O ye affectionate angels! how is it that
ye can take so much interest in our welfare, and we take so little interestin our own.’ After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke inthe morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my happiness?
and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for more, which was given
to me as quick as thought. I then got up to dress myself, and found to mysurprise that I could but just stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little
heaven upon earth. My soul felt as completely raised above the fears ofdeath as of going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it
was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell with
Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to warn sinners to
repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if I had lost all my friends,
and thinking with myself, that I would not let my parents know it until I

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had first looked into the Testament. I went directly to the shelf andlooked into it, at the eighth of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost
speak and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my feelings
corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my parents of it,
and told them that I thought that they must see that when I spoke, that itwas not my own voice, for it appeared so to me. My speech seemedentirely under the control of the Spirit within me; I do not mean that thewords which I spoke were not my own, for they were. I thought that I
was influenced similar to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the
exception of having power to give it to others, and doing what they did).
After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion,
which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at theirrequest I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in public before.
“I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth, and hopeby the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who shall read it. He
has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy Spirit down into our hearts,
or mine at least, and I now defy all the Deists and Atheists in the world toshake my faith in Christ.”
So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon
his later life we gain no information. Now for a minuter survey of theconstituent elements of the conversion process.
If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology,
you will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internalgroups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each ‘aim’
which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested
excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together insubordination to it as its associates; and if the aims and excitements are
distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have little in common. Whenone group is present and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connectedwith other groups may be excluded from the mental field. The Presidentof the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes
camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas
from top to bottom. The presidential anxieties have lapsed into thebackground entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of ason of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous
magistrate would not “know him for the same person” if they saw him as
the camper.
If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests
to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents andpurposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of

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character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly
called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded byanother in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable
as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we
tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a“transformation.”
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be
divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or
more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of
way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, andnever practically come to anything. Saint Augustine’s aspirations to apurer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another would
be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it were not
all vanity, and whether the life of a wood-chopper were not thewholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere velleitates,
whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the realself of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely
different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of ourinterests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from
more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more
central parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one
evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston
newspaper that part of Lord Gifford’s will which founded these four
lectureships. At that time I did not think of being a teacher ofphilosophy, and what I listened to was as remote from my own life as if it
related to the planet Mars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system partand parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being,
devoted to successfully identifying myself with it. My soul stands now
planted in what once was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks
from it as from its proper habitat and centre.
When I say “Soul,” you need not take me in the ontological sense unless
you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in suchmatters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts
in the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is
only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in eachfield a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains theexcitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken.
Talking of this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to
distinguish it from 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,” “not me.” But a “here” can change to a“there,” and a “there” become a “here,” and what was “mine” and what

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was “not mine” change their places.
What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional
excitement alters. Things hot and vital to us today are cold tomorrow. It
is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear tous, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make theirsallies. They are in short the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas thecold parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to theircoldness.
Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of noimportance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own
experience the facts which I seek to designate by it.
Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hotplaces may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run
through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self weheard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement andheat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie
permanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be areligious one, we call it a Conversion, especially if it be by crisis, or
sudden.
Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man’s consciousness,the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which heworks, call it THE HABITUAL CENTRE OF HIS PERSONAL ENERGY.
It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, oranother, be the centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as
regards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether they become
central or remain peripheral in him. To say that a man is “converted”
means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his
consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form thehabitual centre of his energy.
Now if you ask of psychology just HOW the excitement shifts in a man’s
mental system, and WHY aims that were peripheral become at a certain
moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give ageneral description of what happens, she is unable in a given case toaccount accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside
observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully
how particular experiences are able to change one’s centre of energy so
decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We havea thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real
meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has

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suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there aredead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live
ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to recrystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only
the “motor efficacy,” long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but
such talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor
efficacy? And our explanations then get so vague and general that one
realizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon.
In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanicalequilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it
arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutuallycheck or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by
subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and thetendencies alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may
be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as abuilding is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new
perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare theorganic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then thecentre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas thatreach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, andthe new structure remains permanent.
Formed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardationin such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired,plays an accelerating part in the changes; and the slow mutation of ourinstincts and propensities, under the “unimaginable touch of time” hasan enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work
subconsciously or half unconsciously.99 And when you get a Subject inwhom the subconscious life—of which I must speak more fully soon—islargely developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you
get a case of which you can never give a full account, and in which, bothto the Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel.
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent inprecipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways inwhich love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are
known to everybody.100 Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions
characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions thatcome in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
Jouffroy is an example: “Down this slope it was that my intelligence had
glided, and little by little it had got far from its first faith. But thismelancholy revolution had not taken place in the broad daylight of myconsciousness; too many scruples, too many guides and sacred affections
had made it dreadful to me, so that I was far from avowing to myself the99

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progress it had made. It had gone on in silence, by an involuntaryelaboration of which I was not the accomplice; and although I had in reality
long ceased to be a Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I
should have shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I beenaccused of such a falling away.” Then follows Jouffroy’s account of his
counter-conversion, quoted above on p. 173.
One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p. 176, note, for fear, p.
161 ; for remorse, see Othello after the murder; for anger see Lear after
Cordelia’s first speech to him; for resolve, see p. 175 (J. Foster case). Hereis a pathological case in which GUILT was the feeling that suddenly
exploded: “One night I was seized on entering bed with a rigor, such as
Swedenborg describes as coming over him with a sense of holiness, but
over me with a sense of GUILT. During that whole night I lay under the
influence of the rigor, and from its inception I felt that I was under thecurse of God. I have never done one act of duty in my life—sins against
God and man beginning as far as my memory goes back—a wildcat inhuman shape.”100

In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of
California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its
manifestations the ordinary “conversion” which occurs in young people
brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual
life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of humanbeings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen andseventeen. The symptoms are the same,—sense of incompleteness andimperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense ofsin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And
the result is the same—a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence inself gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider
outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic
examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time ofadolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing
the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The
analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck’s conclusion as to theseordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one:
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental
to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectualand spiritual life of maturity.
“Theology,” says Dr. Starbuck, “takes the adolescent tendencies andbuilds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth isbringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity andpersonal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will
intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration ofstorm and stress.” The conversion phenomena of “conviction of sin” last,by this investigator’s statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods ofadolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics,

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but they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of
sleep and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. “Theessential distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but
shortens the period by bringing the person to a definite crisis.”101
101

E. D. Starbuck: The Psychology of Religion, pp. 224, 262.

The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course
mainly those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a preappointed
type by instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which theyaffect is the result of suggestion and imitation.102 If they went throughtheir growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although theessence of the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so
inevitable), its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, forexample, and in our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety andconviction of sin is usual as in sects that encourage revivals. The
sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly ecclesiasticalbodies, the individual’s personal acceptance of salvation needs less to beaccentuated and led up to.
No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood it
already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must always
be taken with the allowances which he suggests:
102“A rule received and established by common consent has a very great,though to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notionsof the process of their own experience. I know very well how they
proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities ofobserving their conduct. Very often their experience at first appears likea confused chaos, but then those parts are selected which bear thenearest resemblance to such particular steps as are insisted on; and theseare dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken of from time to time, tillthey grow more and more conspicuous in their view, and other parts
which are neglected grow more and more obscure. Thus what they haveexperienced is insensibly strained, so as to bring it to an exact conformity
to the scheme already established in their minds. And it becomes natural
also for ministers, who have to deal with those who insist upon
distinctness and clearness of method, to do so too.” Treatise on Religious
Affections.
But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I
propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more firsthand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be foundin sporadic adult cases.

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Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of conversion,103
subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life almost entirely toits moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as “the feeling of
unwholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the technical word,
accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity.” “The word
‘religion,’” he says, “is getting more and more to signify the conglomerateof desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and its release”;
and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin ranges fromdrunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it may beset one
and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the sickened flesh or
any form of physical misery.
103
Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, American Journal of
Psychology, vii. 309 (1896).

Undoubtedly this conception covers an immense number of cases. A
good one to use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his
conversion became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New
York. His experience runs as follows:—“One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless,dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that would bring adrink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eaten fordays, and for four nights preceding I had suffered with delirium tremens,or the horrors, from midnight till morning. I had often said, ‘I will never
be a tramp. I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever itcomes, I will find a home in the bottom of the river.’ But the Lord soordered it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one
quarter of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feelsome great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I didlearn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner’s friend. I walked up to thebar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those whostood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would nevertake another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though thatwould happen before morning. Something said, ‘If you want to keep thispromise, go and have yourself locked up.’ I went to the nearest stationhouse and had myself locked up.
“I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the demons
that could find room came in that place with me. This was not all thecompany I had, either. No, praise the Lord: that dear Spirit that came to
me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray. I did pray, and though I did
not feel any great help, I kept on praying. As soon as I was able to leave
my cell I was taken to the police court and remanded back to the cell. I
was finally released, and found my way to my brother’s house, where

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every care was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit neverleft me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day
would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to go to
Jerry M’Auley’s Mission. I went. The house was packed, and with great
difficulty I made my way to the space near the platform. There I saw theapostle to the drunkard and the outcast—that man of God, Jerry
M’Auley. He rose, and amid deep silence told his experience. There was asincerity about this man that carried conviction with it, and I foundmyself saying, ‘I wonder if God can save me?’ I listened to the testimonyof twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved fromrum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right there.
When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of drunkards.
Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M’Auley prayed fervently for us.
Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor soul! A blessed whisper
said, ‘Come’; the devil said, ‘Be careful.’ I halted but a moment, and then,with a breaking heart, I said, ‘Dear Jesus, can you help me?’ Never withmortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment
my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious
brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a freeman. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I
felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life;
that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new.
“From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, andI have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised God
that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I
would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and I have been
trying to do mine.”104
I have abridged Mr. Hadley’s account. For other conversions ofdrunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the Old
Jerry M’Auley Water Street Mission, New York City. A striking collection ofcases also appears in the appendix to Professor Leuba’s article.
104{200} Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology insuch an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher
helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives othercases of drunkards’ conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as
recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough’s case, forinstance, is practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist—
neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.105 But in spite of the importanceof this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment,
this writer surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to thesubjectively centered form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan andAlline were examples. But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are

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objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaningof the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one—you remember Tolstoy’s case.106 So there are distinct elements inconversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to bediscriminated.107
A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough’s ‘Saviour.’ General
Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the first vital stepin saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent humanbeing cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether
they are to rise or sink.
105

The crisis of apathetic melancholy—no use in life—into which J. S. Mill
records that he fell, from which he emerged by the reading of Marmontel’sMemoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth’s poetry, is anotherintellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill’s Autobiography, New
York, 1873, pp. 141, 148.

106

Starbuck, in addition to “escape from sin,” discriminates “spiritualillumination” as a distinct type of conversion experience. Psychology of
Religion, p. 85.
107

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any
circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become thecentre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servantsof God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They
are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language of
devotion, they are life-long subjects of “barrenness” and “dryness.” Such
inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its
origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency
to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic
and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls,
who in former times would have freely indulged their religious
propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or theagnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, underwhich so many of us today lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In
many persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of theirdays they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its
religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.
In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anaesthetic on
the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a
bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to thereckless “animal spirits” enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; sothe nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith inothers, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those
who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however,

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turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Evenlate in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shotback in the barrenest breast, and the man’s hard heart may soften andbreak into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest theidea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must
not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes. Now there
are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a
striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which
Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try
to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working forit, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which
the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as
if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the namewere JAMMED, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the morefrom rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up theeffort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half anhour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says,
as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process wasstarted in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, andmade the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain musicteacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done
has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: “Stop trying
and it will do itself!”108
108

Psychology of Religion, p. 117.

There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary andunconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and wefind both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two
types, which Starbuck calls the volitional type and the type by selfsurrender respectively.
In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, andconsists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral andspiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the
movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact isabundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practicalaccomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts just as thegrowth of our physical bodies does.
“An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of thefine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert
awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the
sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays itself

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through him—when he loses himself in some great contest. In the sameway, a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in thetechnique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment ofinspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The
writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose
wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until
a year or more after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness ofmarried life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we are
studying.”109
109

Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137–144 and 262.

We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of
subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which wesuddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycockof Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects;
but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term
“unconscious cerebration,” which has since then been a popular phraseof explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively thanhe could know them, and the adjective “unconscious,” being for many ofthem almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term
“subconscious” or “subliminal.”
Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples,110
but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self-surrender
type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often
startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because thedifference between the two types is after all not radical. Even in the mostvoluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are passages of partial
self-surrender interposed; and in the great majority of all cases, when thewill had done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete
unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left toother forces and performed without the help of its activity. In otherwords, self-surrender becomes then indispensable. “The personal will,”says Dr. Starbuck, “must be given up. In many cases relief persistently
refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in
the direction he desires to go.”110
For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element: “Just at thispoint the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my mind in amanner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw, as clearly as
I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ.
Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted,
and all that was necessary on my part to get my own consent to give up
my sins and accept Christ. After this distinct revelation had stood for somelittle time before my mind, the question seemed to be put, ‘will you accept

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it now, today?’ I replied, ‘Yes; I will accept it today, or I will die in theattempt!’” He then went into the woods, where he describes his struggles.
He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride. “I then reproachedmyself for having promised to give my heart to God before I left thewoods. When I came to try, I found I could not.... My inward soul hungback, and there was no going out of my heart to God. The thought waspressing me, of the rashness of my promise that I would give my heart to
God that day, or die in the attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding
on my soul; and yet I was going to break my vow. A great sinking anddiscouragement came over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon
my knees. Just at this moment I again thought I heard some one approachme, and I opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there therevelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood in theway, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my wickedness
in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees before God
took such powerful possession of me, that I cried at the top of my voice,and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if all the men on earth andall the devils in hell surrounded me. ‘What!’ I said, ‘such a degraded sinneras I am, on my knees confessing my sins to the great and holy God; andashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on
my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!’ The sin
appeared awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord.” Memoirs, pp.
14–16, abridged.

“I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it was all
over,” writes one of Starbuck’s correspondents.— Another says: “I simply
said: ‘Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matter with Thee,’and immediately there came to me a great peace.”—Another: “All at once
it occurred to me that I might be saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it
all myself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my load.”—Another: “Ifinally ceased to resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle.
Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and God
was willing to do his.”111—“Lord Thy will be done; damn or save!” cries
John Nelson,112 exhausted with the anxious struggle to escapedamnation; and at that moment his soul was filled with peace.
111

Starbuck: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.

112

Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p. 24.

Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account—so
far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all—of the reasons why
self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin
with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion:
first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the “sin” which he iseager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs tocompass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a
far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of
any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the “sin”

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almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is “aprocess of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards
righteousness.”113 A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain
towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately
imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within
him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious
strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, whichin their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement
towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, anddefinitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines.
It may consequently be actually interfered with (JAMMED, as it were,like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his
voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.
113

Starbuck, p. 64.

Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he saysthat to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where theimperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, thesubconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self inposse which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely
aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What thenmust the person do? “He must relax,” says Dr. Starbuck—“that is, hemust fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which
has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way thework it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving
one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality,
and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed
objectively.”114
114

Starbuck, p. 115.

“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity” is the theological way of putting
this fact of the need of self-surrender; whilst the physiological way ofstating it would be, “Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous
system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact.115
115

Starbuck, p. 113.

To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of
personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be justready to open into flower, “hands off” is the only word for us, it must
burst forth unaided!
We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since,

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in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves
upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal
than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why selfsurrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turningpoint of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and noaffair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that thewhole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little
more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of selfsurrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism;
from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical
Christianity altogether, to pure “liberalism” or transcendental idealism,
whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediaeval mystics,
the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stagesof progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced
by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of
doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.
Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point,since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious
individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology,
defining these forces as “subconscious,” and speaking of their effects, as
due to “incubation,” or “cerebration,” implies that they do not transcend
the individual’s personality; and herein she diverges from Christiantheology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of theDeity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final,
but leave the question for a while in abeyance—continued inquiry may
enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.
Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.
When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness,pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently
inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that hemust stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety,
you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive
consciousness he has tells him that all is NOT well, and the better way
you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded
falsehoods. “The will to believe” cannot be stretched as far as that. We
can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have therudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our
perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed
to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind
we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

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There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry,
fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an opposite
affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is bygetting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop—so we drop
down, give up, and DON’T CARE any longer. Our emotional braincentres strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is
documentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not
infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic
worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of thesoul of faith gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but
for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having
once acquired possession, may retain it.
Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh passes from the everlasting No to the everlasting
Yes through a “Centre of Indifference.”
Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion
process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in
the following words:—“One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I at once
saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or procure deliverance
and salvation for myself were utterly in vain; I was brought quite to a
stand, as finding myself totally lost. I saw that it was forever impossible
for me to do anything towards helping or delivering myself, that I had
made all the pleas I ever could have made to all eternity; and that all mypleas were vain, for I saw that self-interest had led me to pray, and that I
had never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that
there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the
bestowment of divine mercy, that they laid not the least obligation upon
God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there was no more virtue or
goodness in them than there would be in my paddling with my hand in
the water. I saw that I had been heaping up my devotions before God,fasting, praying, etc., pretending, and indeed really thinking sometimes
that I was aiming at the glory of God; whereas I never once truly
intended it, but only my own happiness. I saw that as I had never done
anything for God, I had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on
account of my hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had
regard to nothing but self-interest, then my duties appeared a vile
mockery and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but
self-worship, and an horrid abuse of God.
“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

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again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful melancholy state I
was attempting to pray; but found no heart to engage in that or any otherduty; my former concern, exercise, and religious affections were now
gone. I thought that the Spirit of God had quite left me; but still was NOT
DISTRESSED; yet disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or
earth could make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray—though, as I thought, very stupid and senseless—for near half an hour;
then, as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed toopen to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any externalbrightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a new
inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never had
before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I had no
particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity, either the
Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to be Divine glory.
My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see such a God, such a glorious
Divine Being; and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be
God over all for ever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted
with the excellency of God that I was even swallowed up in him, at least
to that degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarcereflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in thisstate of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark without any
sensible abatement; and then began to think and examine what I had
seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all the evening following. I
felt myself in a new world, and everything about me appeared with adifferent aspect from what it was wont to do. At this time, the way ofsalvation opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, andexcellency, that I wondered I should ever think of any other way ofsalvation; was amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, andcomplied with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could
have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had formerly
contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I wondered that all
the world did not see and comply with this way of salvation, entirely by
the righteousness of Christ.”116
Edward’s and Dwight’s Life of Brainerd, New Haven, 1822, pp. 45–47,
abridged.
116

I have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious
emotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, ofreports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and theentrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,117 yet often again they
speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly
true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But often there
seems little doubt that both conditions—subconscious ripening of the

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one affection and exhaustion of the other—must simultaneously haveconspired, in order to produce the result.
117
Describing the whole phenomenon as a change of equilibrium, we might
say that the movement of new psychic energies towards the personal
centre and the recession of old ones towards the margin (or the rising ofsome objects above, and the sinking of others below the conscious
threshold) were only two ways of describing an indivisible event. Doubtless
this is often absolutely true, and Starbuck is right when he says that “selfsurrender” and “new determination,” though seeming at first sight to besuch different experiences, are “really the same thing. Self-surrender sees
the change in terms of the old self, determination sees it in terms of thenew.” Op. cit., p. 160.

T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton’s, being brought to an acute paroxysm ofconviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked himself in his room in theevening in complete despair, crying aloud, “How long, O Lord, howlong?” “After repeating this and similar language,” he says, “several
times, I seemed to sink away into a state of insensibility. When I came tomyself again I was on my knees, praying not for myself but for others. I
felt submission to the will of God, willing that he should do with me asshould seem good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern forothers.”118
118

A. A. Bonar: Nettleton and his Labors, Edinburgh, 1854, p. 261.

Our great American revivalist Finney writes: “I said to myself: ‘What isthis? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost entirely away.
I have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern about mysoul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.’ ‘Why!’ thought I, ‘I never
was so far from being concerned about my own salvation in my life.’ ... I
tried to recall my convictions, to get back again the load of sin underwhich I had been laboring. I tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was
so quiet and peaceful that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it
should be the result of my having grieved the Spirit away.”119119Charles G. Finney: Memoirs written by Himself, 1876, pp. 17, 18.

But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independentlyof any exhaustion in the Subject’s capacity for feeling, or even in theabsence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having
reached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps
in like a sudden flood. These are the most striking and memorable cases,
the cases of instantaneous conversion to which the conception of divine
grace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them atlength—the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better reserve the other cases

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and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.

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Lecture X
Conversion—Concluded
CASES OF SUDDEN CONVERSION— IS SUDDENNESS ESSENTIAL?— NO, IT
DEPENDS ON PSYCHOLOGICAL IDIOSYNCRASY— PROVED EXISTENCE OF
TRANSMARGINAL, OR SUBLIMINAL, CONSCIOUSNESS— “AUTOMATISMS”—
INSTANTANEOUS CONVERSIONS SEEM DUE TO THE POSSESSION OF AN ACTIVESUBCONSCIOUS SELF BY THE SUBJECT— THE VALUE OF CONVERSION DEPENDSNOT ON THE PROCESS, BUT ON THE FRUITS— THESE ARE NOT SUPERIOR IN
SUDDEN CONVERSION— PROFESSOR COE’S VIEWS— SANCTIFICATION AS A
RESULT— OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL ACCOUNT DOES NOT EXCLUDE DIRECTPRESENCE OF THE DEITY— SENSE OF HIGHER CONTROL— RELATIONS OF THE
EMOTIONAL “FAITH-STATE” TO INTELLECTUAL BELIEFS— LEUBA QUOTED—CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FAITH-STATE: SENSE OF TRUTH; THE WORLDAPPEARS NEW— SENSORY AND MOTOR AUTOMATISMS— PERMANENCY OFCONVERSIONS.

In this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering at
first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul’s is themost eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional
excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division isestablished in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new.
Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious experience,owing to the part which it has played in Protestant theology, and it
behooves us to study it conscientiously on that account.
I think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to amore generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for,as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a
generalization than just so far as one’s previous acquaintance withparticulars enables one to take it in.
I will go back, then, to the case of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his
report of the 26th of March, 1775, on which his poor divided mind
became unified for good.
“As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable
lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink under my burden, I
thought I was in such a miserable case as never any man was before. I
returned to the house, and when I got to the door, just as I was stepping
off the threshold, the following impressions came into my mind like apowerful but small still voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming,laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it
towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than

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when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or fitter toappear before the impartial bar of God, than when you first began toseek?
“It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I did notthink I was one step nearer than at first, but as much condemned, asmuch exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried out within myself, O
Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord, dost not find out some new way,
I know nothing of, I shall never be saved, for the ways and methods I
have prescribed to myself have all failed me, and I am willing they should
fail. O Lord, have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!
“These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat down.
After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning man that was
just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I turned very suddenly
round in my chair, and seeing part of an old Bible lying in one of thechairs, I caught hold of it in great haste; and opening it without any
premeditation, cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I
ever saw the word of God: it took hold of me with such power that it
seemed to go through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God waspraying in, with, and for me. About this time my father called the family
to attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in his
prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me,
help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or I am gone
forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with one drop of thy bloodatone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God. At that instantof time when I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was
willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love
broke into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that mywhole soul seemed to be melted down with love, the burden of guilt andcondemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled andfilled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago
groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for
help, was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith,{215} freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My
Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and myhigh tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting portion.
Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on more than one
previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze of light], though it
appeared different; and as soon as I saw it, the design was opened to me,
according to 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 are no more disputable than that light which I see, or
anything that ever I saw.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 168 de 400“In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my soul was
set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the ministry and callto preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I’ll go; send me, send me. I
spent the greatest part of the night in ecstasies of joy, praising andadoring the Ancient of Days for his free and unbounded grace. After I
had been so long in this transport and heavenly frame that my nature
seemed to require sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments;
then the devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I shouldlose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find it to benothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried out, O Lord God, if
I am deceived, undeceive me.
“I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be refreshedwith sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was, Where is my God?
And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake in and with God, andsurrounded by the arms of everlasting love. About sunrise I arose withjoy to relate to my parents what God had done for my soul, and declared
to them the miracle of God’s unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show
them the words that were impressed by God on my soul the evening
before; but when I came to open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.
“I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the gospel,that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I must and tell thewonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for carnal pleasures, andcarnal company, and was enabled to forsake them.”120120Life and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31–40, abridged.

Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book-learning
but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a
Christian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its
austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints.
But happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste foreven the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like
Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron ofmelancholy left a permanent imprint. His redemption was into anotheruniverse than this mere natural world, and life remained for him a sadand patient trial. Years later we can find him making such an entry as
this in his diary: “On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, andhad the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth.”
The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba,
printed in the latter’s article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American
Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a

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clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic case of
Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it is,somewhat abridged:—“Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I neverdarkened the door of my father’s church, although I lived with him foreight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and spending it
in high carousal with any one who would sit with me and drink it away.
So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week together, and then a terrible
repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month.
“In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three years of age, I never had adesire to reform on religious grounds. But all my pangs were due to someterrible remorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorse taking
the shape of regret after my folly in wasting my life in such a way—a manof superior talents and education. This terrible remorse turned me grayin one night, and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the
next morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression ofwords. It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often did I vow
that if I got over ‘this time’ I would reform. 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 was as capable of enjoying life as I was.
“I was converted in my own bedroom in my father’s rectory house at
precisely three o’clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 13, 1886). I
was in perfect health, having been off from the drink for nearly a month.
I was in no way troubled about my soul. In fact, God was not in mythoughts that day. A young lady friend sent me a copy of Professor
Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me my opinionof it as a literary work only. Being proud of my critical talents andwishing to enhance myself in my new friend’s esteem, I took the book to
my bedroom for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and thenwrite her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to face,and I shall never forget the meeting. ‘He that hath the Son hath life
eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.’ I had read this scores oftimes before, but this made all the difference. I was now in God’spresence and my attention was absolutely ‘soldered’ on to this verse, andI was not allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairly considered
what these words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed,
feeling all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though
not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely
happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one second of time,that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if I died then, I must

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inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as I now know I am
saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in ineffable love; there was no
terror in it; I felt God’s love so powerfully upon me that only a mighty
sorrow crept over me that I had lost all through my own folly; and what
was I to do? What could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me
to repent. All 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 felt like a little child before his father. I had done
wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most wondrously.
Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty, and being naturally ofa brave disposition I did not quail under it, but deep sorrow for the past,
mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold upon me, and my soul
thrilled within me to think it was all over. Then there crept in upon me sogently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it
after all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way: ‘There isno name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that of the Lord
Jesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my
Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to this, nearly nine years now,there has never been in my life one doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ andGod the Father both worked upon me that afternoon in July, bothdifferently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced
there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heardof it in less than twenty-four hours.
“But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my conversion I
went into the hay-field to lend a hand with the harvest, and not having
made any promise to God to abstain or drink in moderation only, I took
too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart-broken; and I
felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where shefollowed me weeping copiously. She said I had been converted and fallen
away instantly. But although I was quite full of drink (not muddled,
however), I knew that God’s work begun in me was not going to be
wasted. About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God
for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I
would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to
him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be
destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a{219} surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has
had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing
occurred with my pipe: after being a regular smoker from my twelfth
year the desire for it went at once, and has never returned. So with every
known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I
have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out
Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but

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never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in myown life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my pathin a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the blessing of atruly surrendered life.”
So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete
abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion’s fruits.
The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am
acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a free-thinking FrenchJew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend,
written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of thecircumstances.121 The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight.
He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a Catholic
priest. He was himself irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to theapostate brother and generally to his “cloth.” Finding himself at Rome in
his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried tomake a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three
conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal
round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the
Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as
having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that forsome days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his
mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in
the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured.
Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent
the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words.
My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in the
Biografia del sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have to thankMonsignore D. O’Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice. I abridge theoriginal.

121“If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: ‘Alphonse, in a quarterof an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour;
you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble
church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shallpass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive
baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce
the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, yourhopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, theesteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; youshall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till
death;’—if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I
should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he—

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whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senselessfolly becoming true.
And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.
“Coming out of the cafe I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [theproselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but first
asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to some duty at
the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage,
I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea waspoor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone.
No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyesmechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particularthought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting
and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had
disappeared, the whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything,... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone. “Heavens, how can I
speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain to expressing theinexpressible. Any description, however sublime it might be, could be
but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.
“I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my heart
beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could not reply to thequestions which followed from him one upon the other. But finally I took
the medal which I had on my breast, and with all the effusion of my soul
I kissed the image of the Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh,
indeed, it was She! It was indeed She! [What he had seen had been avision of the Virgin.]“I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse oranother. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I
looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the bottom of mysoul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I could not speak; I had nowish to reveal what had happened. But I felt something solemn andsacred within me which made me ask for a priest. I was led to one; andthere alone, after he had given me the positive order, I spoke as best I
could, kneeling, and with my heart still trembling. I could give noaccount to myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and afaith. All that I can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen frommy eyes, and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages
in which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly
disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of theburning sun.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 173 de 400“I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I was
living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of that gulf I saw theextreme of misery from which I had been saved by an infinite mercy; andI shuddered at the sight of my iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmedwith wonder and with gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new
insight, for truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read asingle page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either entirely
denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of today, so that I had thought solittle about it that I doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I,
then, to this perception of it? I can {222} answer nothing save this, thaton entering that church I was in darkness altogether, and on coming out
of it I saw the fullness of the light. I can explain the change no better
than by the simile of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind
who should suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define
the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects
which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how can we
explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I remain within thelimits of veracity when I say that without having any knowledge of theletter of religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived its sense andspirit. Better than if I saw them, I FELT those hidden things; I felt themby the inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in myinterior mind, and those impressions, more rapid than thought shook mysoul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another direction, towards
other aims, by other paths. I express myself badly. But do you wish,
Lord, that I should inclose in poor and barren words sentiments which
the heart alone can understand?”I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show
you how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion
may be to him who has the experience. Throughout the height of it heundoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an
astounding process performed upon him from above. There is too muchevidence of this for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining
this fact with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that thespirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly
miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives.
At that moment, it believes, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us,
and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity.
That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on thisview, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see
this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if
not dogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:—

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 174 de 400“In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were
exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could see noreason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single exception) has
declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous; that thechange was wrought in a moment. Had half of these, or one third, or one
in twenty, declared it was GRADUALLY wrought in THEM, I shouldhave believed this, with regard to THEM, and thought that SOME were
gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found,in so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot but
believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneouswork.”122122

Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 463.

All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such
store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church,
Christ’s blood, the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinary religious
duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though noacute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed by relief should be
experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been acrisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, andChrist’s sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here
follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder
spiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typicaland worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically,
but psychologically they have been the more complete.
In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so
to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of
thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of theonce-born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holinesswithout a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) ofmuch mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has
always assumed that only its own type of religious experience can beperfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair andagony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.
It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experienceshould carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a naturalprocess. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed;
automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after thesurrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had
flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation,
safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to

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warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantial nature.
“Conversion,” writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, “is not
the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert holiness is
woven into all his powers, principles, and practice. The sincere Christianis quite a new fabric, from the foundation to the top-stone. He is a newman, a new creature.”
And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: “Those gracious
influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are altogether
supernatural—are quite different from anything that unregenerate men
experience. They are what no improvement, or composition of naturalqualifications or principles will ever produce; because they not only
differ from what is natural, and from everything that natural men
experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of anature far more excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious
affections there are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely
different in their nature and kind from anything experienced by the[same] saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which thesaints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight which theyexperience in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely different from anythingwhich a natural man can possess, or of which he can form any proper
notion.”
And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to bepreceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage.
“Surely it cannot be unreasonable,” he says, “that before God delivers us
from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe, he should give us
some considerable sense of the evil from which he delivers us, in orderthat we may know and feel the importance of salvation, and be enabled
to appreciate the value of what God is pleased to do for us. As those whoare saved are successively in two extremely different states—first in astate of condemnation and then in a state of justification andblessedness—and as God, in the salvation of men, deals with them as
rational and intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom,that those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being, in those
two different states. In the first place, that they should be made sensibleof their state of condemnation; and afterwards, of their state ofdeliverance and happiness.”
Such quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose the doctrinal
interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation
may have played in producing them in men and women in excited

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assemblies, they have at any rate been in countless individual instances
an original and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of themind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious
interest whatever, we should still have to write down man’s liability tosudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.
What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an
instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as he ispresent in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there twoclasses of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of
which the one class really partakes of Christ’s nature while the othermerely seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenonof regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly
be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in one casemore and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine in its merecausation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of man’sinterior life?
Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen tosome more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained theshifting of men’s centres of personal energy within them and the lighting
up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due toexplicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also
to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by theexperiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower.
I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such processesof flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret thatmy limits of time here force me to be so short.
The expression “field of consciousness” has but recently come into vogue
in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which
figured most was the single “idea,” supposed to be a definitely outlined
thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that theactual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave ofconsciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and,second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, withany definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest,around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively
conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Somefields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have awide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often
get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot

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beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which
we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At othertimes, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost toa point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed andcontracted.
Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter ofwidth of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habituallyvast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future
operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead
into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never thismagnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling theirway, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain
diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of
the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down tosome one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates is theindetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter
which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both toguide our behavior and to determine the next movement of ourattention. It lies around us like a “magnetic field,” inside of which ourcentre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of
consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories
floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire
mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our
empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are theoutlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any
moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain
mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.
The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing themarginal outline, has nevertheless taken for {228} granted, first, that all
the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal,
inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field” of the moment, all dim andimpossible to assign as the latter’s outline may be; and, second, thatwhat is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent. and cannot
be a fact of consciousness at all.
And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said
in my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may
recollect, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could
not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you
what I meant by such a statement.

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I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has
occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is thediscovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is
not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre andmargin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories,
thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the
primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious
facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I
call this the most important step forward because, unlike the otheradvances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us
an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature.
No other step forward which psychology has made can proffer any suchclaim as this.
In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field,
or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of
religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it isnaturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of theevidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based. You
will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet’s Alterations of
Personality123 being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.
123

Published in the International Scientific Series.

The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so
far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of
unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients. Yet theelementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that whatis shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably truein some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily highdegree.
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultramarginal life of this sort is that one’s ordinary fields of consciousness areliable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess thesource, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable
impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even ofhallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses may take the direction of
automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the subject himself
may not understand even 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“up-rushes” into the ordinary consciousness of energies originating inthe subliminal parts of the mind.

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The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of posthypnotic suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject,adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act—usualor eccentric, it makes no difference— after he wakes from his hypnotic
sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which
you have told him that the act must ensue, he performs it;—but in sodoing he has no recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up
an improvised pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind.
It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice ata certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision isseen or the voice heard, with no inkling on the subject’s part of its
source.
In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason,
Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients withhysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, inthe shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence,buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making
irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses offeeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hystericdisease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these
subconscious memories, and the patient immediately gets well. His
symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers’s sense of the word. These
clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first reads them, yet it is
impossible to doubt their accuracy; and, the path having been once
opened by these first observers, similar observations have been madeelsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural
constitution.
And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpretingthe unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me thathereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it
motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion,or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search whether it be
not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas
elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. We
should look, therefore, for its source in the Subject’s subconscious life. In
the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so
we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are
the source have to be extracted from the patient’s Subliminal by anumber of ingenious methods, for an account of which you must consult
the books. In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or
psychopathic obsessions, the source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also
should be in subliminal regions which improvements in our methods

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may yet conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be
assumed—but the assumption involves a vast program of work to bedone in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man
must play their part.124
The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance in thelast lecture on the subconscious “incubation” of motives deposited by a
growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted
principles of explanation as far as one can. The subliminal region, whateverelse it may be, is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists toexist for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether
inattentively or attentively registered), and for their elaboration according
to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining
such a “tension“that they may at times enter consciousness with something
like a burst. It thus is “scientific” to interpret all otherwise unaccountable
invasive alterations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal
memories reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confessthat there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which it is
not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation. Some of
the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture
III were of this order (compare pages 59, 60, 61, 66); and we shall see
other experiences of the kind when we come to the subject of mysticism.
The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel
Gardiner, possibly that of saint Paul, might not be so easily explained inthis simple way. The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to amerely physiological nerve storm, a “discharging lesion” like that ofepilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases
named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make thisremark in order that the reader may realize that the subject is reallycomplex. But I shall keep myself as far as possible at present to the more“scientific” view; and only as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shallI consider the question of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all
the facts. That subconscious incubation explains a great number of them,
there can be no doubt.
124

And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneousconversions. You remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, andthe graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon. Similar
occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, allwith a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by ahigher control. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value
for the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their
psychological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind usof what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class themalong with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes thedifference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily thepresence of divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine
in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, thefact, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace wehave one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in

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which mental work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive
experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primaryconsciousness, may come.
I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back andrecollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very
first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notionthat the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual
judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human
event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If
the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize
and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not,we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being
may have infused it.
Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class of preeminent
saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual
run of “saints,” the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthfulor middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether atrevivals or in the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you willprobably agree that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural
creature fulgurates from them, or sets them apart from the mortals who
have never experienced that favor. Were it true that a suddenly
converted man as such is, as Edwards says,125 of an entirely different kindfrom a natural man, partaking as he does directly of Christ’s substance,
there surely ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive
radiance attaching even to the lowliest specimen of this genus, to which
no one of us could remain insensible, and which, so far as it went, would
prove him more excellent than ever the most highly gifted among mere
natural men. But notoriously there is no such radiance. Converted men
as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men
even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one ignorant of
doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the“accidents” of the two groups of persons before him, that their substancediffered as much as divine differs from human substance.
Edwards says elsewhere: “I am bold to say that the work of God in theconversion of one soul, considered together with the source foundation,and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is amore glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material
universe.”
125

The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have
had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-markdistinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as

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voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of
suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions andtumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all comeby way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real
witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in thedisposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart,the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in
those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity
altogether.
Throughout Jonathan Edwards’s admirably rich and delicate descriptionof the supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious
Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that
unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an
exceptionally high degree of natural goodness. In fact, one could hardly
read a clearer argument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of thethesis that no chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, butthat here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, andgeneration and regeneration are matters of degree.
All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by achasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness ofthe fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted.
There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life.
If a flood but goes above one’s head, its absolute elevation becomes amatter of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit andlive in our own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, nomatter how much higher some one else’s centre may be. A small man’ssalvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts FOR
HIM, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinaryevangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the
lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps andStigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had
never touched them at all?126
Emerson writes: “When we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful andpleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, andnot turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better man, with hisgrunting resistance to all his native devils.” True enough. Yet Crump may
really be the better CRUMP, for his inner discords and second birth; andyour once-born “regal” character though indeed always better than poor
Crump, may fall far short of what he individually might be had he only
some Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiar
diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these maybe.
126

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 183 de 400{235} If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing
for a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men andconverts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. The forms which
regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance,but only a psychological significance. We have seen how Starbuck’slaborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary
spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,127
has analyzed the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates forconversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the viewthat sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active
subliminal self. Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic
sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd
impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., hefound these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts
whose transformation had been “striking,” “striking” transformation
being defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous,seems to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process ofgrowth, however rapid.”128 Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as
you know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking.
Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his seventyseven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved tobelong to a subclass which he calls “spontaneous,” that is, fertile in selfsuggestions, as distinguished from a “passive” subclass, to which most of
the subjects of striking transformation belonged. His inference is that
self-suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these
persons of an environment which, on the more “passive” subjects, hadeasily brought forth the effects they looked for. Sharp distinctions are
difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe’s numbers are small. But his
methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect;
and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which isthat if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whomthree factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second,
tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type;
you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden
conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.
127

In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.

128

Op. cit., p. 112.

Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden
conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe wellsays; for “the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological,
nothing definable in terms of HOW IT HAPPENS, but something ethical,
definable only in terms of WHAT IS ATTAINED.”129

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129

Op. cit., p. 144

As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained isoften an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level,in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies andendurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man is born
anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give theparticular shape to his metamorphosis. “Sanctification” is the technicalname of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought beforeyou. In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on theassurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.
One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final
purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be
misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability tosuch subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind of amargin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must hegradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new
habits. His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or
pervious margin, is thus a conditio sine qua non of the Subject’s
becoming converted in the instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox
Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of aphenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of thedirect presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a
psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. The lower
manifestations of the Subliminal, indeed, fall within the resources of thepersonal subject: his ordinary sense-material, inattentively taken in andsubconsciously remembered and combined, will account for all his usual
automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws
open our senses to the touch of things material so it is logicallyconceivable that IF THERE BE higher spiritual agencies that can directly
touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so MIGHT BE ourpossession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access tothem. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the
dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.
Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature inconversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as theorthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might
impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal
human specimen. But in any case the VALUE of these forces would haveto be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of theirtranscendency would of itself establish no presumption that they weremore divine than diabolical.

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I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic leftlying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hopeonce more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive
conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at thispoint of our inquiry to be held to EXCLUDE all notion of a higher
penetration.
If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us
only through the subliminal door. (See below, p. 506 ff.)
Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of theconversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense ofhigher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw
examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need ofsuch a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference
which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisisof his own conversion. It was at Naples in his early manhood, in thesummer of 1827.
“My sadness,” he says, “was without limit, and having got entire
possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external acts
to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings,
my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that to expect toput a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which werethemselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should
pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blindone. I had then no resource save in some INFLUENCE FROMWITHOUT. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what thepositive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing
home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the firsttime in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered
the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernaturalaction, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me,and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of therest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all mypersonal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy thanmy own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees andprayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a newinterior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but
it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on
the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to givemyself up, little by little did the rest.”130
I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book la Vie, anda letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I,. Souvenirs de sa Vie, 1885,130

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p. 433.

It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity ofProtestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such
experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can
do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource,
and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such
subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace throughChrist’s accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.
“God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, the miserable, theoppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to
nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort thebroken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate anddamned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man’s own
righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, anddamnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own
natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maul in hand(the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast withher vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own miserythat she is utterly forlorn and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, thatwhen a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself
up again and say, ‘Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is thetime of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.’ The foolishness of man’sheart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws tosatisfy his conscience. ‘If I live,’ saith he, ‘I will amend my life: I will do
this, I will do that.’ But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except
thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguishlay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy
cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thyworks, thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses
avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could
have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he todeliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could beredeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given?
But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither
sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly ‘forme,’ even ‘for me,’ I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I
take comfort and apply this to MYSELF.
And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith. For
he died NOT to justify the righteous, but the UN-righteous, and to make
THEM the children of God.”131
131

Commentary on Galatians, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20,

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abridged.

That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the very
being whom Christ’s sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic
theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as thismessage from Luther’s personal experience. As Protestants are not all
sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of
one’s merits, the filthy puddle of one’s own righteousness, has come tothe front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view ofChristianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shownby its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.
Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luthermeant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of.
But this is only one part of Luther’s faith, the other part being far morevital. This other part is something not intellectual but immediate andintuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand,without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever. 132 Professor Leuba isundoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ’s
work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory
and non-essential, and that the “joyous conviction” can also come by far
other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself,
the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name offaith par excellence. “When the sense of estrangement,” he writes,“fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, theindividual finds himself ‘at one with all creation.’ He lives in theuniversal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one. Thatstate of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon theachievement of moral unity, is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs
suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of
certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the groundof assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant. But suchconviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a grosserror to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state is its
power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theologicalconceptions.133 On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is
the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires
to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states
and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The
ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective
experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective
stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude.
The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems,
the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions.”134

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In some conversions, both steps are distinct; in this one, for example:—“Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by an
expression: ‘the finished work of Christ.’ ‘Why,’ I asked of myself, ‘does
the author use these terms? Why does he not say “the atoning work”?’
Then these words, ‘It is finished,’ presented themselves to my mind.
‘What is it that is finished?’ I asked, and in an instant my mind replied:‘A perfect expiation for sin; entire satisfaction has been given; the debt
has been paid by the Substitute. Christ has died for our sins; not for ours
only, but for those of all men. If, then, the entire work is finished, all thedebt paid, what remains for me to do?’ In another instant the light was
shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous conviction wasgiven me that nothing more was to be done, save to fall on my knees, toaccept this Saviour and his love, to praise God forever.” Autobiography of
Hudson Taylor. I translate back into English from the French translationof Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not being accessible.
Tolstoy’s case was a good comment on those words. There was almost
no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back thatlife was infinite in its moral significance.

133

134

American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345–347, abridged.

The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity,
should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faithstate, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize
their intensity, unless one has been through the experience one’s self.
The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately
well with one, the peace, the harmony, the WILLINGNESS TO BE, eventhough the outer conditions should remain the same. The certainty ofGod’s “grace,” of “justification,” “salvation,” is an objective belief thatusually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely
lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same—you will recollectthe case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where theassurance of personal salvation {243} was only a later result. A passionof willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre ofthis state of mind.
The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before.
The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often,
nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But thesemore intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat ofmysticism.

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A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which
the world often appears to undergo. “An appearance of newness
beautifies every object,” the precise opposite of that other sort ofnewness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of
the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which
you may recall my relating some examples.135 This sense of clean andbeautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries inconversion records. Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:—
135

Above, p. 150.

“After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became
more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The
appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, acalm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, 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 and blue sky; inthe grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which usedgreatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works ofnature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing
had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified
with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm
rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.”136
136

Dwight: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged.

{244} Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records
his sense of newness thus:—“I said to the Lord: ‘Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that
seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I
have faith to believe it.’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I
cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my wholeheart.... I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I
do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, thepeople, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a newworld. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.”137
137
W. F. Bourne: The King’s Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London, Hamilton,
Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.

Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I
take the two following from Starbuck’s manuscript collection. One, awoman, says:—

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 190 de 400“I was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religious friends seeking
and praying for my conversion. My emotional nature was stirred to its
depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvationfrom sin made me oblivious of all surroundings. I plead for mercy, andhad a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. Whenrising from my knees I exclaimed, ‘Old things have passed away, allthings have become new.’ It was like entering another world, a new stateof existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was soclarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, thewoods were vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love ofGod, and I wanted everybody 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 Holiness tent—and as it was full of seekers
and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and someshouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by abench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something
like a man’s hand would strangle me by choking. I don’t know whether
there were any one around or near me or not. I thought I should surely
die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen
hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off. Finallysomething said: ‘Venture on the atonement, for you will die anyway if
you don’t.’ So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with thesame choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer
for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time
was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat.
I don’t know how long I lay there or what was going on. None of my folks
were present. When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me
praising God. The very heavens seemed to open and pour down rays oflight and glory. Not for a moment only, but all day and night, floods oflight and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I waschanged, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and eveneverybody seemed changed.”
This man’s case introduces the feature of automatisms, which insuggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since, in
Edwards’s, Wesley’s and Whitfield’s time, these became a regular meansof gospel-propagation. They were at first supposed to be semimiraculous proofs of “power” on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great
divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his
Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend themagainst their critics; and their value has long been matter of debate even

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within the revivalistic denominations.138 They undoubtedly have noessential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his
conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been provedthat converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in goodfruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent
accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions,involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed tothe subject’s having a large subliminal region, involving nervous
instability. This is often the subject’s own view of the matter afterwards.
One of Starbuck’s correspondents writes, for instance:—
138
Consult William B. Sprague: Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New York,
1832, in the long Appendix to which the opinions of a large number ofministers are given.

“I have been through the experience which is known as conversion. My
explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to thebreaking point, at the same time resisting their physical manifestations,such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly lets them have their fullsway over his body. The relief is something wonderful, and thepleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest
degree.”There is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special
notice on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudohallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms, to use the term of thepsychologists. Saint Paul’s blinding heavenly vision seems to have been aphenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine’s cross in the sky. The lastcase but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory. Henry
Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain.
Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes:—“All at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in amanner almost marvelous.... A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul,that almost prostrated me on the ground.... This light seemed like thebrightness of the sun in every direction. It was too intense for the eyes....
I think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light thatprostrated Paul on the way to Damascus. It was surely a light such as I
could not have endured long.”139
139

Memoirs, p. 34

Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon. Here isanother from Starbuck’s collection, where the light appeared evidently
external:—

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 192 de 400“I had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks off andon. Had been invited to the altar several times, all the time becoming
more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must do this, or I should
be lost. Realization of conversion was very vivid, 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 bliss which caused me torepeat ‘Glory to God’ for a long time. Decided to be God’s child for life,
and to give up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former
habits of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming
these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed, i. e.,
my ambitions were of a different order.”Here is another one of Starbuck’s cases, involving a luminous element:—“I had been clearly converted twenty-three years before, or rather
reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then clear and spiritual,and I had not backslidden. But I experienced entire sanctification on the
15th day of March, 1893, about eleven o’clock in the morning. The
particular accompaniments of the experience were entirely unexpected. I
was quietly sitting at home singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns.
Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me and inflating
my entire being—such a sensation as I had never experienced before.
When this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large,
capacious, well-lighted room. As I walked with my invisible conductor
and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my mind, ‘They are nothere, they are gone.’ As soon as the thought was definitely formed in mymind, though no word was spoken, the Holy Spirit impressed me that I
was surveying my own soul. Then, for the first time in all my life, did I
know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with the fullness ofGod.”
Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection
reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant
cactus buds called 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. I well remember we reaped oats, andhow every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in akind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory ofGod.”140
These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently only
metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, forinstance, in Brainerd’s statement: “As I was walking in a thick grove,140

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unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do
not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor any
imagination of a body of light in the third heavens, or anything of thatnature, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God.”

In a case like this next one from Starbuck’s manuscript collection thelighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical:—“One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch where I
was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all to God to be
used only by and for him.... It was raining and the roads were muddy;
but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down by the side of the roadand told God all about it, intending then to get up and go on. Such athing as any special answer to my prayer never entered my mind, having
been converted by faith, but still being most undoubtedly saved. Well,
while I was praying, I remember holding out my hands to God andtelling him they should work for him, my feet walk for him, my tongue
speak for him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrument andgive me a satisfying experience—when suddenly the darkness of thenight seemed lit up—I felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered
my prayer. Deep happiness came over me; I felt I was accepted into theinner 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 of evening service. The
minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake—he wasdull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: ‘Do you
not want to give your heart to God?’ I replied in the affirmative. Then
said he, ‘Come to the front 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 give up all to God. After about two hours the minister said
we would go home. As usual, on retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at
this time simply said, ‘Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the wholematter 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 the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and favor.
So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate change.”
The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, andthe last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.
We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple
more. President Finney’s is so vivid that I give it at length:—

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 194 de 400“All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of myheart was, ‘I want to pour my whole soul out to God.’ The rising of mysoul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, topray. There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it
appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut thedoor after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It
did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was
wholly a mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as
I would see any other man. He said nothing but looked at me in such amanner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always sinceregarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me areality that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out
my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I
could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that I bathed his feetwith my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him,that I recollect. I must have continued in this state for a good while, but
my mind was too absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I
said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break offfrom 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 andwas about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of theHoly Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having thethought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any
recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in
the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed
to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a waveof electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to comein waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any otherway. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly thatit seemed to fan me, like immense wings.
“No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in myheart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say
I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. Thesewaves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until
I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’
I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more;’ yet I had no fear of death.
“How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing to rollover me and go through me, I do not know. But I know it was late in theevening when a member of my choir —for I was the leader of the choir—came into the office to see me. He was a member of the church. He foundme in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, ‘Mr. Finney, what ails
you?’ I could make him no answer for some time. He then said, ‘Are you

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in pain?’ I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, ‘No, but so
happy that I cannot live.’”
I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better than give his own brief
account of his post-conversion feelings:—“I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, 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 every moment I shoulddrop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and the
Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden and guiltof sin. My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soulenjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was indescribable. The
happiness lasted about three days, during which time I never spoke toany person about my feelings.” Autobiography of Dan Young, edited by
W. P. Strickland, New York, 1860.
“In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care ofthose who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world wascrystalline, the heavens were 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 there praising God in such
ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can realize.” —“I cannot
express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeon and lifted
into the light of the sun. I shouted and I sang praise unto him who loved
me and washed me from my sins. I was forced to retire into a secretplace, for the tears did flow, and I did not wish my shopmates to see me,
and yet I could not keep it a secret.”—“I experienced joy almost to
weeping.”—“I felt my face must have shone like that of Moses.
I had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatest joy it was ever mylot to experience.”—“I wept and laughed alternately.
I was as light as if walking on air. I felt as if I had gained greater peaceand happiness than I had ever expected to experience.” Starbuck’s
correspondents.
One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency orpermanence of these abrupt conversions. Some of you, I feel sure,knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of

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these their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, anddismiss it with a pitying smile at so much “hysterics.” Psychologically, as
well as religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of serious
interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality ofthese shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every level—
we need no statistics to tell us that. Love is, for instance, well known not
to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights andreaches of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its significance tomen and women, whatever be its duration. So with the conversion
experience: that it should for even a short time show a human being
what the high-water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what
constitutes its importance—an importance which backsliding cannot
diminish, although persistence might increase it. As a matter of fact, all
the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which I
have quoted, HAVE been permanent. The case of which there might bemost doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid
seizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that
Ratisbonne’s whole future was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up
his project of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where hewent to dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showedno tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by thepeculiar circumstances of his conversion—which, for the rest, he could
seldom refer to without tears—and in short remained an exemplary sonof the Church until he died, late in the 80’s, if I remember rightly.
The only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of
conversions, are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss
Johnston. They embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical churchmembers, more than half being Methodists. According to the statementof the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort innearly all the cases, 93 per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men.
Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 percent. are relapses from the religious faith which the conversion
confirmed, and that the backsliding complained of is in most only afluctuation in the ardor of sentiment. Only six of the hundred cases
report a change of faith. Starbuck’s conclusion is that the effect ofconversion is to bring with it “a changed attitude towards life, which isfairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate.... In otherwords, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once
taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified withit, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines.”142
142

Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.

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Lectures XI, XII, and XIIISaintliness
SAINTE–BEUVE ON THE STATE OF GRACE— TYPES OF CHARACTER AS DUE TO
THE BALANCE OF IMPULSES AND INHIBITIONS— SOVEREIGN EXCITEMENTS—
IRASCIBILITY— EFFECTS OF HIGHER EXCITEMENT IN GENERAL— THE SAINTLY
LIFE IS RULED BY SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT— THIS MAY ANNUL SENSUALIMPULSES PERMANENTLY— PROBABLE SUBCONSCIOUS INFLUENCESINVOLVED— MECHANICAL SCHEME FOR REPRESENTING PERMANENTALTERATION IN CHARACTER— CHARACTERISTICS OF SAINTLINESS— SENSE OFREALITY OF A HIGHER POWER— PEACE OF MIND, CHARITY— EQUANIMITY,
FORTITUDE, ETC.— CONNECTION OF THIS WITH RELAXATION— PURITY OF
LIFE— ASCETICISM— OBEDIENCE— POVERTY— THE SENTIMENTS OF
DEMOCRACY AND OF HUMANITY— GENERAL EFFECTS OF HIGHER
EXCITEMENTS.

The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical
fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those weheard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens,for you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely toopen a curious chapter in the natural history of human consciousness,but rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to the total value and positive
meaning of all the religious trouble and happiness which we have seen.
We must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and thenwe must judge them. This divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let
us without further preamble proceed to the descriptive task.
It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these lectures.
Some small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may show humannature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best
fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show.
They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the genuinely
strenuous life; and to call to mind a succession of such examples as I
have lately had to wander through, though it has been only in the readingof them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in better moral
air.
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which
the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for
religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks
which Sainte–Beuve in his History of Port–Royal makes on the results of
conversion or the state of grace.
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phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary,eminent, and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer
study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible state,a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the greatest
deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through all the different
forms of communion, and all the diversity of 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, whatever in short to be theplace and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is fundamentally one
state in spirit and fruits. Penetrate a little beneath the diversity ofcircumstances, and it becomes evident that in Christians of different
epochs it is always one and the same modification by which they areaffected: there is veritably a single fundamental and identical spirit ofpiety and charity, common to those who have received grace; an innerstate which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite
confidence in God, and of severity for one’s self, accompanied withtenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the soulhave the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different
surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother ofHerrnhut.”143
143

Sainte–Beuve: Port–Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.

Sainte–Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regenerationin mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to
consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently fromother men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted tocall them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin
therefore by asking a general psychological question as to what the innerconditions are which may make one human character differ so extremely
from another.
I reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished fromthe intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in our
differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement, and in the different
impulses and inhibitions which these bring in their train. Let me makethis more clear.
Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time, isalways a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us
one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. “Yes! yes!” say
the impulses; “No! no!” say the inhibitions. Few people who have notexpressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of
inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive

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pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The
influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, forexample, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely
without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of theoccasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably
involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more “free andeasy.” But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great
emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in thestreet with his face covered with shaving-lather because a house acrossthe way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her
nightgown if it be a question of saving her baby’s life or her own. Take aself-indulgent woman’s life in general. She will yield to every inhibition
set by her disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or
bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient
to its “no.” But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed bymaternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil
without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive
power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby’s interests areat stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become,as James Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are
now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.
This is an example of what you have already heard of as the “expulsive
power of a higher affection.” But be the affection high or low, it makes nodifference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In one ofHenry Drummond’s discourses he tells of an inundation in India wherean eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, andbecame the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition
to the human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal
tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a
dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by suchan agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up witha rifle and blow out its brains. The tiger’s habitual ferocity was
temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, andformed a new centre for his character.
Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are
mixed together. In that case one hears both “yeses” and “noes,” and the“will” is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for example,
with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears impelling
him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him towards
various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person
becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time
simply waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of

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intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one asalone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away.
The fury of his comrades’ charge, once entered on, will give this pitch ofcourage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear.
In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grownatural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their “no! no!” not only is
not heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops tothe circus rider—no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam theymake.
“Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!” cries the grenadier, frantic
over his Emperor’s capture, when his wife and babes are suggested; andmen pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way
through the crowd with knives.144
144“‘Love would not be love,’ says Bourget, ‘unless it could carry one tocrime.’ And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable passion
unless it could carry one to crime.” (Sighele: Psychollogie des sectes, p.
136.) In other words, great passions annul the 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 may not be at some moment overpowered by
the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also
potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense
enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in thisparticular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here beclassed appropriately as a “higher affection.” If we are soon to die, or if we
believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put ourmoral house in order—we do not see how sin can evermore exert
temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to
extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, andits full conversion value.

One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in thecomposition 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 ofcharacter. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, thoughenergy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one’s
self—it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one,the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothingannihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke
says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is whatmakes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetestdelights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer
themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are
elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-

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rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do wetake a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called
weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude
for these sacrificial moods, of which one’s own inferior self and its pet
softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.145
Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordinary
instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes (Journal,
Paris, 1895, p. 56), “I am tossed and dragged about by my miserable
weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my indecision. Now
marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France hesitation uponhesitation, and all because at bottom I am UNABLE TO GIVE UPANYTHING.” He can’t “get mad” at any of his alternatives; and the careerof a man beset by such an all-round amiability is hopeless.
145

So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting
excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences ofcharacter of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way. In
a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges ofinhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, andother sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn
genius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely from that ofordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your mere
aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when yournatural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift ofnature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive
action. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with
the inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all thatinner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth,a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent
over those around them are as if non-existent. Should the rest of us sodisregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have thewish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibitionquenching fury is lacking.146
The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is COURAGE; and the
addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a different
man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustfulhope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it, wrath will do it.
In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it,
though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. “Love ofadventure” becomes in such persons a ruling passion. “I believe,” says
General Skobeleff, “that my bravery is simply the passion and at the sametime the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated
rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participationof my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate excitement.
Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man toman, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts
me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run
146

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after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it
always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure.

When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, myheart palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it
appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me;
my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my will
would in vain try to resist. (Juliette Adam: Le General Skobeleff,
Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to have been a cruelegoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one may judge by his“Memorie,” lived in an unflagging emotion of similar danger-seeking
excitement.
The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having
ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus
depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronicallydriving the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal
excitement transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love,
indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or
enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That wholeraft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods aresovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Ourconventionality,147 our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands forprecedent and permission, for guarantee and surety, our small
suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed likecobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun—“Wo sind die Sorge nun und NothDie mich noch gestern wollt’ erschlaffen?
Ich scham’ mich dess’ im Morgenroth.”
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very
contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. Thisauroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright andcaroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where thecontrolling emotion is religious. “The true monk,” writes an Italian
mystic, “takes nothing with him but his lyre.”
147
See the case on p. 69, above, where the writer describes his
experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting “merely in the
TEMPORARY OBLITERATION OF THE CONVENTIONALITIES which usually
cover my life.”

We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of
the religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture.

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The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and isactuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self in
perfectly definite ways.
The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower“noes” which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against
infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities
once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean
incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has
fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I
think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary“melting moods” into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, ora novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if
our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts ofancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now
washed and 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 a special grace, the socalled gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held
almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting 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 permanence to be true of thegeneral paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs ofemotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail andbacksliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remaincompletely annulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alterationof the man’s habitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidence in
certain cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of theregenerate character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or
two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You
recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley
Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances.148 You also remember
the graduate of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting
drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of
his appetite. “From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I nevertouch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe.... thedesire for it went at once and has never returned. So with every known
sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have
had no temptations since conversion.”Above, p. 200. “The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania isreligiomania,” is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man.
148

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Here is an analogous case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—“I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holinessmeeting, ... and I began saying, ‘Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.’
Then what was to me an audible voice said: ‘Are you willing to give up
everything to the Lord?’ and question after question kept coming up, toall 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, only
a trust. Just then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I
met a gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into
my face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all myappetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the street, passing
saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my taste andlonging for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or
eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups anddowns. My appetite for liquor never came back.”
The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual
temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, “I was
effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted tothat I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could havecured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as
entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return tothis day.” Mr. Webster’s words on the same subject are these: “One thing
I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted toimpurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as hewas enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghostchanging his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect
seemed more remarkable than in any other.”149
149
Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract
Society, pp. 23–32.

Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us sostrongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestionthat it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play thedecisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in
hypnotism.150 Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a
few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left toordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Bothdrunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action throughthe subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogativeof inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously
operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just
HOW anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall

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do well now to say good-by to the PROCESS of transformation
altogether—leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological ortheological mystery—and to turn our attention to the fruits of thereligious condition, no matter in what way they may have been
produced.151
Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck’s book, in which a “sensory
automatism” brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been
unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:—
150“When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was onme, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God toquit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fiftythree, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did nothear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said,‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ At once I replied. ‘Will you take the desireaway?’ But it only kept saying: ‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ Then I got up,laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any
desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touchedtobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gaveme the least wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.
Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences
physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower
cerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in which the associationcentres connected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often
reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences.... For
example: ‘Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing
WITHIN to respond to them.’ The ego [here] is wholly identified with thehigher centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Another of the
respondents says: ‘Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as itwere a wall of brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’” —Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral
organ. But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is
nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high andstrong as to be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we do notknow just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and notin another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help bymechanical analogies.
151

If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its
different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solidwith different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental
revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say
by a lever, from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, itwill linger for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it,it will tumble back or “relapse” under the continued pull of gravity. But if
at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface

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A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there
permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now
be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther
attraction from their direction.
In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional
influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to theancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence
fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it produces are
unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude. But when acertain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point ispassed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, equivalent to
the production of a new nature.
The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character isSaintliness.152 The saintly character is the character for which spiritualemotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is acertain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all
religions, of which the features can easily be traced.153
I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of “sanctimoniousness” whichsometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exact
combination of affections which the text goes on to describe.
152

153“It will be found,” says Dr. W. R. Inge (in his lectures on Christian
Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), “that men of preeminent saintlinessagree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us that they have arrived
at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate
experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can holdintercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth,and beauty; that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel
his presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion
as they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what separates
us from him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; andsecondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness
and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is
like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.”

They are these:—
1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little
interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it weresensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness thispower is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or
patriotic utopias, or inner versions of holiness or right may also be felt as
the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways which I described in thelecture on the Reality of the Unseen.154

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The “enthusiasm of humanity” may lead to a life which coalesces inmany respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following rules
proposed to members of the Union pour l’Action morale, in the Bulletin del’Union, April 1–15, 1894. See, also, Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892.

154“We would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, ofdiscipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the necessary
perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part which it plays. We
would wage war upon false optimism; on the base hope of happinesscoming to us ready made; on the notion of a salvation by knowledge
alone, or by material civilization alone, vain symbol as this is ofcivilization, precarious external arrangement ill-fitted to replace theintimate union and consent of souls. We would wage war also on bad
morals, whether in public or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness,and over-refinement, on all that tends to increase the painful, immoral,
and anti-social multiplications of our wants; on all that excites envy anddislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion thatthe chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our
example the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men;affectionate simplicity in our relations with inferiors and insignificant
persons; indulgence where our own claims only are concerned, but
firmness in our demands where they relate to duties towards others or
towards the public.
“For the common people are what we help them to become; their vices
are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come backwith all their weight upon us, it is but just.
2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life,
and a willing self-surrender to its control.
3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining
selfhood melt down.
4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards “yes, yes,” and away from “no,” where the claims ofthe non-ego are concerned. These fundamental inner conditions havecharacteristic practical consequences, as follows:—
a. Asceticism.—The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turninto self-immolation. It may then so over-rule the ordinary inhibitions of
the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism,measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty to thehigher power.

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b. Strength of Soul.—The sense of enlargement of life may be so upliftingthat personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become
too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitudeopen out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes theirplace. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!
“We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to appear
important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood, in all its
degrees. We promise not to create or encourage illusions as to what is
possible, by what we say or write. We promise to one another active
sincerity, which strives to see truth clearly, and which never fears to
declare what it sees.
“We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion, to the‘booms’ and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of weakness andof fear.
“We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will speak
seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the appearance ofbanter;—and even so of all things, for there are serious ways of being
light of heart.
“We will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply andwithout false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation, or pride.”c. Purity.—The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first,
increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced,
and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes
imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: thesaintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspottedfrom the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes
an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless
severity.
d. Charity.—The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,
increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary
motives to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness
among human beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, andtreats loathsome beggars as his brothers.
I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of thespiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so abundant.
Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly power seems to be

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the fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.
In our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining
and transfigured to the convert,155 and, apart from anything acutely
religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us
round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods oron the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all
whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence
enfold us like a dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our innerears were subtly ringing with the world’s security. Thoreau writes:—
155

Above, pp. 243 ff.

“Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted
whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene andhealthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of agentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible ofsuch sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of thedrops, and in {270} every sight and sound around my house, an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere,
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood
insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pineneedle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so
distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I
thought no place could ever be strange to me again.”156
156

H. Thoreau: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.

In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendlinessbecomes most personal and definite. “The compensation,” writes a
German author,—“for the loss of that sense of personal independence
which man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all FEARfrom one’s life, the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an
inner SECURITY, which one can only experience, but which, once it has
been experienced, one can never forget.”157
157

C. H. Hilty: Gluck, vol. i. p. 85.

I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr.
Voysey:—“It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God’s
unfailing presence with them in their going out and in their coming in,and by night and day, is a source of absolute repose and confident
calmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall them. That nearness

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of God is a constant security against terror and anxiety. It is not that they
are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves protected by alove which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally
ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them, they will becontent to bear it because the Lord is their keeper, and nothing can befallthem without his will. If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing
and no calamity at all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man protected
and shielded from harm. And I for one—by no means a thick-skinned or
hard-nerved man-am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do
not wish for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe.
Quite as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet feelthat the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of it altogether,by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless keeper, and that
nothing can hurt us without his will.”158
158

The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258.

More excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious
literature. I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is anaccount from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:—“Last night,” Mrs. Edwards writes, “was the sweetest night I ever had in
my life. I never before, for so long a time together, enjoyed so much of
the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul, but without theleast agitation of body during the whole time. Part of the night I lay
awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking.
But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of theheavenly sweetness of Christ’s excellent love, of his nearness to me, andof my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul inan entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine lovecome down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in aconstant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time
my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there seemed to
be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared tomyself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes
swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light whichcome in at the window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth
more than all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in
my whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or
any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it
seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There was but little
difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if there was any
difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.159 As I awoke
early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely done with

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myself. I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing,
and that I had no more to do with any outward interest of my own thanwith that of a person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed toswallow up every wish and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest andsleeping a little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God’s mercy tome, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after that, inmaking me willing to live, that I might do and suffer whatever he called
me to here. I also thought how God had graciously given me an entire
resignation to his will, with respect to the kind and manner of death that
I should die; having been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake,and if it were God’s will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred to me, I
used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man. Uponthis I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out ofheaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply:
Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for thehonor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, andoverwhelming that none could bear to live in the country where thespectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater.
And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, andalacrity of soul in consenting that it should be so, if it were most for theglory of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in mymind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, andevery conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to mynature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This resignation continued
in its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and all the next day,and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon, without
interruption or abatement.”160
159
Compare Madame Guyon: “It was my practice to arise at midnight for
purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that God came at the precise time
and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him. When I was outof health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at such times I felt,
even in my sleep, a singular possession of God. He loved me so much thathe seemed to pervade my being, at a time when I could be only
imperfectly conscious of his presence. My sleep is sometimes broken—asort of half sleep; but my soul seems to be awake enough to know God,when it is hardly capable of knowing anything else.” T. C. Upham: The Lifeand Religious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877,
vol. i. p. 260.

I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in
Edwards’s Narrative of the Revival in New England.
160

The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more
ecstatic than this. “Often the assaults of the divine love,” it is said of the
Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere, “reduced her almost to the point ofdeath. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. ‘I cannot support it,’

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she used to say.
‘Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence ofyour love.’"161
161

Bougaud: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.

Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual
fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theologicalvirtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which theparticular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically fromthe assurance of God’s friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood
as men being an immediate inference from that of God’s fatherhood of us
all. When Christ utters the precepts: “Love your enemies, bless them thatcurse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you,” he gives for a reason: “That ye
may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his
sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just andon the unjust.” One might therefore be tempted to explain both thehumility as to one’s self and the charity towards others whichcharacterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling characterof theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivativesof theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in
the highest possible degree. They HARMONIZE with paternal theism
beautifully; but they harmonize with all reflection whatever upon thedependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think,consider them not subordinate but coordinate parts of that greatcomplex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious
rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all
unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline
to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe thecondition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature isliable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we
swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too
cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural
psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence.
Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are selfforgetful and kindly so long as they endure.
We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his
instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,162 M. Georges Dumas compares
together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, andshows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked
by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was

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Marie in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period
begins, “sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments.
She displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She
becomes solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting
them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Neversince she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous
period utter any but charitable opinions.”163 And later, Dr. Dumas says ofall such joyous conditions that “unselfish sentiments and tenderemotions are the only affective states to be found in them. The subject’s
mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and whollytransformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy.”164
162

Paris, 1900.

163

Page 130.

164

Page 167.

There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, andtheir companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in
narratives of conversion. “I began to work for others”;—“I had moretender feeling for my family and friends”;—“I spoke at once to a personwith whom I had been angry”;—“I felt for every one, and loved myfriends better”;—“I felt every one to be my friend”;—these are so many
expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck.165
165

Op. cit., p. 127.

“When,” says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I madequotation a moment ago, “I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt alove to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far
beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed
inexpressible. I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who wereventing their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would
still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings towards them but
those of love, and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I neverbefore felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I did
that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively manner, howgreat a part of Christianity lies in the performance of our social andrelative duties to one another. The same joyful sense continued
throughout the day—a sweet love to God and all mankind.”Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual humanbarriers.166

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166
The barrier between men and animals also. We read of Towianski, aneminent Polish patriot and mystic, that “one day one of his friends met him
in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him and covering
him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted the animal thus
to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: ‘This dog, whom I am now meetingfor the first time, has shown a great fellow-feeling for me, and a great joy
in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings. Were I to drive him off,
I should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would be an
offense not only to him, but to all the spirits of the other world who are on
the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as
nothing in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, incase I were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We
ought,’ he added, ‘both to lighten the condition of animals, whenever wecan, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves that union of the worldof all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ has made possible.’” Andre
Towianski, Traduction de l’Italien, Turin, 1897 (privately printed). I owe myknowledge of this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W.
Lutoslawski, author of “Plato’s Logic.”

Here, for instance, is an example of Christian non-resistance fromRichard Weaver’s autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semiprofessional pugilist in his younger days, who became a much beloved
evangelist. Fighting, after drinking, seems to have been the sin to which
he originally felt his flesh most perversely inclined. After his first
conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man
who had 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 another man who had lately challenged him to fight andtaunted him with cowardice for refusing as a Christian man;—I mention
these incidents to show how genuine a change of heart is implied in thelater conduct which he describes as follows:—“I went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellowworkman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said tohim:—“‘Tom, you mustn’t take that wagon.’“He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that God
did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said he would
push the wagon over me.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘let us see whether the devil and thee are stronger than the
Lord and me.’“And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had to get
out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him.

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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, thou canst do it.’ So hestruck me on the face.
“I turned the other cheek to him, and said, ‘Strike again.’“He struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I turned mycheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing.
I shouted after him: ‘The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the Lord savethee.’“This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal-pit mywife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with it. I
said: ‘I’ve been fighting, and I’ve given a man a good thrashing.’“She burst out weeping, and said, ‘O Richard, what made you fight?’
Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I had not struckback.
“But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than man’s.
Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: ‘The other men willlaugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.’ I
cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan;’—and went on my way to the coal-pit.
“Tom was the first man I saw. I said ‘Good-morning,’ but got no reply.
“He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him sitting
on the wagon-road waiting for me. When I came to him he burst intotears and said: ‘Richard, will you forgive me for striking you?’“‘I have forgiven thee,’ said I; ‘ask God to forgive thee. The Lord blessthee.’ I gave him my hand, and we went each to his work.”167
167

J. Patterson’s Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66–68, abridged.

“Love your enemies!” Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be
your friends, but your ENEMIES, your positive and active enemies.
Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance,
meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, orelse it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate
individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one

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ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying,so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity
may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit thefriendlier interests aroused? If positive well-wishing could attain sosupreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might wellseem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from thelife of other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive
experience of an authentic kind—for there are few active examples in our
scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,168—what theeffects might be: they might conceivably transform the world.
168
As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the fire tocook himself for a meal for a beggar—having previously shaken himself
three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him.

Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love your enemies” is not
self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of
magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of ouroppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would
involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole,
and with the present world’s arrangements, that a critical point would
practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of
being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close athand, within our reach.
The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by theshowing of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is
personally loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious
mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part;and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire todisclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before God.
Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and
Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars.
All three are at work when religious persons consecrate their lives to thecare of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of
the sick is a function to which the religious seem strongly drawn, evenapart from the fact that church traditions set that way. But in the annalsof this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded
which are only explicable by the frenzy of self-immolation
simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret
Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said tohave cleansed the sores and ulcers of their patients with their respective
tongues; and the lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary andMadame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling in hospital purulence,
disagreeable to read of, and which makes us admire and shudder at the

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same time.
So much for the human love aroused by the faith-state. Let me next
speak of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it
brings.
“A paradise of inward tranquillity” seems to be faith’s usual result; and it
is easy, even without being religious one’s self, to understand this. A
moment back, in treating of the sense of God’s presence, I spoke of theunaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed,
how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, andappease the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one’s
difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one’s life as a whole is in
the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply
religious men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate.
Whoever not only says, but FEELS, “God’s will be done,” is mailed
against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs,
missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquilmindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances,which self-surrender brings.
The temper of the tranquil-mindedness differs, of course, according as
the person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerfulcast of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation andsubmission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of theformer temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, avenerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, atParis:—“My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be what it isable to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing from it. For long years
now I exist, think, and act, and am worth what I am worth, only throughthe despair which is my sole strength and my sole foundation. May it
preserve for me, even in these last trials to which I am coming, thecourage to do without the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more fromthe Source whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, yourwishes will have been accomplished.”169
169

Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale, September, 1894.

There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power ofsuch a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal isanother Frenchman of pessimistic {281} natural temperament. He
expresses still more amply the temper of self-surrendering

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submissiveness:—“Deliver me, Lord,” he writes in his prayers, “from the sadness at myproper suffering which self-love might give, but put into me a sadness
like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make them anoccasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you neither for healthnor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of myhealth and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory, for mysalvation, and for the use of the Church and of your saints, of whom I
would by your grace be one. You alone know what is expedient for me;
you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give tome, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one
thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apartfrom that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which
is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor
anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men
or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I
adore, but do not seek to fathom.”170170

B. Pascal: Prieres pour les Maladies, Sections xiii., xiv., abridged.

When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows
less passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I
might well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that
occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet ofa happy native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable
serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy—“Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly at the hearing of it, butsuch was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw
any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in
me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own
interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish formyself only the very thing which God does.” In another place she writes:“We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary
to pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us
threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts somuch taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger. It is truethat the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost noother sensation or reflection in me than this—that I felt quite contented
and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father’s choice.” Sailingfrom Nice to Genoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea.
“As the irritated waves dashed round us,” she writes, “I could not help

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experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased
myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under the command of
Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with awatery grave. Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I
took in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters.
Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.”171
171
From Thomas C. Upham’s Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences ofMadame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413, abridged.

The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may beeven more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent
autobiography, “With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen. A couple of days
after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there
gives an account—“It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press ofcanvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells wehauled down the flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I
was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sailslipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head
downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship’sbows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation in mycertainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair’s
breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation
but joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds,
but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted
itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I
furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voicepraises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters.”172
172

Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 230.

The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph forreligious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a
humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV:—“They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw six
women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold,and a yard long. He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’ which I did.
He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.’ They had solittle patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from thewaist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the
kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me,‘Does it hurt you?’ and then they discharged their fury upon me,

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exclaiming as they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.’ It was the Roulette
woman who held this language. But at this moment I received thegreatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had thehonor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being
crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down
the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt
interiorly? To understand them one must have passed by the same trial;
they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions aboundgrace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried, ‘We must
double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks norcries.’ And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happinesswithin?”173
173

Claparede et Goty: Deux Heroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, toequanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all thoseshiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre ofenergy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is thatit so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing andthrowing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility
seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguishedfrom moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent ofphilosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurologicalhygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capableof entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.174
Christians who have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,” andare never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of theday. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance ofthings, only as they were presented to her in succession, MOMENT BY
MOMENT.” To her holy soul, “the divine moment was the present
moment, ... and when the present moment was estimated in itself and inits relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was
accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, andto give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.”175
Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon thisconcentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.
Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. Call: As a Matter of
Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. Dresser: Living by the Spirit, New York andLondon, 1900; H. W. Smith: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in thousands of hands.
174

175
T. C. Upham: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York,
1864, pp. 158, 172–74.

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The next religious symptom which I will note is what have called Purityof Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to innerinconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable.
All the mind’s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference tothe special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is
unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixedwith this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of
sacrifice, for the beloved deity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him.
Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at astroke —we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest.
Billy Bray’s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example ofthe latter form of achievement.
“I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love mytobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down into themine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days of old, theLord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the prophets; now he speaks to
us by the spirit of his Son. I had not only the feeling part of religion, but I
could hear the small, still voice within speaking to me. When I took thepipe 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 Lordalso sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house, and I tookout my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke—for that was thewoman’s name—said, ‘Do you not feel it is wrong to smoke?’ I said that I
felt something inside telling me that it was an idol, a lust, and she said
that was the Lord. Then I said, ‘Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is
telling me of it inside, and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go,
love it as I may.’ There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, andthrew it into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, ‘ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.’ And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to break off
old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he gave me strength, forhe has said, ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.’
The day after I gave up smoking I had the toothache so bad that I did notknow what to do. I thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I
said I would never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’ andwhen I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought of the pipe
would come back to me very strong; but the Lord strengthened meagainst the habit, and, bless his name, I have not smoked since.”
Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he thoughtthat he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty habit, too. “On
one occasion,” Bray said, “when at a prayer— meeting at Hicks Mill, I
heard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me with clean lips.’ So, when we got

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up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and ‘whipped‘en’ [threw it] under the form.
But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my mouth.
Then the Lord said to me again, ‘Worship me with clean lips.’ So I took
the quid out of my mouth, and whipped ‘en under the form again, andsaid, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From that time I gave up chewing as well as
smoking, and have been a free man.”
The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may
take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hardbattles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of theecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them mostwounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own
right to social veracity and sincerity in their theeing and thouing, in notdoffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox thatthese conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of
his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and sothat their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.
“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal, “heforbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor,
great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people
Good-morning or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape with myleg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the ragethat was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts:
and especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a single
person was according to their accidence and grammar rules, andaccording to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I
could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage.... Oh! thescorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows, punchings, beatings, andimprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men!
Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that theyquite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received on thisaccount is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes
in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors ofChristianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers. And
though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful
confusion it brought among all professors and priests: but, blessed be theLord, many came to see the vanity of that custom of putting off hats tomen, and felt the weight of Truth’s testimony against it.”In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one

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time was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint andcandid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in
following Fox’s canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy forcitation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things
in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of
spiritual sensibility:—“By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw that though I had not theevil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, andpollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great
goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of thosegrosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from;some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (I John v.
19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me
to be evils, and as such condemned in me.
“As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover themselvesin the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took too much delight in.
This evil of my doings I was required to put away and cease from; andjudgment lay upon me till I did so.
“I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace,ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were set on
only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I ceased to wear
rings.
“Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me there
was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended to belong.
This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was accounted a readyartist in; therefore this evil also was I required to put away and ceasefrom. So that thenceforward I durst not say, Sir, Master, My Lord,
Madam (or My Dame); or say Your Servant to any one to whom I did notstand in the real relation of a servant, which I had never done to any.
“Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the kneeor body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the use of; andthis, being one of the vain customs of the world, introduced by the spiritof the world, instead of the true honor which this is a false representationof, and used in deceit as a token of respect by persons one to another,
who bear no real respect one to another; and besides this, being a typeand a proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to
Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them theChristian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him, andtherefore should not be given to men;—I found this to be one of those

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evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was now required to
put it away and cease from it.
“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number
to a single person, YOU to one, instead of THOU, contrary to the pure,
plain, and single language of truth, THOU to one, and YOU to more thanone, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as
well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men,for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work
upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless wayof speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages,
and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now
called out of and required to cease from.
“These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night ofdarkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion were
now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my conscience,
gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease from, shun, andstand a witness against.”176
The History of Thomas Elwood, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp.
32–34
176

These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency
between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John
Woolman writes in his diary:—“In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed; andhave at sundry times walked over ground where much of their dyestuffs
has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my mind that people
might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of 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, whentraveling in dirtiness, and affected with unwholesome scents, a strong
desire that the nature of dyeing cloth to hide dirt may be more fully
considered.
“Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the
opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving way tohiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal that which isdisagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness becometh a holy people;
but hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems
contrary to the sweetness of sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth
is rendered less useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of

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dyeing, and the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and thatcost applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would realcleanliness prevail.
“Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed witha dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer than areuseful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be customs whichhave not their foundation in pure wisdom. The apprehension of being
singular from my beloved friends was a strait upon me; and thus I
continued in the use of some things, contrary to my judgment, aboutnine months. Then I thought of getting a hat the natural color of the fur,
but the apprehension of being looked upon as one affecting singularity
felt uneasy to me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in
the time of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to berightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the Lord, I
was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was required of me;
and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural color of the fur.
“In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and more
especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who were fond offollowing the changeable modes of dress, and as some friends, who knew
not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me, I felt my way for a time
shut up in the exercise of the ministry. Some friends were apprehensivethat my wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity: those who
spoke with me in a friendly way, I generally informed in a few words,
that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will.”
When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to thisdegree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks todwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by
withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve
harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, orsuggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says
Stevenson, is the one art in literature: “If I knew how to omit, I should
ask no other knowledge.” And life, when full of disorder and slackness
and vague superfluity, can no more have what we call character thanliterature can have it under similar conditions. So monasteries andcommunities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in theirchangeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as
constituted of actions, the holy-minded person finds that innersmoothness and cleanness which it is torture to him to feel violated atevery turn by the discordancy and brutality of secular existence.
That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme

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must be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further
symptom of saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective “ascetic” isapplied to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I
might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.
1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgustedwith too much ease.
2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, andnon-pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of purity,
shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.
3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to the subject
in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to the Deity whom
he acknowledges.
4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to pessimistic
feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs concerning
expiation. The devotee may feel that he is buying himself free, or
escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now.
5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on
irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as achallenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the subject get
his interior consciousness feeling right again.
6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted bygenuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which
normally pain-giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures.
I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it is
not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be
immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usuallywork together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite
you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all ofthem alike.
A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over
our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to facephysical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should
either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of
it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which
our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world’s
order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of

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their day’s work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any humanbeings could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration isthat even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has sucha fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into
desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or “macerates”
himself today arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many
Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect
do so resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste
feelings in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal
discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance.
Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive —and
instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue thehard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one aspurely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural andeven usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme
manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.
The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop
abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is avery complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; itfollows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it
leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner ofthe performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate
pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own generalmoral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it asecondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there
are who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever. But for others(indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive
happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.
Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger,
stringency, and effort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to produce thesense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range ofindividual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the
mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when hehas struck it in the right proportion FOR HIM. This, he feels, is myproper vocation, this is the OPTIMUM, the law, the life for me to live.
Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I
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 individual machine ororganism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will
run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an

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organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I
heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial
tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest incalm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to makethem feel alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained fromday to day must be 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 toturn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural
self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.
When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas
Carlyle put him into his bath-tub every morning of a freezing Berlin
winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even
without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul’s health to startthe day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we
get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, anagnostic:—“Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on
the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would
have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for aminute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.”
Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we
probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3— the asceticism becomes far
more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose
sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms,
and I take his case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.
“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly made burlap
shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in my shoes. I
would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any covering.”
The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, andgiven it a market-value in the shape of “merit.” But we see the cultivationof hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as aspontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when firstsettled as a Unitarian minister, that—“He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become
incapable of any form of self-indulgence. He took the smallest room inthe house for his study, though he might easily have commanded one

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more light, airy, and in every way more suitable; and chose for his
sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a younger brother. The
furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of an anchorite,and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plain wooden chairs
and table, with matting on the floor. It was without fire, and to cold he
was throughout life extremely sensitive; but he never complained orappeared in any way to be conscious of inconvenience. ‘I recollect,’ says
his brother, ‘after one most severe night, that in the morning hesportively thus alluded to his suffering: “If my bed were my country, I
should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control except over thepart which I occupy, the instant I move, frost takes possession.”’ Insickness only would he change for the time his apartment and accept a
few comforts. The dress too that he habitually adopted was of mostinferior quality; and garments were constantly worn which the world
would call mean, though an almost feminine neatness preserved himfrom the least appearance of neglect.”177
177

Memoirs of W. E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.

Channing’s asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of
hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of theenthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the headof the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no
pessimistic element in his case.
In the next case we have a strongly pessimistic element, so that it belongs
under head 4. John Cennick was Methodism’s first lay preacher. In 1735
he was convicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside—“And at once left off sing-singing, card-playing, and attending theatres.
Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to spend his life indevout retirement. At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleeping on
fallen leaves, and feeding on forest fruits. He fasted long and often, andprayed nine times a day.... Fancying dry bread too great an indulgencefor so great a sinner as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns,
crabs, and grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs.
At length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way
rejoicing.”178
178

L. Tyerman: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.

In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices
made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness ofChristian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally
has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self-

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mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact that
this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory
purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do
penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous anexpression of self-despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to 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 fruit ofhighly optimistic religious feeling.
M. Vianney, the cure of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness
was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his innerneed of sacrifice:—“‘On this path,’ M. Vianney said, “it is only the first step that costs. Thereis in mortification a balm and a savor without which one cannot live
when once one has made their acquaintance. There is but one way inwhich to give one’s self to God— that is, to give one’s self entirely, and tokeep nothing for one’s self. The little that one keeps is only good totrouble one and make one suffer.’ Accordingly he imposed it on himselfthat he should never smell a flower, never drink when parched withthirst, never drive away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant
object, never complain of anything that had to do with his personalcomfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he waskneeling. The Cure of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would nevertake means to protect himself against it. During a very severe winter, oneof his missionaries contrived a false floor to his confessional and placed ametal case of hot water beneath. The trick succeeded, and the Saint wasdeceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion. ‘This year, through all
the cold, my feet have always been warm.’ “179179
A. Mounin: Le Cure d’Ars, vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545,
abridged.

In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure loveof God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it,
then, under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrificeis the main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal
phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, forinstance, is what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply
expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual and his
Maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally
reputed a rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple
than his relation of what happened when his wife came to die?
“When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the Lord,”

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he says, “I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify him. So, two hours
before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took
into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world. With her thus
in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and intoken of my real RESIGNATION, I gently put her out of my hands, andlaid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more.
This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did.
She ... told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And
though before that she called for me continually, she after this neverasked for me any more.”180180

B. Wendell: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.

Father Vianney’s asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of apermanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of
itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all
the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any
one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system
mapped out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals.181
The dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative oneof avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscencefrom our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride,
sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement andpossession. All these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline andausterities are a most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there arealways in these books chapters on self-mortification. But whenever aprocedure is codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if wewish the undiluted ascetic spirit—the passion of self-contempt wreaking
itself on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making asacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its
adoration—we must go to autobiographies, or other individual
documents.
That of the earlier Jesuit, Rodriguez, which has been translated into all
languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern manual, very
well put together, is L’Ascetique Chretienne, by M. J. Ribet, Paris,
Poussielgue, nouvelle edition, 1898.
181

Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished—or rather who
existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him—in thesixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.
“First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affectionate will in all
things to imitate Jesus Christ. If anything agreeable offers itself to yoursenses, yet does not at the same time tend purely to the honor and glory

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of God, renounce it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ,
who all his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of his
Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example, you takesatisfaction in HEARING of things in which the glory of God bears nopart. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your wish to listen. You takepleasure in SEEING objects which do not raise your mind to God: refuse
yourself this pleasure, and turn away your eyes. The same withconversations and all other things. Act similarly, so far as you are able,with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free fromtheir yokes.
“The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural
passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of
every satisfaction and 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 for desolation 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 the worst, so that you may
enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect povertyof spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world.
“Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you willfind in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.
“Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you;“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others hold

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the same;“To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.
“To know all things, learn to know nothing.
“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.
“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.
“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever
experiences you have no taste for.
“To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.
“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.
“To be what you are not, experience what you are not.”These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which is sodear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for inthem Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of theAll.
“When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All.
“For to come to the All you must give up the All.
“And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it, desiring
Nothing.
“In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest. Profoundly
established in the centre of its own nothingness, it can be assailed bynaught that comes from below; and since it no longer desires anything,what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desires alone are thecauses of its woes.”182
182

Saint Jean de la Croix, vie et Oeuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged.

And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all ourheads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic
individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere
Suso’s account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember, was
one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography,
written in the third person, is a classic religious document.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 234 de 400“He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and when thisbegan to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; and he sought bymany devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He wore for along time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him, sothat he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused anundergarment to be made for him; and in the undergarment he had
strips of leather fixed, into which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed
and filed sharp, were driven, and the points of the nails were always
turned towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so
arranged as to go round him and fasten in 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 heused to sleep at night. Now in summer, when it was hot, and he was very
tired and ill from his journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer,
he would sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil,and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way tofretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm does when
run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he werelying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if hewished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one
another.183 Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of hisheart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed bymurderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dying here
under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die. The nights in winter were
never so long, nor was the summer so hot, as to make him leave off thisexercise. On the contrary, he devised something farther —two leathernloops into which he put his hands, and fastened one on each side histhroat, and made the fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been
on fire about him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued
until his hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain,
and then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused a
brazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and he used to
put them on at night, in order that if he should try while asleep to throw
off the hair undergarment, or relieve himself from the gnawings of thevile insects, the tacks might then stick into his body. And so it came topass. If ever he sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, hedrove the sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh
festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore himself
again and made fresh wounds.
183“Insects,” i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediaeval sainthood. We
read of Francis of Assisi’s sheepskin that “often a companion of the saintwould take it to the fire to clean and dispediculate it, doing so, as he said,
because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of pedocchi, but on thecontrary kept them on him (le portava adosso) and held it for an honor andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit. Quoted by P. Sabatier:Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.

“He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At theend of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire of his
temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on
Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God required
this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and threw all thesethings away into a running stream.”
Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, hemade himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. Thishe bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. “The firsttime that he stretched out this cross upon his back his tender frame wasstruck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly against astone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them
all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It madehis back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down
or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touchedhim unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him.”
Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this cross andforcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his selfscourgings—a dreadful story—and then goes on as follows: “At this same
period the Servitor procured an old castaway door, and he used to lie
upon it at night without any bedclothes to make him comfortable, exceptthat he took off his shoes and wrapped a thick cloak round him. He thus
secured for himself a most miserable bed; for hard pea-stalks lay inhumps under his head, the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back,his arms were locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was
round his loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus helay in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would send up
many a sigh to God.
“In winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched out his
feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered them up the blood
became all on fire in his legs, and this was great pain. His feet were full ofsores, his legs dropsical, his knees bloody and seared, his loins covered
with scars from the horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched withintense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these
torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of
the greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine andEternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings hesought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of thedoor, and instead of it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used

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the bench, which was so narrow and short that he could not stretch
himself upon it, as his bed. In this hole, or upon the door, he lay at nightin his usual bonds, for about eight years. It was also his custom, during
the space of twenty-five years, provided he was staying in the convent,never to go after compline in winter into any warm room, or to theconvent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be, unless hewas obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all these years henever took a bath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this he did inorder to mortify his comfort-seeking body. He practiced during a longtime such rigid poverty that he would neither receive nor touch a penny,either with leave or without it. For a considerable time he strove to attainsuch a high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any
part of his body, save only his hands and feet.”184
The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by T. F. Knox,
London, 1865, pp. 56–80, abridged.
184

I spare you the recital of poor Suso’s self-inflicted tortures from thirst. It
is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed him by aseries of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the natural man,and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is distinctly
pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation, whichsome ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable ofactually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the founderof the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that
“Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that she could
cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always havematter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without
suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was devoured
with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the otherfor suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. ‘Nothing but pain,’ shecontinually said in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable.’"185
Bougaud: Hist de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.
185

So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain
persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character threeminor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as
indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience,and poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads ofobedience and poverty I will make a few remarks.
First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with

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this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual todetermine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences
seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary
Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively
to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could
ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite
creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something ofa mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need ofmany persons, and we must do our best to understand it.
On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obediencein a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as
meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one’s
life when one can be better counseled by others than by one’s self.
Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves;
friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely
than we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult andobey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential
regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which
we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience
may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening
and self-surrender and throwing one’s self on higher powers. So saving
are these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they
become ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility we
see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when
we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and thepassion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic
sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it
might have.
It is as a sacrifice, a mode of “mortification,” that obedience is primarily
conceived by Catholic writers, a “sacrifice which man offers to God, andof which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty heimmolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body;by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yetholds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will.
The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, forthe entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God.”186 Accordingly,
in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as therepresentative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedienceis easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all theirreasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.
Lejuene: Introduction a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust
simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.
186

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 238 de 400“One of the great consolations of the monastic life,” says a Jesuit
authority, “is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit nofault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do thisthing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as youobey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed whatorders you received, and if you can furnish a clear account in that
respect, you are absolved entirely. Whether the things you did were
opportune, or whether there were not something better that might havebeen done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of yourSuperior. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it
out of your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome
well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, ‘Oh,
sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one become
almost impeccable!’“Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls obediencean excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this orthat, and you reply, it is because I was so ordered by my Superiors, God
will ask for no other excuse. As a passenger in a good vessel with a goodpilot need give himself no farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace,because the pilot has charge over all, and ‘watches for him’; so a religious
person who lives under the yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if while
sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his Superiors,
who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for him continually. It isno small thing, of a truth, to be able to cross the stormy sea of life on theshoulders and in the arms of another, yet that is just the grace which God
accords to those who live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superiorbears all their burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would
rather spend his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own
responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of charity,
because one is certain of following the will of God in whatever one may
do from obedience, but never certain in the same degree of anythingwhich we may do of our own proper movement.”187
Alfonso Rodriguez, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chretienne, Part iii.,
Treatise v., ch. x.
187

One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends
obedience as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into thefull spirit of its cult.188 They are too long to quote; but Ignatius’s belief isso vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions that,though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to copy
them once more:—
188

Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by Bouix,

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Paris, 1870.

“I ought,” an early biographer reports him as saying, “on entering
religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God, andof him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desire that mySuperior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, and conquer myown mind. I ought to set up no difference between one Superior andanother, ... but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they
fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In thehands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is torequire whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or
not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must put all my fervor in
executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider
myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a massof matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may
please any one; like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it
according to his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be
under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.
“I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place, to be
employed in a particular duty.... I must consider nothing as belonging tome personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets
itself be stripped and never opposes resistance.”189
189

Bartoli–Michel, ii. 13

The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I amoment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope’s authority,
Rodriguez writes:—“Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the Holy
Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which he might findin the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon himself to the sea,
without a mast, without sails, without oars or rudder or any of the things
that are needful for navigation or subsistence, he would obey not onlywith alacrity, but without anxiety or repugnance, and even with a greatinternal satisfaction.”190
190

Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.

With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue
we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in order.
“Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly imbued with theholiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon after he

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came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so tenderly attached
to Mother Angelique, that it would perhaps be better not to speak to her
again. Marie Claire, greedy of obedience, took this inconsiderate word
for an oracle of God, and from that day forward remained for several
years without once speaking to her sister.”191
191

Sainte–Beuve: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.

Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as
one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership isfundamental in man’s nature, this is one more example of the ascetic
paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, themoment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower
cupidities in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on thesubject of obedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our
discussion of poverty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter
virtue. You must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of
his own order, and bases them all on the text, “Blessed are the poor in
spirit.”“If any one of you,” he says, “will know whether or not he is really poor in
spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences andeffects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and thedenudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out
habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to
your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive
is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad ofthese things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof
that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.” Rodriguez
then goes on to describe the practice of poverty in more detail. “The firstpoint is that which Saint Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when hesays, ‘Let no one use anything as if it were his private possession.’ ‘A
religious person,’ he says, ‘ought in respect to all the things that he uses,
to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which feels nogrief and makes no resistance when one strips it again. It is in this waythat you should feel towards your clothes, your books, your cell, andeverything else that you make use of; if ordered to quit them, or toexchange them for others, have no more sorrow than if you were a statue
being uncovered. In this way you will avoid using them as if they wereyour private possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield
possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you feel
repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you view thesethings as if they were your private property.’

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 241 de 400“And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test theirmonks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their poverty andtheir obedience to trial, that by this means they may become acquainted
with the degree of their virtue, and gain a chance to make ever farther
progress in perfection, ... making the one move out of his room when hefinds it comfortable and is attached to it; taking away from another abook of which he is fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment fora worse one. Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property
in all these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty thatsurrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be thrown
down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to treat theircompanions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse, desired a certain knife,
and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for his private use, but for
employment in the infirmary of which he had charge. Whereupon Saint
Dorotheus answered him: ‘Ha! Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so
much! Will you be the slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ! Do you
not blush with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I
will not let you touch it.’ Which reproach and refusal had such an effectupon the holy disciple that since 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, thingspurely necessary, and nothing more. It is not allowed among us that ourcells should be ornamented with pictures or aught else, neither
armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort of cabinet or bureau of any
elegance. Neither is it allowed us to keep anything to eat, either forourselves or for those who may come to visit us. We must ask permission
to go to the refectory even for a glass of water; and finally we may notkeep a book in which we can write a line, or which we may take awaywith us. One cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty.
But this poverty is at the same time a great repose and a great perfection.
For it would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to own
supernuous possessions, that these things would greatly occupy his
mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to increase them; sothat in not permitting us at all to own them, all these inconveniences are
remedied. Among the various good reasons why the company forbids
secular persons to enter our cells, the principal one is that thus we may
the easier be kept in poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were toreceive people of the world into our rooms, we should not have thestrength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at least
wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a better opinionof our scholarship.”192

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192

Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii, Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.

Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unitewith Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest
individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds
for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie
closest to common human nature.
The opposition between the men who HAVE and the men who ARE is
immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old— fashioned sense of theman who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous andreveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence withthese possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, thecourage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain
huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever
inaccessible, and if in life’s vicissitudes he should become destitutethrough their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was
all the freer to work out his salvation. “Wer nur selbst was hatte,” says
Lessing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, “mein Gott, mein Gott, ichhabe nichts!” This ideal of the well-born man without possessions wasembodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted
as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically,
the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the
man absolutely unincumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, andwilling to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, heis the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The
laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested
in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage,
he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and fromhis simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-ownerseems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels,“wading in straw and rubbish to his knees.” The claims which THINGS
make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a draganchor on our progress towards the empyrean.
“Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seems to carry this voicewith it—‘Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have noparty or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes back, ‘Lord Jesus, help
me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of
NESTLING—in pity—in tender pity—put a THORN in my nest to preventme from it.’"193
193
R. Philip: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p.
366.

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The loathing of “capital” with which our laboring classes today are
growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this soundsentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist
poet writes:—“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have,“Shall you become beautiful;“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;“Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy,
but rather by discarding them . . .
“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh
furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind;“Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use andhandle is an impediment.”194
194

Edward Carpenter: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.

In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on
doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritualexcitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those whohave no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth andcowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When abrother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: “Father, it would be a great
consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general
should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have yourconsent,” Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland,
and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on
the field of battle. “So care not,” he said, “for owning books andknowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.” And when someweeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter,
Francis said: “After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary;
and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a grandprelate, and will say to your brother: “Hand me my breviary.”. . . And
thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: A man possesses oflearning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is agood preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree
is known by its fruits.”195
195

Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. Sabatier, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.

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But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing andbeing, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still,something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience,the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So longas any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential
guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis
is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine
obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after afashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical
experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, ora morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals tothe doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blankabstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides
supplies of it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled inin case of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his
own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which thechronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on
God, but IF he should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one
knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reformdrunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one
perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate NEVER being
drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to giveit up definitely, “for good and all” and forever, signifies one of thoseradical alterations of character which came under our notice in thelectures on conversion. In it the inner man rolls over into an entirely
different position of equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy fromthis time on, and the turning-point and hinge of all such operations
seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses
and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this everrecurring note: Fling yourself upon God’s providence without making
any reserve whatever—take no thought for the morrow—sell all you haveand give it to the poor—only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless
will the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read apage from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, muchpersecuted in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because shewould not take her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her
father’s house—“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou
have me to do? And being one night in a most profound penitence, shesaid from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What must I do to pleasethee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear

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thee.’ At that instant she heard, as if another had spoke within her:Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures.
Deny thyself. She was quite astonished, not understanding this language,
and mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill
them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor without
loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she said, ‘By thy
Grace I will do it, Lord!’ But when she would perform her promise, sheknew not where to begin. Having thought on the religious inmonasteries, that they forsook all earthly things by being shut up in acloister, and the love of themselves by subjecting of their wills, she asked
leave of her father to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but
he would not permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave.
This seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the cloister
the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found afterwards that
he knew the cloisters better than she, for after he had forbidden her, andtold her he would never permit her to be a religious, nor give her any
money to enter there, yet she went to Father Laurens, the Director, andoffered to serve in the monastery and work hard for her bread, and becontent with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said:
That cannot be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without
money; you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here.
“This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to thecloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone till it should
please God to show her what she ought to do and whither to go. She
asked always earnestly, ‘When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God?’ And
she thought he still answered her, When thou shalt no longer possess
anything, and shalt die to thyself. ‘And where shall I do that, Lord?’ Heanswered her, In the desert. This made so strong an impression on hersoul that she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,
she was afraid of 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 please thee. It is for thee that I do it. I
will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will take that of a hermit that I may
pass unknown.’ Having then secretly made ready this habit, while herparents thought to have married her, her father having promised her to arich French merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening,
having cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out ofher chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one penny tobuy bread for that day. And it being said to her in going out, Where is thy
faith? in a penny? she threw it away, begging pardon of God for her fault,
and saying, ‘No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.’ Thus
she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares andgood things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no

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longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God, withthis only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged to return
home; for she felt already more content in this poverty than she haddone for all her life in all the delights of the world.”196
An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270,
abridged.
196

Another example from Starbuck’s MS. collection:—“At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his
experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ
among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would.
Then he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four
hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would and thus the Lord
saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made a realconsecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord, but had
always tried to serve the Lord in my way. Now the Lord asked me if I
would serve him in HIS way, and go out alone and penniless if he soordered. The question was pressed home, and I must decide: To forsake
all and have him, or have all and lose him! I soon decided to take him;
and the blessed assurance came, that he had taken me for his own, andmy joy was full. I returned home from the meeting with feelings as
simple as a child. I thought all would be glad to hear of the joy of theLord that possessed me, and so I began to tell the simple story. But to mygreat surprise, the pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches)
opposed the experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told themembers of his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon foundthat my foes were those of my own household.”
The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual
obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the
new equilibrium completely.
Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are in the cult ofpoverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity:“Naked came I into the world,” etc.— whoever first said that, possessed
this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot
save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of theequality before God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems ingeneral to have been more widespread in Mohammedan than inChristian lands) tends to nullify man’s usual acquisitiveness. Those whohave it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring,as I said in a former lecture, to grovel on the common level before theface of God. It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes

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so close to it in practice. It is HUMANITY, rather, refusing to enjoy
anything that others do not share. A profound moralist, writing ofChrist’s saying, “Sell all thou hast and follow me,” proceeds as follows:—“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as aresult not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a very likely
proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is probably
true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ
loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious.
You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These
truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ’s love formankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every
generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined
intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the vortex by
their interest in helping mankind, and by the understanding that comesfrom actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is likedust in the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly.
Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question atall, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which
we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others.”197
J. J. Chapman, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900,
abridged.
197

But in all these matters of sentiment one must have “been there” one’s
self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain tounderstanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German
towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand thepeace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious
nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as
simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth,
how much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments
which we have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or
divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of
excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what wasso enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Eachemotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no otherlogic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly
lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in asupreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation; as asupreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust
may render common safeguards odious, and in certain glows of generous
excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one’s hold of
personal possessions. The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside
the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who

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feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I needhardly say, is what I have striven to do in these last two descriptive
lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently forour present needs.

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Lectures XIV and XVThe Value of Saintliness
IT MUST BE TESTED BY THE HUMAN VALUE OF ITS FRUITS— THE REALITY OF
THE GOD MUST, HOWEVER, ALSO BE JUDGED— “UNFIT” RELIGIONS GETELIMINATED BY “EXPERIENCE”— EMPIRICISM IS NOT SKEPTICISM—
INDIVIDUAL AND TRIBAL RELIGION— LONELINESS OF RELIGIOUS
ORIGINATORS— CORRUPTION FOLLOWS SUCCESS— EXTRAVAGANCES—EXCESSIVE DEVOUTNESS, AS FANATICISM— AS THEOPATHIC ABSORPTION—EXCESSIVE PURITY— EXCESSIVE CHARITY— THE PERFECT MAN IS ADAPTEDONLY TO THE PERFECT ENVIRONMENT— SAINTS ARE LEAVENS— EXCESSES OF
ASCETICISM— ASCETICISM SYMBOLICALLY STANDS FOR THE HEROIC LIFE—MILITARISM AND VOLUNTARY POVERTY AS POSSIBLE EQUIVALENTS— PROS
AND CONS OF THE SAINTLY CHARACTER— SAINTS VERSUS “STRONG” MEN—
THEIR SOCIAL FUNCTION MUST BE CONSIDERED— ABSTRACTLY THE SAINT IS
THE HIGHEST TYPE, BUT IN THE PRESENT ENVIRONMENT IT MAY FAIL, SO WE
MAKE OURSELVES SAINTS AT OUR PERIL— THE QUESTION OF THEOLOGICAL
TRUTH.

We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena
which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics ofmen who are devout. Today we have to change our attitude from that ofdescription to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits inquestion can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds tohuman life. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a “Critique of pureSaintliness” must be our theme.
If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject fromabove like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man andman’s perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have aneasy time of it. Man’s perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; andhis end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued byhim along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively;
and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by
the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions
and definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit ofreligious experience we might hear of would thus be given almost
mathematically into our hands.
If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding
ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we
did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you
remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; andit must be {321} confessed that after that act of renunciation we can

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never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. WE cannot divide man
sharply into an animal and a rational part. WE cannot distinguishnatural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which arefavors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. WE
have merely to collect things together without any special a priori
theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as tothe value of this and that experience—judgments in which our generalphilosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our
only guides—decide that ON THE WHOLE one type of religion isapproved by its fruits, and another type condemned. “On the whole”—I
fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear toyour practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!
I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of
you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.
Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results ofsuch a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecationof such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist
principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be inplace.
Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of areligion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How CAN you measure
their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is
supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct
instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable
fruit of his religion—it would be unreasonable only in case he did notexist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or
animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all thewhile a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would bemaking a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be
non-existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as
if you were a scholastic philosopher.
To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain typesof deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs canbe said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, andcommon sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of
us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruitof an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secularalteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as theirinsight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.

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After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves
unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly
satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level,
and can no longer be believed in. Today a deity who should require
bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken
seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his
favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruelappetites were of themselves credentials.
They positively recommended him to men’s imaginations in ages whensuch coarse signs of power were respected and no others could beunderstood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits wererelished.
Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but theoriginal factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been
psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who
founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them
personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted
their hopes, and controlled their will—or else they required him as asafeguard against the demon and a curber of other people’s crimes. In
any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them toyield.
So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they
conflicted with indispensable human 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. It was in this way that the Greek and Romangods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that weourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies;
Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal
Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judgeof us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants.
When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity
implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.
Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations oftheological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, forexample, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers thata dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to havebeen required by their imagination. They called the cruelty “retributive
justice,” and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not“sovereign” enough. But today we abhor the very notion of eternal

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suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation anddamnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could
persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a “delightfulconviction,” as of a doctrine “exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,”appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.
Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believedin by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shallsee examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which makes us
rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the moderntranscendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if
addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking
delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling
and mummery, and finding his “glory” incomprehensibly enhanced
thereby:—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness ofpantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt
theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.
Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nailhis theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they weredestined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.
So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be ourpretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of
theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate thefruits of other men’s religion, yet this very standard has been begotten
out of the drift of common life. It is the voice of human experience within
us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway
along which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in thelargest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged,
were inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, yousee, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.
If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is
not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods
we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands
on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one
another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness bycommon sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the
religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it
commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far
forth will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all
without reference to anything but human working principles. It is but theelimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest,
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without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the longrun established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have
APPROVED themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs
which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly,or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the firstreligions were supplanted.
The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So thereproach of vagueness and subjectivity and “on the whole“ness, which
can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as weare forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man
in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed
its prevalence to “apodictic certainty.” In a later lecture I will ask
whether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning toa religion that already empirically prevails.
One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of anempirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic
skepticism.
Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments andneeds, it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of the world canbe beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be
ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which theirconclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption fromthis universal liability. But to admit one’s liability to correction is one
thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of willfully
playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He who
acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance{326} for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position
for gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or isdogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming,
as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, whatcommand over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead ofabsolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her
conclusions? If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as muchas men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to havewithin their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had,
if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for thisconfession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious
to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of thequestion. They will claim it even where the facts most patently

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pronounce its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all theinsights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The
wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of themorrow, and right at any moment, only “up to date” and “on the whole.”
When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open
ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions.
“Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.”
The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore
entirely unescapable, whatever may be one’s own desire to attain theirreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question
awaits us, the question whether men’s opinions ought to be expected to
be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the samereligion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the sameleadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, forproud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded anddespairing, exactly the same religious incentives are required? Or are
different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different
types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion of
consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror
and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more andmore suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible
judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which his own
needs are best met? He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to thestruggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve
most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good andprove most nourishing to HIM.
I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound.
Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair ofthe very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until
we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelievethat we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely
incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as thosewith which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of aperverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder anddoubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess
it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving
always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope tobring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of theselectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably
against the empiricism which I profess.
I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method,

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but seek immediately to use it upon the facts.
In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very
important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual
personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal
product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second
lecture. The word “religion,” as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey ofhistory shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, andproduce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enoughto “organize” themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions withcorporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of
dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originallyinnocent thing; so that when we hear the word “religion” nowadays, wethink inevitably of some “church” or other; and to some persons theword “church” suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness
and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they
glory in saying that they are “down” on religion altogether. Even we who
belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from thegeneral condemnation.
But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us
at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives
itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of
this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those
who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it
has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness,often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus,
Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.
George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at thispoint than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of
his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.
“I fasted much,” Fox says, “walked abroad in solitary places many days,
and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places
until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully
about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the firstworkings of the Lord in me.
“During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion withany, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company,
taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled
up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined myheart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying
sometimes more, sometimes less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a

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place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tenderyoung man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which
reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and getting
knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, torely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate
preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw
there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And
when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had
nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I
heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak
to thy condition.’ When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the
Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to
my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor
professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of all carnal talkand talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions. When I was in thedeep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome;my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often
thought I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ
opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome
him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life,
grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I
had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as
nothing, for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. I saw
professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition
which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid
of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was castupon him alone.”198
198

George Fox: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59–61, abridged.

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be aheterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely
madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any
others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove
contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself anorthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of
inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand
exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spiteof whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on
as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious
spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer
days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting
new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use
them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this politic

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sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman
ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples
enough for our instruction.
The plain fact is that men’s minds are built, as has been often said, inwater-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have manyother things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements andassociations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged toreligion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to
religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, thespirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in theirturn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit ofdogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form ofan absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit ingeneral is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you
never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology
which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life
which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, thehunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers andducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacringof Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia,
that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatredof the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, thanthey express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is themask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in
spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed
his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested,
and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anythingwhatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in theperformance.
Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we makepiety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to checkour natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them withhypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and withthe pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gustis over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious
natural man would not have shown.
For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge,
religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that overzealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit
her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will preface it bya preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows.

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Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably
produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary,
some of you have asked, as one example after another came before us, tobe quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for theextremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if ourhumility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This
practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire inthis field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious
phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of
the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in
the history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great
schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, atthe cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends.
We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, witha kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but
we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So ofmany of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a humannature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink fromadvising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves
for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is lessdependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in
different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able tocommend.
The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable
to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not
blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as
one who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in
one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no
indulgence need be asked.
We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue.
Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want ofbalance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only
other faculties equally strong be there to cooperate with it in action.
Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a strong
intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life steady. If
the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong—we only get
the stronger all-round character. In the life of saints, technically socalled, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of
extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency ofintellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever otherinterests are too few and the intellect too narrow. We find thisexemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn—devout love of God,

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purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over thesevirtues in succession.
First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices iscalled Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of
ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.
When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feelingthat a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, oneof the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To
adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one
great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by whichsavage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited theirfaithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity.
Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt topraise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful
notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one
might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within
the tribe.199 The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons arefruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha200 and
Mohammed201 and their companions and many Christian saints are
incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to behonorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touchingexpression of man’s misguided propensity to praise.
Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to
Christ’s wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ’s childhood; Saint
Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc. The Shi-ite
Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet’s son-inlaw, instead of Abu-bekr,
his brother-inlaw. Vambery describes a dervish whom he met in Persia,“who had solemnly vowed, thirty years before, that he would never employ
his organs of speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of
his favorite, Ali, Ali. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was themost devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand years. In
his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no other word
but ‘Ali!’ ever passed his lips. If he wanted food or drink or anything else,he expressed his wants still by repeating ‘Ali!’ Begging or buying at thebazaar, it was always ‘Ali!’ Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on
his monotonous ‘Ali!’ Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous
proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up anddown the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into the air, andshriek our, all the while, at the top of his voice, ‘Ali!’ This dervish was
venerated by everybody as a saint, and received everywhere with thegreatest distinction.” Arminius Vambery, his Life and Adventures, written
by Himself, London, 1889, p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of
Hussein, Ali’s son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with criesof his name and Ali’s.
199

Compare H. C. Warren: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U.S.,
1898, passim.
200

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201
Compare J. L. Merrick: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as
contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston. 1850,
passim.

An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for thedeity’s honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than bysensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be
resented, the deity’s enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly
narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing
preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres
instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon theGod. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, andchurches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper toa glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices
associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They areunquestionably its besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper,and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, andthat is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah’s enemies a David knows nodifference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among
Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no bettermethod of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks;
Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tortures withwhich the Anabaptist leaders were put to death; and a Cromwell praises
the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for “execution.”
Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership notquite unnatural. So, when “freethinkers” tell us that religion andfanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of thecharge.
Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion’s
account, so long as the religious person’s intellect is on the stage which
the despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented
as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.
Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful andaggressive. In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and theintellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God tothe exclusion 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 kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession ofsuch a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no
English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as atheopathic condition.
The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 261 de 400“To be loved here upon the earth,” her recent biographer exclaims: “to be
loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity,with devotion—what enchantment! But to be loved by God! and loved byhim to distraction [aime jusqu’a la folie]!—Margaret melted away withlove at the thought of such a thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former
times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my
God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for
their reception.”202
Bougaud: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p.
145.
202

The most signal proofs of God’s love which Margaret Mary received were
her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most signal inturn of these were the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart, “surroundedwith rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal. The
wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it. There
was a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart, and a cross aboveit.” At the same time Christ’s voice told her that, unable longer to containthe flames of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle tospread the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart,placed it inside of his own and inflamed 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 disciple of my Sacred Heart.”
In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the “great design”
which he wished to establish through her instrumentality. “I ask of theeto bring it about that every first Friday after the week of holy Sacramentshall be made into a special holy day for honoring my Heart by a generalcommunion and by services intended to make honorable amends for theindignities which it has received. And I promise thee that my Heart will
dilate to shed with abundance the influences of its love upon all those
who pay to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do thesame.”“This revelation,” says Mgr. Bougaud, “is unquestionably the mostimportant of all the revelations which have illumined the Church sincethat of the Incarnation and of the Lord’s Supper.... After the Eucharist,
the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.”203 Well, what were its goodfruits for Margaret Mary’s life? Apparently little else but sufferings andprayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became
increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ’s love—“which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable ofattending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary, but without

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much success, although her kindness, zeal, and devotion were withoutbounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a heroism that our readers
would not bear the recital of them. They tried her in the kitchen, butwere forced to give it up as hopeless—everything dropped out of her
hands. The admirable humility with which she made amends for her
clumsiness could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the order andregularity which must always reign in a community. They put her in theschool, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her
clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but where she was too
absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary attention. Poor dear sister, evenless after her visions than before them was she a denizen of earth, andthey had to leave her in her heaven.”204
Bougaud: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
365, 241.
203

204

Bougaud: Op. cit., p. 267.

Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual
outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant andmodern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of
saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic
saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth
century, whose “Revelations,” a well-known mystical authority, consist
mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person.
Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of themost absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as anindividual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.205 In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and thetwentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield
almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior
intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, ourown imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different
temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out
personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as
we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent toeverything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual
favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best
professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a
conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.
205
Examples: “Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of God,to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth,
when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and tofind comfort Himself in these odors. After having gently breathed them in,
He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with

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what He had done: ‘see the new present which my betrothed has given
Me!’“One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words ‘Sanctus,
Sanctus, Sanctus.’ The son of God leaning towards her like a sweet lover,and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus:‘In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive with this kiss all the
sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it be to thee asufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.’ And thenext following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold
the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in
His arms as if He were proud of her and presents her to God the Father,in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And theFather took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only son, that,
as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost
gave her also, the sanctity attributed to each by His own Sanctus—andthus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing ofSanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love.”
Revelations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.
Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many
respects, of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect ofthe practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology,
possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics andbusiness, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary style. She was
tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious
ideals. Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking,that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confessthat my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality ofsoul should have found such poor employment.
In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor ofsuperficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr.
Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls“shrews” and “nonshrews” respectively.206 The shrew-type is defined as
possessing an “active unimpassioned temperament.” In other words,
shrews are the “motors,” rather than the “sensories,”207 and theirexpressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear
to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may
sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of her
style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she receive unheardof personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must
immediately write about them and exploiter them professionally, anduse her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged. Her
voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite

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have it, but of her “faults” and “imperfections” in the plural; herstereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with“confusion” at each new manifestation of God’s singular partiality for a
person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountly feelingnature would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent. She had somepublic instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the
church’s triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems
to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so
without irreverence— between the devotee and the deity; and apart from
helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her
example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or signof any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far fromrebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
Furneaux Jordan: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later
editions change the nomenclature.
206

207
As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.
Baldwin’s little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.

We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintshipbased on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep apedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on theother can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such
insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence.
When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of hishand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals
by the Almighty, he stretched the soul’s imagination and saved theology
from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions
which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic
characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God
must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters,
brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitivenessand narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require
above all things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are
too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas youraggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping
disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his
subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smallerworld in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it
altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons,

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dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as
one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarianorganizations, both churches pursuing the same object—to unify thelife,208 and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely
sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another,as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things.
Amusements must go first, then conventional “society,” then business,then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day
into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne.
The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations ofcomplication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after
another, to save the purity of inner tone.209 “Is it not better,” a young
sister asks her Superior, “that I should not speak at all during the hour ofrecreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sinof which I might not be conscious?”210 If the life remains a social one atall, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule.
Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free
once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain
sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost
inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, andhabits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that somepersons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of
mental rest.
On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies dusentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification themainspring of the whole religious life. But ALL strongly ideal interests,
religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything
to themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier’s pages that this formal
condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might incomparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trustthat the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty ofmaterial content which is characteristic and which is more important by far
than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M.
Murisier’s book highly instructive.
208

209
Example: “At the first beginning of the Servitor’s [Suso’s] interior life,
after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out forhimself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a
spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and thechoir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete
security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outergate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it wasnecessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outsidethese circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild
animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore
in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” The Life of the Blessed Henry
Suso, by Himself, translated by Knox, London, 1865, p. 168.

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210
Vie des premieres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congregation de St.
Dominique, a Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.

We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of SaintLouis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification.
I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of theexternal and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire.
At the age of ten, his biographer says:—“The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God his own
virginity—that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents.
Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous ofheart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity.
Mary accepted the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for himfrom God, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace of never feeling
during his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtueof purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded evento Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt
always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity
are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from his earliest childhood
had shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or
unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort whatever between personsof opposite sex. But this made it all the more surprising that he should,
especially since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such anumber of expedients for protecting against even the shadow of danger
the virginity which he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if
any one could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions,prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In
the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the mostinsignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril, just as in themortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He,
who by an extraordinary protection of God’s grace was never tempted,
measured all his steps as if he were threatened on every side byparticular dangers. Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when
walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid allbusiness with females even more scrupulously than before, but herenounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation withthem, although his father tried to make him take part; and hecommenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities ofevery kind.”211
Meschler’s Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by
Lebrequier, 1891, p. 40.
211

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At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that “if by chance hismother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he neverallowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened
door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his
own mother, whether at table or in conversation; and when the rest of
the company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring.... Several
great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight;
and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly andreadily to accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all
visits to ladies.” 212
212

Ibid., p. 71.

When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order,213 against
his father’s passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; andwhen a year later the father died, he took the loss as a “particularattention” to himself on God’s part, and wrote letters of stilted good
advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon
became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his
brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before
replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by thethought of his family, to which, “I never think of them except when
praying for them,” was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his
hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it.
On the contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was mostdisgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from thehands of his companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried
to turn every conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained
silent. He systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Beingordered one day to bring a book from the rector’s seat in the refectory, he
had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten
bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed theplace. One day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his
companions, he reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty.
He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue; and his
greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily
penances. He sought after false accusations and unjust reprimands asopportunities of humility; and such was his obedience that, when aroom-mate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel
free to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of thesuperior, who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted hisorders.
213
In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom fromsin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to store up, “of

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merit in God’s eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all Eternity.” Loc.
cit., p. 62.

I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis’s saintship. He diedin 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as thepatron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted
to him in a certain church in Rome “is embosomed in flowers, arranged
with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its foot, written
to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to ‘Paradiso.’ They
are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who must findsingular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now with a green
ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of love,”etc.214214

Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in Hare’s Walks in Rome, 1900, i. 55.

I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck’s book, p. 388,
another case of purification by elimination. It runs as follows:—“The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent
occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often they will havenothing to do with churches, which they regard as worldly; they become
hypercritical towards others; they grow careless of their social, political,
and financial obligations. As an instance of this type may be mentioned awoman of sixty-eight of whom the writer made a special study. She had
been a member of one of the most active and progressive churches in abusy part of a large city. Her pastor described her as having reached thecensorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy withthe church; her connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance
at prayer-meeting, at which her only message was that of reproof andcondemnation of the others for living on a low plane. At last she
withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found her living
alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap boarding-house quite
out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in theenjoyment of her own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied inwriting booklets on sanctification—page after page of dreamy rhapsody.
She proved to be one of a small group of persons who claim that entire
salvation involves three steps instead of two; not only must there beconversion and sanctification, but a third, which they call ‘crucifixion’ or‘perfect redemption,’ and which seems to bear the same relation to
sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the Spirit
had said to her, ‘Stop going to church. Stop going to holiness meetings.
Go to your own room and I will teach you.’ She professes to care nothing
for colleges, or preachers, or churches, but only cares to listen to what
God says to her. Her description of her experience seemed entirely

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consistent; she is happy and contented, and her life is entirely
satisfactory to herself. While listening to her own story, one was tempted
to forget that it was from the life of a person who could not live by it inconjunction with her fellows.”
Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely
on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased
with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid little
heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil whilst
saving one’s own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme. Today, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, inconsequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of
which I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to
be of some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine
service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, theXaviers, Brebeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way
for the world’s welfare; so their lives today inspire us. But when theintellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin’s head, andcherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result,notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity,
we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is betterthat a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its
efforts to remain unspotted.
Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next
come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has toface the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites andbeggars. “Resist not evil,” “Love your enemies,” these are saintly maximsof which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are
the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper
range of truth?
No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexityof the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts andideals are interwoven.
Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects
for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct
should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, andreception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if
it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient.
Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself tothe actor’s animus alone, apart from the other elements of theperformance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by

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those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity,
and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing withhuman crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give theuniverse into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by nonresistance cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conduct will appear
perfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environmentis it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admittingthat saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in anenvironment where all were saints already; but by adding that in anenvironment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints,
it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empiricalcommon sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world 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 taken advantage of them.
The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence ofthe failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional
government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, andwhen one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the othercheek also.
You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of
Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, inshooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds
and swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these
hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were
there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards
whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs inpity for the wronger’s person; no one ready to be duped many a timerather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals
passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence;
the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The
tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be bornsomehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from theperspective of our imaginations.
The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of humantenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved
themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past,

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in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to BE
worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by
the challenge of their expectation.
From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we findin all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to bea genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue
which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors,auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in
human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably
hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, inways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised thespectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that hissalvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak ofhuman crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We
know not the complexities of personality, the smouldering emotionalfires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of thesubliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with theidea 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 itself today in all sorts ofhumane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion
to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with
their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of
this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like thesingle drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of theadvancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and areforerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the
midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnatorsof the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which
but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite asmean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One firekindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which theyshow, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.
Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness andbe the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of
his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever tomove upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume
the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try nonresistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods
will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more
powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys
enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what

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we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns
enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly
methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints find in theelevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority andimpressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men ofshallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly
prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely
transcended is the saint’s magic gift to mankind.215 Not only does his
vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose andbarrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill
adapted, he makes some converts, and the environment gets better forhis ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter ofthe earthly into a more heavenly order.
The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of nonresistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example, in the New
Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a charmed life bydint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever dares actually to strike
him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous virtue. “One of
our chiefs, full of the Christ-kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a
message to an inland chief, that he and four attendants would come on
Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came backsternly forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian thatapproached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving message,
telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil,
and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Sonof God came into the world and died in order to bless and save his
enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more:‘If you come, you will be killed.’ On Sabbath morn the Christian chief andhis four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief, who
implored and threatened them once more. But the former said:—
215“‘We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you
about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us today.’“As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began to be
thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one dexterous
warriors; and others they literally received with their bare hands, andturned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen, apparently
thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons ofwar, and not even flinging back their own spears which they had caught,
after having thrown what the old chief called ‘a shower of spears,’desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian chief called out, as he and his
companions drew up in the midst of them on the village public ground:—“‘Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once wewould have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come,not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts.

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He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and tohear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, theonly living God.’“The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these
Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the firsttime to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief
and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not
an island in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where
similar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited.” John
G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second
part, London, 1890, p. 243.
In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many
contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of theirimpracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental
conditions, analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom ofheaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness andare slow leavens of a better order.
The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready toconsider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess.
The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I havealready said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards
corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara216
appear to us today rather in the light of tragic mountebanks than of sane
men inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask,
what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It keeps
the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipatedfrom the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance andprivation, as alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions
and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement.
As the Bhagavad–Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions
who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to thefruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in aformer lecture Saint Augustine’s antinomian saying: If you only love God
enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. “He needs no
devotional practices,” is one of Ramakrishna’s maxims, “whose heart ismoved to tears at the mere mention of the name of {354} Hari.”217 And
the Buddha, in pointing out what he called “the middle way” to his
disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes, excessive
mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure.
The only perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which makes one
thing as indifferent to us as another, and thus leads to rest, to peace, andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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to Nirvana.218
Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (Frenchtranslation, p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping morethan an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the onethat had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees oron his feet. The little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in asitting posture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall.
Even had he wished to lie down, it would have been impossible, because
his cell was only four feet and a half long. In the course of all these years
he never raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s
strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth,with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible, andover it a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off
the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his cell. Thenhe closed them and resumed the mantle—his way, as he told us, of
warming himself, and making his body feel a better temperature. It was afrequent thing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I
expressed my surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had
acquired the habit. One of his companions has assured me that he hasgone sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; andhis mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he had
passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of themonks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised hiseyes, and only found his way about by following the others. He showed thissame modesty on public highways. He spent many years without everlaying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at the age he hadreached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He
was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuatedthat it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees.
With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he wasquestioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all hiswords an irresistible charm.”
216

217

F. Max Muller: Ramakrishna, his Life and sayings, 1899, p. 180.

218

Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey, London, 1882, p. 127.

We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, anddirectors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown atendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholicteachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for
efficiency in God’s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification.
The general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestantcircles today makes mortification for mortification’s sake repugnant tous. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that
God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his
honor is abhorrent. In consequence of all these motives you probably aredisposed, unless some special utility can be shown in some individual’s
discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological.

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Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,
distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and theuselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought
to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning asceticism
stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.
It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that
there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to beignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by anappeal to the soul’s heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away
by suffering. As against this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the onceborn philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let
a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the sufferingof any great amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as
it exists in the wider universe outside his private experience, and he will
be quit of it altogether, and can sail through life happily on a healthyminded basis. But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precarious
this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but for the individual; andleaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and unprovided for in his
philosophy.
No such attempt can be a GENERAL solution of the problem; and tominds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such
optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a realdeliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escapeby. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan.
The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal
application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome
in higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If
one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in thisworld’s history fairly into his mind—freezing, drowning entombment
alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases—he can withdifficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity
without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside thegame, that he may lack the great initiation.
Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes theinitiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something
we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste will purge usof our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it
that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental
optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious
solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be ananswer to the sphinx’s riddle.

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In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct forreality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially atheatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery ishidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any
direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise
may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer itheroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.
Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life, and he isable “to fling it away like a flower” as caring nothing for it, we account
him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person
feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his
shortcomings.
The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he
who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently andexcellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is thetruth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of thecross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital
meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries
into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it
wander, asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with theprofounder way of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism ismere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practicalcourse of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me,
not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us
today turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which thefruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful.
The older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or
terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own
perfection.219 But is it not possible for us to discard most of these older
forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism which
inspired them?
“The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as
regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.” Ramakrishna his Lifeand Sayings, 1899, p. 172.
219

Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, whichconstitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat
for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic andfacetious way in which most children are brought up today—so different
from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelicalcircles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a

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certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points ofapplication for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics,
militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as theremedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for theenergy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as
contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects
them.220 War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them fromtreating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts,
depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that thewhole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger andwet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent
operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its
usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of thesecustomary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems
cast upon a higher plane of power.
“When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun,” I read inan American religious paper, “you may be sure that it is running away fromChrist.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight ofmany of our churches.
220

The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary
human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; sothe most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field,
is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness toward his precious
person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of
insensibility.
But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of theascetic saint, we find a world-wide difference in all their spiritual
concomitants.
“‘Live and let live,’” writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, “is no device
for an army. Contempt for one’s own comrades, for the troops of theenemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one’s own person, are what
war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage,
too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality andhuman reasonableness.
If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly
the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness
in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of thesoldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with

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him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to getrid. For him victory, success, must be EVERYTHING. The most barbaric
tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for war’s uses they are
incommensurably good.”221
C. V. B. K.: Friedens-und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon:
Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.
221

These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of thesoldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction;
and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.
Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all
those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things,
that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains that war is a school ofstrenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct,
is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely
ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality andcrime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at thethought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of themechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in thesocial realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will
speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible
with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I
have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of
the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral
equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted
poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weakerpeoples?
Poverty indeed IS the strenuous life—without brass bands or uniforms or
hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees
the way in which wealth— getting enters as an ideal into the very boneand marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of thebelief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “thetransformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which ourtime stands most in need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty
need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to bepoor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify andsave his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant withthe money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in
ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our

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way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to flingaway our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, inshort, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes
are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness andhardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, andquake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account anddoomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so
unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise toideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But
wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere thedesire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of
cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands ofconjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man
for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of thestrength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we weredevoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear
to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, ourhopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our
faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to thespirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause
would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion
as we personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain thatthe prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst
moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits ofreligion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief
review and pass to my more general conclusions.
Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands
approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type ofcharacter. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be
temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. But thewhole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, forit seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychologicalcentre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to thinkthat the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance fromtheir relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields
him a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soulwith which no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is

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exemplary; he abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as well as
outward, for his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles
unsuspected faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness wherecommon men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of innerexcitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls
unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; andwhen we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending
his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person.
Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save himfrom the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinarysocial intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for acompanion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity—these are
splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in thecompletest possible measure.
But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible.
When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy
excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery,scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By thevery intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior
intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable anddamnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation.
We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, butusing our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment,
and estimating his total function.
Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it
is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a viceto the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably
absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must notconfound the essentials of saintliness, which are those general passionsof which I have spoken, with its accidents, which are the special
determinations of these passions at any historical moment. In these
determinations the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of
their tribe. Taking refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribein the middle ages, as bearing a hand in the world’s work is today. SaintFrancis or Saint Bernard, were they living today, would undoubtedly beleading consecrated lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly theywould not lead them in retirement. Our animosity to special historic
manifestations must not lead us to give away the saintly impulses in theiressential nature to the tender mercies of inimical critics.
The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is
Nietzsche. He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these

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embodied in the predaceous military character, altogether to theadvantage of the latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has
something about him which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise,so it will be worth while to consider the contrast in question more fully.
Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of thebiologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying thechief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant, themasterful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our inferiority andgrovel before him. We quail under his glance, and are at the same time
proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive
hero-worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In theendless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for thetribe’s survival. If there were any tribes who owned no leaders, they canhave left no issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had good
consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those wholooked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom
from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward
performances.
Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints
are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn-yard poultry. There
are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity.
Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience isfull of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom
nor his outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether
different faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with
contempt.
In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reenacted inhuman nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The
sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more
admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers
the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turnsubjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the sainthas always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind issusceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of
influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue theirfeud in literature as much as in real life.
For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness andslavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate par
excellence, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put thehuman type in danger.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 282 de 400“The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not thestronger, are the strong’s undoing. It is not FEAR of our fellow-man,
which we should wish to see diminished; for fear rouses those who arestrong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves the hardearned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreaded by us
more than any other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust, notfear, but rather the great pity—disgust and pity for our human fellows....
The MORBID are our greatest peril—not the ‘bad’ men, not the predatory
beings. Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken— they it is, theWEAKEST who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning ourtrust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of them is asigh—‘Would I were something other! I am sick and tired of what I am.’
In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes,
and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Hereswarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment, here the air smells
odious with secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven
endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those
who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious; here the very
aspect of the victorious is hated—as if health, success, strength, pride,and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious, for which one
ought eventually to make bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would
themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be thehangmen! And all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred
to be hatred.”222
Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, Section 14. I haveabridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence.
222

Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what
he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two Ideals. The
carnivorous-minded “strong man,” the adult male and cannibal, can see
nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness andself-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud
revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen
world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means ofadaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds
must be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world bothaggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question ofemphasis, of more or less. Is the saint’s type or the strong-man’s type themore ideal?
It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most
persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human

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character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man
absolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from
economical considerations. The saint’s type, and the knight’s orgentleman’s type, have always been rival claimants of this absoluteideality; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in amanner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, allideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask fora definition of “the ideal horse,” so long as dragging drays and runningraces, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen’s packages all
remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function. You may
take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but hewill be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one
particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing
saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by
its economical relations.
I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will
help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter ofadaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy
itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others
must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is thepresent constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of ourblessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending tobecome bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such astate of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quitepossible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no
aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness—any small communityof true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such asociety on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thingmight be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial
society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal
would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one
extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore
abstractly a higher type of man than the “strong man,” because he isadapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be
concretely possible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by
his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in
everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as
they now are.
But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we findthat the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according toparticular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the
excellence of sainthood. It must be confessed that as far as this world

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goes, anyone who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at his
peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant
and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained aworldling.223 Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically taken in
our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly
temper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its
impulses, but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ
himself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons,Gordons, show that Christians can be strong men also.
We all know DAFT saints, and they inspire a queer kind of aversion. But
in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals on thesame intellectual level. The under-witted strong man homologous in his
sphere with the under-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan
or rowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority.
223

How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so manyenvironments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot
be measured absolutely; the verdict will vary according to the point ofview adopted. From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure,because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger
environment of history; and so far as any saint’s example is a leaven ofrighteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of moreprevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his
immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes
whom every one acknowledges, the Francises, Bernards, Luthers,
Loyolas, Wesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses,
the Agnes Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, aresuccesses from the outset. They show themselves, and there is noquestion; every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of
mystery in things, their passion, their goodness, irradiate about themand enlarge their outlines while they soften them. They are like pictureswith an atmosphere and background; and, placed alongside of them, thestrong men of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard andcrude as blocks of stone or brick-bats.
In a general way, then, and “on the whole,”224 our abandonment of
theological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common
sense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering
place in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is
indispensable to the world’s welfare. The great saints are immediate
successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they
may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if
we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in ourFather’s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for

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himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best
comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest
mission and vocation. There are no successes to be guaranteed and no
set orders to be given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods ofempirical philosophy.
224

See above, p. 321.

This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves
a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to sucha subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I
made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.225 How, you say, can religion,
which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by theadaptation of its fruits to this world’s order alone? It is its truth, not its
utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If religion istrue, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they should
prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It goes back,then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The plot inevitably
thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I
propose, then, that to some degree we face the responsibility. Religious
persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a
special manner. That manner is known as mysticism. I will consequently
now proceed to treat at some length of mystical phenomena, and after
that, though more briefly, I will consider religious philosophy.
225

Above, pp. 321–327

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Lectures XVI and XVIIMysticism
MYSTICISM DEFINED— FOUR MARKS OF MYSTIC STATES— THEY FORM ADISTINCT REGION OF CONSCIOUSNESS— EXAMPLES OF THEIR LOWER GRADES—MYSTICISM AND ALCOHOL— “THE ANAESTHETIC REVELATION”— RELIGIOUS
MYSTICISM— ASPECTS OF NATURE— CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD— “COSMICCONSCIOUSNESS”— YOGA— BUDDHISTIC MYSTICISM— SUFISM— CHRISTIANMYSTICS— THEIR SENSE OF REVELATION— TONIC EFFECTS OF MYSTICSTATES— THEY DESCRIBE BY NEGATIVES— SENSE OF UNION WITH THE
ABSOLUTE— MYSTICISM AND MUSIC— THREE CONCLUSIONS— (1) MYSTICAL
STATES CARRY AUTHORITY FOR HIM WHO HAS THEM— (2) BUT FOR NO ONEELSE— (3) NEVERTHELESS, THEY BREAK DOWN THE EXCLUSIVE AUTHORITY OF
RATIONALISTIC STATES— THEY STRENGTHEN MONISTIC AND OPTIMISTIC
HYPOTHESES.

Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them
open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject ofMysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted myreiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism
must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads wound up
together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience
has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, whoin these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subjectof our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter
from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of
mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for myown constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, andI can speak of them only at second hand. But though forced to look upon
the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; andI think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of thestates in question, and of the paramount importance of their function.
First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression “mystical states ofconsciousness” mean? How do we part off mystical states from otherstates?
The words “mysticism” and “mystical” are often used as terms of mere
reproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast andsentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers
a “mystic” is any person who believes in thought-transference, or spiritreturn. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too
many less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I
will do what I did in the case of the word “religion,” and simply propose

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to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us incalling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way weshall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally gotherewith.
1. Ineffability.—The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state ofmind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it
defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given inwords. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced;
it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity
mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect.
No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, inwhat the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears toknow the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self tounderstand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot
interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider
him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord tohis experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. Noetic quality.—Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states
seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They
are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive
intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance andimportance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carrywith them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in thesense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply
marked, but are usually found. These are:—
3. Transiency.—Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except inrare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be thelimit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when
faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; butwhen they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it issusceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness
and importance.
4. Passivity.—Although the oncoming of mystical states may befacilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing theattention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways
which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sortof consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will werein abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a

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superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states withcertain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, suchas prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. Whenthese latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be norecollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have nosignificance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, 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 modify the inner life of thesubject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in thisregion are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations
and mixtures.
These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states ofconsciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for
careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group.
Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typicalexamples. Professional mystics at the height of their development haveoften elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based
thereupon. But you remember what I said in my first lecture:phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied
in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their
exaggerated and degenerated kindred. The range of mystical experienceis very wide, much too wide for us to cover in the time at our disposal.
Yet the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if wereally wish to reach conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore,
with phenomena which claim no special religious significance, and end
with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme.
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be thatdeepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula whichoccasionally sweeps over one. “I’ve heard that said all my life,” weexclaim, “but I never realized its full meaning until now.” “When afellow-monk,” said Luther, “one day repeated the words of the Creed: ‘Ibelieve in the forgiveness of sins,’ I saw the Scripture in an entirely newlight; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had
found the door of paradise thrown wide open.”226 This sense of deeper
significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words,227 andconjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musicalsounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us canremember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems readwhen we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which
the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts

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and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polishedsurfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only
in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with
our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We arealive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as wehave kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.
226

Newman’s Securus judicat orbis terrarum is another instance.

“Mesopotamia” is the stock comic instance.—An excellent Old German
lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me her
Sehnsucht that she might yet visit “Philadelphia,” whose wondrous namehad always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is said that “single
words (as chalcedony), or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty
fascination over him. ‘At any time the word hermit was enough to transport
him.’ The words woods and forests would produce the most powerfulemotion.” Foster’s Life, by Ryland, New York, 1846, p. 3.
227

A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an
extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, whichsometimes sweeps over us, of having “been here before,” as if at someindefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we werealready saying just these things. As Tennyson writes:“Moreover, something is or seems
That 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.”228
The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports ofhimself as follows:—
228“I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of
waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had,quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come uponme through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as
it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality,
individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundlessbeing, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of thesurest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable
impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no
extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description.
Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?”

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Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition:“By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous
ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute
clearness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.
Sir James Crichton–Browne has given the technical name of “dreamy
states” to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscentconsciousness.229 They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysicalduality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which
seems imminent but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton–
Browne’s opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scareddisturbances of self-consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic
attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist
view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along thedownward ladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward ladderchiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of aphenomenon’s connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadfulaccording to the context by which we set it off.
229
The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture, on
Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailliere, 1895. They have been a gooddeal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example, Bernard–Leroy:
L’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.

Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with inyet other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley
describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:—“When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate
feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.
And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp
amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.... Have you not felt that yourreal soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few
hallowed moments?”230
Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by Inge: Christian Mysticism,
London, 1899, p. 341.
230

A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J.
A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give
parallels to it from their own experience.
“Suddenly,” writes Symonds, “at church, or in company, or when I was
reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt theapproach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind andwill, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid

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sensations which resembled the awakening from anaesthetic influence.
One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could notdescribe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it
intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliterationof space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience
which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion
as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the senseof an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At lastnothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe
became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable
in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality,
ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble roundabout it. And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, thegrim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, thesense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of theabyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion,
stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditionsof sentient existence began by my first recovering the power of touch,and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressions anddiurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being; andthough the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved I was
thankful for this return from the abyss—this deliverance from so awful
an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism.
“This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the ageof twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing nature thephantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which contribute to amerely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself with
anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient
being, Which is the unreality—the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive,
skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena andhabits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and— blood
conventionality? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dreamlike unsubstantiality of which they comprehend at such eventful
moments? What would happen if the final stage of the trance werereached?”231
H. F. Brown: J. A. Symonds. a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29–31,
abridged.
231

In a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of
pathology.232 The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm
that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as
pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry
seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness

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produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The
sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power tostimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed toearth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety
diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites,and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YES function in man. It
brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It
makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity
do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the placeof symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper
mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we
immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of
us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degradinga poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic
consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our
opinion of that larger whole.
Crichton–Browne expressly says that Symonds’s “highest nerve centres
were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states
which afflicted him so grievously.” Symonds was, however, a perfectmonster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives no objective
grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Symonds complained
occasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude
and uncertainty as to his life’s mission.

232

Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently
diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an
extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to theinhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of
coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe
itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a
profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one
person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have agenuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect ofnitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion
was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth
has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking
consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special typeof consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We
may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply therequisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all theircompleteness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere
have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe

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in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms ofconsciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—
for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may
determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a
region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid apremature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own
experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot
help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it isinvariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose
contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, weremelted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one
and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, isitself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. Thisis a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic,
but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must meansomething, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one
could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, letthem hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial
mystic state of mind.233
233
What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being
with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole
philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness ofmystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal? The notion isthoroughly characteristic of the mystical level and the Aufgabe of making it
articulate was surely set to Hegel’s intellect by mystical feeling.

I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaesthetic revelation. Forthem too it is a monistic insight, in which the OTHER in its various
forms appears absorbed into the One.
“Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them, “we pass, forgetting andforgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, nodeeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. ‘The One
remains, the many change and pass;’ and each and every one of us IS the
One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure as being—whence isall our care—so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble,
where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above.”234
234
Benjamin Paul Blood: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist ofPhilosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has madeseveral attempts to adumbrate the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphlets ofrare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at
Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who died young at Amherst in the‘80’s, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by therevelation. “In the first place,” he once wrote to me, “Mr. Blood and I agree
that the revelation is, if anything non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as

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Mr. Blood says, ‘the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, buthow, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by thevacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or
accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning isin regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past.’ The real secretwould be the formula by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yetnever escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating? The
formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic
every question contains its own answer—we simply fill the hole with thedirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice
two. Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goesbecause it is a-going. But the revelation adds: it goes because it is and
WAS a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation.
Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. The more hehunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with hisheels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already aforegone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the
moment of recovery from anaesthesis, just then, BEFORE STARTING ON
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 journeythat was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy isaccomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, ourdestination (being already there)—which may occur vicariously in this life
when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile
upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever
half a second too late— that’s all. ‘You could kiss your own lips, and have
all the fun to yourself,’ it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be
perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why
don’t you manage it somehow?”

Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize theregion 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 Man into the
Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as theInevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive isinherent—it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy
nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.
“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things but it
fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular andintimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence,
which then seems reminiscent—as if it should have appeared, or shall yet
appear, to every participant thereof.
“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly sucha matter of course—so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs that it
inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified

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with the aboriginal and the universal. But no words may express theimposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial,
Adamic surprise of Life.
“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not
possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness
only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to
formulate its baffling import—with only this consolatory afterthought:that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with humantheories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond
instruction in ‘spiritual things.’“The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All days are
judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor
any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of
bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we
reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of
us stands.
“This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my firstprinted mention of it I declared: ‘The world is no more the alien terrorthat was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry
battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull
lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with afearless eye.’ And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, thewing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly
emphasize that declaration. I know—as having known—the meaning of
Existence: the sane centre of the universe— at once the wonder and theassurance of the soul—for which the speech of reason has as yet no namebut the Anaesthetic Revelation.” —I have considerably abridged thequotation.
This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A.
Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as
follows:—‘After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in astate of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternatingwith blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the roomaround me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death;when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly
dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personalpresent reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot
describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 296 de 400of the anaesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began toreturn, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I suddenly
leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, ‘It is
too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,’ meaning that I could not
bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at lastawoke covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were
frightened), ‘Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?’
Only think of it. To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision thevery God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, andthen to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been
tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.
“Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality
which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without,to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but anactual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some ofthe saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable
certainty of God?”235
235
Op. cit., pp. 78–80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, anotherinteresting anaesthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript by afriend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for asurgical operation.

“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I rememberedhaving heard it said that people ‘learn through suffering,’ and in view ofwhat I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I
said, aloud, ‘to suffer IS to learn.’“With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately
preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was mostvivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.
“A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on akind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning
was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one
another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and eachpart of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence onlythat he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I
thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw thatwhat he had been trying with all his might to do was to CHANGE HISCOURSE, to BEND the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the
direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness,
and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner bymeans of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life,

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and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I SAW. I understood for a
moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could
remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I
remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I
should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably
have died.
“He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed
before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I
UNDERSTOOD them. THIS was what it had all meant, THIS was thepiece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God’s
purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards
his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting acork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing.
And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine
non sum digna,’ for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too
small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more
distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am
capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing
something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of
my capacity for suffering.
“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so
deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the LOVE of God,
nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I
could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the
MEASURE is suffering’—I give the words as they came to me. With that I
came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with thereality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the‘cause’ of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether,in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in acommon city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I thencaught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows:—“The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The
veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;—the passivityof genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, notmoving, it must do what it does;—the impossibility of discovery without
its price;—finally, the excess of what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays
over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his 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
lifts the lac away, dropping ONE rupee, and says, ‘That you may givethem. That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.’) I perceived

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also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what
we can demonstrate.
“And so on!—these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but forme they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words
as these has been given me by an ether dream.”With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.
Symonds’s question takes us back to those examples which you willremember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of
sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon
in one shape or another is not uncommon.
“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police force who has told
me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening,
there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness withthis Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of andso fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement,so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of thisinflowing tide.”236
236

In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening
such mystical moods.237 Most of the striking cases which I have collectedhave occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact inmany passages of great beauty—this extract, for example, from Amiel’s
Journal Intime:—
237
The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from
Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at thefoot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity ofwhat I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for thenotice of Almighty God.”I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me
sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I
might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments ofwhich I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, butsomething in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger
than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees,

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birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact ofexistence, of being a part of it all—the drizzling rain, the shadows of theclouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments
continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well thesatisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that
I was unhappy because that perception was not constant.” The cases
quoted in my third lecture, pp. 65, 66, 69, are still better ones of thistype. In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of thesense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due tothe disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor
adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constantbackground of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in theforeground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly
instructive article, which seems to me to throw light upon thepsychological conditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or therevelation-value of the experience in the Subject’s eyes.
“Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries whichsometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise,
sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains,
under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree andvisited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of
the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging
through the Milky Way;—such grand and spacious, immortal,
cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns theinfinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies fromworld to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration
broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene andlimitless as the blue firmament; ... instants of irresistible intuition inwhich one feels one’s self great as the universe, and calm as a god....
What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enoughto fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy
Ghost.”238
238

Op cit., i. 43–44

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German
idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:—“I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me,
liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant daysin the Alps of Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before
the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had

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never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return fromthe solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all thatis, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one
imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast worldencircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had everlived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I
heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who
overcome.’"239
Memoiren einer Idealistin, Ste Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had
been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
239

The well known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression ofthis sporadic type of mystical experience.
“I believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stopfrom your throat;... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I
mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly
arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I
knowthat the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the menever born are also my brothers and thewomen my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.”240
Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably
with him a chronic mystical perception: “There is,” he writes, “apart frommere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, awondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without
what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all
education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, intime and space, of the whole of this multifariousness this revel of fools, andincredible make-believe and general unsettiedness, we call THE WORLD; asoul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the wholecongeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial,
however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of]such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only
the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked thisperception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.
240

I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from theAutobiography of J. Trevor.241
241

My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 301 de 400“One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian
Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them—asthough to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to thechapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt suchneed for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly
and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went
further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness ofthe morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my senseof sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the‘Cat and Fiddle,’ and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without
warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy
and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being
bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had
brought about the internal effect—a feeling of having passed beyond thebody, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if
nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst ofwhich I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though withdecreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only
gradually passing away.”
The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he
now knows them well.
“The spiritual life,” he writes, “justifies itself to those who live it; butwhat can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we cansay, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor,
because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with theobjective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake fromthem to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought
brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had ofGod’s presence have been rare and brief—flashes of consciousness whichhave compelled me to exclaim with surprise—God is HERE!—orconditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only gradually
passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of these moments. To
no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and work onmere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning andtest, they stand out today as the most real experiences of my life, andexperiences which have explained and justified and unified all pastexperiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their farreaching significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. Whenthey came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was
not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute determination, wasto live more intensely my own life, as against what I knew would be theadverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the

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Real Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite
ocean of God.”242
242

Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.

Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of theexistence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely
specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those
who have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to themore distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic
consciousness. “Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances isnot,” Dr. Bucke says, “simply an expansion or extension of the selfconscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of afunction as distinct from any possessed by the average man as SELFconsciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of thehigher animals.”“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness ofthe cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with theconsciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment
which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence—
would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added astate of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation,and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as
striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual power.
With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a
consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but
the consciousness that he has it already.”243
Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind,
Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
243

It was Dr. Bucke’s own experience of a typical onset of cosmic
consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others.
He has printed his conclusions In a highly interesting volume, fromwhich I take the following account of what occurred to him:—“I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading anddiscussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long
drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of
the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, wascalm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment,
not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow ofthemselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of
any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an

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instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close byin that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense
joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual
illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not
merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed ofdead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became
conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would
have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I
saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without
any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all;that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what wecall love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run {391}absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the
memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained
during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what
the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which
I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that
consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression,
been lost.”244
Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet
which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs verbally a little fromthe text of the latter.
244

We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as itcomes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as
an element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, andChristians all have cultivated it methodically.
In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time
immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental
union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering
exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, andmoral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The
yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of
his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samadhi,“and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can everknow.” He learns—“That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, asuperconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state,then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes.... All the different steps inyoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or
Samadhi.... Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there

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is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is notaccompanied with the feeling of egoism .... There is no feeling of I, andyet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless,bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know
ourselves—for Samadhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are,free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts ofgood and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal
Soul.”245
My quotations are from Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The
completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by Vihari
Lala Mtra: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana. 4 vols. Calcutta, 1891–99.
245

The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness
sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure. Their
test of its purity, like our test of religion’s value, is empirical: its fruits
must be good for life. When a man comes out of Samadhi, they assure us
that he remains “enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his wholecharacter changed, his life changed, illumined.”246
A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga withthose of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says:“It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men.... Throughthe mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, hegrows into a ‘character.’ By the subjection of his impulses and propensities
to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, hebecomes a ‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the
opposite of what we usually imagine a medium so-called, or psychic
subject to be. Karl Kellner: Yoga: Eine Skizze, Munchen, 1896, p. 21.
246

The Buddhists used the word “samadhi” as well as the Hindus; but“dhyana” is their special word for higher states of contemplation. Thereseem to be four stages recognized in dhyana. The first stage comesthrough concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire,but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second
stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity
remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference
begins, along with memory a self-consciousness. In the fourth stage theindifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what
“memory” and “self-consciousness” mean in this connection is doubtful.
They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.] Higher
stages still of contemplation are mentioned—a region where there exists
nothing, and where the mediator says: “There exists absolutely nothing,”and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: “There areneither ideas nor absence of ideas,” and stops again. Then another region
where, “having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops
finally.” This would seem to be, not yet Nirvana, but as close an approach

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to it as this life affords.247
I follow the account in C. F. Koeppen: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin,
1857, i. 585 ff.
247

In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are
the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia
from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the
hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that
Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We
Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to thoseinitiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will
quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.
Al–Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in theeleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem
church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside ofChristian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among
ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere—the absence ofstrictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary
student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness ofreligions other than the Christian. M. Schmolders has translated a part of
Al–Ghazzali’s autobiography into French:248—
248
For a full account of him, see D. B. Macdonald: The Life Of Al–Ghazzali,
in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx., p. 71.

“The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “aims at detaching
the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation
the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me thanpractice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned
by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most
exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but onlytransport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul. How great, forexample, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, ofsatiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or
filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists—as being astate occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach—and BEING
drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither thedefinition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science.
Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunkknows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing
conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the nature ofabstinence, and BEING abstinent or having one’s soul detached from theworld.—Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what

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was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, butsolely by giving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.
“Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude ofbonds—temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it
was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might toachieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six
months’ hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at
Bagdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.]
Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own
will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources.
He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heart nolonger felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth, and my children. So
I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from my fortune only what wasindispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria,
where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living
in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions,training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, toprepare my heart for meditating on God—all according to the methods of
the Sufis, as I had read of them.
“This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to complete
the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudesof the times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed insome respects my primitive resolve, and interfered with my plans for apurely solitary life. I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy,
save in a few single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining thisstate. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to return; andin this situation I spent ten years. During this solitary state things wererevealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I
recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path ofGod. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal orexternal, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from theprophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart
entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life
consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, andin the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely.
But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism
being total absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so
to speak, only the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning
revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before
them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They
hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises fromthe perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all

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expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without hiswords involving sin.
“Whosoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true
nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sureof its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say. As
there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject what isoffered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there
are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by theprophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors save
what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has broughtprophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its
principal characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who washimself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people
who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who [indreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it [and givehis reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refuted by actual
experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage of human lifein which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects
uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight isillumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which theintellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible
only during the transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The
prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing
analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand.
How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one
can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of
the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects
with one’s hand.”249
A. Schmolders: Essai sur les ecoles philosophiques chez les Arabes,
Paris, 1842, pp. 54–68, abridged.
249This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all
mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport,
but for no one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge
given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought.
Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in thehistory of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation.
It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God’s knowledge cannot be
discursive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after
the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling, than afterthat of proposition and judgment. But our immediate feelings have no

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content but what the five senses supply; and we have seen and shall see
again that mystics may emphatically deny that the senses play any partin the very highest type of knowledge which their transports yield.
In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although manyof them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in theeyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as
precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based
upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.250 The basis of
the system is “orison” or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul
towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mysticalexperience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especiallyevangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything
methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestantmystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It
has been left to our mind— curers to reintroduce methodical meditation
into our religious life.
Gorres’s Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So does
Ribet’s Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodical
modern work is the Mystica Theologia of Vallgornera, 2 vols., Turin, 1890.
250

The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachment fromouter sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal
things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommend
the disciple to {398} expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts toimagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semihallucinatory mono-ideism—an imaginary figure of Christ, for example,
coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether
literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.251 But in certain
cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it
tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible ofany verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. SaintJohn of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes
the condition called the “union of love,” which, he says, is reached by“dark contemplation.” In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but insuch a hidden way that the soul—“finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the
sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling withwhich she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothedin none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations,which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly in thisknowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we
get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish

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any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comeshome so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing acertain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it,
use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any
idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How
much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses!
This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate,spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, bothinner and outer, and impose silence upon them....
The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which
no created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert, desert
the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom,
the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of thecomprehension of love, ... and recognizes, however sublime and learned
may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, andimproper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by theirmeans.”252
251
M. ReCeJac, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism hedefines as “the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally AND BY THE
AID OF SYMBOLS.” See his Fondements de la Connaissance mystique,
Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical conditions inwhich sensible symbols play no part.

Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch. xvii., in
Vie et Oeuvres, 3me edition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428–432. Chapter xi. of bookii. of Saint John’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing the harmfulness
for the mystical life of the use of sensible imagery.
252

I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian
mystical life.253 Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover,I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic
books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So manymen, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as
infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.
253
In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal
and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as “levitation,” stigmatization,and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often
presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mysticalsignificance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever,when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind.
Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of “mystical”
states.

The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is
what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation

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how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depthsof truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing suchconditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of thehighest of them, the “orison of union.”“In the orison of union,” says Saint Teresa, “the soul is fully awake asregards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and inrespect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it weredeprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think ofany single thing. Thus she needs to employ no artifice in order to arrest
the use of her understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that
she neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor
what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world andlives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in this state she hasenough life left to breathe. It seems to me she has not; or at least that if
she does breathe, she is unaware of it. Her intellect would fain
understand something of what is going on within her, but it has so little
force now that it can act in no way whatsoever. So a person who falls intoa deep faint appears as if dead....
“Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself, suspend
the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, norunderstands, so long as she is united with God. But this time is always
short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in theinterior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it iswholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God inher. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even thoughmany years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither
forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you, nevertheless,ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has
been in God, since during the union she has neither sight nor
understanding, I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it
clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by acertitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her.
I knew a person who was ignorant of the truth that God’s mode of beingin everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence, but
who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking, believed
this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so that, having
consulted a half-learned man who was as ignorant on this point as she
had been before she was enlightened, when he replied that God is in us
only by ‘grace,’ she disbelieved his reply, so sure she was of the true
answer; and when she came to ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her inher belief, which much consoled her....

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 311 de 400“But how, you will repeat, CAN one have such certainty in respect towhat one does not see? This question, I am powerless to answer. These
are secrets of God’s omnipotence which it does not appertain to me topenetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth; and I shall never believethat any soul who does not possess this certainty has ever been reallyunited to God.”254
254
The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, Ch. i., in Oeuvres, translated by BOUIX,
iii. 421–424.

The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be
sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to thisworld—visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden
understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but
the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.
“Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single hour of
meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about heavenly
things than all the teachings of all the doctors put together could havetaught him.... One day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the
Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine
wisdom in the creation of the world. On another occasion, during aprocession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him tocontemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of adweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last visionflooded his heart with such sweetness, that the mere memory of it inafter times made him shed abundant tears.”255
255
Bartoli–Michel: vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34–36. Others have had
illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme for instance. At theage of twenty-five he was “surrounded by the divine light, and replenishedwith the heavenly knowledge, insomuch as going abroad into the fields to agreen, at Gorlitz, he there sat down and viewing the herbs and grass of the
field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties,
which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.”
Of a later period of experience he writes: “In one quarter of an hour I saw
and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university.
For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and theeternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world
and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself
all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or
extern birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw andknew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and themutual original and existence, and likewise how the fruitful bearing wombof eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did
also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in
my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough viewof the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up,
but it was impossible for me to explicate the same.” Jacob Behmen’s

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Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by Edward Taylor, London, 1691, pp. 425,
427, abridged.

So George Fox: “I was come up to the state of Adam in which he wasbefore he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me,
how all things had their names given to them, according to their natureand 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 creatures
were so opened to me by the Lord.” Journal, Philadelphia, no date, p. 69.
Contemporary “Clairvoyance” abounds in similar revelations. Andrew
Jackson Davis’s cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiences related
in the delectable “Reminiscences and Memories of Henry Thomas
Butterworth,” Lebanon, Ohio, 1886.
Similarly with Saint Teresa. “One day, being in orison,” she writes, “itwas granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen andcontained in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, andnevertheless the view I had of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has
remained vividly impressed upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of
all the graces which the Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile
and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it.”256
256

Vie, pp. 581, 582.

She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous andsovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained insuch a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On
another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed—“Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be inthree persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as extremely
surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think of the holy
Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the three adorable
Persons form only one God and I experience an unspeakable happiness.”
On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see andunderstand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into herplace in Heaven.257
257

Loc. cit., p. 574

The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything
known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic
sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne,
and as verging on bodily pain.258 But it is too subtle and piercing a delight

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for ordinary words to denote. God’s touches, the wounds of his spear,references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in thephraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses bothswoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. “If our understanding
comprehends,” says Saint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains
unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends.
For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I
said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all amystery in which I am lost.”259 In the condition called raptus orravishment by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressedthat it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be nottemporarily dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa’s
descriptions and the very exact distinctions which she makes, topersuade one’s self that one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences,
but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite
psychological types.
Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a partand pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As for thebodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as “penetrating to themarrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of thesenses. I think,” she adds, “that this is a just description, and I cannot
make it better.” Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i.
258

259

Vie, p. 198.

To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested andimitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and acorporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly thesepathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all thecases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the
consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment uponthese states, we must not content ourselves with superficial 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 altogether absent as a result. You may remember
the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary
Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the caretaken of them by admiring followers. The “other-worldliness”
encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction
from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom thecharacter is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in natively
strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The great
Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often
been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit

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and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged.
Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly oneof the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. SaintJohn of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and “touches” by which God
reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that—“They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient toabolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its
whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with
virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these
intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone inits life—even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage,
filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then isseized with a strange torment—that of not being allowed to suffer
enough.”260
260

Oeuvres, ii. 320.

Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps
remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture.261 There aremany similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a moreevidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritualenergy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies
which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional
excitement?
261

Above, p. 22.

“Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy,
the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably disposed foraction ... as if God had willed that the body itself, already obedient to thesoul’s desires, should share in the soul’s happiness.... The soul after sucha favor is animated with a degree of courage so great that if at thatmoment its body should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would
feel nothing but the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic
resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror of theworld, and the clear perception of our proper nothingness.... Whatempire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit towhich God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet,and is captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former
attachments! How amazed at her blindness! What lively pity she feels for
those whom she recognizes still shrouded in the darkness! ... She groansat having ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that madeher ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she sees in

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this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the world remains
a victim. She discovers, in the new light from above, that in genuine
honor there is nothing spurious, 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 notagreeable to God.... She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons oforison, caring for points of honor for which she now feels profoundest
contempt. It is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, theypretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows that in
despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of God they would domore good in a single day than they would effect in ten years by
preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there should ever have been atime in her life when she made any case of money, when she ever desired
it.... Oh! if human beings might only agree together to regard it as somuch useless mud, what harmony would then reign in the world! With
what friendship we would all treat each other if our interest in honor andin money could but disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if itwould be a remedy for all our ills.”262
262

Vie, pp. 229, 230, 231–233, 243.

Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in thelines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned anadvantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration
were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken andmisbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth whichconfronted us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You willremember that we turned to mysticism precisely to get some light on
truth. Do mystical states establish the truth of those theologicalaffections in which the saintly life has its root?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description, mystical statesin general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give theoutcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite
philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism, and theother is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary
consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into avastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel themas reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than
to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits andpeacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you
may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth—He, the Self, the Atman,
is to be described by “No! no!” only, say the Upanishads263—though it
seems on the surface to be a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of a

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deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that
it is THIS, seems implicitly to shut it off from being THAT —it is as if helessened it. So we deny the “this,” negating the negation which it seems
to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude by which
we are possessed. The fountain-head of Christian mysticism is Dionysius
the Areopagite.
He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively.
263

Muller’s translation, part ii. p. 180.

“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 spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order,
nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity,
nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither
essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong
to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; notone; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it,”etc., ad libitum.264
T. Davidson’s translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893,
vol. xxii., p. 399.
264

But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth
falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above
them. It is SUPER-lucent, SUPER-splendent, SUPER-essential, SUPERsublime, SUPER EVERYTHING that can be named. Like Hegel in his
logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the“Methode der Absoluten Negativitat.”265“Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur.” Scotus Erigena,
quoted by Andrew Seth: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55.

265

Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical
writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, “where
never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where
there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peacethan in itself.”266 As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that “it may
fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as
nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible
by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore freefrom all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express orutter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, toexpress it by.”267 Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:—

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Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir.”268
266

J. Royce: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.

Jacob Bellmen’s Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by
Bernard Holland, London, 1901, p. 48.
267

268

Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.

To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage
towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of
moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of thefinite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found inreligious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more
blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with theintellectual mystery in all mystical writings.
“Love,” continues Behmen, is Nothing, for “when thou art gone forthwholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and art become
Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou art in that eternalOne, which is God himself, and then thou shalt feel within thee thehighest virtue of Love.... The treasure of treasures for the soul is where
she goeth out of the Somewhat into that Nothing out of which all things
may be made. The soul here saith, I HAVE NOTHING, for I am utterly
stripped and naked; I CAN DO NOTHING, for I have no manner of
power, but am as water poured out; I AM NOTHING, for all that I am is
no more than an image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so,
sitting down in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the eternal Being,
and WILL NOTHING of myself, that so God may will all in me, being
unto me my God and all things.”269
269

Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.

In Paul’s language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when I
become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his lifeand mine remain outstanding.270
From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness inGod’s indwelling presence:—270“Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a
habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life!
life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall before me, darka few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on
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smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even so
there is a royal song of triumph in my heart {410} because the Lord isthere. My days succeed each other; yesterday a blue sky; to day a clouded
sun; a night filled with strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, andI regain consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same
figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart.... Formerly
the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by
all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. To-day
he is with me; and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an
obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand, I
feel something else which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare to speak
it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The Holy
Spirit is not merely making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition
which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me
in my night, it is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes
me with him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one withme. It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound modificationof my nature, a new manner of my being.” Quoted from the MS. of an old
man by Wilfred Monod: II Vit: six meditations sur le mystere chretien,
pp. 280–283.
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and theAbsolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both
become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. Thisis the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered bydifferences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism,in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note,so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which
ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the
mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.
Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates
languages, and they do not grow old.271
Compare M. Maeterlinck: L’Ornement desRuysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.
271

Noces

spirituellesde“That art Thou!” say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: “Not a
part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of theWorld.” “As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus,
O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in
fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them: likewise a man whose
mind has entered into the Self.”272 “‘Every man,’ says the Sufi Gulshan–Raz, whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty
that there is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the ME, andWE, the THOU, are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction.

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Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from himself, hears
resound outside of him this voice and this echo: I AM GOD: he has an
eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to death.’"273 In thevision of God, says Plotinus, “what sees is not our reason, but somethingprior and superior to our reason.... He who thus sees does not properly
see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes, he ceases tobe himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, he makes but
one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding with another centre.”274“Here,” writes Suso, “the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels of
the Godhead ... and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling
obscurity and of the naked simple unity. It is in this modeless WHERE
that the highest bliss is to be found.”275 “Ich bin so gross als Gott,” singsAngelus Silesius again, “Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht uber mich,ich unter ihm nicht sein.”276
272

Upanishads, M. Muller’s translation, ii. 17, 334.

273

Schmolders: Op. cit., p. 210.

Enneads, Bouillier’s translation. Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp. 473–
477, and vol. i. p. 27.
274

275

Autobiography, pp. 309, 310.

276

Op. cit., Strophe 10.

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling
obscurity,” “whispering silence,” “teeming desert,” are continually met
with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is theelement through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many
mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.
“He who would hear the voice of Nada, ‘the Soundless Sound,’ andcomprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana.... When to himself
his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams,
when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—theinner sound which kills the outer.... For then the soul will hear, and willremember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE
SILENCE.... And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto
THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.. . .
Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thouart thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search:
the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt fromchange, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE
SILENCE. Om tat Sat.”277

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H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence.

These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them,probably stir chords within you which music and language touch incommon. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musicalcriticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness
in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt;
and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of ourunderstanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves
to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
“Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end. Where
we stand,
Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves
that gleam,
We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man
hath scanned....
Ah, but here man’s heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom
with venturous glee,
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all thesea.”278
278

Swinburne: On the Verge, in “A Midsummer vacation.”

That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our“immortality,” if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already
now and here, which we find so often expressed today in certain
philosophic circles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” or an “amen,”which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.279 We recognize thepasswords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use
them ourselves; it alone has the keeping of “the password primeval.”280
279

Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.

As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region
and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle’s Unmoved
Mover, by F. C. S. Schiller, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900.
280

I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly
as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of
consciousness. It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least
the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes bestwith twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states mind.
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Doesit furnish any WARRANT FOR THE TRUTH of the twice-bornness andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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supernaturality and pantheism which it favors?
I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can. In brief myanswer is this—and I will divide it into three parts:—(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the rightto be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for
those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic
consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. Theyshow it to be only one kind of consciousness.
They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as
anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to havefaith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1.
As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced
and emphatic sort ARE usually authoritative over those who have them.
They have been “there,” and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble
about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force
that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him tolive in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but
we cannot change his mind—we commonly attach it only the more
stubbornly to its beliefs.281 It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter offact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own
more “rational” beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature tothat which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured usof certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as directperceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were
for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyancein them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality,
if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression—that is, they are face toface presentations of what seems immediately to exist. I abstract fromweaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where
the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether theexperience may not have proceeded from the demon.
281

Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching

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Methodism: “My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to
God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest
as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say,‘God’s service is perfect freedom,’ and I was carried out much in prayerthat my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God
gave so largely to me.” Journal, London, no date, p. 172.

The mystic is, in short, INVULNERABLE, and must be left, whether werelish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says
Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state arepractically convertible terms.
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that weought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we areourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they canever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption.
They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would
be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should
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 acknowledge it, it is for“suggestive,” not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to doso suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far frombeing strong. In characterizing mystic states an pantheistic, optimistic,
etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository
reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The
classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a“privileged case.”
It is an EXTRACT, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest
specimens and their preservation in “schools.” It is carved out from amuch larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious
mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed
unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism
itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is muchless unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic andantinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church.282 It is dualistic
in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic;
but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are withfew exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom “the category of
personality” is absolute. The “union” of man with God is for them much

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more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity.283 How
different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is themysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, andother naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christiansort.284 The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, andemancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It
is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by
the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they canfind a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We haveno right, therefore, to invoke its 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, of the world. It is only
relatively in favor of all these things—it passes out of common humanconsciousness in the direction in which they lie.
282
Ruysbroeck, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter
against the antinomianism of disciples. H. Delacroix’s book (Essai sur lemysticisme speculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siecle, Paris, 1900) is full of
antinomian material. compare also A. Jundt: Les Amis de Dieu au XIV
Siecle, These de Strasbourg, 1879.

283

Compare Paul Rousselot: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii.

see Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, andJefferies’s wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.
284

So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, forreligious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has noaccumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity
supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which“mystical ideas” are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled ordeluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as theysometimes call it, we may have a DIABOLICAL mysticism, a sort ofreligious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffableimportance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming withnew meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions,the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is
pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings
are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that fromthe point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism
and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that
great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning toadmit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region
contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side byside. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes mustbe sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total

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context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world ofsense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as weare not mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation toacknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on themby their intrinsic nature.285
In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, “Max Nordau” seeks toundermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds.
Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance inthings. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted
associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These
give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading
further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought.
The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling ofsignificance, and other alienists (Wernicke, for example, in his Grundriss
der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac”
conditions by a laming of the association-organ. But the higher mysticalflights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of nosuch merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe
them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity
correlative to which we as yet know nothing.
285

3.
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole andultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states
merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or
ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively
before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with
our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny
anything that our senses have immediately seized.286 It is the rationalistic
critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his
denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which
new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend toa more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question
whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view,windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive andinclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different
mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this
supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed
constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestialand its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid
experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it

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would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its
experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is ourcustom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error
just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings,
and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be
indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.
They sometimes add subjective audita et visa to the facts, but as these
are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no alteration in thefacts of sense.

286

In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed
wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But thehigher ones among them point in directions to which the religious
sentiments even of non— mystical men incline. They tell of thesupremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They
offer us HYPOTHESES, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore,
but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism
and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one
way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of thislife.
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and whatworlds away!” It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are
all that are religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture
I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case. Meanwhile,
however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too slender. If
supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you think,then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to befound. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth bycoercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of this kind has
always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this termin the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous
subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it
which my limits will allow.

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Lecture XVIII
Philosophy
PRIMACY OF FEELING IN RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY BEING A SECONDARYFUNCTION— INTELLECTUALISM PROFESSES TO ESCAPE OBJECTIVE STANDARDSIN HER THEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS— “DOGMATIC THEOLOGY”— CRITICISMOF ITS ACCOUNT OF GOD’S ATTRIBUTES— “PRAGMATISM” AS A TEST OF THE
VALUE OF CONCEPTIONS— GOD’S METAPHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES HAVE NO
PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE— HIS MORAL ATTRIBUTES ARE PROVED BY BAD
ARGUMENTS; COLLAPSE OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY— DOES TRANSCENDENTALIDEALISM FARE BETTER? ITS PRINCIPLES— QUOTATIONS FROM JOHN CAIRD—

THEY ARE GOOD AS RESTATEMENTS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, BUT
UNCOERCIVE AS REASONED PROOF— WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN DO FORRELIGION BY TRANSFORMING HERSELF INTO “SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS.”

The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is thesense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned
first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism isentirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too
various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But
philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they
are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can
philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man’s sense of
the divine?
I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at thegoal to which I am tending. I have 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 to hear me conclude, isnothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on thatvivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture
and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples. It is essentiallyprivate and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of formulation;
and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic mould willprobably always go on, men being what they are, yet these attempts arealways secondary processes which in no way add to the authority, or
warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own
stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves
possess.
In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expenseof reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade
you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name.

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To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believethat feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic andtheological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text
into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from theirbrevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly
what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in aworld in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any
philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if
dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart frominner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mysticalemotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies
such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic
explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientificones, as they actually have done. In the science they would have left acertain amount of “psychical research,” even as they now will probably
have to re-admit a certain amount. But high-flying speculations likethose of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had
no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities.
These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs,
buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feelingoriginally supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied byfeeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which
feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an
account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas,
declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that theyshould even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the
opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox
whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure andwayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking
men has ever been the intellect’s most cherished ideal. To redeem
religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status anduniversal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason’s task.
I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at thistask.287 We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect fromparticipating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing withourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal
ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted
congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits.
The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on

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us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and indoing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal
formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of ourreligion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator
among the criticisms of one man’s constructions by another, philosophy
will always have much to do.
It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I
am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards) alaborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experiencesome general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which
everybody may agree.
Compare Professor W. Wallace’s Gifford Lectures, in Lectures andEssays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.
287

Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably
engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysicaltheologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another.
Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible,
alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce
between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have thebeginnings of a “Science of Religions,” so-called; and if these lectures
could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I
should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive orcomparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as theirsubject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, notcoordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.
The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to besomething altogether different from this. It assumes to constructreligious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logicalreason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its
conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the casemay be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an apriori way, and warrants their veracity.
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. Allinclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true;—
what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer tospirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible
things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of

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today, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely
possible or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance cangrasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John
Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to thePhilosophy of Religion:—“Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart, but in order to elevate itfrom the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to
distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must
appeal to an objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be
discerned by the intelligence to be TRUE. It must be seen as having in its
own nature a RIGHT to dominate feeling, and as constituting theprinciple by which feeling must be judged.288 In estimating the religious
character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how
they feel, but what they think and believe—not whether their religion is
one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement andenthusiastic, but what are the CONCEPTIONS of God and divine things
by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion,but it is by the CONTENT or intelligent basis of a religion, and not byfeeling, that its character and worth are to be determined.”289
288

Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.

289

Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.

Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives moreemphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.290 Theology, hesays, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he says,
what it is not— not “physical evidences” for God, not “natural religion,”for these are but vague subjective interpretations:—
290

Discourse II. Section 7.

“If,” he continues, “the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful, just so far
as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his moral
law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the animalframe, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs, if
his Essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no
more if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science
about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an
hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him while the pageant ofexperiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing
more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament of language, a certain
view taken of Nature which one man has and another has not, which
gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious,

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and which all would be the better for adopting. It is but the theology of
Nature, just as we talk of the Philosophy or the ROMANCE of history, or
the POETRY of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the
humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or the capriceof the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent of the world,
recognizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contemplation.
I do not see much difference between avowing that there is no God, andimplying that nothing definite can be known for certain about Him.”
What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these things: “I
simply mean the SCIENCE OF GOD, or the truths we know about God,put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it
astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology.”
In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feelingvalid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally.
The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason
must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, whereinwould its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even as
sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programmeof freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly
definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion
on universal reason simplifies my procedure today. I need not discredit
philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I
show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be“objectively” convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does notbanish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I
believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of
divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or inpolitics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions
or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds argumentsfor our conviction, for indeed it HAS to find them. It amplifies anddefines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It
hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.291
As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and theprimacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs see the striking
work of H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into myhands after my text was written. “Creeds,” says the author, “are thegrammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech.
Words are the expression of our wants grammar is the theory formed
afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As
speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must
follow” (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete
facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.
291

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Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of theolder systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic
manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope
Leo’s Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance firstat the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God’s
existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature.292
292
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 Protestant theologians as C. Hodge:
Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. Strong: Systematic
Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.

The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years withthe waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totallydiscrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly andsurely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a
God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you
are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The“cosmological” one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world
to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself
contains. The “argument from design” reasons, from the fact that
Nature’s laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted toeach other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The“moral argument” is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The“argument ex consensu gentium” is that the belief in God is so
widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and should
therefore carry authority with it.
As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The barefact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or toneglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion’s
all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be induty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed
too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure oftheology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas
have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many
fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, thebenevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very
different from the one who figured in the earlier versions of theargument.293 The fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined
suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing
rigorously. They only corroborate our preexistent partialities.
293

It must not be forgotten that any form of DISorder in the world might,

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by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The
truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logicallysusceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at
Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as
it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particulararrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No
other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any otherarrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be foundresulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic
consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument
accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The
first is physical: Nature’s forces tend of their own accord only to disorderand destruction, 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 ofanthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us is“disorderly” can possibly have been an object of design at all. This
principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests ofanthropomorphic Theism.
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or
the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them,are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types ofarrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral—so interested that whenever wefind them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result
is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It isoverflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, butorder is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one canalways find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos.
If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could
doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest inalmost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you mightthen say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and thatthe other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Ourdealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which ourattention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We countand name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the otherthings and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There arein reality infinitely more things “unadapted” to each other in this world
than there are things “adapted”; infinitely more things with irregular
relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the
regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve
it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until thecollection of them fills our encyclopaedias. Yet all the while between andaround them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one everthought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.

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The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument starts
are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products.
So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God
follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute aknockdown proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those whoon other grounds believe in him already.
If philosophy can do so little to establish God’s existence, how stands itwith her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while to look at theattempts of systematic theology in this direction.
Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all
his creatures in possessing existence a se. From this “a-se-ity” on God’spart, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For
instance, he must be both NECESSARY and ABSOLUTE, cannot not be,
and cannot in any way be determined by anything else. This makes Him
absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; forlimitation is non-being; and God is being itself. This unlimitedness
makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is ONE, and ONLY, for theinfinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is SPIRITUAL, for were He
composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine
them into the total, and his aseity would thus be contradicted. He is
therefore both simple and non-physical in nature. He is SIMPLE
METAPHYSICALLY also, that is to say, his nature and his existence
cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share theirformal natures with one another, and are individual only in theirmaterial aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse mustbe given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all thosedistinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality
and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence andattributes. We can talk, it is true, of God’s powers, acts, and attributes,
but these discriminations are only “virtual,” and made from the humanpoint of view. In God all these points of view fall into an absolute identityof being.
This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be IMMUTABLE.
He is actuality, through and through. Were there anything potential
about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either
loss or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot, therefore,change. Furthermore, He is IMMENSE, BOUNDLESS; for could He be
outlined in space, He would be composite, and this would contradict his
indivisibility. He is therefore OMNIPRESENT, indivisibly there, at every
point of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of time—inother words ETERNAL. For if He began in time, He would need a prior

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cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He ended it would
contradict 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 nequit superare causam. In
Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their
OBJECT, since God can be bounded by naught that is external, canprimarily be nothing else than God himself. He knows himself, then, in
one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite selfpleasure.294 Since He must of logical necessity thus love and will himself,
He cannot be called “free” ad intra, with the freedom of contrarieties thatcharacterizes finite creatures. Ad extra, however, or with respect to his
creation, God is free. He cannot NEED to create, being perfect in being
and in happiness already. He WILLS to create, then, by an absolute
freedom.
For the scholastics the facultas appetendi embraces feeling, desire, and
will.
294

Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God
is a PERSON; and a LIVING person also, for He is both object andsubject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living fromthe lifeless. He is thus absolutely SELF-SUFFICIENT: his SELFKNOWLEDGE and SELF-LOVE are both of them infinite and adequate,
and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them.
He is OMNISCIENT, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all
creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is previsive, for
He is present to all time. Even our free acts are known beforehand toHim, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successive moments ofenrichment, and this would contradict his immutability. He is
OMNIPOTENT for everything that does not involve logicalcontradiction. He can make BEING —in other words his power includes
CREATION. If what He creates were made of his own substance, it would
have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it
must be non-divine in substance. If it were made of a substance, an
eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his
hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God’s
definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of somethingcaused already. The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, andgives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional tohimself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes
in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity, and asthese ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are

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in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them. We
must attribute them to Him only in a TERMINATIVE sense, as differing
aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.
God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is positive
being’s fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that He has createdphysical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good, for bonum
totius praeeminet bonum partis. Moral evil He cannot will, either as end
or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By creating free beings
He PERMITS it only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him toprevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.
As regards God’s purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been toexercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory.
From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in
the first place of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of
happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring offelicity. In so far forth one may say that God’s secondary purpose increating is LOVE.
I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations
farther, into the mysteries of God’s Trinity, for example. What I havegiven will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology ofboth Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God’slist of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you
by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrainfrom adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon ourtime.295 He first enumerates God’s attributes sonorously, then celebrates
his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of
all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us scholastic
philosophy “touched with emotion,” and every philosophy should betouched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then,dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman’s.
It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point I
make a short digression.
295

Op. cit., Discourse III. Section 7.

What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental
schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man’s
thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be
the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic
connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has infact been that every difference must MAKE a difference, every theoretical

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difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best
method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining whatpractical difference would result from one alternative or the other beingtrue. What is the particular truth in question KNOWN AS? In what facts
does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience?
This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In thisway, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity.
What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he.
That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further
ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual
substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning;and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed ordenied. So Berkeley with his “matter.”
The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is
known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore,
is the whole meaning of the term “matter”—any other pretended
meaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing withcausation. It is known as habitual antecedence, and as tendency on ourpart to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practicalmeaning it has no significance whatever, and books about it may becommitted to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas
Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed moreor less consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used
the principle with full explicitness. When all is said and done, it was
English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced “the criticalmethod” into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy astudy worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain
in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable
difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if all propositions
were practically indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or
which false?
An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders
Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from theparticulars of its application the principle by which these men were
instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to
it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of PRAGMATISM, and hedefends it somewhat as follows:296—
In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science
Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.
296

Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainmentof belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has

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found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely
begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of
thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there wereany part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practicalconsequences, then that part would be no proper element of thethought’s significance. To develop a thought’s meaning we need
therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that
conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of
all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as toconsist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfectclearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what
sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it,
and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Ourconception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of ourconception of the object, so far as that conception has positive
significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a
principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various
attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God’s perfections,
whether some be not far less significant than others.
If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God’s metaphysicalattributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I
think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we
still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible
significance. Take God’s aseity, for example; or his necessariness; his
immateriality; his “simplicity” or superiority to the kind of inner variety
and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility, and lackof the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident,
potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in agenus; his actualized infinity; his “personality,” apart from the moral
qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive andnot positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity inhimself:—candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any
definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no
distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it
possibly make to a man’s religion whether they be true or false?
For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upontender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these
attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of thesmallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should betrue. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the

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better to God’s simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior,
to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middleof the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of outof-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and fieldobservers of living animals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective
against the “closet-naturalists,” as he called them, the collectors andclassifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used
to think that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under
the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalistsof the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. What is their deductionof metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic
dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs,
something that might be worked out from the mere word “God” by one ofthose logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has
contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail ofthe serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians’ hands, they are
only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms;
verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that oflife. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did
such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of ourknowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue toflourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from thisworld. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract
definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something
different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things
are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital
conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many
instances, renewing themselves in saecula saeculorum in the lives ofhumble private men.
So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of viewof practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to ourworship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.
What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, theystand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear andhope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs
but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the
good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, hecan see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees.
Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him
securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly

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important that we should be informed concerning them. That God’s
purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an
attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among otherthings it has given a definite character to worship in all Christiancountries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a
God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid
basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with herarguments?
It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not
only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is aplain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has foundin the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for
doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God’s goodnessby the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence
would sound to such a witness simply silly.
No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all anddefinitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path tothe deity: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.” An intellectperplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence—such is thesituation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but
who remains religious still.297
Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive
justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point,
will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is renderedcertain by pure logic? Theology herself has largely based this doctrine uponrevelation, and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substituteconventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But thevery notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, andlaughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams
and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern
imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.
297

We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatictheology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern
idealism, I repeat, has said goodby to this theology forever. Can modern
idealism give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self
for witness?
The basis of modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine of the Transcendental
Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant thefact that the consciousness “I think them” must (potentially or actually)
accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the “I”

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in question had remained for them identified with the personal
individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most
universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself theTranscendental Ego had no theological implications.
It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant’s notion of
Bewusstsein uberhaupt, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite
concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which
our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It would leadme into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation
was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian school,
which today so deeply influences both British and American thinking,two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.
The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us
more than a post-mortem dissection of disjecta membra, and that the
fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every
object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion ofsome other object which seems at first to negate the first one.
The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is alreadyvirtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of a
dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is alreadyimminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite in posse.
Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our
logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each thing
never attains to. The objects of our thought now ACT within our thought,act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop.
They introduce something other than themselves along with them; andthis other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be
actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies andcorrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.
The program is excellent; the universe IS a place where things arefollowed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic
which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth
far better than the traditional school-logic, which never gets of its own
accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions andsubsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be
more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new
logic. Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish
transcendentalist whom I have already named.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 341 de 400“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 conversely that itis only in communion with this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that thefinite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of
human intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose theabsolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or denial
themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce
anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relative to thought, but
not to be relative to my thought, or to the thought of any other individual
mind. From the existence of all individual minds as such I can abstract; I
can think them away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or
self-consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, inother words, an Absolute Thought or Self–Consciousness.”
Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not
make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as acondition of “truth” being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent
universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his
concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge
your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to
the religious experience of individuals in the following words:—“If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and impulses, ofan ever coming and going succession of intuitions, fancies, feelings, thennothing could ever have for him the character of objective truth orreality. But it is the prerogative of man’s spiritual nature that he can yield
himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own.
As a thinking self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his very
nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life.
As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in myconsciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion andopinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as thisparticular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that isuniversal—in one word, to live no more my own life, but let myconsciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal lifeof spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain
myself, or realize the highest possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in
one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason,
yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self.
The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.”
Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able

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outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete.
Whatever we may be in posse, the very best of us in actu falls very shortof being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self-sacrifice even,merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite
identify it with the Infinite. Man’s ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic,
might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable.
“Is there, then,” our author continues, “no solution of the contradiction
between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There is such a solution,
but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality intothat of religion. It may be said to be the essential characteristic ofreligion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration into
fruition, anticipation into realization; that instead of leaving man in theinterminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual
partaker of a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from thehuman side or the divine—as the surrender of the soul to God, or as thelife of God in the soul—in either aspect it is of its very essence that theInfinite has ceased to be a far-off vision, and has become a present
reality. The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly
apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division between the
Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that thefinite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence andlife of the Infinite.
“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future
hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To
enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act whichconstitutes the beginning of the religious life—call it faith, or trust, or
self-surrender, or by whatever name you will—there is involved theidentification of 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, religious progress is not progress TOWARDS, but
WITHIN the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endlessfinite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but
it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, toappropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already inpossession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning,but it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on thereligious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not really belong to him:
they are excrescences which have no organic relation to his true nature:they are already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed andannulled, and in the very process of being annulled they become themeans of spiritual progress. Though he is not exempt from temptationand conflict, [yet] in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the

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struggle is over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an
infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is theexpression and realization of the life of God.”298
298
John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion London and
New York, 1880, pp. 243–250, and 291–299, much abridged.

You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of thereligious consciousness could be better than these words of yourlamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture ofthose crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter
what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, inhearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying tofind the content of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said
and done, has Principal Caird—and I only use him as an example of thatwhole mode of thinking—transcended the sphere of feeling and of thedirect experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in
impartial reason? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning,transformed it from 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, but that he has simply
reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary.
And again, I can be excused from proving technically that thetranscendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I canpoint to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously
disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The wholeof Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelianargumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser’s
and Professor Pringle–Pattison’s memorable criticisms, with which somany of you are familiar.299 Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism
were {445} as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be,
could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?
A. C. Fraser: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh andLondon, 1899, especially part ii, chaps. vii. and viii. A. Seth [Pringle–
Pattison]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim.
299

The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of
the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah
Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885; in his
Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in his
Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., NewYork and London, 1901–02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers toevade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on

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me, by not even attempting to meet Professor Royce’s arguments
articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures,
which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for
subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient
the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion canbe transformed into a universally convincing science), to point to the factthat no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.
Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may befollowed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only
Professor Royce’s arguments, but others for monistic absolutism shall beconsidered with all the technical fullness which their great importancecalls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach ofsuperficiality.
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a factof experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it
and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptionsof fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract
reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of. Conceptual
processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not
produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There isalways a PLUS, a THISNESS, which feeling alone can answer for.
Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to warrant
faith’s veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the
beginning of this lecture.
In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt todemonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverancesof direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.
It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under thisnegative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she
CAN do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for
criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology intoscience of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels
in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions.
Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental
from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she canremove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious
constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also
eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd orincongruous.

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Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuumof conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as
HYPOTHESES, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or
positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their
number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps
become the champion of one which she picks out as being the mostclosely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of thishypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief andsymbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As aresult, she can offer mediation between different believers, and help tobring about consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully,
the better she discriminates the common and essential from theindividual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she
compares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not
eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by aphysical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its
conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of
optics—it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of
optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, byfacts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would
depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, andwould have to square itself with personal experience through all its
critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or
work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every
science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its
formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth
and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers
and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes toolate. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volleyof new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession
condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness andirrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic
photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, themotion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that
formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description ofreligious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I
will try my hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is awitness.

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Lecture XIX
Other Characteristics
AESTHETIC ELEMENTS IN RELIGION—CONTRAST OF CATHOLICISM AND
PROTESTANTISM— SACRIFICE AND CONFESSION— PRAYER— RELIGION HOLDSTHAT SPIRITUAL WORK IS REALLY EFFECTED IN PRAYER— 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— RELIGION AND
THE SUBCONSCIOUS REGION IN GENERAL.

We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism
and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses tothe individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to theworld, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to theempirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though thequalification “on the whole” may always have to be added. In this lecture
we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of thereligious consciousness by a word about 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 the aesthetic life plays indetermining one’s choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago,
involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need
formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, toocontemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic
list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected toconsider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them300
puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral
service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches our barepiety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as itenriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes
and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our
devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may
sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like
Newman’s301 grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of thatof the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
300

Idea of a University, Discourse III. Section 7.

Newman’s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that
he can write: “From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental
principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into theidea of any other sort of religion.” And again speaking of himself about the301

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age of thirty, he writes: “I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s
sight, as if it were the sight of God.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.

Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously
indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to
say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed,
however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which theirsatisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on humannature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity andsimplification, for others RICHNESS is the supreme imaginativerequirement.302 When one’s mind is strongly of this type, an individual
religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather ofsomething institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic
interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage tostage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor,
derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain andculmination of the system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast
incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous
liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every
quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity, in which ascending
and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, inwhich no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many
august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelicalProtestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated
religious lives whose boast it is that “man in the bush with God may
meet.”303 What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up
structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity andglory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.
302
The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance withthe analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head ofSaintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity,
consistency, simplicity (above, p. 275 ff.). For others, on the contrary,superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations,
are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you
should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been
kept, their letters answered their perplexities relieved, and their duties
fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes withnothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped sostaringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributesof affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of thesethings which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.

In Newman’s Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII. Section 6, there is asplendid passage expressive of this aesthetic way of feeling the Christianscheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
303

It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient

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empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when
one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass,
the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, andputs up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, andcomes, it may be, from a “home” upon a veldt or prairie with one sittingroom and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchicalimagination!
The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously
impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in
spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day
succeed in making many converts from the more venerable
ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to
the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so
indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism
will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter
negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual
Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the
Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are toProtestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of “childlike”—
innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the
undeveloped condition of the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant,on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods.
He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving theCatholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose
as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The
two will never understand each other—their centres of emotional energy
are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature’s intricacies arealways in need of a mutual interpreter.304 So much for the aesthetic
diversities in the religious consciousness.
304
Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the “meek lover of thegood,” alone with his 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 all more complex businesses. An essentiallyworldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely
coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her “merit” storingup, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his
attention as a professional devote, her definite “exercises,” and her
definitely recognized social pose in the organization.

In most books on religion, three things are represented as its mostessential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I mustsay a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of
Sacrifice.

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Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults
have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have beensuperseded by sacrifices 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 preserved in transfigured form in the
mystery of Christ’s atonement. These religions substitute offerings of theheart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In theascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity
encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some
sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its
significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken
strenuously, calls for.305 But, as I said my say about those, and as theselectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions ofderivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn tothat of Confession.
305

Above, p. 354 ff.

In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it
psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, itcorresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of
the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one’s selfin need of, in order to be in right relations to one’s deity. For him who
confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized
his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer
smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon abasis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in
Anglo–Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction
against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery
confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible
practices. But on the {453} side of the sinner himself it seems as if theneed ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its
satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy
would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, eventhough the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic
church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricularconfession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We
English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance andunsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone
into our confidence.306
A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by
Frank Granger: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.
306

The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer—and this time it must

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be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especiallyagainst prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As
regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered tostand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute torecovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being anormal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would bedeleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding therecency of the opposite belief,307 every one now knows that droughts andstorms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot
avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if
we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward
communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we caneasily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Example: “The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in
Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as theservice was over, he went to the petitioner and said ‘You Boston ministers,
as soon as a tulip 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.
307

Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
“Religion,” says a liberal French theologian, “is an intercourse, aconscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress withthe mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and uponwhich its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized byprayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayerthat distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar orneighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Religion
is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to saveitself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act isprayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere
repetition of certain sacred formula, but the very movement itself of thesoul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious
power of which it feels the presence—it may be even before it has a nameby which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no
religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul,even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One
sees from this why “natural religion, so-called, is not properly a religion.
It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness,with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, noaction of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended
religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of criticalinvestigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An artificial anddead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters

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proper to religion.”308
Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion. 2me ed.,1897, pp. 24–26, abridged.
308

It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M.
Sabatier’s contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as in Innerfact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has
shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the
consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between
themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to berelated. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active andmutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if
nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit
different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide
meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a
feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, notsimply as containing elements of delusion—these undoubtedly
everywhere exist—but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as
materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there mightremain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false
witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence musthave a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it
would doubtless be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but
the spectators’ part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and theprayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in avery serious reality.
The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with thequestion whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The
conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness
is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great
differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been
supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man
can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence inprayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed isonly the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer’s
effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense inwhich these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that
effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion insists,things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy
which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates insome part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.
This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late

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Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It
shows how independent the 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
around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actual relation withthe material. From the spiritual universe comes the energy which
maintains the material; the energy which makes the life of eachindividual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal ofthis energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, muchas the vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour
to hour.
“I call these ‘facts’ because I think that some scheme of this kind is the
only one consistent with our actual evidence; too complex to summarize
here. How, then, should we ACT on these facts? Plainly we must
endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possible, and we must place
our minds in any attitude which experience shows to be favorable to suchindrawal. PRAYER is the general name for that attitude of open andearnest expectancy. If we then ask to whom to pray, the answer(strangely enough) must be that THAT does not much matter. The
prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing;—it means a real increase
in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or grace;—but we do notknow enough of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how theprayer operates;—WHO is cognizant of it, or through what channel thegrace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate thehighest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it would
be rash to say that Christ himself HEARS US; while to say that GOD
hears us is merely to restate the first principle—that grace flows in fromthe infinite spiritual world.”
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief thatpower is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions,
if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to thedescription of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort,of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a casewith which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Muller ofBristol, who died in 1898. Muller’s prayers were of the crassest petitional
order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literalsincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight,
but by the Lord’s hand. He had an extraordinarily active and successfulcareer, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two
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equipment of several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more thana hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts;
the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of
thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment of schools in which overa hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were
taught. In the course of this work Mr. Muller received and administerednearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two
hundred thousand miles of sea and land.309 During the sixty-eight yearsof his ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes andfurniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate
worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
My authority for these statistics is the little work on Muller, by Frederic
G. Warne, New York, 1898.

309

His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not toacquaint other people with the details of his temporary necessities. For
the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing thatsooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough.
“When I lose such a thing as a key,” he writes, “I ask the Lord to direct
me to it, and I look for an answer to my prayer; when a person withwhom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the
fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to bepleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do notunderstand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lordthat he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect
to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and the manner how it
should be; when I am going to minister in the Word, I seek help from theLord, and ... am not cast down, but of good cheer because I look for his
assistance.”
Muller’s custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week. “As the
Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week’s payment might become due
and we have no money to meet it; and thus those with whom we deal
might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found acting against thecommandment of the Lord: ‘Owe no man anything.’ From this day andhenceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our supplies by the day, we
purpose to pay at once for every article as it is purchased, and never tobuy anything except we can pay for it at once, however much it may seemto be needed, and however much those with whom we deal may wish to
be paid only by the week.”
The articles needed of which Muller speaks were the food, fuel, etc., of
his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going without ameal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so. “Greater and more

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manifest nearness of the Lord’s presence I have never had than whenafter breakfast there were no means for dinner for more than a hundred
persons; or when after dinner there were no means for the tea, and yet
the Lord provided the tea; and all this without one single human being
having been informed about our need.... Through Grace my mind is sofully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of thegreatest need, I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed,
did not the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I
should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now comparatively a rarething that a day comes when I am not in need for one or another part of
the work.”310
310
The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George
Muller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219.

In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Muller affirmsthat his prime motive was “to have something to point to as a visible
proof that our God and Father is the same faithful God that he ever was—as willing as ever to prove himself the living God, in our day as formerly,
to all that put their trust in him.”311 For this reason he refused to borrowmoney for any of his enterprises. “How does it work when we thus
anticipate God by going our own way? We certainly weaken faith insteadof increasing it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own wefind it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way
entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How different
if one is enabled to wait God’s own time, and to look alone to him forhelp and deliverance! When at last help comes, after many seasons ofprayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what a present recompense! Dear
Christian reader, if you have never walked in this path of obedience
before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the sweetnessof the joy which results from it.”312
311

Ibid., p. 126.

312

Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.

When the supplies came in but slowly, Muller always considered that
this was for the trial of his faith and patience When his faith and patience
had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means. “And thus
it has proved,”—I quote from his diary—“for today was given me the sumof 2050 pounds, of which 2000 are for the building fund [of a certain
house], and 50 for present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy
in God when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor
surprised; for I LOOK out for answers to my prayers. I BELIEVE THATGOD HEARS ME. Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could only SIT

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before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii. At last I castmyself flat down upon my face and burst forth in thanksgiving to God
and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed service.”313
313

Ibid., p. 323

George Muller’s is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect
more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man’s intellectual
horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems tohave been for Muller little more than a sort of supernatural clergymaninterested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who
were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but
unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributeswith which the human imagination elsewhere has invested him. Muller,
in short, was absolutely unphilosophical. His intensely private andpractical conception of his relations with the Deity continued the
traditions of the most primitive human thought.314 When we compare amind like his with such a mind as, for example, Emerson’s or Phillips
Brooks’s, we see the range which the religious consciousness covers.
I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even moreprimitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber’s English Garland,
vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy,being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of sevenFrenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought homethe ship. Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very
present help in time of trouble:—314“With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more
did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung about
my middle hang very 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 which made him fall.... Then I looked
about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them withal. But
seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do?’ Then casting up my eye
upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked my rightarm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of aninch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One of
the Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away from him.] But
through GOD’S wonderful providence! it either fell out of his hand, or
else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me
strength enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at the other’s
head: and looking about again to see anything to strike them withal, butseeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do now?’ And then it pleased
GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of
the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me

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so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife andsheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut the man’s
throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he immediately dropt
down, and scarce ever stirred after.”—I have slightly abridged Lyde’s
narrative.
There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer.
The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are
devoted to the subject,315 but for us Muller’s case will suffice.
As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the Bishop of Ripon and others,
London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer,
Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. Hastings: The Guiding Hand, orProvidential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898(?).
315

A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life is followed
by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the Almighty
for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it proofs,
palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active influence. The
following description of a “led” life, by a German writer whom I havealready quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every
country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds
in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty—“That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one’s
cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that one
glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what
would have terrified one or led one astray, until the peril is past—thisbeing especially the case with temptations to vanity and sensuality; thatpaths on which one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off withthorns; but that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly removed;that when the time has come for something, one suddenly receives a
courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until
then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces ofknowledge and insight, in one’s self, of which it is impossible to say
whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to help us,
favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against their will, so that
often those indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest
service and furtherance. (God takes often their worldly goods, from thosewhom he leads, at just the right moment, when they threaten to impede
the effort after higher interests.)“Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which it is noteasy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that now one walks
continually through ‘open doors’ and on the easiest roads, with as little

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care and trouble as it is possible to imagine.
“Furthermore one finds one’s self settling one’s affairs neither too early
nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by untimeliness, evenwhen the preparations had been well laid. In addition to this, one does
them with perfect tranquillity of mind, almost as if they were matters of
no consequence, like errands done by us for another person, in whichcase we usually act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns.
Again, one finds that one can WAIT for everything patiently, and that is
one of life’s great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one
thing after the other, so that one gains time to make one’s footing sure
before advancing farther. And then every thing occurs to us at the rightmoment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way,
just as if a third person were keeping watch over those things which weare in easy danger of forgetting.
“Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or ask forwhat is needed, and what we should never have had the courage orresolution to undertake of our own accord.
“Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and tolerantof other people, even of such as are repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, forthey also are instruments of good in God’s hand, and often most efficientones. Without these thoughts it would be hard for even the best of us
always to keep our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine
guidance, one sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would
otherwise be possible.
“All these are things that every human being KNOWS, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could be
brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable toattain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord.”316
316

C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.

Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not thatparticular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending
providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating thecontinuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as
they are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The
outward face of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in
it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between
looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In
the latter case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one’s

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affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world’s authorship, fearand egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds inthe hours, as they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant
opportunities. It is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshlysmoothed. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in thespirit which this kind of prayer infuses.
Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.317 It is that ofmind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so-called “liberal”
Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one ofMartineau’s sermons:—“Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “any one thing in the creation is
sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. The
mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool
from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or
plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us
with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us
hands and instruments of digestion, who has given us to grow insensibly
and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate.... But
because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be some one
to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for whatelse can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I anightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the partof a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise
God ... and I call on you to join the same song.” Works, book i. ch. xvi.,
Carter–Higginson (translation) abridged.

317“The universe, open to the eye today, looks as it did a thousand years
ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which
our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world.
We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in your houseor in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting
seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in thegeneral laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering
afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think weshould discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the
moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater
miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, thatmakes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The
devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, THERE is miracle: and it issimply an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, canthere be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be
more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which
the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which he does notlove well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath thesun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may

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recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on thefirst dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time orplace; but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that canreawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can render
him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of‘the Living God.’"318
James Martineau: end of the sermon “Help Thou Mine Unbelief,” inEndeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page theextract from Voysey on p. 270, above, and those from Pascal and Madame
Guyon on p. 281.

318

When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read incommon matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness withwhich custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a wholeappears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor iswell expressed in these words, which I take from a friend’s letter:—“If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties weare privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so greatthat we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time even to
begin to review the things we may imagine WE HAVE NOT). We sumthem and realize that WE ARE ACTUALLY KILLED WITH GOD’SKINDNESS; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties, without
which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not feel buoyed upby the Eternal Arms?”
Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead ofbeing habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives
this instance from his youthful melancholy period:—“One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with somethingwhich seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the
tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to theschool on the evening of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a
way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find nopretext for fault-finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or
spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were inthis drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I wasenchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act did me good.
Good is at least possible, I said. since the ideal can thus sometimes getembodied.”319
319

Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.

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In Senancour’s novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil isrecorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower inbloom, a jonquil:“It was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of theyear. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmonyof souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I neverfelt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what
analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower alimitless beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, thisimmensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain;
this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature
has not made actual.”320
320

Op. cit., Letter XXX.

We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may
appear to converts after their awakening.321 As a rule, religious persons
generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any
way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with them.
Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home tothem, and if it be “trial,” strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at allstages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the process ofcommunion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and becomes
operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this operativeness isadmitted to be real, it makes no essential difference whether its
immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental religious
point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber,does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really.
321
Above, p. 243 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world,in Melancholiacs, p. 148.

So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion.
As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is
the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with thesubconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my
opening lecture322 about the prevalence of the psychopathic
temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly finda religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record ofautomatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose
followers regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamountto inspiration, I speak of leaders of thought and subjects of

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intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, hisgift of tongues, small as was the importance he attached to the latter. The
whole array of Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest,
the Barnards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had theirvisions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and “openings.”
They had these things, because they had exalted sensibility, and to suchthings persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie,
however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened whereverautomatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond thetransmarginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The
inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but
strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination.
Saints who actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme ofassurance. Motor automatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even moreconvincing than sensations. The subjects here actually feel themselves
played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; theGod or spirit moves the very organs of their body.323
322

Above, pp. 25, 26.

323
A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic
automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the
movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it
obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously
believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge
downwards of our voluntary motor-centres. We must normally have such a
feeling, he thinks, or the SENSE OF AN ABSENCE would not be so striking
as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kindis rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements
as Antonia Bourignon’s, that “I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit toanother power than mine,” is shown by the context to indicate inspiration
rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latteroccurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called,“Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,”
Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated automatically by Dr.
Newbrough of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have beenlately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico.
The latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is“Zertouhem’s Wisdom of the Ages,” by George A. Fuller, Boston, 1901.

The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power isof course “inspiration.” It is easy to discriminate between the religious
leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and those whohave not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apartfrom his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, ofWesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have been
only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in
Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints,

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in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent,sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the
direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards
the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has madea careful study of them, to see—“How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in theprophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it
would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by thetentative efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden
about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came.
And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without,against which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] theopening of the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the firsttwo chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
“It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet
passes through a crisis which is clearly not self— caused. Scattered all
through the prophetic writings are expressions which speak of somestrong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet,determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his
utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than theirown. For instance, this of Isaiah’s: ‘The Lord spake thus to me with astrong hand,’—an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering
nature of the impulse—‘and instructed me that I should not walk in theway of this people.’ ... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: ‘The hand of theLord God fell upon me,’ ‘The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.’ The
one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with theauthority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one and all
preface their addresses so confidently, ‘The Word of the Lord,’ or ‘Thus
saith the Lord.’ They have 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; I am 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 the mouthpiece of the
Almighty.”324
324

W. Sanday: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49–56, abridged.

“We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that theprophets formed a professional class. There were schools of theprophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of young
men would gather round some commanding figure—a Samuel or an
Elisha—and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his

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sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his
inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their exercises.... It isperfectly clear that by no means all of these Sons of the prophets eversucceeded in acquiring more than a very small share in the gift which
they sought. It was clearly possible to ‘counterfeit’ prophecy. Sometimes
this was done deliberately.... But it by no means follows that in all cases
where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether consciousof what he was doing.325
Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses’s and Isaiah’s commissions,as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi.
325

Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of
Alexandria describes his inspiration:—“Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, andimplanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of divine
inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known neither theplace in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I
was saying, nor what I was writing, for then I have been conscious of arichness of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating
insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done; having such
effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on
the eyes.”326
Quoted by Augustus Clissold: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius andMadness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s caseis of course the palmary one of audita et visa, serving as a basis ofreligious revelation.
326

If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed’s revelations all came fromthe subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them—“Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell asfrom a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and when theangel went away, he had received the revelation. Sometimes again heheld converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to understand his
words. The later authorities, however, ... distinguish still other kinds. In
the Itgan (103) the following are enumerated: 1, revelations with soundof bell, 2, by inspiration of the holy spirit in M.‘s heart, 3, by Gabriel inhuman form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his
journey to heaven) or in dream.... In Almawahib alladuniya the kinds arethus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet’s heart, 3,Gabriel taking Dahya’s form, 4, with the bell-sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in

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propria persona (only twice), 6, revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing inperson, but veiled, 8, God revealing himself immediately without veil.
Others add two other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the form of still
another man, 2, God showing himself personally in dream.”327
Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller
account in Sir William Muir’s: Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii.
327

In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case ofJoseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to
the revealed translation of the {472} gold plates which resulted in theBook of Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, theinspiration seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began histranslation by the aid of the “peep-stones” which he found, or thought or
said that he found, with the gold plates —apparently a case of “crystal
gazing.” For some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but
seems generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.328
The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations
accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging
letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following
extract:—
328“It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr. Snow]of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of revelations very
recently from heaven. To explain fully what these revelations are, it isnecessary to know that we, as a people, believe that the Church of Jesus
Christ has again been established through messengers sent from heaven.
This Church has at its head a prophet seer, and revelator, who gives to
man God’s holy will. Revelation is the means through which the will of
God is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got
through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices
without visional appearance or by actual manifestations of the Holy
Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person andspoken to our prophet and revelator.”
Other revelations are described as “openings”—Fox’s, for example, were
evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of today as“impressions.” As all effective initiators of change must needs live tosome degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception orconviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must
be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common aphenomenon.
When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious

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mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden
unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when
we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and selfseverity met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusionthat in religion we have a department of human nature with unusuallyclose relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region. If the word
“subliminal” is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychicalresearch or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, todistinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latterthe 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 each of us, for it is theabode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything thatpasses unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things
as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of
all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, andprejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions,persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations,come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may
return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, andour automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and “hypnoid”
conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixedideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supranormal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It isalso the fountain-head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deepin the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen—and this is myconclusion—the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any
rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had
emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in
my first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced ofinner religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate
human individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both mydocuments and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe,in itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie, I
think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, wemust try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material may
suggest.

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Lecture XX
Conclusions
SUMMARY OF RELIGIOUS CHARACTERISTICS— MEN’S RELIGIONS NEED NOT BEIDENTICAL— “THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS” CAN ONLY SUGGEST, NOT
PROCLAIMS A RELIGIOUS CREED— IS RELIGION A “SURVIVAL” OF PRIMITIVETHOUGHT?— MODERN SCIENCE RULES OUT THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY—ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND BELIEF IN THE PERSONAL CHARACTERIZEDPRESCIENTIFIC THOUGHT— PERSONAL FORCES ARE REAL, IN SPITE OF THIS—SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS ARE ABSTRACTIONS, ONLY INDIVIDUALIZED EXPERIENCES
ARE CONCRETE— RELIGION HOLDS BY THE CONCRETE— PRIMARILY RELIGION
IS A BIOLOGICAL REACTION— ITS SIMPLEST TERMS ARE AN UNEASINESS AND A
DELIVERANCE; DESCRIPTION OF THE DELIVERANCE— QUESTION OF THE
REALITY OF THE HIGHER POWER— THE AUTHOR’S HYPOTHESES: 1. THE
SUBCONSCIOUS SELF AS INTERMEDIATING BETWEEN NATURE AND THE HIGHERREGION— 2. THE HIGHER REGION, OR “GOD”— 3. HE PRODUCES REAL EFFECTS
IN NATURE.

The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; andin this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw
our theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending
the empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we mightcome to could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of
the significance for life of religion, taken “on the whole.” Our conclusions
cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will
formulate them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can.
Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of thereligious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:—
1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it
draws its chief significance;
2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is ourtrue end;
3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof— be that spirit“God” or “law”—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritualenergy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within
the phenomenal world.
Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:—
4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either

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5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation toothers, a preponderance of loving affections.
In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literallybathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalledat the amount of emotionality which I find in it.
After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in
the rest of the work that lies before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the factthat I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you
are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are,nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt myselection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I
might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer
examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets ofany science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be
eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what
they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment
independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical
expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as
authentically as anyone can know them who learns them from another;and we have next 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 restrained by other elements, to give theproper balance?
But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately
and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.329
Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with otherelements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the
lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words,
is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds
regrettable?
329

For example, on pages 135, 160, 326 above.

To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. And my reason is that I
do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions
and with such different powers as human individuals are, should haveexactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us haveidentical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical

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solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain
sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a uniquemanner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself;
one must yield a point, another must stand firm—in order the better todefend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a
Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total humanconsciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single
quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which
in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude
being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us
to spell the meaning out completely. So a “god of battles” must beallowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heavenand home, the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that
we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in thespiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must
be an element of our religion; why need it be one if we are good andsympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion ofdeliverance; but why think so much of deliverance, if we are healthyminded?330 Unquestionably, some men have the completer experienceand the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for eachman to stay in his own experience, whate’er it be, and for others totolerate him there, is surely best.
330
From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and themorbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, ofwhich I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 159–164), cease to be the radical
antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down upon therectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being “mere morality,”
and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” an orthodox minister is reported
to have said, “is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the
extraordinary rectitude of his character.” It is indeed true that the outlook
upon life of the twice-born—holding as it does more of the element of evil
in solution—is the wider and completer. The “heroic” or “solemn” way inwhich life comes to them is a “higher synthesis” into which healthymindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded,
but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons (see pp. 47–52,
354–357). But the final consciousness which each type reaches of unionwith the divine has the same practical significance for the individual; andindividuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie mostopen to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in
Lecture IV, of the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we foundabundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in
this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink theconsciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get ridof it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it
is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twiceborn subject.

But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we

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should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In
answering this question I must open again the general relations of thetheoretic to the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al–
Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism—that to understand thecauses of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be
drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes
and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements werequalified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, tobe considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be theman who found it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c’est tout
pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons
as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one
only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one’s living
faith.331 If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’scause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however
narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however
much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a placein life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
331

Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.

For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent forliving religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science,
we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic
attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by
active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions
constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all thenecessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence thesame conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced.
Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing,involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerfulcommunion with them,332 work is done, and something real comes topass. She has now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, inthe light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs
can be considered TRUE.
332“Prayerful” taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 453 ff.

Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the othersciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in theirpresent state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know
nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practicalcommerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which

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general philosophy inclines. The scientist, so-called, is, during his
scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on thewhole the influence of science goes against the notion that religion
should be recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo
within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this sciencehas to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible
superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief
that is religious probably is false. In the “prayerful communion” ofsavages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it ishard for us to see what genuine spiritual work—even though it were work
relative only to their dark savage obligations— can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as
likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that theessence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that
religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of “survival,” anatavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its moreenlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious
anthropologists at present do little to counteract.
This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it withsome explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the“Survival theory,” for brevity’s sake.
The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, isthe interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, inshort, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The
gods believed in-whether by crude savages or by men disciplined
intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls.
Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in theworld of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as atany previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets
him on the basis of his personal concerns.
Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal
point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws
indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, andconstructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on humananxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish areligion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are overwhen it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare theglory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar
system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of acertain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local

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accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In aspan of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will
have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, andsubsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as wellas to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of thescientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,
whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything
but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper
history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable
ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast
rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she
appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied
the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,333
representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things ofnature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science
recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does awholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes
to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats astormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of thewind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—
epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; theirdestinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s
irremediable currents of events.
333
How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in
whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century
was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby-like faith in the
personal and human character of Nature as to expound her operations as
he did in his work on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is theaccount he gives of the sun and its utility:—“We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions
on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may
inhabit its surface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, andable to infer God’s invisible being from the contemplation of the world,
the sun in so far forth contributes to the primary purpose of creation:
without it the race of man could not be preserved or continued.... The
sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets;
and daylight is of the utmost utility to us, for by its means we cancommodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would
either be quite impossible. Or at any rate impossible without our going to
the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day
which they would not be able to find at night. Moreover we owe it to thesunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth’s surface,
not only near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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far things according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us
not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we aretraveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, whichknowledge for the most part depends on observations made with thehelp of sight, and without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If
any one would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which
he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one
month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not
day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own
experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the street or in
the fields.... From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, andby knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on
which account astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one
can find the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun-dials,
and generally speaking, we should have no sun-dials if we had no sun.”Vernunftige Gedanken von den Absichter der naturlichen Dinge, 1782.
pp.74–84.
Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institution of “the great
variety throughout the world of men’s faces, voices, and hand-writing,”
given in Derham’s Physico-theology, a book that had much vogue in theeighteenth century. “Had Man’s body,” says Dr. Derham, “been madeaccording to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method thanthat of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety would never havebeen: but Men’s Faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very
different Mould, their Organs of Speech would have sounded the same or
not so great a Variety of Notes, and the same Structure of Muscles andNerves would have given the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in
this Case what Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would theworld eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to ourpersons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justicebetween Man and Man, no Distinction between Good and Bad, between
Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male or
Female; but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed to
the Malice of the Envious and ill-Natured, to the Fraud and Violence ofKnaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts ofthe Effeminate and Debauched, and what not! Our Courts of Justice canabundantly testify the dire Effects of Mistaking Men’s Faces, ofcounterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings.
But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered the
Matter, every man’s Face can distinguish him in the Light, and his Voicein the Dark, his Hand-writing can speak for him though absent, and be
his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations. A manifest

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as well as admirable Indication of the divine Superintendence andManagement.”
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signingof bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of eighteenth
century Anglicanism.
I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham’s “Vindication of God by theInstitution of Hills and Valleys,” and Wolff’s altogether culinary accountof the institution of Water:—“The uses,” says Wolff, “which water serves in human life are plain to see
and need not be described at length. Water is a universal drink of man
and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are
artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of waterand malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine isprepared from grapes, which could never have grown without the help ofwater; and the same is true of those drinks which in England and otherplaces they produce from fruit.... Therefore since God so planned theworld that men and beasts should live upon it and find there everything
required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one
means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is
all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtainfrom this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of ourclothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding-mill one
sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get astill greater idea of the use of water.”Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty, discourses
as follows: “Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength, and so
confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost any place ortemperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not tobe able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With somethe more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who arelanguishing and dying in the feculent and grosser air of great towns, oreven the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys and waters. But
contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong in
the warmer air of the valleys.
“So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the vales,
is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit to thevaletudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an easy andcomfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and pineaway.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 374 de 400“To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great
convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places forhabitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep
off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, andreflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams and so rendering ourhabitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.
“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the rivers
their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are
not, as they are charged such rude and useless excrescences of our illformed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and orderedby the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was thesurface of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands
and continents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain
there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters;
but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher
lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate andperhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.
“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler they
may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of thegreat Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our sublunary
world.”You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as amere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of themost primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square themand get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one
great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors,
dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were
inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such
distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only
conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects ofexistence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imaginedin a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed
confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth
was what had not yet been contradicted, most things were taken into themind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and theattention confined itself exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspectsof events.334
334
Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One need
only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by
Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever tomake a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle,

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to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular
movement. The circle is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed
point and a moving line, which contradict each other; and whatever moves
in a circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle
is the most “natural” movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as
it does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion,and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by
Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south
because of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over
Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine’s speculations: “Who gave to chaff such
power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power towarm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties offire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which,though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that it touches andfeeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders? ... Then whatwonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a lighttap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong thatno moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City of God, book xxi,
ch. iv.

Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness the
sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, theireccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were
inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention.
If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invokedon every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment
attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of receipts,
including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or abear, powdered earthworms, the usnia, or mossy growth on theweathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equallyunpleasant—the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, butnever under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in thepatient’s blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be
immersed in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, thelatter infallibly gets well—I quote now Van Helmont’s account—for the
blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it the spirit of thewounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of theointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cureits cousin-german the blood in the patient’s body. This it does by sucking
out the dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do
this it has to implore the aid of the bull’s fat, and other portions of theunguent. The reason why bull’s fat is so powerful is that the bull at thetime of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, andtherefore dies with a higher flame of revenge about him than any otheranimal. And thus we have made it out, says this author, that theadmirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed, not to any
auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the

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posthumous character of Revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the
blood and concreted fat in the unguent. J. B. Van Helmont: A Ternary of
Paradoxes, translated by Walter Charleton, London, 1650.—I much
abridge the original in my citations.
The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural facts
that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is the true
rationale of the case. “If,” he says, “the heart of a horse slain by a witch,taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be impaled upon an arrow androasted, immediately the whole witch becomes tormented with theinsufferable pains and cruelty of the fire, which could by no means
happen unless there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch
with the spirit of the horse. In the reeking and yet panting heart, thespirit of the witch is kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by thearrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at thecoroner’s inquest suffered a fresh haemorrhage or cruentation at thepresence of the assassin?—the blood being, as in a furious fit of anger,
enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against themurderer, at the instant of the soul’s compulsive exile from the body. So,
if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including some of your warm
blood in the shell and white of an egg, which, exposed to a gentle heat,and mixed with a bait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog, thedisease shall instantly pass from you into the animal, and leave you
entirely. And similarly again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow
or of a woman, the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at
Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon
Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of aporter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his own
country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few days
dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had expired, nearabout the same punctilio of time. There are still at Brussels eye-witnessesof this occurrence,” says Van Helmont; and adds, “I pray what is there inthis of superstition or of exalted imagination?”
Modern mind-cure literature—the works of Prentice Mulford, forexample—is full of sympathetic magic.
How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for
explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modesof conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly
have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction,
position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer
animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that makephenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first

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singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue tothe knowledge of Nature’s life? Well, it is still in these richer animisticand dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror andbeauty of phenomena, the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow, the“voice” of the thunder, the “gentleness” of the summer rain, the“sublimity” of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things
follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed;and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his
room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings ofhelp come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen
reality fill him with security and peace.
Pure anachronism! says the survival-theory;—anachronism for which
deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The
less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal
and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become.
In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude
makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, andI can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason isthat, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal onlywith the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private andpersonal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest
sense of the term. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by thesewords.
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, anobjective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably
more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or
suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any
given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state”
in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may beenormous—the cosmic times and spaces, for example— whereas theinner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet thecosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal
pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but
only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience
itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field
PLUS its object as felt or thought of PLUS an attitude towards the object
PLUS the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete
bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as longas it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as
the “object” is when taken all alone. It is a FULL fact, even though it be
an insignificant fact; it is of the KIND to which all realities whatsoever

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must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; itis on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable
feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as
he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for
its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing thatfills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existentthat should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality
only half made up.335
Compare Lotze’s doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to thenotion of a thing as it is “in itself” is by conceiving it as it is FOR itself, i.e.,
as a piece of full experience with a private sense of “pinch” or inner activityof some sort going with it.
335

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements ofexperience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely throughthe egotistic places—they are strung upon it like so many beads. To
describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch ofdestiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description—
they being as describable as anything else —would be something likeoffering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion
makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion may be egotistic, andthose private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow
enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow andabstract, as far as it goes, 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 the word “raisin,” with
one real egg instead of the word “egg,” might be an inadequate meal, but
it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of thesurvival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements
exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever withreading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particularquestions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is
only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in thesphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But tolive thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survivaltheory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does notfollow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed
them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being
religious at all.336 By being religious we establish ourselves in possessionof ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard.
Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
336

Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as

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the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious conception of
the universe seems to many mind-curers “verified” from day to day by
their experience of fact. “Experience of fact” is a field with so many thingsin it that the sectarian scientist methodically declining, as he does, torecognize such “facts” as mind-curers and others like them experience,otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as “bosh,” “rot,” “folly,”certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious
interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would
never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to betrue already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as well.
Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist stock in
trade, and have always been dismissed by the scientist as figments of theimagination. But the scientist’s tardy education in the facts of hypnotism
has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order,and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you
expressly call them effects of “suggestion.” Even the stigmata of the crosson Saint Francis’s hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.
Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the
point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has thename of “hystero-demonopathy” by which to apperceive it. No one canforesee just how far this legitimation of occultist phenomena under newly
found scientist titles may proceed—even “prophecy,” even “levitation,”might creep into the pale.

Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may notnecessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism
and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, bematters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human opinion may, in short,in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personalstyle, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than astraight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of sciencemight one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity
rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarianscientist at present so confidently announces it to be.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout theselectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element offeeling in religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality isfounded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata
of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact
in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is
actually done.337 Compared with this world of living individualized
feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellectcontemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic
pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, themovement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture ofan express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I
have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?338

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337
Hume’s criticism has banished causation from the world of physicalobjects, and “Science” is absolutely satisfied to define cause in terms ofconcomitant change-read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The “original” of thenotion of causation is in our inner personal experience, and only there cancauses in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and described.

When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the bestthing we can say of God is that he is THE INEVITABLE INFERENCE,” I
recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms.
Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however
inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther,
Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle
with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows
everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism
evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every
one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian
Revelation, The Christian Life The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York,1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy
properly so called:—
338“Religion,” writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313, 436, et
passim), “answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent
determination of human nature, being merely an expression of that stageof the human mind which is dominated by the imagination....
Christianity has but a single possible final heir to its estate, and that isscientific philosophy.”
In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Sentiments,
p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single
formula—the ever-growing predominance of the rational intellectual
element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter
tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments. “Ofreligious sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save avague respect for the unknowable x which is a last relic of the fear, and acertain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, thatcharacterized the earlier periods of religious growth.
To state this more simply, religion tends to turn into religious
philosophy.—These are psychologically entirely different things, the one
being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other is theliving work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling
into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man.”
I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies inindividuality in attempts like those 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.”

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Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personaldestinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities
which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.
The next thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, orwhether indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered ageneral message to mankind. We have done as you see, with ourpreliminaries, and our final summing up can now begin.
I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I havequoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution andbelief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I
now advance may appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a taperingoff and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest
and result. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants
appears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more povertystricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first to
some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in
mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce
religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free fromindividualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their nucleus,
and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. Thatestablished, we should have a result which might be small, but would atleast be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on
which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted, andflourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which
will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a criticalphilosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and weshall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once
more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task.
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same
conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we
survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughtsthat have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the
conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian,and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The
theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary;and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings andthe conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these twoelements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her
principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions
form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may
even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are
not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at

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all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion
which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed inreview.
The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order
do they belong?
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a “sthenic”
affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, “dynamogenic” orderwhich, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture,but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we haveseen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy andimparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an
enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.339 The name of“faith-state,” by which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.340 It
is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy isabsolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces BY WHICH MEN
LIVE.341 The total absence of it, anhedonia,342 means collapse.
339

Compare, for instance, pages 200, 215, 219, 222, 244–250, 270–273.

340

American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.

341

Above, p. 181.

342

Above, p. 143.

The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. We saw
examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or insuch mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.343 It may be a mere vague
enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great
and wondrous things are in the air.344
343

Above, p. 391.

344
Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “I do not know how to deal
with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms
me; I want to DO something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing....
I would fain do GREAT THINGS.” Again, after an inspiring interview, hewrites: “I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I
wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude far from all men. It was late;but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman,looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me
draw hastily back —I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step moreand I must have fallen. 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 expansive impulse over

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direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman’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 onward with me, andstill urge you, without the least idea what is ourdestination
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d anddefeated.”
This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its
importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seemto be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own
dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive destinies, and faith in
the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of oursanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible
over the real.
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faithstate, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,345 and this explains thepassionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest detailsof their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together,as forming “religions,” and treating these as purely subjective
phenomena, without regard to the question of their “truth,” we are
obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action andendurance, to class them amongst the most important biological
functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect is so greatthat Professor Leuba, in a recent article,346 goes so far as to say that solong as men can USE their God, they care very little who he is, or even
whether he is at all. “The truth of the matter can be put,” says Leuba, “inthis way: GOD IS NOT KNOWN, HE IS NOT UNDERSTOOD; HE IS
USED—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support,
sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself
useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God
really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant
questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying
life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any andevery level of development, is the religious impulse.”347
345

Compare Leuba: Loc. cit., pp. 346–349.

346
The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July1901.

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347
Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s extraordinarily
true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve theintellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. Bender says (in his
Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38): “Not the question about God,and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but
the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric.”“Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation bymeans of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes throughagainst the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards
the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own
strength are reached.” The whole book is little more than a development ofthese words.

At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be consideredvindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seemthat she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert apermanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content,
and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility,
and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.
First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common
nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?
I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in theaffirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do
indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance inwhich religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:—
1. An uneasiness; and2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is
SOMETHING WRONG ABOUT US as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that WE ARE SAVED FROM THE
WRONGNESS by making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, thewrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mysticaltinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to
all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience interms like these:—

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The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, isto that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch withsomething higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part
there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a mosthelpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by nomeans obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution orsalvation) arrives,348 the man identifies his real being with the germinal
higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes
conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a
MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside ofhim, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get
on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces
in the wreck.
Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually,
whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.
348

It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in thesevery simple general terms.349 They allow for the divided self and thestruggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender ofthe lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping
power and yet account for our sense of union with it;350 and they fully
justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no
autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, towhich the description will not well apply. One need only add suchspecific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personaltemperaments, and one will then have the various experiences
reconstructed in their individual forms.
The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the reality” of one’s higher
part; 2, to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all
the rest of ideal being.
349“When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessedby the sense of a being at once EXCESSIVE and IDENTICAL with the self:
great enough to be God; interior enough to be ME. The “objectivity” of it
ought in that case to be called EXCESSIVITY, rather, or exceedingness.”
ReCeJac: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.

350

So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only
psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biologicalworth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has
them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux
where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but
his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of
the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the

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objective “truth” of their content?351
The word “truth” is here taken to mean something additional to barevalue for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe thatwhatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.

351

The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most
pertinently arises is that “MORE of the same quality” with which ourown higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious
working relation. Is such a “more” merely our own notion, or does itreally exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as
exist? And in what form should we conceive of that “union” with it ofwhich religious geniuses are so convinced?
It is in answering these questions that the various theologies performtheir theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They
all agree that the “more” really exists; though some of them hold it toexist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied toconceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal
structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as
exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you
throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of“union” with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly.
Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works
and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism andmysticism, carry on inveterate disputes.
At the end of my lecture on Philosophy352 I held out the notion that an
impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of theirdiscrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also
formulate in terms to which {501} physical science need not object. This,
I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, andrecommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I
should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis.
352

Above, p. 445.

The time has now come for this attempt. Who says “hypothesis”
renounces the ambition to be coercive in 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 for vetoing yourimpulse 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. Into what definite description can these

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words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would
never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particulartheology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately
to define the “more” as Jehovah, and the “union” as his imputation to usof the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions,and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief.
We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of theduties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with therest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the“more,” which psychologists may also recognize as real. The
subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; andI believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apartfrom all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life
in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of thetransmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what
Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness353 is
as true as when it was first written: “Each of us is in reality an abiding
psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality
which can never express itself completely through any corporeal
manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there isalways some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, somepower of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.”354 Much of thecontent of this larger background against which our conscious being
stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles,
inhibitive timidities, “dissolutive” phenomena of various sorts, as Myers
calls them, enters into it for a large part. But in it many of theperformances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our studyof conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how
striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305. For afull statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his posthumous work,“Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,” which is alreadyannounced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myersfor the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the
exploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its wholeextent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treating asa natural series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as
curious isolated facts and subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature.
How important this exploration will prove, future work upon the path which
Myers has opened can alone show. compare my paper: “Frederic Myers’s
services to Psychology,” in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.

353

Compare the inventory given above on pp. 472–4, and also what is saidof the subconscious self on pp. 228–231, 235–236.
354

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Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its
FARTHER side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feelourselves connected is on its HITHER side the subconscious
continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognizedpsychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with“science” which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time thetheologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external
power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from thesubconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to
the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as“higher”; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties
of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union withthe power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but
literally true.
This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science ofreligions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view.
Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we
step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries
us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here
mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism andtranscendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations355 and tellus that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with
God and identical with the soul of the world.356 Here the prophets of all
the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, andother openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith.
355

Compare above, pp. 410 ff.

One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader’s familiarity
with the notion of it:—356

“If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you come inand begin to weep and wail, ‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the darkness vanish?
Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment. So what
good will it do you to think all your lives, ‘Oh, I have done evil, I havemade many mistakes’? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in thelight, and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up
yourselves, the effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in
every one whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such astate that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see theGod within, and instead of condemning, say, ‘Rise, thou effulgent One,rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise
almighty, and manifest your nature.’ ... This is the highest prayer that theAdvaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering our nature.”...

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 389 de 400“Why does man go out to look for a God? ... It is your own heart beating,and you did not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He,nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body andmy soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it,
manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be
perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act
upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, theGod behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, theeternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were,a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know It?” Swami
Viverananda: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part iv. pp. 172,174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the Apparent Man, p. 24,
abridged.
Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations
must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least,
decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines,
they neutralize one another and leave no fixed results. If we follow any
one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic
pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of ourindividual freedom, and build out our religion in the way mostcongruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among thesesusceptibilities intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although thereligious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in
the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritualexcitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be
aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs orideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched.357 These ideas
will thus be essential to that individual’s religion;—which is as much as
to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable,
and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as
they are not intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the mostinteresting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs.
For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth toChristian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in spiritistic formulas
before the saving experience set in:—
357

“For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was revealed to
me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I don’t know what I
should have done. It has taught me to detach myself from worldly things
and to place my hope in things to come. Through it I have learned to see
in all men, even in those most criminal, even in those from whom I havemost suffered, undeveloped brothers to whom I owed assistance, love,and forgiveness. I have learned that I must lose my temper over nothing

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despise no one, and pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And
although I have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me
more strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that 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 that the day will come when
all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has a great place in mylife, indeed it holds the first place there.” Flournoy Collection.
Disregarding the over beliefs, and confining ourselves to what iscommon and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person iscontinuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come,358 apositive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally
and objectively true as far as it goes.
If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits ofthis extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief—
though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you—for
which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I
should accord to yours.
“The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is amatter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro
magnetism.” W. C. Brownell, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx. p. 112.
358

{506} The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an
altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely“understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural
region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate inthis region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find thempossessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we
belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to thevisible world, for we belong in the 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 commune with it, work is
actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into newmen, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world
upon our regenerative change.359 But that which produces effects within
another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no
philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.
359
That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer, is aperfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly in thepreceding lectures. I append another concrete example to rein force theimpression on the reader’s mind:—“Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought] andhttp://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/varieties/complete.html

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draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known throughexperience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act ofconsciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience. It
is not an ecstasy, it is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the
Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm,sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from thephenomena of sense-perception to the phenomena of seership, from thethought of self to a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower
self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to becalm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism.
It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely asheat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely usedas the sun s rays can be focused and made to do work, to set fire towood.” The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.
God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme
reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of
God.360 We and God have business with each other; and in opening
ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at
those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn
genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us
fulfills or evades God’s demands. As far as this goes I probably have youwith me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call theinstinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.
Transcendentalists are fond of the term “Over-soul,” but as a rule theyuse it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion.
“God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion, and that is the
aspect which I wish to emphasize.
360

The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, areexerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the
spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider
sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or “know,” if they be
mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings
to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is asense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are ALL saved, in spite of
the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God’s existenceis the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved.
This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up or
freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought
elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional
and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final
things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, andremote objective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems

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to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience,and bring a REAL HYPOTHESIS into play. A good hypothesis in sciencemust have other properties than those of the phenomenon it isimmediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. God,
meaning only what enters into the religious man’s experience of union,
falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs toenter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject’s absoluteconfidence and peace.
That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extramarginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be
the absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief.
Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one’s religion.
Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but thephilosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to saythat Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere
illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, likelove, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we haveseen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new
FACTS as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic
world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over andabove the altered expression, a natural constitution different at somepoint from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be suchthat different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be
required.
This thoroughly “pragmatic” view of religion has usually been taken as amatter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine
miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond thegrave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that,without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by
simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it moredivine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to
be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as
everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very
own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from theactual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not.
But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture isthat they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me thatthe world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds ofconsciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must containexperiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although inthe main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet thetwo become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By

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being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself tokeep more sane and true. I CAN, of course, put myself into the sectarianscientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations andof scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hearthat inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering theword “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 beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds.
Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more intricately
built than physical science allows.
So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the overbelief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of
individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually
help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

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Postscript
PHILOSOPHIC POSITION OF THE PRESENT WORK DEFINED AS PIECEMEALSUPERNATURALISM— CRITICISM OF UNIVERSALISTIC SUPERNATURALISM—
DIFFERENT PRINCIPLES MUST OCCASION DIFFERENCES IN FACT— WHATDIFFERENCES IN FACT CAN GOD’S EXISTENCE OCCASION?— THE QUESTION OF
IMMORTALITY— QUESTION OF GOD’S UNIQUENESS AND INFINITY: RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE DOES NOT SETTLE THIS QUESTION IN THE AFFIRMATIVE— THE
PLURALISTIC HYPOTHESIS IS MORE CONFORMED TO COMMON SENSE.

In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much atsimplification that I fear that my general philosophic position
received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible tosome of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which mustalso be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In alater work I may be enabled to state my position more amply
and consequently more clearly.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes
and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago,
and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar
head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists andsupernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along with mostphilosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser anda more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division thatmost philosophers at the present day belong. If not regulartranscendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enoughto bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course ofphenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic
supernaturalism; for the “crasser” variety “piecemeal” supernaturalism
would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology
which today is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to befound among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant isthought to have displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings,
and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds
together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among theforces that causally determine the real world’s details. In this the refinedsupernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.
For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and neverbursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world,
for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is apoint of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different “-ology,” andinhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which
existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level ofexperience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of
nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in

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response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianityor scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with
the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are madehere below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists ofthe piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders,
it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physicalscience at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism
finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad.
It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which
may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existenceof systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking theideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate.
Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe thatprinciples can exist which make no difference in facts.361 But all facts are
particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God’s existence
seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which thatexistence may be expected to entail. That no concrete particular ofexperience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being
there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis towhich (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It
is only with experience en bloc, it says, that the Absolute maintains
relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.
361
Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes
THIS difference, that facts EXIST. We owe it to the Absolute that we have aworld of fact at all. “A world” of fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire
world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our
finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting
in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs,
but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which
our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken
earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. It
is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which
Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no
particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and
who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd
evolution from the God of David’s psalms!

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely inorder the better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend
the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. Allsupernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law;
but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it
remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word

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The Varieties of Religious Experience : a Study in Human Nature / William Ja... Página 396 de 400“judgment” here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic
appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it
carries, on the contrary, EXECUTION with it, is in rebus as well as post
rem. and operates “causally” as partial factor in the total fact. The
universe becomes a gnosticism362 pure and simple on any other terms.
But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of thecrasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on
the whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed.
See my Will to Believe and other Essays in popular Philosophy. 1897, p.
165.
362

I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought inacademic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set hisback against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed andlocked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes,
I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and acomplete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be thehypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements are
met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what I
now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where I
belong.
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s
existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no
hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of “prayerfulcommunion,” especially when certain kinds of incursion from thesubconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The
appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one
sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actuallyexerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces
regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider
world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there beforces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of
the effects be the openness of the “subliminal” door, we have theelements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lendplausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomenathat I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At theseplaces at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies,
God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world towhich the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural “fact” which most of us would assign as the firstdifference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine,
be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our

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own race MEANS immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer ofimmortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as
an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about
immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If
our ideals are only cared for in “eternity,” I do not see why we might not
be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathizewith the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of
impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how
to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify.
Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove “spirit-return,” though I have thehighest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, andHyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I
consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save thereader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention
in the body of this book.
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the “God” ofordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowedwith certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on
philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter ofcourse to be “one and only” and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many
finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider,and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual
clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we havestudied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist
belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we canexperience union with SOMETHING larger than ourselves and in that
union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, andmysticism with its monoideistic bent, both “pass to the limit” andidentify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of
the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows theexample which they set.
Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me
sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion
continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him
and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be
both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do,
if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite,
it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger andmore godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the
mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collectionof such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absoluteunity realized in it at all.363 Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon

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us—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim
at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within
its proper bounds. [Compare p. 130 above.]363
Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human
Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by
the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so
still today) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of
security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, ALLis saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portionof some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and ourreligious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what
was said on pages 129–131, about the possibility of there being portionsof the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is lesssweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont
to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved andpartly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of
the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its
part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion
when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine thedetails. Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in
the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be
persuaded that their cause will prevail—all of us are willing, whenever
our activity-excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final
philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis
more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For
practical life at any rate, the CHANCE of salvation is enough. No fact inhuman nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on achance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund
Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a lifeof which the keynote is hope.364 But all these statements areunsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to returnto the same questions in another book.
364

Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.

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William James (1842–1910)
A Note on the Author of “The Varieties of Religious
Experience”
The road by which William James arrived at his position of leadershipamong American philosophers was, during his childhood, youth andearly maturity, quite as circuitous and unpredictable as were his father’sideas on the training of his children. That Swedenborgian theologian
foresaw neither the career of novelist for his son Henry, nor that ofpragmatist philosopher for the older William. The father’s migrations
between New York, Europe and Newport meant that William’s education
had variety if it did not have fixed direction. From 13 to 18 he studied inEurope and returned to Newport, Rhode Island, to study painting under
the guidance of John La Farge. After a year, he gave up art for scienceand entered Harvard University, where his most influential teachers
were Louis Agassiz and Charles W. Eliot. In 1863, William James began
the study of medicine, and in 1865 he joined an expedition to the
Amazon. Before long, he wrote: “If there is anything I hate, it iscollecting.” His studies constantly interrupted by ill health, James
returned to Germany and began hearing lectures and reading
voluminously in philosophy. He won his medical degree at Harvard in
1870. For four years he was an invalid in Cambridge, but finally, in 1873,
he passed his gravest physical and spiritual crises and began the careerby which he was to influence so profoundly generations of American
students. From 1880 to 1907 he was successively assistant professor ofphilosophy, professor of psychology and professor of philosophy at
Harvard. In 1890, the publication of his Principles of Psycholog brought
him the acknowledged leadership in the field of functional psychology.
The selection of William James to deliver the Gifford lectures in
Edinburgh was at once a tribute to him and a reward for the universitythat sponsored the undertaking. These lectures, collected in this volume,
have since become famous as the standard scientific work on thepsychology of the religious impulse. Death ended his career on August
27th, 1910.

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This web edition published by:eBooks@Adelaide
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