 Lecture 2 of the Varieties of Religious Experience. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Lecture 2, Circumstption of the Topic. Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile, the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word religion cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we should inquire for the essence of government, for example, one man might tell us it is authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws, yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. And join an intimate acquaintance with all their peculiarities 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? Footnote I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monast for January 1901, after my own text was written. And footnote Consider also the religious sentiment which we see referred to in so many books as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion we find the authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to the feeling of dependence. One makes it a derivative from fear. Others connect it with the sexual life. Others still identify it with the feeling of the infinite and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing. And the moment we are willing to treat the term religious sentiment as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a religious object. Religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it. Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight or in a mountain gorge, only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations, and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions, of course, are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions. But there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract religious emotion to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception. As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject, and although it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or out of the many meanings of the word from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say religion I mean that. This in fact is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose. One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave out. At the outset, we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion. As M.P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is, on the contrary, the inner dispositions of man himself which form the 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 to which this sort of religion prompts are personal, not ritual acts. The individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker. Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself, as far as I can, to personal religion, pure and simple. To some of you, personal religion, thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. It is a part of religion, you will say, but only its unorganized rudiment, if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's conscience, or morality, than his religion. The name, religion, should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution. For the church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element. But if you say this, it will only show, the more plainly, how much the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience, or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion. Under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality, pure and simple, does not contain. And these elements I shall soon seek to point out. So I will myself continue to apply the word religion to it. And in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation to them. In one sense, at least, the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. The churches, when once established, live at second hand upon tradition, but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the Divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Muhammad, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case, so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete. There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically. At least our records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as states 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, Javons and Frasier, expressly oppose religion and magic to each other, it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science, as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again. And our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that further discussion would not be worthwhile. Religion therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all. We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our field. But still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word divine if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a god. Buddhism is in this case. Only of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a god. But in strictness, the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let god evaporate into abstract ideality. Not a deity in concerto, but a superhuman person, and the imminent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838, which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. Quote, These laws, said the speaker, execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus, in the soul of man, there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far as he God, the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. Murder is always known, thefts never enrich, alms never impoverish, murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie, for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks, he becomes less and less, a moat, 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, I ought. When love warns him. When he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed. Then deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship and be enlarged by his worship, for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. They affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant, and the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as plowed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. Close quote. Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being the soul within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality, like the eyes' brilliancy, or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life, like the eyes' seeing, or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight. The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature. Quote. If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the renumeration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world, in vain, set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and moat, and star and sun must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. Close quote. 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 their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual, and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life, are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects, identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds religions. And accordingly, when in our definition of religion, we speak of the individual's relation to what he considers the divine, we must interpret the term divine very broadly, as denoting any object that is god-like, whether it be a concrete deity or not. But the term god-like, if thus treated as a floating general quality, becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is that essentially god-like 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 proceed further. 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, where most primal and enveloping and deeply true, might at this rate be treated as god-like, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt to be the primal truth. Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life. So why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from causal 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 an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which, in some degree, everyone possesses. This sense of the world'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 the completest of all our answers to the question, what is the character of this universe in which we dwell? It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious, as some of these reactions may be, in one sense of the word religious, they yet belong to the general sphere of the religious life, and so should 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 are trifling, sneering attitudes even towards the whole of life, and in some men 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. He says, quote, as for myself, weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment. I get a hundred pike thrusts. I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on 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. Close, quote. Much as we may admire such a robust old game-cock spirit in a valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Jumanfiche is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation. Who cares? And the happy term Jumanfichisme recently has been invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly. All is vanity is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan took pleasure in his latter days of sweet decay and putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the all is vanity state of mind. Take the following passage, for example. We must hold to duty even against the evidence, Renan says, but he then goes on, quote, there are many chances that the world may be nothing but a very pantomime of which no God has care. We must therefore arrange ourselves so that on neither hypotheses we shall be completely wrong. We must listen to superior voices, but in such a way that if the second hypotheses 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 who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly-minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really wise. In Utrumke Paratus, then, be ready for anything that perhaps is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony, and we may be sure that at certain moments, at least, we shall be with the truth. Good humor is a philosophic state of mind. It seems to say to nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk a philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the eternal to be virtuous, but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal. In this way, we return to the right quarter just for jest. We play the trick that has been played on us. In St. Augustine's phrase, Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee, remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we wish the eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the interest of our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely. Surely, all the usual associations of the word religion would have to be stripped away if such a systematic parti-pri 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 would be, all is not vanity in this universe, whatever the appearances may suggest. If it can stop anything, religion, as commonly apprehended, can stop just such chafing talk as renons. It favors gravity, not pertness. It says, hush to all vain chatter and smart wit. But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions, and the tragedy is realized as purging and a way of deliverance is held to exist. 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 Aurealis' racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche, and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlisle, though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with a 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 experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose, arbitrarily again, if you please, to narrow our definition once more by saying 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 well prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. But solemnity and gravity and all such emotional attributes admit of various shades, and do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last 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 our task. Things are more or less divine. States of mind are more or less 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 solenity 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 our study at all. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious, we need have nothing to do, our only profitable business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else. I said in my former lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its more exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. Its fainter manifestations 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. Quote, 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 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 to me. No, let it 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 so adjourn 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 a baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter tomorrow. At best it is but a froward child that must be played with and humored to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over. Close quote. 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 a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem too listless and half-hearted but what matters in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or not? 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 unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious moods and others with which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic states that our soul business lies and we can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go. It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I said that personal religion even without theology or ritual would prove to embody some elements that morality, pure and simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to point out what those elements 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 someone repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been God, she'd better. At bottom, the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving? Or shall we think that even with evil there are ways of living that 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'd better? Or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality, pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning so far as to acknowledge 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 is never felt as a yoke. Dole submission is left far behind and the mood of welcome which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness has taken its place. It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps 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 for comparison you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you and that in passing from one to the other a critical point has been overcome. If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a difference of doctrine, rather is it a difference of emotional mood that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has ordered things there is a frosty chill about his words which you rarely find in a Jewish and never in a Christian 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 fine sentence if God's 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 him and you immediately see the difference I mean the Anima Mundai to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the stoic consents is there to be respected 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 be much the same says Marcus Aurelius it is a man's duty 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 comfortable to the nature of the universe and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me for there is a 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 seems disagreeable because it leads to this the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus 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 cutest off anything and thou dost cut off as far as it is in thy power when thou art dissatisfied and in a manner tryest to put anything out of the way close quote compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the Theologia Germanica quote where men are enlightened with the true light they renounce all desire and choice and commit and commend themselves and all things to the eternal goodness so that every enlightened man could say I would fame to be 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 and the hope of reward or heaven and are living in pure submission to the eternal goodness in the perfect freedom of fervent love when a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself who and what he is and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy he falleth into such 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 is willing 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 our 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 the eternal good only and then when the man neither careeth for nor desireeth anything but the eternal good alone and seeketh not himself nor his own things but the honor of God only he is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace rest and consolation and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven this hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man and happy is he who truly findeth them close quote how much more active and positive the impulse Christian writer to accept his place in the universe is Marcus Aurelius agrees to the scheme 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 quote everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee oh 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 oh nature from thee are all things in thee are all things to thee all things return the poet says dear city of sea crops wilt thou not say dear city of Zeus close quote 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 imitation of Christ quote lord thou knowest what is best let this or that be according as thou wilt give what thou wilt so much as thou wilt when thou wilt do with me as thou knowest best and as shall be most to thine honor 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 thysake than 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 is heaven and where thou art not behold their death and hell close quote it is a good rule in physiology when we are studying the meaning of an organ to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of performance and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no other organ can possibly exert surely the same maxim holds good in our present quest the essence of religious experiences the thing by which we finally must judge them must be that element or quality in them which 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 experiences of tamer minds so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical rather than religious we find a character that is perfectly distinct that character, it seems to me should be regarded as the practically important differentia of religion for our purpose and just what 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 it calls for volunteers and for morality life is a war and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers even a sick man unable to be militant outwardly can carry on the moral warfare he can willfully turn his attention away from his own future whether in this world or the next he can train himself to indifference present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible he can follow public news and sympathize with other people's affairs he can cultivate cheerful manners and be silent about his miseries he can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him and practice whatever duties such as patience, resignation, trust his ethical system requires such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane he is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave and yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence the mystic and ascetic saint for example has an abundant measure 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 the Christian 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 the athletic 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 to go over with the sense of irredeemable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things what he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness to feel that the spirit of the universe 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 with lunatics and prison inmates and death finally runs the robustness of us down and whenever we feel this such a sense of the vanity 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 and all our well-doing has 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 in which 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 and waterspouts 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 has turned into a spiritual birthday the time for tension in our soul is over and that of happy relaxation of calm deep breathing of an eternal present with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived fear is not held in silence as it is by mere morality it is positively expunged and washed away we shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later lectures in 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 enrichment which is not rationally or logically deducible from 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 fall in love with a given woman a mere word or command religious feeling is 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 outer world 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 we ought to take it as meaning and a limited dimension of emotion this enthusiastic temper of a spousal in regions where morality strictly so called 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 footnote once more there are plenty of men constitutionally somber men in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking they are religious in the wider sense yet in this acutist of all senses they are not so and it is religion in the acutist sense that I wish without disputing about words to study first so as to get at its typical differential footnote this sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere 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 of mind 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 the prerogative of religion forget this complication and call all happiness as such religious for example identifies religion with the entire field of the soul's liberation from oppressive moods quote the simplest functions of physiological life may be its ministers everyone who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion indeed 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 in laughter is to however slight an extent a religious exercise whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the organism and the resultant is not discomfort or pain not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood this expansion or aspiration of the whole soul there is religion it is the infinite for which we hunger and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us toward it close quote but such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out the more commonplace happinesses which we get are reliefs occasioned by our momentary escapes from evil either experienced or threatened but in its most characteristic embodiments religious happiness is no mere 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 the matter 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 Renny of Saint 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 to his 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 we shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form there are saints who have literally on the negative principle on humiliation and privation and the thought of suffering and death their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grows 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 our question about the value of religion for human life I think we ought to look for the answer among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue 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 these cases repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with respect it will have proved in some way its value for life at large by subtracting and toning down extravagances we may there upon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway to be sure it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with eccentricities and extremes how can religion on the whole be the most important of all human functions you may ask every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and pruned 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 the personal attitude which the individual finds himself impaled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine and you will remember that this was our definition will prove to be both a helpless and a sacrificial attitude that is we shall have to confess to at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy and to practice some amount of renunciation great or small to save our souls alive the constitution of the world we live in requires it quote abstain it calls you shall abstain thus goes the sempiternal song that every mortal creature hears that our entire existence long each hour comes rasping to our ears close quote 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 and sacrifice are positively espoused even unnecessary giving up are added in order happiness may increase religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result it's vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute it becomes an essential organ of our life 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 lead 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 and to arrive there safely is another in the next lecture abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts end of lecture two