 Lecture 20 Part 2 of the Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Lecture 20 Part 2 Conclusions 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, and I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. The reason is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality. But as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the complete sense of the term. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words. The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective 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 be enormous, the cosmic times and spaces, for example, whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of the mind. Yet the cosmic 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 long as it lasts, not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, but 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 must belong. The motor currents of the world run through the like of it. It is 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 that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be-existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analog, would be a piece of reality only half made up. Footnote. Compare Lotzi's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion 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 activity of some sort going with it. End footnote. If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places. They are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes left out from the description, they being as describable as anything else, would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual's religion may be egotistic, as those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough. But at any rate, it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account 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 the survival theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions and living in the sphere of thought which they open up that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious, so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival theory of religion as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow 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. Footnote, even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw, in lecture four, how the religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-cures verified from day to day by their experience of fact. Experience of fact is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist methodically declining as he does to recognize such facts as the mind-cures and others like them experience, otherwise then 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 be true 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 the imagination. But the scientist's tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an aperceiving 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 cross on St. Francis' 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 the name of hysterodemonopathy by which to aperceive it. No one can foresee 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 not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems. Nor the personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitely triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be. End footnote. By being religious, we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded 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. Footnote. Hume's criticism has banished causation from the world of physical objects and science is absolutely satisfied to define cause in terms of concomitant change. Reed Mock, Pearson, Ostwald. The original of the notion of causation is in our inner personal experience and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and described. End footnote. Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects, which the intellect contemplates, is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in our picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the 50 miles an hour. Footnote. When I read in a religious paper words like these, perhaps the best thing 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, Bayman 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 everyone should read, of a philosopher like Professor Bown. See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy, properly so-called. writes M. Vasharo. Quote, religion answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination. Christianity has but a single possible final error to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy. Close quote. In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribo 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. Quote, of religious sentiment, properly so-called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable ex, which is a last relic of the fear and a certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love that characterized the earlier period 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 ratio-sination, whereas the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader calling into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man. Close quote. I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin and Mr. HR Marshall to make it a purely conservative social force. End footnote. Let us agree then that religion occupying herself with personal destinies 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 or whether indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general message to mankind. We have done, as you see with our preliminaries, and our final summing up can now begin. I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I have quoted and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution and belief 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 tapering off and flattening out of the subject instead of a crescendo of interest and result. I said a while ago that the religious attitude of Protestants appears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-stricken, 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 from individualistic excrescences which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. That established we should have a result which might be small but would at least be solid, and on it and round it the rudder additional beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted and flourish 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 critical philosopher. And you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and we shall 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 thoughts that 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 and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements 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 someday all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena which we have passed in review. 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 order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on conversion and on saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the subject, or a zest or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life. The name of faith state by which Professor Leuba designates it is a good one. It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces by which men live. The total absence of it, and hedonia, means collapse. 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 in such mystical seizures as Dr. Buck described. 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. Footnote. Example. Henry Perry Vey writes to Gratchery, quote, I do not know how to deal with this 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 fame do great things. Close quote. Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes, quote, 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 more I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade. Close quote. This primacy in the faith state, a vague expansive impulse over direction, is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines. Quote, Oh, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do. Oh, camarado, I confess I have urged you onward with me. I still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination. For whether we shall be victorious or utterly quelled and defeated. Close quote. This readiness for great things and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to 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 our sanguine impulses and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. End footnote. When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of 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 and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anesthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article, goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their God, they care very little who he is or even whether he is at all. Says Leuba. Quote. The truth of the matter can be put in this 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 and every level of development is the religious impulse. Close quote. Footnote. See also this writer's extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. Bender says. Quote. 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 by means of which man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against 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. Close quote. The whole book is little more than a development of these words. End footnote. At this purely subjective rating, therefore, religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent 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 the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts. One, an uneasiness, and two, its solution. One, the uneasiness reduced to its simplest terms is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. Two, 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, the wrongness takes a moral character and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. 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 in terms like these. The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher if anything higher exists. Along with the wrong part, there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage, but when stage two, the stage of solution or salvation arrives, 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 contaminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, 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. Footnote. Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life. And footnote. It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these very simple general terms. Footnote. The practical difficulties are, one, to realize the reality of one's higher part, two, to identify oneself with it exclusively, and three, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being. And footnote. They allow for the divided self and the struggle. They involve the change of personal center and the surrender of the lower self. They express the appearance of exteriority by the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it. Footnote. When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by 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 accessibility rather, or exceedingness. And footnote. There is probably no autobiographic document among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms. So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. 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 conflicts 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 objective truth of their content? Footnote. The word truth is here taken to mean something additional to bear value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true. End footnote. The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most constantly arises is that moray of the same quality with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a moray merely our own notion, or does it really 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 of which just geniuses are so convinced? It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They all agree that the moray really exists, though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in eternal structure of the world. They all agree more over that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is affected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat 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 and mysticism carry on in veteran disputes. At the end of my lecture on philosophy I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis and recommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such a hypothesis. 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 that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. The moree, as we called it, and the meaning of our union with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these 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 particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the moree as Jehovah and the union as his imputation to us of 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 the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the moree which psychologists may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity, and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from 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 the trans-marginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness is as true as it was first written. Each of us is in reality an abiding physical 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 is always some part of the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve. Close quote. Footnote. For a full statement of Mr. Myers' views, I may refer to his posthumous work Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research which is already announced by Mr. Longman's Green and Company as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a 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 opened can alone show. End footnote. Much of the content 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, enter into it for a large part. But in it, many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin, and in our study of conversion of mystical experiences and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life. Let me then propose, as in hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the more a with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected, is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with science which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time, the theologian's contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious 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 we are controlling, the sense of union with the 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 of religions, 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 trans-marginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remotor side. Here the over beliefs begin. Here mysticism and the conversion rapture and dauntism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations, and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world. Footnote. One more expression of this belief to increase the reader's familiarity with the notion of it. Quote. If this room were full of darkness for a thousand years, and you come in and 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 have made many mistakes. It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, 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 everyone whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see the vilest of human beings, we can see the God 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 the aviata teaches. This is the one prayer, remembering our nature. 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, of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body, and my 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 simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the infinity, the God behind, manifests itself. The eternal subject of everything, the eternal witness in this universe, your own self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. We are it already. How to know it? Close quote. End footnote. Here the prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith. Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations must stand outside of them all together, and, for the present at least, decide that since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. 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 our individual freedom and build out our religion in the way most congruence with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities, intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious 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 spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him are touched. Footnote. For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth to Christian ideas had to wait until they came to her clad in spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in. Quote, 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 brought 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 have most suffered, undeveloped brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, 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 this 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 my life. Indeed, it holds the first place there. These ideas will thus be essential to that individual's religion, which is as much as to say that overbeliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant to themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his overbeliefs. Disregarding the overbeliefs and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come. A positive 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 of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own overbelief, though I know it will appear a sorry underbelief to some of you, for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which, in a converse case, I should accord to yours. The farther 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 in this region and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing 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 the visible 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 men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. Footnote that the transaction of opening ourselves otherwise called prayer is a perfectly definite one for certain persons appears abundantly in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to reinforce the impression on the reader's mind. Man can learn to transcend these limitations of finite thought and draw power and wisdom at will. The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is 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 the phenomena of sense perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought 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 be calm. 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 as he is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focused and made to do work to set fire to wood. 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. God is the natural abolition, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality. So I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. Footnote. Transcendentalists are fond of the term over-soul, but as a rule they use 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. End footnote. 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 you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind. God is real since he produces real effects. The real effects in question so far as I have as yet admitted them are exerted on the personal centers of energy by 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 a sense, 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 existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. The world may indeed, as science assures us, someday 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 and remote objective consequences are predicted does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience and bring a real hypothesis into play. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately 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 a hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject's absolute confidence and peace. That the God with whom, starting from the hitherside of our own extra-marginal self, we come at its remote or margin to 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 everyone's religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that religion, in her fullest exercise of function is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion like love which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that as we have seen abundantly, but it is something more namely a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again with an altered expression. It must have over and above the altered expression a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required. This thoroughly pragmatic view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature. They have built a heaven out beyond the grave. 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 more divine 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 its claim as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of facts as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual 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 is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also, and that although in the main, their experiences and those of this world keep discreet, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word Bosh. Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow scientific bounds. Assurably the real world is of a different temperament, more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscious both hold me to the over belief 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. End of lecture 20. Post script of the varieties of religious experience. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The varieties of religious experience by William James. Post script. In writing my concluding lecture, I had to aim so much at simplification that I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy, but little, the defect. In a later work, I may be unable 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 and super naturalists I should undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering supposedly in the course of phenomenal 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 be found among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant admits. 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 the forces that causally determine the real worlds details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts 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 a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different ology, and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer are bound to think it must. Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the ideal new forces comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science 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 existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts. Footnote. Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that the ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist. We owe it to the absolute, that we have a world 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 soul's compass 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. God evolution from the God of David's Psalms. End footnote. 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 that existence may be expected to entail, that no concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being there, seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which, implicitly at any rate, refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience and block, it says, that the absolute maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail. I am ignorant of Buddhism, and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view, but as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma I agree in principle with it. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law, but for Buddhism, as I interpreted, and for religion generally, so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalist metaphysics, the word 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 postrem, and operates causally as partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a nosticism, pure and simple, on any other terms. But this view, that judgment and execution go together, is that of the crass or supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must, on the whole, be clasped with the other expressions of that creed. I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis 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 relates to the philosophic reader the place where I belong. If asked just where the difference 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 prayerful communion, especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in, 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, actually exerts an influence, raises our center of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If then there be a wider world of being than that of our everyday consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects of the openness of the subliminal door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places, at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs. The difference in natural fact, which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race means immortality and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without further 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 sympathize with 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 imminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove spirit return, though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Mr. Meyers, Hodgson, and Hislup, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open with this brief word to save the reader 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 of ordinary men, is both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which, in the lecture on philosophy, I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be one and only and to be infinite, and the notion of many gods is one which hardly anyone thinks it worthwhile to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual awareness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that is unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves, and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism and mono-ideistic bent, both pass to the limit and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set. Meanwhile, the practical needs of experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continues 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 to 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 and more God-like self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon 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. 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, all is saved. If there be different Gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was said in Lecture 6 about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its demands that philosophy and mysticism have been what to be and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly 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 the details. Human 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 in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope. But all of these statements are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book. End of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James