The Varieties of Religious Experience quotes

It would profit us little to study this secondhand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.

These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.

But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability.

No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power.

Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest dye.

His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:—

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique.

Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it.

“I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am myself, myself alone.”

Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it.

“I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am myself, myself alone.”

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.”

Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:

“Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.”

When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform—menaced and negated …

Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves.

William’s melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion⁠—probably his liver is torpid.

Eliza’s delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc.

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering.

Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.

It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.

According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition.

Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are;

and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.

Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most “good” is not always most “true,” when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience.

The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time.

It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors.

“Genius,” said Dr. Moreau, “is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree.”

“Genius,” says Dr. Lombroso, “is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity.”

Take the happiness which achieved religious belief confers. Take the trance-like states of insight into truth which all religious mystics report. These are each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope.

Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance.

And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown;

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.

Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex?

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.

In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism.

Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition;

but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.

Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible.

Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?

Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes.

The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth.

The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.

They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.

If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

It is precisely as being solemn 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;

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: “Gad! 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?

“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: “Gad! 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?

and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to transgress.

He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature, through being displeased with the things which happen.

For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus.

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 are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down.

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 are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest 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 as the hollowest substitute for …

… 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 our 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.

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 abeyance 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 of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be.

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 this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head …

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. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for example, identifies religion with the entire field of the soul’s liberation from oppressive moods.

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 evils 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.

… these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them.

So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so …

The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence.

The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen.

I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen.

I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

“My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart.

“

God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath.

In him literally I live and move and have my being.”—

Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas.

The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.

Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.

Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.

Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.

If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.

The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flection and contraction are not wholly checked.

It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough.

Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven;

Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flection and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough.

Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God.

In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?”

… I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the ‘problem of life.’

I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was.

To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural;

He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses.

Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman.

All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.

nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of us insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be “good in the making,” or something equally ingenious.

Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks.

They neither denied the ills of nature—Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,” would have been mere silliness to them—nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent “another and a better …

And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say.

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.

What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty?

A. Nothing whatever.

I am a man without a religion. These words mean so much mythic bosh.

Q. Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?

A. Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically.

Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. His contentment with the finite encases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the Infinite.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother.

His contentment with the finite encases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the Infinite.

We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science.

After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the Diätetik der Seele into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism:

“Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.”

“Thoughts are things,” as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages;

Things are wrong with them; and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?” is the form of their question. And the answer is:

“You are well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.”

“The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, “God is well, and so are you. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”

The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment.

Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture.

Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule.

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, …

At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop.

He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.

As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never …

… demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology.

It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there.

The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of …

The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost.

In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert.

The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses.

The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.

Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good.

… religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.

The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.

There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.

Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness.

The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.

Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again—at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.

Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again—at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness.

It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.

Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others;

And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. “There is indeed one element in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that not blindness itself can controvert.

Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

” And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life’s significance is reached?

But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human being’s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness:—

To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one’s brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure.

The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity.

We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.

and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with.

Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits;

… lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion.

The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.

The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender.

There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection.

An abstract heaven over a naked rock.

Such was my present abode for eternity.”

The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it.

Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.

So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions.

No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective.

Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind.

The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it.

A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny.

Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.

“It is as if I lived in another century,” says one asylum patient.—“I see everything through a cloud,” says another, “things are not as they were, and I am changed.”—“I see,” says a third, “I touch, but the things do not come near me, a …

When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitutio ad integrum.

One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again.

The happiness that comes, when any does come—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute—is not the simple ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but …

“

I was both a burden and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die.

How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own.”

How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this!

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!

No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these.

The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens.

Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account.

In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery.

Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being.

“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.

Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself.

This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”

There was naught in me to answer thy call, ‘Awake, thou sleeper,’ but only drawling, drowsy words, ‘Presently; yes, presently; wait a little while.’

But the ‘presently’ had no ‘present,’ and the ‘little while’ grew long.

… For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see extinguished. With what lashes of words did I not scourge my own soul.

I felt the strength of the argument, and at once accepted the reasoning.

The baby had discovered that it could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.

“From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an entirely different aspect.

“Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility of living.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on.

It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all.

What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters.

Things hot and vital to us today are cold tomorrow.

It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies.

We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility.

All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.

We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only the “motor efficacy,” long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but such talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor efficacy?

you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds.

Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited.

Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain music teacher, says Dr.

The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is not well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. “The will to believe” cannot be stretched as far as that.

We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite.

The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

“I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me;

I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself.

In the bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a priest.

and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher someone else’s centre may be.

A small man’s salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts for him, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look discouraging.

Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all?

I praised God with my whole heart. … I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees.

I was like a new man in a new world.

I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.”

“

I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say ‘Glory’; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say ‘Amen’; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.

”

It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels. Men lapse from every level—we need no statistics to tell us that.

Love is, for instance, well known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts.

These revelations form its significance to men and women, whatever be its duration. So with the conversion experience:

and to call to mind a succession of such examples as I have lately had to wander through, though it has been only in the reading of them, is to feel encouraged and uplifted and washed in better moral air.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.

I can do no better than quote, as to this, some remarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the results of conversion or the state of grace.

If left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more “free and easy.”

But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotional excitement supervenes.

I have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face covered with shaving-lather because a house across the way was on fire;

… swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains.

The tiger’s habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his character.

Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are mixed together. In that case one hears both “yeses” and “noes,” and the “will” is called on then to solve the conflict.

I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character.

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.

The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one’s self—it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it;

The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one’s self—it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what.

Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.

This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited.

Could the rest of us so disregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the wish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition-quenching fury is lacking.

The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement transiently acquired.

Given a certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once.

… the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.

Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.

I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.”

“

And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him.

So I gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:—

they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried, ‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks nor cries.’

And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?

”

Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate.

Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.

Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous;

“

To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.

“To know all things, learn to know nothing.

“

To be all things, be willing to be nothing.

“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for.

“

To be what you are not, experience what you are not.

”

Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away.

Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard.

When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying:

for she felt already more content in this poverty than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the world.”

The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual obstacle.

Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the new equilibrium completely.

If sentiments as simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have been considering!

One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it.

In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw.

One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious.

Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw.

Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain;

In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw.

Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether.

As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain;

… tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his “glory” incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.

Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.

So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men’s religion, yet this very standard has been begotten …

If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method.

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.

What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity.

They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional.

The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only “up to date” and “on the whole.”

When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. “Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.”

When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. “

Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.

”

The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. Firsthand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth.

Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.

George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.

… the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and nonconforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators.

Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.

You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to …

They are unquestionably its besetting sins.

The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel.

It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah’s enemies a David knows no difference;

so their lives today inspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin’s head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive.

Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars.

The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them.

The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms.

The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.

Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of everyone expresses itself today in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment.

The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torchbearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness.

Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners.

The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant.

It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.

Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of his charity in social evolution is vital and essential.

No one who is not willing to try charity, to try nonresistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence.

Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety.

But nonresistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies;

When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety.

But nonresistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects.

These saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies;

The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution.

Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx’s riddle.

In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden.

Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the initiation.

Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly.

The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution.

In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden.

We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction.

Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander, asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way of handling the gift of existence.

Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison.

The practical course of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us today turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the …

But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat.

What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.

I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking.

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor.

We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the moneymaking street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.

yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions.

The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances.

Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barnyard poultry.

There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples and returns;

Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barnyard poultry.

There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity.

Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward power;

How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many environments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation? It cannot be measured absolutely; the verdict will vary according to the point of view adopted.

From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded.

Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment of history;

Economically, the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world’s welfare. The great saints are immediate successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they may be leavens also, of a better mundane order.

Let us be saints, then, if we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally.

But in our Father’s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation.

In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.

One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind.

Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.

This sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright.

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.

The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit.

The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit.

We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.

A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us, of having “been here before,” as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, …

“

When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.

And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. … Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?”

I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.

It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.

It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man.

It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.

At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation.

Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.

It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness.

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.

At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation.

This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life.

Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams.

Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test.

Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul.

How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled.

How different to know in what drunkenness consists—as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach—and being drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science.

As there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty.

A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay.

Yet God has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal characters. This state is sleep.

… Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.

Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.

“That art Thou!” say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add:

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity,” “whispering silence,” “teeming desert,” are continually met with.

They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.

Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.

These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common.

Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.

There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression—that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.

The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed.

Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.

… the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known.

That region contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side by side.

To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.

“

Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what worlds away!

” It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case.

But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which feeling suggested?

Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself.

It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude.

It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.

Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls.

All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true;—what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things?

… reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.

It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them.

It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result?

What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience?

This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he.

It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.

No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy.

It could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher.

What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure!

To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.

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

… embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a “home” upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table.

It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!

The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism.

It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one’s self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one’s deity.

For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness.

If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon a basis of veracity.

But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.

Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.

“Religion,” says a liberal French theologian, “is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent.

The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions.

Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.

So a “god of battles” must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another.

But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to the active life.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself.

You remember what al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism—that to understand the causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk.

The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.

Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact.

The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants.

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.

He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water.

How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been expected in advance.

Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas!

How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature’s life?

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.

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.”

These ideas will thus be essential to that individual’s religion;—which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves.

As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs.

Disregarding the over-beliefs, 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 …

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 centres of energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider sphere than this.

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.

Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express.

Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the 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?

All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves.

Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.

It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.

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.

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 these statements are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book.