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The Varieties Of Religious Experience, By William James
Lecture XX
Conclusions
THE
material of our study of human nature is now spread before
us; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of
description, we can draw our theoretical and practical conclusions.
In my first lecture, defending the empirical method,
I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could
be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of
the significance for life of religion, taken "on the
whole."
Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions
would be, but I will formulate them, when the time comes,
as sharply as I can.
Summing
up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the
religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following
beliefs:--
1.
That the visible world is part of a more spiritual
universe from which it draws its chief significance;
2.
That union or harmonious relation with that higher
universe is our true end;
3.
That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof--
be that spirit "God" or "law"--is a
process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy
flows in and produces effects, psychological or material,
within the phenomenal world.
Religion
includes also the following psychological characteristics:--
4.
A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life,
and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal
to earnestness and heroism.
5.
An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and,
in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.
In
illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have
been literally bathed in sentiment.
In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled
at the amount of emotionality which I find in it.
After
so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic
in the rest of the work that lies before us.
The
sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence
of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of
the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand
as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to
me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been
sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have
stuck to soberer examples.
I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding
the profounder information.
To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert
specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons,
and not to commonplace pupils.
We combine what they tell us with the rest of our
wisdom, and form our final judgment independently.
Even so with religion.
We who have pursued such radical expressions of it
may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically
as anyone can know them who learns them from another; and
we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical
question: what
are the dangers in this element of life?
and in what proportion may it need to be restrained
by other elements, to give the proper balance?
But
this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately
and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already
vexed us.[330] Ought it to be assumed that in all men the
mixture of religion with other elements should be identical?
Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of
all men should show identical religious elements?
In other words, is the existence of so many religious
types and sects and creeds regrettable?
[330]
For example, on pages 135, 160, 326 above.
To
these questions I answer "No" emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that
creatures in such different positions and with such different
powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the
same functions and the same duties.
No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should
we be expected to work out identical solutions.
Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes
in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must
deal with in a unique manner.
One of us must soften himself, another must harden
himself; one must yield a point, another must stand firm--in
order the better to defend the position assigned him.
If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody
forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of
the divine would suffer.
The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean
a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation,
different men may all find worthy missions.
Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's
total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning
out completely. So
a "god of battles" must be allowed to be the god
for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home,
the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial
systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual
life. If we
are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be
an element of our religion; why need it be one if we are
good and sympathetic from the outset?
If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance;
but why think so much of deliverance, if we are healthy-minded?[331]
Unquestionably, some men have the
completer experience and the higher vocation, here
just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in
his own experience, whate'er it be, and for others to tolerate
him there, is surely best.
[331]
From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy
and the morbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born
types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 159-164),
cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them.
The twice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness
of life of the once-born as being "mere morality,"
and not properly religion.
"Dr. Channing," an orthodox minister is
reported to have said, "is excluded from the highest
form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of
his character."
It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the
twice-born--holding as it does more of the element of evil
in solution--is the wider and completer.
The "heroic" or "solemn" way
in which life comes to them is a "higher synthesis"
into which healthy- mindedness and morbidness both enter
and combine. Evil
is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer
of these persons (see pp. 47-52, 354-357).
But the final consciousness which each type reaches
of union with the divine has the same practical significance
for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed
to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their
several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind-cure
form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of
regenerative process.
The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter
of degree. How
long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil,
and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of
it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many
instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual
as a once-born or a twice-born subject.
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.
A science might come to understand everything about
the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide
which elements were qualified, by their general harmony
with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true;
and yet the best man at this science might be the man who
found it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as
an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may
make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the
acuteness of one's living faith.[332]
If religion be a function by which either God's cause
or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives
the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than
he who merely knows about it, however much.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation
of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through
your being, is another.
[332]
Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.
For
this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent
for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties
of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must
drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots
remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith.
To see this, suppose that we have our science of
religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the necessary historical
material and distilled out of it as its essence the same
conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced.
Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it
is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences,
and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them,[333]
work is done, and something real comes to pass.
She has now to exert her critical activity, and to
decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that
of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered TRUE.
[333]
"Prayerful" taken in the broader sense explained
above on pp. 453 ff.
Dogmatically
to decide this is an impossible task.
Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy
still far from being completed, but in their present state
we find them full of conflicts.
The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual
presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever
with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy
inclines. The
scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at
least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the
whole the influence of science goes against the notion that
religion should be recognized at all.
And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within
the very science of religions itself.
The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted
with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a
presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that
is religious probably is false.
In the "prayerful communion" of savages
with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it
is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work--even
though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations--
can possibly be done.
The
consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions
are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable
to the claim that the essence of religion is true.
There is a notion in the air about us that religion
is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival,"
an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity
in its more enlightened examples has outgrown; and this
notion our religious anthropologists at present do little
to counteract.
This
view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider
it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the "Survival theory," for brevity's
sake.
The
pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced
it, revolves, 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. To-day,
quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual
tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his
personal concerns.
Science,
on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the
personal point of view.
She catalogues her elements and records her laws
indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them,
and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing
on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually
nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible
hours, the days are over when it could be said that for
Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and
the firmament showeth his handiwork.
Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now
as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium
in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling
wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span
of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an
hour, it will have ceased to be.
The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent
destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest
as well as to the smallest facts.
It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific
imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,
whether they work on the universal or on the particular
scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and
undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result.
Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with
which it is possible to feel a sympathy.
In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific
mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.
The books of natural theology which satisfied the
intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,[334]
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. Our private selves are like those bubbles--epiphenomena, as
Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies
weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable
currents of events.
[334]
How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian
Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the
early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved
such a baby-like faith in the personal and human character
of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his
work on the uses of natural things?
This, for example, is the account he gives of the
sun and its utility:--
"We
see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable
conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures,
men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.
Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and
able to infer God's invisible being from the contemplation
of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes to the
primary purpose of creation:
without it the race of man could not be preserved
or continued. . . . The sun makes daylight, not only on
our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is
of the utmost utility to us, for by its means we can commodiously
carry on those occupations which in the night-time would
either be quite impossible.
Or at any rate impossible without our going to the
expense of artificial light.
The beasts of the field can find food by day which
they would not be able to find at night.
Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able
to see everything that is on the earth's surface, not only
near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near
and far things according to their species, which again is
of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary
to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the
scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledge for the
most part depends on observations made with the help of
sight, and without the sunshine, would have been impossible.
If any one would rightly impress on his mind the
great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him
imagine himself living through only one month, and see how
it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not day
but night. He
would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience,
especially if he had much work to carry on in the street
or in the fields. . . . From the sun we learn to recognize
when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly,
we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy
owes much to the sun. . . . By help of the sun one can find
the meridian. . . . But the meridian is the basis of our
sun-dials, and generally speaking, we should have no sun-dials
if we had no sun." Vernunftige Gedanken von den Absichter
der naturlichen Dinge, 1782. pp.74-84.
Or
read the account of God's beneficence in the institution
of "the great variety throughout the world of men's
faces, voices, and hand-writing," given in Derham's
Physico-theology, a book that had much vogue in the eighteenth
century. "Had
Man's body," says Dr. Derham, "been made according
to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method than
that of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety
would never have been:
but Men's Faces would have been cast in the same,
or not a very different Mould, their Organs of Speech would
have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of Notes,
and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have
given the Hand the same Direction in Writing.
And in this Case what Confusion, what Disturbance,
what Mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under!
No Security could have been to our persons; no Certainty,
no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice between Man
and Man, no Distinction between Good and Bad, between Friends
and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male
or Female; but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by
being exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill-Natured,
to the Fraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the
Forgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate
and Debauched, and what not!
Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the
dire Effects of Mistaking Men's Faces, of counterfeiting
their Hands, and forging Writings.
But
now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered
the Matter, every man's Face can distinguish him in the
Light, and his Voice in the Dark, his Hand-writing can speak
for him though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his
Contracts in future Generations.
A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the
divine Superintendence and Management."
A
God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable
signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after
the heart of eighteenth century Anglicanism.
I
subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham's "Vindication
of God by the Institution of Hills and Valleys," and
Wolff's altogether culinary account of the institution of
Water:--
"The
uses," says Wolff, "which water serves in human
life are plain to see and need not be described at length.
Water is a universal drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are artificial,
they could not do this without water.
Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the water
in it which quenches thirst.
Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have
grown without the help of water; and the same is true of
those drinks which in England and other places they produce
from fruit. . . . Therefore since God so planned the world
that men and beasts should live upon it and find there everything
required for their necessity and convenience, he also made
water as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent
a dwelling. And
this is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages
which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of
our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters.
. . . When one goes into a grinding-mill one sees that the
grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get
a still greater idea of the use of water."
Of
the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty,
discourses as follows:
"Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a
strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent
to almost any place or temperature of the air.
But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not
to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another
place. With
some the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best
agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent and
grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous
air of the valleys and waters.
But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and
grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys.
"So
that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills
to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and
great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind;
affording those an easy and comfortable life, who would
otherwise live miserably, languish, and pine away.
"To
this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another
great convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious
places for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth
it) as screens to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of
the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign
and cherishing sunbeams and so rendering our habitations
both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.
"Lastly,
it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and
the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast
masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged such
rude and useless excrescences of our ill-formed globe; but
the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered by
the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works.
For, was the surface of the earth even and level,
and the middle parts of its islands and continents not mountainous
and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be
no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters;
but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which
the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea,
they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large
tracts of land.
"[Thus]
the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler
they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble
work of the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for
the good of our sublunary world."
You
see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat
religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate
the traditions of the most primeval thought.
To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them
and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of
time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural
world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and
cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts.
Up to a comparatively recent date such distinctions
as those between what has been verified and what is only
conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects
of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.
Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever
you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and
whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed.
Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most
things were taken into the mind from the point of view of
their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself
exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events.[335]
[335]
Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed.
One need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical
questions by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation
of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise a
larger one. This
is due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous
character of the circle and of all circular movement.
The circle is both convex and concave; it is made
by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradict each
other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite
directions. Nevertheless,
movement in a circle is the most "natural" movement;
and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it does, in the
larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion,
and consequently requires the lesser force.
Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of the position
of the sun in winter:
It moves to the south because of the cold which drives
it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya.
Or listen to Saint Augustine's speculations:
"Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that
it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm
that it ripens green fruit?
Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself,
which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright,
and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors
almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing
fuel into grimy cinders? . . . Then what wonderful properties
do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light
tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and
yet is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time
causes it to decay."
City of God, book xxi, ch. iv.
Such
aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness
the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities,
their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and
destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they
originally fastened our attention.
If
you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic
magic invoked on every page.
Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment
attributed to Paracelsus.
For this there were a variety of receipts, including
usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar,
or a bear, powdered earthworms, the usnia, or mossy growth
on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials
equally unpleasant--the whole prepared under the planet
Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn.
Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's
blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed
in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up,
the latter infallibly gets well--I quote now Van Helmont's
account--for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing
in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active
excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there
results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german
the blood in the patient's body.
This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic
impression from the wounded part.
But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull's
fat, and other portions of the unguent.
The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that
the bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy
and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher
flame of revenge about him than any other animal.
And thus we have made it out, says this author, that
the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed,
not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to
the energy of the posthumous character of Revenge remaining
firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the
unguent. J. B. Van Helmont: A
Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by Walter Charleton, London,
1650.--I much abridge the original in my citations.
The
author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural
facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance
is the true rationale of the case.
"If," he says, "the heart of a horse
slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase,
be impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole
witch becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and
cruelty of the fire, which could by no means happen unless
there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch
with the spirit of the horse.
In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit
of the witch is kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented
by the arrow transfixed.
Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the
coroner's inquest suffered a fresh haemorrhage or cruentation
at the presence of the assassin?--the blood being, as in
a furious fit of anger, enraged and agitated by the impress
of revenge conceived against the murderer, at the instant
of the soul's compulsive exile from the body.
So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including
some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg,
which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of
flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease
shall instantly pass from you into the animal, and leave
you entirely. And
similarly again, if you burn some of the milk either of
a cow or of a woman, the gland from which it issued will
dry up. A gentleman
at Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the
celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him
out of the skin of the arm of a porter at Bologna.
About thirteen months after his return to his own
country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in
a few days dropped off, and it was then discovered that
the porter had expired, near about the same punctilio of
time. There
are still at Brussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence,"
says Van Helmont; and adds, "I pray what is there in
this of superstition or of exalted imagination?"
Modern
mind-cure literature--the works of Prentice Mulford, for
example--is full of sympathetic magic.
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?
Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic
aspects that religion delights to dwell.
It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise"
of the dawn and of the rainbow, the "voice" of
the thunder, the "gentleness" of the summer rain,
the "sublimity" of the stars, and not the physical
laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind
still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore,
the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room
or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that
inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that
sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security
and peace.
Pure
anachronism! says the survival-theory;--anachronism for
which deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy
required. The
less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell
in universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science
we become.
In
spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific
attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe
it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason in comparatively
few words. That
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 completest 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 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, such as the "object" is
when taken all alone.
It is a FULL fact, even though it be an insignificant
fact; it is of the KIND to which all realities whatsoever
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 analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made
up.[336]
[336]
Compare Lotze'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.
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, and 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.[337] 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.
[337]
Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be
as wholesale as the scientist assumes.
We saw in Lecture IV how the religious conception
of the universe seems to many mind-curers "verified"
from day to day by their experience of fact.
"Experience of fact" is a field with so
many things in it that the sectarian scientist methodically
declining, as he does, to recognize such "facts"
as mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise
than by such rude heads of classification as "bosh,"
"rot," "folly," certainly leaves out
a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest
of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality,
would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at
all. We know
this to 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 apperceiving mass for phenomena
of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings
may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of "suggestion."
Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's
hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.
Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical
possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist
as a fact, now that he has the name of "hystero-demonopathy"
by which to apperceive 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 definitively triumphant position which the
sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces
it to be.
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.[338]
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 the picture, as I have heard
a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?[339]
[338]
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-read
Mach, 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.
[339]
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,
Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect's pretension
to meddle with religious things.
Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere
its shallowing effect.
See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates
under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which
every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne
(The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life The Atonement:
Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy properly
so called:--
"Religion,"
writes M. Vacherot
(La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313, 436, et passim), "answers
to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination
of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage
of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination.
. . . Christianity has but a single possible final heir
to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy."
In
a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie
des Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion.
He sums it up in a single formula--the ever-growing
predominance of the rational intellectual element, with
the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter
tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments.
"Of religious sentiment properly so called,
nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable
x 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 periods of religious growth.
To
state this more simply, religion tends to turn into religious
philosophy.--These are psychologically entirely different
things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination,
whereas the other is 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."
I
find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of
religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of
Professor Baldwin (Mental Development, Social and Ethical
Interpretations, ch. x) and Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct
and Reason, chaps.
viii. to xii.) to make it a purely "conservative
social force."
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
awhile 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 |
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