A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
These deeper reaches are familiar to evangelical Christianity and
to what is nowadays becoming known as 'mind-cure' religion or 'new
thought.' The phenomenon is that of new ranges of life succeeding on
our most despairing moments. There are resources in us that naturalism
with its literal and legal virtues never recks of, possibilities that
take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and power, based on
giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us, and
these seem to show a world wider than either physics or philistine
ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in _spite_
of certain forms of death, indeed _because_ of certain forms of
death--death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility,
of fear and worry, competency and desert, death of everything that
paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their
trust to.
Reason, operating on our other experiences, even our psychological
experiences, would never have inferred these specifically religious
experiences in advance of their actual coming. She could not suspect
their existence, for they are discontinuous with the 'natural'
experiences they succeed upon and invert their values. But as they
actually come and are given, creation widens to the view of their
recipients. They suggest that our natural experience, our strictly
moralistic and prudential experience, may be only a fragment of real
human experience. They soften nature's outlines and open out the
strangest possibilities and perspectives.
This is why it seems to me that the logical understanding, working in
abstraction from such specifically religious experiences, will always
omit something, and fail to reach completely adequate conclusions.
Death and failure, it will always say, _are_ death and failure
simply, and can nevermore be one with life; so religious experience,
peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered
and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete
philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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