As to the first two objects of the individual religious experience, namely, the individual's own personal ideal and his sense of his need, you will readily agree that one's private experience is, indeed, a source of genuine insight. You will, however, find it hard at first to define just how far that insight extends. For the world of a man's private ideals and estimates is a world of precious caprices, because not only does one man's private feelings or intuitions about ideals and values differ from another man's, but every man's own ideals, and his sense of {30} need, tend to alter endlessly with the play of his passions, with the waxing and waning of all his natural powers, with his health, with his age. One form of the religious paradox may, in fact, be stated thus: Without intense and intimate personal feeling, you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable-- like the passing hour, doomed to pass away. James, as a psychologist, well knew this truth about the value and the limitations of private experience; yet it was characteristic of his enterprising soul that he was always looking, in his "pluralistic universe," for the strange, new religious experiences of other and still other individuals, without being able thereby even to define what all these ardent souls were seeking, namely, some genuine home land of the spirit, some place or experience or insight in which is to be revealed that for the sake of which all the feelings, the caprices, the longings, the efforts of individuals are justified--and fulfilled.