The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature — John Shaqi
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern
psychology, finding definite psycho‐physical connections to hold good,
assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states
upon bodily conditions must be thorough‐going and complete. If we adopt
the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be
true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had
once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an
hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto‐intoxicated by some
organ or other, no matter which,—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can
such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way
or another upon their spiritual significance? 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. When it alters in one
way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another
way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our
drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are
equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non‐religious
content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in
refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite
illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance
some psycho‐physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with
determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts
and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our
_dis_‐beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for
every one of them without exception flows from the state of their
possessor’s body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no
such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man
is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and
reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary
spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of
these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt
to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them
with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily
affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.
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