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
There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are enough.
One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the sense of
sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the universe;—and in one
or other of these three ways it always is that man’s original optimism and
self‐satisfaction get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion
about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really
insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a
worse story still—desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe
coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror,
surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual
perception of evil, but the grisly blood‐freezing heart‐palsying sensation
of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live
for a moment in its presence. 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. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint,
if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser
religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and
supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some
constitutions need them too much.
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Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally
arise between the healthy‐minded way of viewing life and the way that
takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter
way, the morbid‐minded way, as we might call it, healthy‐mindedness pure
and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy‐minded way,
on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.
With their grubbing in rat‐holes instead of living in the light; with
their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind
of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath
and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and
burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt
that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy‐minded would at
present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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