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
It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute
totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to
higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so
extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect
of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical
resource. This question must confront us on a later day. But
provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil
facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic
presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that
systematic healthy‐mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow,
pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally
less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in
their scope.
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the
pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and
Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially
religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can
be born into the real life. In my next lecture, I will try to discuss some
of the psychological conditions of this second birth. Fortunately from now
onward we shall have to deal with more cheerful subjects than those which
we have recently been dwelling on.
LECTURE VIII. THE DIVIDED SELF, AND THE PROCESS OF ITS UNIFICATION.
The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a
pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were
brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at
life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy‐
minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be
twice‐born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions
of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once‐born the
world is a sort of rectilinear or one‐storied affair, whose accounts are
kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally
they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and
minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist
in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice‐
born, on the other hand, the world is a double‐storied mystery. Peace
cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of
minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and
transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is
by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can
never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our
real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step
in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the
spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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