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
other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two
types are violently contrasted; though here as in most other current
classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and
the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties
and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you
understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere
sky‐blue healthy‐minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion
of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the
Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the
inversion of natural appearances the essence of God’s truth.(86)
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The psychological basis of the twice‐born character seems to be a certain
discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an
incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first
time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my
brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is
dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self
thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at
the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.
Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on
foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me
that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or
put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”(87)
Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this
point.(88) Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is
harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are
consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the
guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their
lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted;
and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result
in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the
consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent
kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant’s
autobiography.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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