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
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of
inheritance—the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic
ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.(90) This
explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainly needs
corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be,
we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of
which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about that temperament make
the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently,
indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to
a man at all. A “dégénéré supérieur” is simply a man of sensibility in
many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his
spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his
feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the
haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid
scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament
when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of
heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, “Sell
Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” which would run
through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath
with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” he impulsively said, “Let him go
if he will,” and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a
year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions,
ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects
itself with the life of the subconscious self, so‐called, of which we must
ere‐long speak more directly.
Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in
proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified
temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly
psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in
the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the
lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a
comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of
functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the
period of order‐making and struggle. If the individual be of tender
conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form
of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and
of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer
of one’s spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and “conviction
of sin” that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant
Christianity. The man’s interior is a battle‐ground for what he feels to
be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo
makes his Mahomet say:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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