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
“The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not
the stronger, are the strong’s undoing. It is not _fear_ of our
fellow‐man, which we should wish to see diminished; for fear
rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves,
and preserves the hard‐earned and successful type of humanity.
What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear,
but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great
pity—disgust and pity for our human fellows.... The _morbid_ are
our greatest peril—not the ‘bad’ men, not the predatory beings.
Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken—they it is, the
_weakest_, who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning
our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of
them is a sigh,—‘Would I were something other! I am sick and tired
of what I am.’ In this swamp‐soil of self‐contempt, every
poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so
dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of
sensitiveness and resentment; here the air smells odious with
secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven
endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy
of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious;
here the very aspect of the victorious is hated—as if health,
success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in
themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make
bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselves like to
inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen! And all
the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be
hatred.”(220)
Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what
he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The
carnivorous‐minded “strong man,” the adult male and cannibal, can see
nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self‐
severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves
essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be
our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this
seen world be aggressiveness or non‐resistance?
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must
be acknowledged and taken account of; and in the seen world both
aggressiveness and non‐resistance are needful. It is a question of
emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint’s type or the strong‐man’s type
the more ideal?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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