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
“Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had
been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was
breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to
sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in
the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a
live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a
smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I
do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply
stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I
felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious
dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to
happen.”(26)
Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend
of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:—
“Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it
is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of
a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so
definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position.
This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies
in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom
the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I
feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems
to recognize it.”
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of
presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a
gray‐bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself
under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room
towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi‐hallucination is an
exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual
imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive
that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the
feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—in
other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_.
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