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
“5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing
look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner
consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for
I was Soul, an expression of God’s Perfect Thought. That was to me
the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I
appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my
real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees
(though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I
expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_.
“In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience I have never known
this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I
have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have
learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child.”
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you
back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of
experience how impossible it is not to class mind‐cure as primarily a
religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s
life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s
message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of
your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52)
But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi‐logical explanation of
the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world,
the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness,
the mind‐curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no
speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for
everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill
agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as
a “mystery” or “problem,” or in “laying to heart” the lesson of its
experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don’t reason about it,
as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya,
ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended
and forgotten. Christian Science so‐called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the
most radical branch of mind‐cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is
simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic
ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit
attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad
speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical
merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a
mind‐curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account