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 mind‐curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting
go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by
faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of
persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran
theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and
finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or
great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative
phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of
human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic‐
idealistic, or a medical‐materialistic view of their ultimate causal
explanation.(54)
When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn
something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the
mind‐curer’s _methods_.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of
environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the
word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, is unfortunately
already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon
investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying
susceptibilities of individual cases. “Suggestion” is only another name
for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and
conduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over
others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are
not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are
not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to‐day, whatever they may
have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why
the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving
of the word “suggestion” as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr.
Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to
nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and
by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is
in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our
religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.” And this in
spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely
_nothing_, or did nothing until mind‐cure came to the rescue.(55)
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a
revelation. The mind‐cure with its gospel of healthy‐mindedness has come
as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left
hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the
originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,
until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some
group of human beings?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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