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
“I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not
been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling
increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and
faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an
attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the
grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind‐cure
teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon
came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to
test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with
some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step
gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send
for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until
morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most
beautiful experiences of my life.
“I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie
down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.’ I gave up all
fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and
obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto
me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfect confidence that all would be
well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me
every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in
harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There
was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness
of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and
faith.
“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;
but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_.”
These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have
anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For
the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider
the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they
seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was
enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident
that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not
every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every
one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet
it would surely be pedantic and over‐scrupulous for those who _can_ get
their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such
experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more
scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science
made too wide a claim?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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