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 believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the
least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this
hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them)
plainly show the universe to be a more many‐sided affair than any sect,
even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our
verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated
systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why
in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of
ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the
world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled
by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of
profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some
other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all
of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in
preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape
of mind‐cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and
prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better
in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the
religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure‐
house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently
neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And
why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many
interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in
alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different
attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial
facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or
by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and
science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to
life, would be co‐eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in
individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from
being driven by science from the field to‐day. Numbers of educated people
still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on
their intercourse with reality.(65)
The case of mind‐cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the
temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention,
but I must content myself to‐day with this very brief indication. In a
later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive
thought will have to receive much more explicit attention.
Appendix
(See note to p. 121.)
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