The Varieties of Religious Experience · William James
FOOTNOTES
“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through suffering,’ and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, ‘to suffer _is_ to learn.’ “With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words. “A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.
“He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant, _this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God’s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna,’ for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering.
“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God, nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the _measure_ is suffering’—I give the words as they came to me. With that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the ‘cause’ of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows:— “The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;—the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;—the impossibility of discovery without its price;—finally, the excess of what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, ‘That you may give them. That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.’) I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate.
“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree‐trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant.” The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation‐value of the experience in the Subject’s eyes.
236 Op. cit., i. 43‐44. 237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief. 238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception: “There is,” he writes, “apart from mere intellect, in the make‐up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make‐believe and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul‐sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul‐sight and root‐centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174. 239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged. 240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged. 241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter. 243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1891‐99. 244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says: “It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’ By the subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a ‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a ‘medium’ so‐called, or ‘psychic subject’ to be.” KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München, 1896, p. 21. 245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff. 246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al‐ Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx. p. 71.
247 A. SCHMÖLDERS: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54‐68, abridged. 248 GÖRRES’S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So does RIBET’S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2 vols., Turin, 1890. 249 M. RÉCÉJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he defines as “the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and by the aid of Symbols_.” See his Fondements de la Connaissance mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical conditions in which sensible symbols play no part. 250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch. xvii., in Vie et Œuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428‐432. Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of sensible imagery. 251 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as “levitation,” stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non‐mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of “mystical” states.
252 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i., in Œuvres, translated by Bouix, iii. 421‐424. 253 BARTOLI‐MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34‐36. Others have had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for instance. At the age of twenty‐five he was “surrounded by the divine light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Görlitz, he there sat down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.” Of a later period of experience he writes: “In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth.
So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same.” Jacob Behmen’s Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George Fox: “I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord.” Journal, Philadelphia, no date, p. 69. Contemporary “Clairvoyance” abounds in similar revelations. Andrew Jackson Davis’s cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiences related in the delectable “Reminiscences and Memories of Henry Thomas Butterworth,” Lebanon, Ohio, 1886. 254 Vie, pp. 581, 582. 255 Loc. cit., p. 574. 256 Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as “penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of the senses. I think,” she adds, “that this is a just description, and I cannot make it better.” Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i.
269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L’Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix. 270 Upanishads, M. MÜLLER’S translation, ii. 17, 334. 271 SCHMÖLDERS: Op. cit., p. 210. 272 Enneads, BOUILLIER’S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp. 473‐477, and vol. i. p. 27. 273 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310. 274 Op. cit., Strophe 10. 275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence. 276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in “A Midsummer Vacation.” 277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399. 278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900. 279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon. 280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism: “My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say, ‘God’s service is perfect freedom,’ and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me.” Journal, London, no date, p. 172.
281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX’S book (Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siècle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT: Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879. 282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii. 283 See CARPENTER’S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and JEFFERIES’S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart. 284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, “MAX NORDAU” seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac” conditions by a laming of the association‐organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.
285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no alteration in the facts of sense. 286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE’S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff. 287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged. 288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized. 289 Discourse II. § 7. 290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written. “Creeds,” says the author, “are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow” (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text. 291 For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL’S Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER’S Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.
292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of débris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature’s forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for _us_ is “disorderly” can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things ’unadapted’ to each other in this world than there are things ’adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.
The facts of order from which the physico‐theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knock‐down proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already. 293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling, desire, and will. 294 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7. 295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286. 296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.
297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, 1880, pp. 243‐250, and 291‐299, much abridged. 298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH [PRINGLE‐PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim. The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London, 1901‐02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor Royce’s arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers. Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only Professor Royce’s arguments, but others for monistic absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.
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