The Varieties of Religious Experience · William James
FOOTNOTES
299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7. 300 Newman’s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: “From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.” And again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: “I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s sight, as if it were the sight of God.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50. 301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.). For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over‐pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.
302 In Newman’s Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this æsthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote. 303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the “meek lover of the good,” alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate “business” that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly‐minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her “merit” storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional _dévote_, her definite “exercises,” and her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization. 304 Above, p. 362 ff. 305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii. 306 Example: “The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, ‘You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.’ ” R. W. EMERSON: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.
“With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, ‘Go round the binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.’ So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them withal. But seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do?’ Then casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD’S wonderful providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at the other’s head: and looking about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do now?’ And then it pleased GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife and sheath, ... put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut the man’s throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after.”—I have slightly abridged Lyde’s narrative.
314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898 (?). 315 C. HILTY: Glück, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff. 316 “Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion; who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God ... and I call on you to join the same song.” Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER‐HIGGINSON translation, abridged.
317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon “Help Thou Mine Unbelief,” in Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and Madame Guyon on p. 286. 318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122. 319 Op. cit., Letter XXX. 320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151. 321 Above, pp. 24, 25. 322 A friend of mine, a first‐rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor‐centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as Antonia Bourignon’s, that “I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine,” is shown by the context to indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called, ’Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,’ Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is “Zertoulem’s Wisdom of the Ages,” by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901.
323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49‐56, abridged. 324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses’s and Isaiah’s commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi. 325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a basis of religious revelation. 326 NÖLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR’S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii. 327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following extract:— “It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr. Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God’s holy will. Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator.”
328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above. 329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the once‐born and the twice‐born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162‐167), cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice‐born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once‐born as being “mere morality,” and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” an orthodox minister is reported to have said, “is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character.” It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice‐born—holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution—is the wider and completer. The “heroic” or “solemn” way in which life comes to them is a “higher synthesis” into which healthy‐ mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons (see pp. 47‐52, 362‐365). But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind‐cure form of healthy‐mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short‐circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once‐born or a twice‐born subject.
330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above. 331 “Prayerful” taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463 ff. 332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in whose dry‐as‐dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby‐like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility:— “We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God’s invisible being from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race of man could not be preserved or continued.... The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night‐time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at night.
Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth’s surface, not only near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields.... From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can find the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun‐dials, and generally speaking, we should have no sun‐dials if we had no sun.” Vernünftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74‐84.
Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institution of “the great variety throughout the world of men’s faces, voices, and handwriting,” given in Derham’s Physico‐theology, a book that had much vogue in the eighteenth century. “Had Man’s body,” says Dr. Derham, “been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety would never have been: but Men’s Faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male or Female; but all would have been turned topsy‐turvy, by being exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill‐Natured, to the Fraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not! Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of Mistaking Men’s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered the Matter, every man’s Face can distinguish him in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand‐writing can speak for him though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the divine Superintendence and Management.”
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of eighteenth century Anglicanism. I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham’s “Vindication of God by the Institution of Hills and Valleys,” and Wolff’s altogether culinary account of the institution of Water:— “The uses,” says Wolff, “which water serves in human life are plain to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks which in England and other places they produce from fruit.... Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding‐ mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get a still greater idea of the use of water.”
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty, discourses as follows: “Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys. “So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and pine away. “To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.
“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless excrescences of our ill‐formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land. “[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our sublunary world.”
333 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradict each other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most “natural” movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as it does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine’s speculations: “Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention. If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the _usnia_, or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equally unpleasant—the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient’s blood, or the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,—I quote now Van Helmont’s account,—for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin‐german, the blood in the patient’s body. This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull’s fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reason why bull’s fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed, not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the _posthumous character of Revenge_ remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the unguent. J. B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650.—I much abridge the original in my citations.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.