The Varieties of Religious Experience · William James
FOOTNOTES
The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is the true rationale of the case. “If,” he says, “the heart of a horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase, be impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse. In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcase at the coroner’s inquest suffered a fresh hæmorrhage or cruentation at the presence of the assassin?—the blood being, as in a furious fit of anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against the murderer, at the instant of the soul’s compulsive exile from the body.
So, if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg, which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman, the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had expired, near about the same punctilio of time. There are still at Brussels eye‐witnesses of this occurrence,” says Van Helmont; and adds, “I pray what is there in this of superstition or of exalted imagination?” Modern mind‐cure literature—the works of Prentice Mulford, for example—is full of sympathetic magic. 334 Compare Lotze’s doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is “in itself” is by conceiving it as it is _for_ itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of “pinch” or inner activity of some sort going with it.
335 Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the religious conception of the universe seems to many mind‐curers ’verified’ from day to day by their experience of fact. “Experience of fact” is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist, methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such “facts” as mind‐curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as “bosh,” “rot,” “folly,” certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be true already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist’s tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of “suggestion.” Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis’s hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly, the time‐honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of “hystero‐demonopathy” by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed—even “prophecy,” even “levitation,” might creep into the pale.
“Religion,” writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313, 436, et passim), “answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage of the human mind which is dominated by the imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final heir to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy.” In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula—the ever‐growing predominance of the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments. “Of religious sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable _x_ which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this more simply, _religion tends to turn into religious philosophy_.—These are psychologically entirely different things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man.” I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin (Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. x.) and Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, viii. to xii.) to make it a purely “conservative social force.”
338 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to 278. 339 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345. 340 Above, p. 184. 341 Above, p. 145. 342 Above, p. 400. 343 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_.” Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes: “I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back—I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.” A. GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89. This primacy, in the faith‐state, of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman’s lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190):— “O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.... Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”
This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. 344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346‐349. 345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July, 1901. 346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38): “Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric.” “Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self‐preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached.” The whole book is little more than a development of these words.
347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life. 348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the reality” of one’s higher part; 2, to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being. 349 “When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and _identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me. The ‘objectivity’ of it ought in that case to be called _excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness.” RÉCÉJAC: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46. 350 The word “truth” is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true. 351 Above, p. 455. 352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305. For a full statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his posthumous work, “Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,” which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my paper: “Frederic Myers’s Services to Psychology,” in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.
353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483‐4, and also what is said of the subconscious self on pp. 233‐236, 240‐242. 354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff. 355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader’s familiarity with the notion of it:— “If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you come in and begin to weep and wail, ‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives, ‘Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes’? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God within, and instead of condemning, say, ‘Rise, thou effulgent One, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest your nature.’ ... This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering our nature.” ... “Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know It?” SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.
356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:— “For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I don’t know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come. Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there.” Flournoy Collection.
357 “The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro‐magnetism.” W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx. p. 112. 358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to reinforce the impression on the reader’s mind:— “Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought] and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi‐conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not super‐consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self‐ hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common‐sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense‐ perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun’s rays can be focused and made to do work, to set fire to wood.” The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.
359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term “Over‐soul,” but as a rule they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion. “God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion, and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize. 360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world” of fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David’s psalms! 361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897, p. 165. 362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human Immortality, Boston and London, 1899. 363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.
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