M. Schmolders has translated a part of Al-Ghazzali’s

autobiography into French :? —
“The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “ aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and
1 TI follow the account in C. F. Korpren: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.
2 For a full account of him, see D. B. Macponatp: The Life of Al Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx p- 71
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hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclu- sively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the defini- tions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists, — as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,—and being drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence, and being abstinent or having one’s soul detached from the world. — Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.
“ Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds — temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six months’ hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth, and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and re- serving from my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria, where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my char- acter perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God — all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them.
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“This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to complete the purification of my heart and fit it for medita- tion. But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life. I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours; nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to return; and in this situation I spent ten years. Dur- ing this solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin. .
“Whoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there are intellec- tual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by the pro- phetic faculty, A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God
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has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principa) characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon _ away so as to resemble dead men, and who [in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it [and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only dur- ing the transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly under- stand. How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an imme- diate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s
hand.” !
This incommunicableness of the transport is the key- \ ‘ note of all mysticism. ~ Mystical truth exists for the indi- | vidual who has the transport, but for no one else. In“ this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of philosophy been con- trasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God’s knowledge cannot be discur- sive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and judgment. But our immediate feelings have no content
1 A. ScHMOLDERS : Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabey Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged.
Ys vf
\
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but what the five senses supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their transports yield.
In the Christian church there have always been mys: tics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything legiti- mate finds its place. The basis of the system is ‘ori- son’ or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Pro-
testant mystical experience appears to have been almost
exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life. i | if
The first thmg to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with
/ its concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals as
d Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommend the dis
ciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to immagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of disci- pline would be a semi-hallucinatory mono-ideism — an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to
1 Gérres’s Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So does Rrser’s Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2 vols., Turin, 1890.
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occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.’ But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition called the ‘union of love,’ which, he says, is reached by ‘ dark contemplation.’ In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul —
“finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled. . . . We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them. . . . The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no created thing has access, in an ‘immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious the
1M. Ricfsac, 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.
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more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the com- prehension of love, . . . and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignifi- cant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means.” ?
I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life? Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the subdi- visions and names which we find in the Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experi- ences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.
The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing sueh conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the highest of them, the ‘ orison of union.’
“In the orison of union,” says Saint Teresa, “ the soul is
fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing.
1 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch. xvii., in Vie et uvres, 3me ddition, 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.
2 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, ver- bal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as ‘ levitation,’ stigmatiza- tion, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented), have no essential mys- tical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whats ever, 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.
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Thus she needs to employ no artifice in order to arres% the use of her understanding : it remains so stricken with inactivity that she neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world and lives solely in God. . . . I do not even know whether in this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears as if dead. .. .
“Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with him- self, suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the con- dition returning, she can neither forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you, nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God, since during the union she has neither sight nor under- standing, I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person who was ignorant of the truth that God’s mode of being in everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence, but who, after hav- ing received the grace of which I am speaking, believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so that, having consulted a half-learned man who was as ignorant on this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he replied that God is in us only by ‘grace,’ she disbelieved his reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much consoled her... .
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“ But how, you will repeat, can one have such certainty in respect to what one does not see? This question, | am power- less to answer. These are secrets of God’s omnipotence which it does not appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not possess this certainty has ever been really united to God.” 1
The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this world, — visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.
“Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about heavenly things than all the teachings of all-the doctors put together could have taught him. . . . One day in prison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the crea- tion of the world. On another occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him to con- template, in a form and images fitted to the weak understand- ing of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such sweet- ness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed abundant tears.” 2
1 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i, in Cuvres, translated by Bourx, iii. 421-424.
? 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 replen- ished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Gorlitz, 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.” Ofa 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
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Similarly with Saint Teresa. “One day, being in orison,” she writes, “it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly im- pressed upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the Lord has granted me. . . . The view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it.” !
She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian
Creed, —
“‘OQur Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly
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 expli- cate the same.” Jacob Behmen’s Theosophic Philosophy, ete., by E>Dwarp Taytor, 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 crea- tion 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 ‘ Clairvoy- ance’ 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. 2 Vie, pp. 581, 582.
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that I remained as extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an unspeakable happiness.”
On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place in Heaven."
The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be berne, and as verging on bodily pain? But it is too subtle and piercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God’s touches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. “If our understanding com- prehends,” says Saint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mys- tery in which I am lost.””* In the condition called raptus or ravishment by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa’s descrip- tions and the very exact distinctions which she makes, to
1 Loe. cit., p. 574.
2 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 can.
not make it better.” Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i. ® Vie, p. 198.
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persuade one’s self that one is dealing, not with imagi- nary experiences, but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.

To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intel- lectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of de- generation and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life.
~ Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the ihe lesences in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by admiring followers. The ‘ other- worldliness’ encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged.
Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most powerfully practical hu- man engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and ‘touches’ by which God veaches the substance of the soul, tells us that —
414 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
“They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may re- ward it for all the labors undergone in its life — even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment — that of not being allowed to suffer enough.” 4
Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage I quoted from her in wy first lecture. There are many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more evi- dently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritual energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement ?
‘“‘ Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admir- ably disposed for action . . . as if God had willed that the body itself, already obedient to the soul’s desires, should share in the soul’s happiness. . . . The soul after such a favor is animated with a degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring ‘lesires, horror of the world, and the clear perception of our proper nothingness. . . . What empire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she recognizes still shrouded in the darkness! . . . She groans at having ever been sensi-
1 uvres, ii. 320. 2 Above, p. 21.
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tive to points of honor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God. . . . She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, they pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect in ten years by preserving it. . . . She laughs at herself that there should ever have been a time in hev life when she made any case of money, when she ever desired it... . Oh! if human beings might only agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would all treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but dis- appear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a remedy for all our ills.” }
Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states establish the truth of those theologi- cal affections in which the saintly life has its root ?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-descrip-
1 Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231-233, 243.
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tion, mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophi- cal directions. One of these directions is optimism, and the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness. as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest toa rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth, — He, the Self, the Atman, is to be described by ‘No! no!’ only, say the Upanishads,’ — though it seems on the surface to be a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that it is this, seems implicitly to shut it off from being that — it is as if he lessened it. So we deny the ‘ this,’ negating the negation which it seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude by which we are possessed. The fountain-head of Christian mys- ticism is Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively.
‘The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests. . . . It is neither es- sence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity
1 MULLER’s translation, part ii. p. 180.
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or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it,” ete., ad libi-: tum.)
But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is super- lucent, swper-splendent, super-essential, swper-sublime, super everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the ‘ Methode der Absoluten Negativitit.’ ?
Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, “ where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself.”* As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that “it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehen- sible by any of them. And because it is nothing respec- tively, it is therefore free from all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it by.” * Or as when Angelus Silesius sings : —
“ Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn riihrt kein Nun noch Hier ; Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir.” 5
To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as
1 T. Davipson’s translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893, a xxii_ p. 399.
“Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur.” Scotus Eri- gena, quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55.
3 J. Royce: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.
4 Jacob Behmen’s Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by Brrnarp Hoiianp, London, 1901, p. 48.
5 Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.
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a mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery inter twines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all mystical writings.
“‘ Love,” continues Behmen, is Nothing, for ‘“ when thou art gone forth wholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and art become Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou art in that eternal One, which is God him- self, and then thou shalt feel within thee the highest virtue of Love. . . . The treasure of treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here saith, J have-nothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked; J can do nothing, for I have no manner of power, but am as water poured out; [am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an image of Being, and only God is to me 1 AM; and so, sitting down in my own Nothing- ness, I give glory to the eternal Being, and will nothing of my- self, that so God may will all in me, being unto me my God and all things.” 4
In Paul’s language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth inme. Only when I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life and mine remain - outstanding?
1 Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.
2 From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness in God’s indwelling presence : —
“Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life ! life which becomes each day more luminous. . .. The wall before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a conflagration of glory ; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there. My
MYSTICISM 419
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the |
individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achieve- \ ment. In mystic states we both become one with the / Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech ante- dates languages, and they do not grow old.
‘That art Thou!’ say the Upanishads, and the Ve- dantists add: ‘ Not a part, not a mode of That, but iden- tically That, that absolute Spirit of the World.” “As pure. water. poured. into..pure..water- remains. the same, thus, O Gautama,.is.the Self of..a.thinker.who knows.
days succeed each other ; yesterday a blue sky ; to-day a clouded sun; a night filled with strange dreams ; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart... . Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by aii sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. © To-day he is with me ; and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with him. More than that ; he is not other than myself: he is one with me. It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound modification of my nature, anew manner of my being.” Quoted from the MS. ‘of an old man’ by Wirrrep Monon : II Vit : six méditations sur le mystére chrétien, pp. 280- 283.
1 Compare M. Marteriincx: L’Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.
490 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Water in water, fire in fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them ; likewise a man whose mind has entered into the Self.” * ‘Every man,’ says the Sufi Gulshan- Raz, ‘ whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no being save only One. . .. In his divine majesty the me, the we, the thou, are not found, for in the One there can be no dis- tinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely sep- arated from himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: I am God. he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to death.’” ? In the vision of God, says Plotinus, “ what»sees 1s not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason. . . . He who thus sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Ab- sorbed in God, he makes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding with another centre.”* “ Here,” writes Suso, “the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead . . . and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked sim- ple unity. It is in this modeless where that the highest bliss is to be found.”* “Ich bin so gross als Gott,” sings Angelus Silesius again, “Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht iiber mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein.” ®
_In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as ‘ dazzling obscurity,’ ‘whispering silence,’ teeming desert,’ are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we
1 Upanishads, M. Mtier’s translation, ii. 17, 334.
2 ScHMOLDERS : Op. cit., p. 210,
8 Enneads, BovrLirer’s translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp. 473-477, and vol. i. p. 27.
4 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310. 5 Op. cit., Strophe 10.
MYSTICISM 491
are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.
*% He who would hear the voice of Nada, ‘the Soundless Sound,’ and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhé- rand. .. . When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE — the inner sound which kills the outer. . . . For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy Self is lost in sELF, thyself unto THYSELF, merged in that sELF from which thou first didst radiate. . . . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat.” }
These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you
receive them, probably stir chords within you which
music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is un- able to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
“ Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end. Where we stand, Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves that gleam, We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath
scanned. ... Ah, but here man’s heart leaps, yearning *owards the gloom with venturous
glee, From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea.” 2
1H. P. Bravarsxry : The Voice of the Silence. 2 SwinBurRNE: On the Verge, in ‘A Midsummer Vacation.’
422 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our ‘immortality,’ if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain gas fee circles, finds its support in a ‘hear, hear!’ or an ‘amen,’ which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.! We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear ae but we cannot use them ourselves; it alone has the keep- ing of ‘the password primeval.’ ?
I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insuff- ciency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the
eneral traits of the mystic range of consciousness. Jt is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It 1s anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called others \worldly states of mind.
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can.
/ In brief my answer is this,—and I will divide it into ' three parts : —
(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
1 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.
2 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. Scurzuer, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900.
MYSTICISM 423 (3) They break down the authority of the non-mys-
tical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the under- standing and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to el we may freely continue to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1,
As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually au- thoritative over those who have them.’ They have been ‘there,’ and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind — we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs.2 It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more ‘rational’ beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions
1 T 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.
2 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 trod gave so largely to me.” Journal, London, no date, p. 172.
424 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely _ sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, —- that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms. y
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have _no nght to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have an un- equivocal outcome ; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rational- ism the other way; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for ‘ sugges- tive,’ not for logical reasons: we follow the majority be- cause to do so suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics 1s far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be cons
MYSTICISM 425
fessed, is only a ‘privileged case.’ It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest speci- mens and their preservation in ‘schools.’ It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church.’ It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it panthe- istic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysi-
cal minds, for whom ‘the category of personality’ is
absolute. The ‘union’ of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity.” How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Ed- ward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort.’ The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual con- tent whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matri- monial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they
1 RuysBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. Driacrorx’s book (Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siécle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JuNDT: Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siécle, Thése de Strasbourg, 1879.
2 Compare Paut RovsseLot: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii. ‘
8 See CARPENTER’S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and JEFFERIES’S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.
426 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emo- tional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It is only relatively.in favor of all these things — it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie.
So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abun- dant cases in which ‘ mystical ideas’ are cited as character- istic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of in- effable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pes- simistic : instead of consolations we have desolations ; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: ‘seraph and snake’ abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gaunt- let of confrontation with the total context of experience,
MYSTICISM 427
just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.’
3.
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mysticat states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mysti- cal states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. Asa rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
emcee
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which © facts already objectively before us fall into a new expres- siveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny any- thing that our senses have immediately seized.’ It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in
1 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, ‘Max Norpav’ seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden signifi- cance 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 signifi- cance ; and other alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained ‘ paranoiae’ 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.
2 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.
428 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possi- bly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from . “the different mystical windows need not prevent us from \.entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, i spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.
“Tn this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. ‘Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among
fier point in directions to which the religious senti-
/ ments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the
- supremacy of the ideal, of vastness,-of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we can- not possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism
| to which they would persuade-us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
® , MYSTICISM 429
Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what worlds away!” It may be that possi- bility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you think, then not so much. permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be found. - Philosophy has always professed to prove religious Oo coercive _argument ; and the construc-
tion of philosophies of this kind has always been one
favorite function of the religious life, if we use this term in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it which my limits will allow.
¢*
LECTURE XVIII PHILOSOPHY
2 ee subject of Saintliness left us face to face with
the question, Is the sense of divine presence a jsense of anything objectively true? We turned first to \mysticism for an answer, and found that although mys- ficism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too / private (and also too various) i in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy pub-. \Tishes results. which claim to be universally valid if they are valid ‘at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man’s sense of the divine ?
I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending. I have undermineu the authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to dis- credit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture dt" is essentially private and individualistic ; it always exceeds our powers of formulation; and although at- tempts to pour its contents into’a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus
PHILOSOPHY 431
and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may them- selves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name.
To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas _ are secondary products, like translations of a text into/ another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, T mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic. theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science they would have left a certain amount of ‘ psychical research,’ even as they now will probably have to re-admit a cer- tain amount. But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feel- ing originally supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a supe
432 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
rior way with the matter which feeling suggested ? Feel- ing is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and en enig- ‘ mas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and “absurd. Philosophy _ takes just _the opposite attitude. | Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox . whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objec- tively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intel- lect’s most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and uni- versal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason’s by task. “I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity /fto labor at this task... We are thinking beings, and we
cannot ‘exclude t the intellect from participating in any of * . our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted Scngriecely with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic / climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on ' us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion ; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man’s constructions
by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lec- tures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly
2 Compare Professor W. Wa.uace’s Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford. 1898, pp. 17 ff.
PHILOSOPHY 433
from now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the beginnings of a ‘ Science of Religions,’ so-called; and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coérdinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.
The intellectualism_in_religion which I wish to dis- credit pretends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of | the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true; what more ideal refuge could
434 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensi- ble things ? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the the- ological schools of to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible or prob- able truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Reli- gion: —
“ Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart ; but in order to elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and way- wardness, and to distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelli- gence to be true. It must be seen as having in its own nature a right to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feeling must be judged.1 In estimating the religious character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but what they think and believe — not whether their religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the con- ceptions of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the content or intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its character and worth are to be determined.” 2
Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.’ Theology, he says, is a science in the strict- est sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not —not ‘physical evidences’ for God, not ‘natural religion,’ for these are but vague subjective interpreta- tions : —
1 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.
2 Thid., p. 186, abridged and italicized. 8 Discourse II. § 7.
PHILOSOPHY 435
“Tf,” he continues, “ the Supreme Being is powerful or skill- ful, just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is. just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingen- ious, and which all would be the better for adopting. It is but _ the theology of Nature, just as we talk of the philosophy or the romance of history, or the poetry of childhood, or the pic- turesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other ab- stract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent of the world, recog- nizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contempla- tion. Ido not see much difference between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain about Him.”
What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these things: “I simply mean the Science of God, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a sci- ence of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology.”
In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme of freeing us
436 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my pro- cedure to-day. I need not discredit philosophy by labori ous criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter.of history it fails to prove its pretension to be ‘ objectively’ convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our convic tion, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It batts ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.’
Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope Leo’s Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. TI glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic the
1 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. Fretpine, 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 froth grammar, but the re- verse. 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.
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ology establishes God’s existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature. |
The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criti- cism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The ‘ cos- mological’ one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The ‘argument from design’ reasons, from the fact that Nature’s laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The ‘ moral argument’ is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The ‘argument ex consensu gentium’ is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it.
As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments tech- nically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion’s all-suffi- cient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the
1 For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A. Stéckt’s Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. Borpprr’s Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholie Manual; but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C.
Honce : Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. Strona: Syste: matic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.
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argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless pro- cesses of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured'in the earlier versions of the argument.’
1 It must not be forgotten that any form of disorder 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 arrange- ment of débris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrange- ment, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting any- where 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 im- probable. 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 arrange- ment, useful, esthetic, 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 capri- cious 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
PHILOSOPHY = 439
The fact is that these arguments do but follow the com- bined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only aéntoborate our pre- existent partialities.
If philosophy can do so little to establish God’s exist- ence, how stands it_ with her efforts to define his attri- bits? It is worth while to look at the attempts of / systematic theology in this direction.
Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence @ se. From this ‘ a-se-ity’ on God’s part, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both necessary and absolute, cannot not be, and cannot in any way be determined by anything else. This makes Him abso- lutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within ; for limitation is non-being ; and God is being itself. This un- limitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is One, and Only, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is Spiritual, for were He composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine them into the total, and his aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature. He is simple metaphysi- cally also, that is to say, his nature and his existence can-
‘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 encyclopedias. 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 fol- lows, 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.
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not be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essen- tia and his esse must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God’s powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only ‘virtual,’ and made from the human point of view. In God all these points of view fali into an absolute identity of being.
This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be immutable. He is actuality, through and through. Were there anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is immense, boundless ; for could He be outlined in space, He would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore omnipresent, indivisibly there, at every point of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of time, — in other words eternal. For if He began in time, He would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability.
He has intelligence and will and every other creature-perfec- tion, for we have them, and effectus nequit superare causam. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their object, since God can be bounded by naught that is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself. He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite self-pleasure.! Since He must of logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called ‘free’ ad intra, with the freedom of contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures. Ad extra, however, or with re- spect to his creation, God is free. He cannot need to create, being perfect in being and in happiness already. He wills to create, then, by an absolute freedom.
1 For the scholastics the facultas appetendi embraces feeling, desire, and
will,
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Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a person ; and a living person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this dis- tinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely self-sufficient : his self-knowledge and self-love are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them.
He is omniscient, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is previsive, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his immutability. He is omnipotent for everything that does not involve logical contradiction. He can make being —in other words his power includes creation. If what He creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non-divine in substance. If it were made of a sub- stance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God’s definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, and gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multipli- city, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute them to Him only in a terminative sense, as differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.
God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is positive being’s fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good, for bonum totius preeminet bonum partis. Moral evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He permits it only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging
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Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the ift.
: As regards God’s purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifesta- tion to others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in the first place of know- ledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that God’s secondary purpose in creating is Jove.
I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther, into the mysteries of God’s Trin- ity, for example. What I have given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthu- slasm at God’s list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time.’ He first enumerates God’s attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of all that hap- pens upon his permissive will. He gives us scholastic philo- sophy ‘touched with emotion,’ and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman’s. It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point I make a short digression.
What God hath joined together, let no man put asun-
der. The Continental schools of philosophy have too
( often overlooked the fact that man’s thinking is organi-
\eally connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be 1 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7.
PHILOSOPHY 443
the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding prin- ciple of British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must make a difference, every theoretical dif- ference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience? This is the char- acteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his ‘matter.’ The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, there- fore, is the whole meaning of the term ‘ matter’ — any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as aabitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practi- cal meaning it has no significance whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgsen has used the principle with full explicitness. When all is
444 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced ‘the critical method’ into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action ? And what could it matter, if all propositions were practi- cally indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or which false ?
An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a
‘f Greek name. He calls it the principle of pragmatism, and he defends it somewhat as follows : 1 —
Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are_rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is is but one step in the pro- duction of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s prac- tical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s significance. To develop a thought’s meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible dif- ference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our
1 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.
PHILOSOPHY 445
thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our conception of these prac- tical consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive sig- nificance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of prag- matism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God’s perfections, whether some be not far less significant than others.
If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism te God’s metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, as dis- tinguished from his moral attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. Take God’s aseity, for example; or his necessariness ; his immateriality ; his ‘simplicity’ or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity ; his ‘personality,’ apart from the moral quali- ties which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self- love, and absolute felicity in himself : — candidly speak- ing, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital dif- ference can it possibly make to a man’s religion whether they be true or false ?
For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that
446 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly con- fess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God’s simplicity ? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living ani- mals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the ‘ closet-naturalists,’ as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-natural- ist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet- naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attri- butes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic diction- ary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘ God’ by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians’ hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from
PHILOSOPHY __ 447
this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after- effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in secula seculorum in the lives of humble private men.
So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the meta-
physical monster which they offer to our worship is an /
absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.
What shall we now say of the attributes called Gel?
Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. /
They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Bemg omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God’s pur- pose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dog- matic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her arguments ?
i
448 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God’s goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound to such a witness simply silly.
No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity : “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.” An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of | presence — such is the situation of the man who is sin- cere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still.
- We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism, I repeat, has said good-by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness ?
The basis of modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine of the
1 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive jus- ) tice. 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 cer- tain 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.
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Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness ‘I think them’ must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the ‘I’ in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and deper- sonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.
It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant’s notion of Bewusstsein tiberhaupt, or abstract conscious- ness, into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that im the Hegelian school, which to-day so deeply influences both British and American thinking, two prin- ciples have borne the brunt of the operation.
The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissec- tion of disjecta membra, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.
The second principle is that to be conscious of a nega- tion is already virtually to be beyond it. The mere ask- ing of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent ; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite in posse. |
Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare,
450 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
stark self-identity in each thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now act within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop. They introduce something other than them- selves along with them ; and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.
The program is excellent; the universe is a place where things are followed by other things that both cor- rect and fulfill them; and a logic which gave us some- thing like this movement of fact would express truth far better than the traditional school-logic, which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and subsumptions, or static re- semblances and differences. Nothing could be more un: like the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic. Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have already named.
“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes, “of the reality in which all intelligence rests?” He replies: “Two things may without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in com: munion with this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest move- ment of human intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of all individual minds as such I can ab- stract; I can think them away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self-consciousness itself, in its independence
PHILOSOPHY 451
and absoluteness, or, in other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness.”
Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not make: he converts the omnipre- sence of consciousness in general as a condition of ‘ truth’ being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his con- creteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious experi- ence of individuals in the following words : —
“If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions, fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the char- acter of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative of man’s spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a think- ing, self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that is universal— in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.”
Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete. Whatever we may be in posse, the very best of us im actu falls very short of
oe
452 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man’s ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable.
“Is there, then,” our author continues, “no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, | There is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality into that of religion. It It may be _ said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted
with morality, that it changes aspiration into “fruition, anticipa- tion into realization; that instead of leaving man in the inter- _minable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human side or the divine —as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul — in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be a far- off vision, and has become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of the Infinite.
“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very begin- _ ning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act which constitutes the be. ginning of the religious life — call it faith, or trust, or self-sur- render, or by whatever name you will— there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress towards, but within the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions or incre- ments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to ap- propriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in
PHILOSOPHY 453
possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not really belong to him: they are excres- cences which have no organic relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress. Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realization of the life of God.” }
You will readily admit that no description of the pheno- mena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises of con- version of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is mdeed gratifying to find the content of religion reported se unanimously. But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird — and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking — transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason ? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public cer- tainty? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery ?
I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but - that he has simply reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be
1 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged.
454 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
excused from proving technically that the transcendental- ist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser’s and Professor Pringle-Pattison’s memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar." Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and abso- lutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive ?
What religion reports, you must remember, always pur ports to be a fact of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves rela— tions of give and take are actual. If definite percep tions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet,
1 A. C. Fraser: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SzrH [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 Con- ception 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 con- vineing 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 abso- lutism 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.
PHILOSOPHY 455
surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness,, which feeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to warrant faith’s veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.
Yn all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes \. the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless. us
It would be unfair to p her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by / briefly enumerating what she can do for religion. If she, will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology | into science of religions, she can make herself enormously / useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incon- gruous.
Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as hypotheses, testing them in ©
hilosophy, however, to leave
a
)
456 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She'can reduce their num- ber, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguish- ing between what is innocent over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. /As a result, she can offer mediation between different ' believers, and help to bring about consensus of opinxon. She can do this the more successfully, the better she dis- criminates the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she com- pares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics — it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, ‘ and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science con- fesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. _Philosophy liv lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection
PHILOSOPHY 457
comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philo- sopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows. the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoseopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal expe- rience.
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness.
LECTURE XIX OTHER CHARACTERISTICS
E have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the indi-
vidual who has it, and the uses of. the individual jual himself
to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it.
We return to the empirical philosophy: the 'true is , what works well, even though the qualification ‘ on the whole ’ may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independ- ent conclusions.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the esthetic life plays in determining one’s choice of a reli- gion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectu- alize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, there- fore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them ' puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their esthetic value. It enriches our bare piety +o carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches
1 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 459
a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. LEpithets lend an atmos- phere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman’s* grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the esthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain esthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement.” When one’s mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather
1 Newman’s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he ean 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.
2 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, trib- utes of affection, social recognitions — some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.
460 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority de- scending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in pre- sence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architec- ture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity, in which as- scending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however hum- ble, is significant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestant- ism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated re- ligious lives whose boast it is that “man in the bush with God may meet.” * What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a ‘home’ upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagi- nation !
The strength of these xsthetic sentiments makes it
1 In Newman’s Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this esthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 461
rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. _ The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensi- ble. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives counte- nance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of rep- tile. The two will never understand each other — their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature’s intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter... So much for the esthetic diver- sities in the religious consciousness.
1 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.
462 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Con- fession, and Prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of Sacrifice.
Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship ; but, as cults have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have been superseded by sacri- fices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ’s atonement. These religions substitute offermgs of the heart, renun- ciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.’ But, as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly avoid earlier reli- gious usages and questions of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession.
In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, say- ing my word about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one’s self in need of, in order to be in right rela- tions to one’s deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rotr tenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least
1 Above, p. 362 ff.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 463
no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show_of virtue — he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo- axon communities is a little hard to account for. le- action against popery is of course the historic explana- tion, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the\ (shell of secrecy’ would have had to open, the pent-in n | \ abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear | . that heard the confession were Sey The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted
auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking Protes- tants, in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone into our confidence.’
The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer, — and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain envi- ronments prayer may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a nor- mal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is differ- ent. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,’
1 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by FRANE GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii. 2 Example : “The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in
464 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
every one now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only one depart- ment of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. “ Religion,” says a liberal French theolo- gian, “‘is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary rela- tion, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysteri- ous power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighbor- ing phenomena as purely moral or esthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formule, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a per- sonal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence, — it may be even before it nas a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living reli- gion. One sees from this why ‘natural religion,’ so-
Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, ‘You Boston minis- ters, 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. EmrErson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 465
called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no in- terchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion.” ?
It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabatier’s contention. The reli- gious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they
feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is re- alized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then |
prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that some- thing is transacting, is of course a feeling of what is
illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not | simply as containing elements of delusion, — these un-, doubtedly everywhere exist, — but as being rooted in
delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be
1 AuausTE SABATIER: Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me éd., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.
466 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators’ part at a play, whereas in experimental reli- gion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.
The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful conscious- ness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that some- thing is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer’s effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which © these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the per- suasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. | Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.
This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written - by the late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications. Mr. Myers writes ; —
“Tam glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actual relation with the material. From the spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the mate-
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 467
rial ; the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to hour.
“T call these ‘facts’ because I think that some scheme of this kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence ; too complex to summarize here. How, then, should we act on these facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which experience shows to be favorable to such in- drawal. Prayer is the general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If we then ask to whom to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must be that that does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing ; — it means a real increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or grace ;— but we do not know enough of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer operates ; — who is cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himself hears us ; while to say that God hears us is merely to restate the first principle, — that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.”
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lec- ture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena; and as a concrete exam- ple of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Miller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Miiller’s prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Larly in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on
letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight,
468 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE but by the Lord’s hand. He had an extraordinarily
active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more than a hundred ‘and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphan- ages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans ; finally, the establishment of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Miller received and administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hun- dred thousand miles of sea and land.’ During the sixty- eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not to acquaint other people with the details of his tempo- rary necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough. ‘“ When I lose such a thing as a key,” he writes, “‘1] ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the Word, I seek help from the Lord, and . . . am not cast down, but of good cheer because I look for his assistance.”
1 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Miiller, by FrEpD- ERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 469°
Miiller’s custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week. ‘As the Lord deals out to us by the day, .. . the week’s payment might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those with whom we deal might be incon- venienced by us, and we be found acting against the command- ment of the Lord: ‘Owe no man anything.’ From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our supplies by. the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and how- ever much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the week.”
The articles needed of which Miiller speaks were the food, fuel, etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so. ‘Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord’s presence I have never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner for more than a hundred per- sons; or when after dinner there were no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all this without one. single human being having been informed about our need... . Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need, I am en- abled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now compar- atively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need for one or another part of the work.’’?
In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Miller affirms that his prime motive was ‘‘to have something to point to as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful God that he ever was, —as willing as ever to prove himself the living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in him.”? For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of his enterprises. ‘‘ How does it work
1 The Life of Trust ; Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Miiller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219. 2 Ibid., p. 126.
470 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
when we thus anticipate God by going our own way? We cer- tainly weaken faith instead of increasing it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How different if one is enabled to wait God’s own time, and to look alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes, after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results from it.’’ 4
When the supplies came in but slowly, Miller always con- sidered that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means. ‘And thus it has proved,” — I quote from his diary, — “for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which 2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for present necessities. It is impossi- ble to describe my joy in God when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor surprised ; for I look out for answers to my prayers. J believe that God hears me. Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could only sit before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii. At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed service.” 2
George Miiller’s is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrow- ness of the man’s intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been for Miiller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of
1 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged. 2 Thid., p. 323.
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any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has in- vested him. Miller, in short, was absolutely unphiloso- phical. His intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive human thought.!. When we com- pare a mind like his with such a mind as, for example, Emerson’s or Phillips Brooks’s, we see the range which the religious consciousness covers.
There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer. The evangelical journals are filled
1 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber’s English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble :—
“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 bin- nacle, 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, ‘Lorp! 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 Gop’s wonderful providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty Gop 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, ‘Lorp! what shall I do now?’ And then it pleased Gop to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet Gop 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 searce ever stirred after.” —I have slightly abridged Lyde’s narrative.
472 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
with such answers, and books are devoted to the subject, but for us Miiller’s case will suffice.
A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayer- ful life is followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active influence. The following description of a ‘led’ life, by a German writer whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One
finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty, —
“‘ That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one’s cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until the peril is past —this being especially the case with temptations to vanity and sensuality ; that paths on which one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly re- moved; that when the time has come for something, one sud- denly receives a courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of knowledge and insight, in one’s self, of which it is impossible to say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right
1 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BisHor or Ripon and others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?) ; H. L. Hastinas: The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898 (?).
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 473
moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher interests. )
*¢ Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt what- ever that now one walks continually through ‘ open doors’ and on the easiest roads, with as little care and trouble as it is pos- sible to imagine.
‘“* Furthermore one finds one’s self settling one’s affairs neither too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind, almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that one can wait for everything patiently, and that is one of life’s great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing after the other, so that one gains time to make one’s footing sure before advancing farther. And then every- thing occurs to us at the right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way, just as if a third per- son were keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting.
“ Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.
“ Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are instruments of good in
-God’s hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these
thoughts it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would otherwise be possible.
“All these are things that every human being knows, who has had experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could be brought forward. Tne highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord.” }
1 C, Hizty: Gliick, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.
474 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the con- tinuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one’s affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world’s authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that fol- lows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer infuses.
Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epic- tetus.’ It is that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so-called ‘liberal’ Christians. As an expres-
1 “Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “ any one thing in the creation is suf- ficient 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 sup- plied 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 cele- brate. . . . 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 la 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.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 475
sion of it, I will quote a page from one of Martineau’s sermons : — 7
“The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thou- sand years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and drop- ping off; Ido not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place; but only the lov- ing meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of ‘the Living God.’ ”}
When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of
1 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.
476 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
meaning. The deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears trans- figured. The state of a mind thus awakened from tor por is well expressed in these words, which I take from a friend’s letter : —
“If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and. bounties we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time even to begin to review the things we may imagine we have not). Wesum them and realize that we are actually killed with G'od’s kindness ; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties, without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms? ”
Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine send- ing, instead of being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period : —
“One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault-finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or rich- ness, than were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal can thus sometimes get em- bodied.” }
In Sénancour’s novel of Obermann a similar transient hfting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jonquil :
‘ Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 477
“Tt was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a lim- itless beauty. . . . I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made actual.” 1
We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may appear to converts after their awak-
ening. As a rule, religious persons generally assume)
that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny are significant of the divine pur- poses with them. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if it be ‘ trial,’
strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at all stages |
of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the |
process of communion energy from on high flows in to
meet demand, and becomes operative within the pheno-—
menal world. So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes ‘no essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The funda- mental religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and. spiritual 5 work of some kind is effected really.
So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for
1 Op. cit., Letter XXX. 2 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.
478 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my opening lecture! about the prevalence of the psycho- pathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose follow- ers regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt condi- tions, guiding impressions, and ‘openings.’ They had these things, because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corrob- orate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than con- ception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body.’
1 Above, pp. 24, 25. 2 A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphia
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 479
The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power is of course ‘inspiration.’ It is easy to discriminate between the religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi-auto- matic composition appears to have been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a careful study of them, to see —
‘“‘ How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely dif- ferent from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own
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 “Ido 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, Newsrovucs 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 GroraE A. Futter, Boston, 1901.
480 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
‘It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self- caused, Scattered all through the prophetic writings are ex- pressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. For instance, — this of Isaiah’s: ‘The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,’ — an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse, —‘and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.’ ... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: ‘The hand of the Lord God fell upon me,’ ‘ The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.’ The one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the au- thority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one and all preface their addresses so confidently, ‘The Word of the Lord,’ or ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ They have even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah: ‘ Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am He, I am the First, I also am the last,’ — and so on. The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the | background ; he feels himself for the time being the mouth- piece of the Almighty.” }
“ We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the prophets formed a professional class. There were | schools of the prophets, in which the gift was regularly culti- | vated. A group of young men would gather round some com- manding figure —a Samuel or an Elisha — and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his inspiration. It
2 W. Sanpay: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49-56, abridged.
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 481
seems that music played its part in their exercises. ... It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible to ‘counterfeit’ prophecy. Sometimes this was done deliber- ately. . . . But it by no means follows that in all cases where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether con- scious of what he was doing.” !
Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria describes his inspiration : —
‘“‘Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes.” 2
If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed’s revela- tions all came from the subconscious apnere, To the question in what way he got them, —
‘“ Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and when the angel went away, he had received the revelation. Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however, . . . distinguish still other kinds. In the Itgan (1038) the following are enumerated: 1, revelations with
1 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.
2 Quoted by Aucustus 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 reli: gious revelation.
482 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
sound of bell, 2, by inspiration of the holy spirit in M.’s heart, 8, by Gabriel in human form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his journey to heaven) orin dream. . . . In Almawahib alladuniya the kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet’s heart, 3, Gabriel taking Dahya’s form, 4, with the bell-sound, ete., 5, Gabriel in propria persona (only twice), 6, revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8, God revealing himself im- mediately without veil. Others add two other stages, namely : 1, Gabriel in the form of still another man, 2, God showing himself personally in dream.” }
In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly mo- tor. In the case of Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the revealed trans- lation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration seems to have been predominantly sen- sorial. He began his translation by the aid of the ‘ peep- stones’ which he found, or thought or said that he found, with the gold plates, — apparently a case of ‘ crys- tal gazing.’ For some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but seems generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.’
1 NOLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorans, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller ac- count in Sir Wixt1am Mutr’s Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii.
2 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an oblig- ing letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the follow- ing 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 revela- tions are got through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 483
Other revelations are described as ‘ openings’ — Fox’s, for example, were evidently of the kind known in spirit- istic circles of to-day as ‘impressions.’ As all effective initiators of change must needs live to some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or convic- tion of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.
When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self- severity met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans- marginal or subliminal region. If the word ‘subliminal’ is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychi- cal research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latter the A-region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the B-region. The B-region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypo- theses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations, come from it. 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.”
484 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and ‘hypnoid ’ conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain-head of much _ that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen, —and this is my conclusion, — the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their en- trance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner religious pheno- mena as we find them in developed and articulate human individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multi- ply both my documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material may suggest.
LECTURE XX CONCLUSIONS
HE material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our theoreti- cal and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, de- fending the empirical method, I foretold that whatever ecnclusions we might come to could be reached by spir- itual judgments only, appreciations of the significance for life of religion, taken ‘on the whole.’ Our conclu- sions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can.
Summing up in the broadest possible way the char- , acteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, “ it includés*the following beliefs : —
1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance ;
2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher », universe is our true end ; :
3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof — be that spirit ‘God’ or ‘law’ —is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
Religion includes also the following psychological char- acteristics : —
4, A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and | takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal - to earnestness and heroism.
486 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.
In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that les before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to com- monplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as any one can know them who learns them from another; and we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question: what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance ?
But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.’ Ought it te be as-
1 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.
CONCLUSIONS 487
sumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other
elements should be identical ? Ought if indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements ? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable ? To these questions I answer ‘No’ emphatically. And. my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such differ- ent powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Hach, from his pecul- iar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must stand firm,—in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wes- ley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of quali- ties, by bemg champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Lach attitude bemg a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out. completely. So a “god of battles’ must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our religion; why need it be one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much
488 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of deliverance, if we are healthy-minded?* Unquestion- ably, some men have the completer experience and the — higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate’er it be,| and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism, — that to understand the causes of drunken- ness, as a physician understands them, is not to be druuk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even
1 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the mor- bid 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 an- tagonisms 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 re- ported 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 ele- ment 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 conscious- ness 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 arbi- trary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject.
CONCLUSIONS 489
decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be con- sidered true; and yet the best man at this science might _
be the man ie liceEoendl it hardest- +o-be-personally devout. Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one’s living faith.’ If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
_ For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and nif we turn to the inner difficulties of os a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted as a matter of fact. Sup- pose that she has assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same con- clusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them,’ work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered true.
1 Compare, e. g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above. 2 « Prayerful’ taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463 ff.
490 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic concep- tions towards which general philosophy inclines. The sci- entist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the ‘ prayerful com- munion’ of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genu- ine spiritual work — even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations — can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true.
‘There is a notion in the air about us that pean probably only an anachronism, a case of ‘survival,’
atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which hee in its more enlightened examples has outgrown ; ; and this notion our religious anthropologists at present do little to counteract.
This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the ‘ Survival theory,’
for brevity’s sake.
CONCLUSIONS 491
The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monu- mental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in — whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.
Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repu- diating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what pur- pose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxie- ties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance pro- duction, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and
492 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tend- ency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of, her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,’ represent-
1 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 per- sonal 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 commodi- ously 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 sun- shine, 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 suffi- ciently 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 recog- nize 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.” Verniinftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natiirlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74-84.
CONCLUSIONS 493
ing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The
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 eigh- teenth century. ‘Had Man’s body,” says Dr. Derham, “ been made accord- ing 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 Rob- bers, 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. Hven 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
494 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the
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 lan- guish 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 vale- tudinarian, feeble part of mankind ; affording those an easy and comfort- able 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 habi- tation, 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 sur- face 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.”
CONCLUSIONS 495
convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles, — epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them ; their des- tinies aah nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.
You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get _ them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, _ the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, reve- lations, and cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such dis- tinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively man- ner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently ; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively to the zsthetic and dramatic aspects of events.’
1 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, te the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular move- ment. 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 ina circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most ‘natural’ movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as
oe pn PE LA.
“Th LAL env
496 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
How indeed ‘could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation and prevision, of those mathemati-
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 pro- perties 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 attrib- uted 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 hound up, the latter infallibly gets well, —I quote now Van Hel- mont’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 con- tact 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 mur- murs, 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 eharacter of Revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and con- creted fat in the unguent. J. B. VAN Hetmont: A Ternary of Para-
CONCLUSIONS 497
cal and mechanical modes of conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, posi- tion, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and fol- lowed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature’s life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion de-
doxes, translated by WALTER CHARLETON, London, 1650. — I much abridge the original in my citations.
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 ration- ale 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 pre- ceded 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 cap- tive, 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 hemorrhage 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 com- pulsive 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 ani- mal, 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 ex- ample — is full of sympathetic magic.
498 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
lights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the ‘ promise ’ of the dawn and of the rainbow, the ‘ voice’ of the thunder, the ‘ gentleness’ of the summer rain, the ‘sublimity’ of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still con- tinues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflow- ings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacri- fices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.
Pure anachronism! says the survival-theory ; ; — anach- ronism for which deanthropomorphization of the i imagi- nation is the remedy required. The less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universai
-and impersonal terms, the truer-heirsof.Science we become.
In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of tem- per, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that,
so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we
deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we |
deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term, I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or sup- pressed. The objective part is the sum total of what- soever at any given time we may be thinking of, the
CONCLUSIONS 499
subjective part is the inner ‘ state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous, — the cosmic times and spaces, for example, — whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself ; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs —such a concrete bit of per- sonal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract ele- ment of experience, such as the ‘ object’ is when taken all alone. Itisa full fact, even though it be an insignifi- cant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities whatso- ever must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the mea- sure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or is analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.’
If this be true, it is absurd f for science to say. that the egotistic. elements_of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic
1 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.
500 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
places, — they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description — they being as describable as anything else— would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individ- ual’s religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all. |
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg,’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions con- nected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival- theory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their reli- gion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.’ By being religious we establish ourselves in
1 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
CONCLUSIONS «B01
possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religion | and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and
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 sci- entist titles may proceed — even ‘prophecy,’ even ‘ levitation,’ might creep into the pale.
Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism and ¢ romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be mat- ters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be.
>-
502 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared with this world of living indi- vidualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect eontemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the movement, the vital] element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour ??
1 Hume’s criticism has banished causation from the world of physical objects, and ‘Science’ is absolutely satisfied to define cause in terms of concomitant change —read Mach, Pearson, Ostwald. The ‘original’ of the notion of causation is in our inner personal experience, and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and described.
2 When I read in a religious paper words like these : “ Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is the Inevitable Inference,” I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would mar- tyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shal- lowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898,1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy properly so called :—
“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 philo- sophy.”
In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Senti- ments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula —the ever-growing predominance of the rational intellec- tual 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 z 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
CONCLUSIONS 503
Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with. ‘the only absolute realities which we know, must neces- sarily play an eternal part in human history. The next thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general message to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries, and our final summing up can now begin.
1 am well aware that after all the palpitating docu- ments which I have quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring institution and belief that my pre- vious lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which 1 now advance may appear to many of you like an anti- climax, a tapering-off and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and result. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants ap- pears poverty-stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-stricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first to some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. That simply, religion tends to turn into religious philosophy. — These are psychologic cally entirely different things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratio- cination, 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 organ- ism 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 Develop- ment, 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.’
504 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
established, we should have a result which might be ‘small, but would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pal- lid kind, as befits a critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task.
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feel- ing or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indis- tinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary ; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmont- ous system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first con- clusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.
The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order do they belong ?
CONCLUSIONS 505
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what, Kant calls a ‘sthenic’ affection, an excitement of the \ cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order which, like any / tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lec- ture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes tem- peramental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Sub- ject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.’ The name of ‘faith- state,’ by which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.” It is a biological as well as a psychological con- dition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces by which men live.2 The total absence of it, anhedonia,* means collapse.
The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intel- lectual content. We saw examples of this in those sud- ~ den raptures of the divine presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.” It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air.®
1 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to 278.
2 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.
3 Above, p. 184.
* Above, p. 145.
5 Above, p. 400.
6 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It over- whelms 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
506 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
When, however, a positive intellectual content is asso- ciated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,’ and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differmmg creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming ‘ religions,’ and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘ truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anesthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,’ goes so far as to say that so long as men can wse their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all. “The truth of the matter can be put,” says / Leuba, “in this way: Glod is not known, he is not under- . stood ; he 1s used —sometimes as meat-purveyor, some- times as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the re-
my nocturnal promenade.” A. GratRy: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over direc- tion 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 im- pulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real.
1 Compare Lrvsa : Loc. cit., pp. 346-349.
* The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July, 1901.
CONCLUSIONS 507
ligious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does ,God really exist? How does he exist? What is he?
/ are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life,
/ more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying ie is, in the © last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at / any and every level of development, is the religious im- pulse.” *
At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
Ye We must next pass beyond. the point of view of merely
subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.
First, is there, etre all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously ?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true ?
‘Iwill take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and
1 Loe. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intel- lectual 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.
508 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance i in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts : —
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is pomolny wrong about us as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that we are sowed from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious ex- perience in terms like these : —
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives,’ the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a morz of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.
1 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.
CONCLUSIONS 509
It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these very simple general terms.’ They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it;” and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms.
So far, however, as this dhalyeis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really | increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of the effects pro- duced. I now turn to my second question: What is the objective ‘ truth’ of their content ?*
The part of the content concerning which the ccc
1 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.
2 « 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 ezcessivity, rather, or exceedingness.” Riciisac: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.
& 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.
510 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of truth most pertinently arises is that ‘more of the same quality ’ with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a‘ more’ merely our own notion, or does it really exist ? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist ? ‘And in what form should we conceive of that ‘union’ with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced ?
It is in answering these questions that the various theo- logies perform their theoretic work, and that their diver- gencies most come to light. They all agree that the ‘more’ really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satis- fied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that some- thing really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experi- ence of ‘ union’ with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes.
At the end of my lecture on Philosophy’ I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis.
The time has now come for this attempt. Who says
1 Above, p. 455.
CONCLUSIONS 511
‘hypothesis’ renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scien- tific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true.
The ‘more,’ as we called it, and the meaning of our ‘union’ with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the posi- tion of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the ‘more’ as Jehovah, and the ‘union’ as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, vould be an over-belief.
We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the ‘more,’ which psychologists may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said. in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness * is
1 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 an- nounced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the explora-
”
512 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS: EXPERIENCE
as true as when it was first written: “ Hach of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows — an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested ; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeys ance or reserve.”* Much of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jin- gles, inhibitive timidities, ‘ dissolutive’ phenomena of vari- ous sorts, as Myers calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of con- version, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.
Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our con- scious life. Starting thus with a recognized psycholo- gical fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with ‘ science’ which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian’s contention that the reli- gious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the
tion 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 impor- tant this exploration will prove, future work upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my paper: ‘ Frederic Myers’s Ser- vices to Psychology,’ in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.
1 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483-4, and also what is said of the subconscious self on pp. 233-236, 240-242.
CONCLUSIONS 513
subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher facul- ties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.
This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves:as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations? and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world.’? Here the prophets of all the different religions
? Compare above, pp. 419 ff.
2 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader’s familiarity with the notion of it : —
“Tf 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 ina 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 fora God? . . . It is your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He, near- est of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my
514 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other open- ings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith.
Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least, decide that, since they cor- roborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neu- tralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intel- lectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched.’ These ideas will thus be essential to
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.
1 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 mn : —
“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
CONCLUSIONS 515
that individual’s religion ;—— which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indis- pensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant them- selves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interest- ing and valuable things about a man are usually his over- beliefs. 3
Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come,’ a positive con- tent of religious experience which, it seems to me, is liter- ally and objectively true as far as i goes. If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief — though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you— for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a con- verse case I should accord to yours.
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘ understandable’ world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you
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 for- giveness. 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, in- deed it hoids the first place there.” Flournoy Collection.
1 « The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnete
ism.” W. C. BRowneELt, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx. p. 112.
516 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articu- lately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and conse- quences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.’ But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world un- real. God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.? We and God
1 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly in the preced- ing lectures. I append another concrete example to reinforce the impres- sion 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.
* Transcendentalists are fond of the term ‘Over-soul,’ but as a rule they
CONCLUSIONS - 517
have business with each other; and in opening ourselves )_/
to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The uni- | ' verse, at those parts of it which our personal being con-
stitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the
better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades : God’s demands. As far as this goes I probably have you
with me, for I only translate into schematic language
what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind: God
is real since he produces real effects.
The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet ad- mitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or ‘ know,’ if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are ail saved, in spite of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God’s existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. This world may indeed, as sclence assures us, some day burn up or freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only provisional. and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience, and bring a real hypo- thesis into play. A good hypothesis in science must have
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.
518 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
other properties than those of the phenomenon it is im- mediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the reli- gious man’s experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject’s absolute confidence and peace.
That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra-marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief. Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one’s religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumina- tion of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression ; it must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.
This thoroughly ‘ pragmatic’ view of religion has usu- ally been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands.
CONCLUSIONS 519
I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the
deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it. claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic
realm of fact as its veryown. What the more character-
istically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of
energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know
not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make
my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of. our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds. .of£ consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds » must contain experiences which have a meaning for our | life also; and that although in the main their experi-
ences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two
become continuous at certain points, and higher energies
filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this
over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.
I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s
attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations
and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But when-
ever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W.
K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word ‘bosh!’
Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific
name, and the total expression of human experience, as I
view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow
‘scientific’ bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a dif-
ferent temperament, — more intricately built than phy-
sical science allows. So my objective and my subjective
conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I ex-
press. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individ- uals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks ?
POSTSCRIPT
i writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification that I fear that my general philo sophic position received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position more amply and conse- quently more clearly.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like slae where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a fa- miliar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers_into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that most philosophers at the present day belong. “If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phe- nomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic supernaturalism ; for the ‘crasser’ variety ‘ piecemeal ’ supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which to-day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to have displaced. It admits miracles
POSTSCRIPT 521
and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual diffi- . culty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world’s details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different ‘-ology,’ and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the super- naturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Univer- salistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sen- timents about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to
522 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.’ But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God’s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that exist- ence may be expected to entail. That no concrete par- ticular of experience should alter its complexion in con: sequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience en bloc, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.
Iam ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correc- tion, and merely in order the better to describe my gen- eral point of view; but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law ; but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word ‘judgment’ here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appre- ciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist sys- tems; it carries, on the contrary, execution with it, is in
1 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 piece- meal 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 pri- vate 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!
POSTSCRIPT 523
rebus as well as post rem, and operates ‘ causally’ as partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a gnosticism’ pure and simple on any other terms. But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the ‘present volume must on the whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its meta- physical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where I belong.
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of ‘prayerful communion,’ especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. 'The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not our- selves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unat- tainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if
1 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897, p. 165.
524 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness ot the ‘subliminal’ door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural. ‘fact’ which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal im- mortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race means immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality ; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. Ihave said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in ‘eternity, I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sym- pathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove ‘ spirit-return,’ though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am some- what impressed by their favorable conclusions. I conse- quently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why im- mortality got no mention in the body of this book.
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in con- nection, the ‘God’ of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary
POSTSCRIPT 525
men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philoso- phy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be ‘one and only’ and to be ‘ infi- nite’; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as un- equivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its mono- ideistic bent, both ‘pass to the limit’ and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their ‘authority, follows the example which they set. Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of reli- gion seem to me sufficiently met by the\belief that be- yond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both\ other ’and\ larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infi- nite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the pre- sent self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no ab solute unity realized in it at all." Thus would a sort of
1 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human Immor« tality, Boston and London, 1899.
526 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
polytheism return upon us—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above. ]
Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a poly- theism (which, by the way, has always been the real reli- gion of common people, and is so still to-day) that uniess there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, all is saved. If there be different gods, each car- ing for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious con- solation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what was said on pages 131-133, about the possibility of there being portions of the universe that may irre- trievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details. Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail —all of us are willing, whenever our activity-excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to con: sider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes
POSTSCRIPT 527
the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’ But all these statements are unsatis- factory from their brevity, and [ can only say that I hope to return to the same questions in another book.
4 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 9Y¥. See also pp. 148, 149.
te oa Ai Sip Be hd) ts
=
Piet enim
INDEX
Absolute, oneness with the, 419. Abstractness of religious objects, 53. AcHILLES, 86. AcKERMANN, Mapamm, 68. Adaptation to environment, of things,
438; of saints, 374-877. Zisthetic elements in religions, 460. Alacoque, 310, 344, 413, Alcohol, 387 Ar-GHazzaut, 402,
, d41.
ALLEINE, 228, Aung, 159, 217. Alternations of personality, 193. ALVAREZ DE Paz, 116, Amie, 394 Anesthesia, 288. Anesthetic revelation, 387-393. AncEtus Sizsivs, 417. Anger, 181, 264. * Anhedonia,’ 145, Aristocratic type, 371. ARISTOTLE, 495. Ars, le Curé d’, 302. Asceticism, 273, 296-310, 360-365. Aseity, God’s, 430, 445. Atman, 400. Attributes of God, 440; their esthetic
use, 458. Avcustine, Sart, 171, 861, 496. AURELIUS, see Marcus. Automatic writing, 62, 478. Automatisms, 234, 250, 478-483.
Baupwiy, 347, 503.
BasHKIRTSEFF, 83.
BrxrcuHer, 256.
BrxHMEN, see BoEHME.
due to non-rationalistic impulses, 3
Besant, Mrs., 23, 168. Bhagavad-Gita, 361. Buavatsky, Mapam, 421. Bxoop, 389.
Buiumuarpt, 118. Borume, 410, 417, 418. Boorg, 208.
Boveaun, 344. Bovurczxr, 263. Bovunrienon, 321.
| Bowne, 502.
BRarverp, 212, 258. Bray, 249, 256, 290, BrRooxs, 512. Browne 1, 515, Bucxg, 398.
Buddhism, 31, 34, 522. Buddhist mysticism, 401. BuuuEn, 287.
Bunyan, 157, 160. BurrERwortH, 411.
Carrp, Epwarp, 106.
Carrp, J., on feeling in religion, 434; oa absolute self, 450; he does not ee but reaffirms, religion’s dicta,
pee 289, CarR.y.g, 41, 300.
CARPENTER, "319,
Catharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289.
Catholicism and Protestantism com- pared, 114, 227, 336, 461.
Causality of God, 517, 522.
Cause, 502.
CErnnIcK, 301.
Centres of personal energy, 196, 267,
523.
Cerebration, unconscious, 207.
Chance, 526.
CHANNING, 300, 488.
CHAPMAN, 324.
Character, cause of its alterations, 193; scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214.
Causes of its diversity, 261; balance of, 340.
Charity, 274, 278, 310, 365.
Chastity, 310.
Chiefs of tribes, 371.
Christian Science, 106.
Christ’s atonement, 129, 245.
Churches, 335, 460.
CuaRK, 389.
Cuissoxp, 481.
Cor, 240.
Conduct, perfect, 355.
Confession, 462.
Consciousness, fields of, 231; sublimi- nal,
530
Consistency, 296.
Conversion, to avarice, 178.
Conversion, Fletcher’s, 181; Tolstoy’s, 184; Bunyan’ on 186; in general, Lectures [IX and X, passim; Brad- ley’s, 189; compared with natural moral growth, 199; Hadley’s, 201; two types of, 205 ff.; Brainerd’s, 212 ; Alline’s, 217 ; Oxford graduate’s, 221 ; Ratisbonne’s, 223; instantaneous, 227; is ita natural phenomenon ? 2380 ; subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240; fruits of, 237; its momentousness, 239; may be super- natural, 242; its concomitants: sense of higher control, 244, happiness, 248, automatisms, 250, luminous phenomena, 251; its degree of per- manence, 256,
Cosmic consciousness, 398.
Counter-conversion, 176.
Courage, 265, 287.
Crankiness, see Psychopathy.
Cricutron-Browne, 884, 386.
Criminal character, 263.
ae of value of spiritual affections, 18.
Crump, 239.
Cure of bad habits, 270.
Dauner, 167.
Death, 139, 364.
DrrHam, 498.
Design, argument from, 4388, 492 ff.
Devoutness, 340.
Dionysius AREOPAGITICUS, 416,
Disease, 99, 113.
Disorder in contents of world, 488.
Divided Self, Lecture VIII, passim ; Cases of: Saint Augustine, 172, H. Alline, 178.
Divine, the, 31.
Dog, 281.
Dogmatism, 326, 333.
Down, 118.
Dresser, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516.
Drink, 268.
Drummer, 476.
Drummonpn, 262.
Drunkenness, 387, 403, 488.
* Dryness,’ 204
Dumas, 279.
Dyes, on clothing, 294.
Earnestness, 264.
Ecclesiastical spirit, the, 385, 338.
Ecxnart, 417.
Eppy, 106.
Epwarps, JONATHAN, 20; 229, 238, 239, 248, 330.
114, 200,
INDEX
Epwarps, Mrs. J., 276, 280.
Effects of religious states, 21.
Effeminacy, 365.
Ego of Apperception, 449.
Ex.tis, HAVELOCK, 418.
ExLwoop, 292.
Emerson, 82, 56, 167, 205, et 330.
Emotion, as alterer of life’s val ue, 150; of the character, 195, 261 ff., 279.
Empirical method, 18, 327 rte 443,
Enemies, love your, 278, 283.
Energy, personal, 196; mystical states increase it, 414,
Environment, 356, 374.
Epictetus, 474.
Epicureans, 143,
Equanimity, 284.
Ether, mystical effects of, 392.
Evil, ignored by healthy-mindedness, 88, 106, 181; due to things or to the Self, 134; its reality, 1638.
Evolutionist eae 91.
Excesses of piety, 340.
Excitement, its effects, 195, 266, 279, 825.
Seer religious, the essence of, 508.
Extravagances of piety, 339, 486. Extreme cases, why we take them, 486.
Failure, 139.
Faith, 246, 506.
Faith-state, 505.
Fanaticism, 338 ff.
Fear, 98, 159, 161, 263, 275.
sna deeper than intellect in religion, 1
Freipine, 436.
Finney, 207, 215.
FietcHERr, 98, 181.
Frournoy, 67, 514.
Flower, 476.
Foster, 178, 3
Fox, GEorRGE, 7 291, 335, 411.
FRANCIS, Sarr, p’AssIsi, 319.
FRANCIS, a DE Saxgs, 11.
FRASER,
Fruits, of conversion, 237; of religion, 827; of Saintliness, 357.
Futur, 41.
Gamonp, 288.
GARDINER, 269.
Genius and insanity, 16.
Geniuses, see Religious leaders. Gentleman, character of the, 317, 371. GERTRUDE, Sart, 345.
‘ Gifts,’ 151.
Glory of God, 342.
INDEX 531
Gop, 31; sense of his presence, 66-72, | Insanity and genius, 16; and happi- 272, 2'15 ff. ; historic changes in idea} ness, 279. of him, 74, 328 ff., 493; mind-curer’s | Institutional religion, 335. idea of him, 101; his honor, 342;] Intellect a secondary force in religion, described by negatives, 417; his at-} 481, 514. tributes, scholastic proof of, 439; the | Intellectual weakness of some saints, metaphysical ones are for us mean-| 370. ingless, 445; the moral ones are ill- | Intolerance, 342. deduced, 447; he is not a mere infer- | Irascibility, 264. ence, 502; is used, not known, 506; his existence must make a difference | Jesus, Harnack on, 100. among phenomena, 517, 522; his re-| Jos, 76, 448 lation to the subconscious region, 242, | Joun, Saint, or THE Cross, 304, 407, 515; his tasks, 519; may be finite} 413.
and plural, 525. JOHNSTON, 258. Goppagrp, 96. Jongquin, 476, GorRREs, 407. JORDAN, 347. GorrTuHE, 1387. Jour¥rroy, 176, 198. Gove, 208. Judgments, existential and spiritual, 4,
Govurpon, 171. K igs the operation of, 226; thestate | Kant, 54, 448. 260
of, i; Karma, 522. Gratry, 146, 476, 506. Kener, 401. Greeks, their pessimism, 86, 142. Kindliness, see Charity. Guidance, 472. Kinestey, 385. Gurney, 527. Guyon, 276, 286. LAGNEAD, 285.
Leaders, see Religious leaders.
Hap tey, 201, 268. Leaders, of tribes, 371. Hate, 82. LrsEune, 113, 312. Hanon, 367. Lzssine, 318. Happiness, 47-49, 79, 248, 279. Levsa, 201, 208, 220, 246, 506. Harnack, 100. Life, its significance, 151.
Healthy-mindedness, Lectures IV and | Life, the subconscious, 207, 209. V, passim; its philosophy of evil, | LockER-Lampson, 39, 131 ; compared with morbid-minded- | Logic, Hegelian, 449.
ness, 162, 488. Louis, Saint, of Gonzaga, 350. Heart, softening of, 267. Love, see Charity. Hecxt, 389, 449, 454. Love, cases of falling out of, 179. Hetmont, Van, 497. Love of God, 276. Heroism, 364, 488, note. Love your enemies, 278, 283. Heterogeneous personality, 169, 193. LowE11, 65. Higher criticism, 4. Loyalty, to God, 342. Hnury, 79, 275, 472. LurruLuag, 164. Honpesoy, R., 524. LuTusr, 128, 137, 244, 330, 348, 382. Homer, 86. Lutheran self-despair, 108, 211. Hugo, 171. Luxury, 365. Hypocrisy, 338. Lycaon, 86. am what make a useful one, | Lyre, 267.
517. Hystop, 524. Mahomet, 171. See Monammen.
Marcus Aurgtivs, 42, 44, 474.
Icnatius Loyoxa, 318, 406, 410. Marcarer Mary, see ALACOQUE. Illness, 113. Margin of consciousness, 232. ‘Imitation of Christ,’ the, 44. MARSHALL, 503. Immortality, 524. Marrineav, 475. Impulses, 261. Maruer, 303. Individuality, 501. Mavpstey, 19. Inhibitions, 261 ff. Meaning of life, 151.
Insane melaneholy and religion, 144. Medical criticism of religion, 413.
532
Medical materialism, 10 ff.
Melancholy, 145, 279; Lectures Y and VI, passim ; cases of, 148, 149, 157, 159, 198.
Melting moods, 267.
een of judging value of religion, 18,
32
Methodism, 227, 237.
MzyYsENBUG, 395.
Militarism, 365-367.
Military type of character, 871.
Mix, 204.
Mind-cure, its sources and history, 94- 97; its opinion of fear, 98; cases of, 102-105, 120,123; its message, 108 ; its methods, 112-123 ; it uses verifica- tion, 120-124; its philosophy of evil, 181.
Miraculous character of conversion, 227.
Moxammep, 341, 481
Motrivos, 180.
Mo.urTKe, Von, is 367.
Monasteries,
Monism, 416.
Morbidness compared with healthy- mindedness, 488. See, also, Melan- choly.
Mormon revelations, 482.
Mortification, see Asceticism.
Morr, 482
Mou.rorp, 497.
Mixer, 468.
Morisrer, 349.
Myers, 238, 234, 466, 511, 524.
Mystic states, their effects, 21, 414.
Mystical experiences, 66.
Mysticism, Lectures XVI and XVII, passim ; its marks, 380 ; its theoretic results, 416, 422,428; it cannot war- rant truth, 422; its results, 425; its relation to the sense of union, 509.
Mystical region of experience, 515.
Natural theology, 492.
Naturalism, 141, 167.
Nature, scientific view of, 491.
Negative accounts of deity, 417.
Netson, 208, 423.
NeErrieron, 215.
Newman, F. W., 80.
Newman, J. H., on dogmatic theology, 434, 442; his type of imagination,
459. Nierzscun, 371, 372. Nitrous oxide, its mystical effects, 387. No-function, 261-263, 299, 387, 416. Non-resistance, 281, 358, 376,
Obedience, 310. OsERMANN, 476,
INDEX
O’ConnELL, 257.
Omit, 296.
‘ Once-born’ type, 80, 166, 368, 488.
Oneness with God, see Union.
Optimism, systematic, 88; and evolu tionism, 91; it may be shallow, 864.
Orderliness of world, 438.
Organism determines all mental states whatsoever, 14.
Origin of mental states no criterion of their value, 1
Orison, 406.
Over-beliefs, 513; the author’s, 515,
Over-soul, 516.
Oxford, graduate of, 220, 268,
Pagan feeling, 86.
Pantheism, 131, 416.
PARKER, 83.
Pascat, 286.
Parton, 359.
Paut, Saint, 171, 857.
Prxrx, 258.
Perrrcs, 444,
Penny, 323.
PrRrR5yve, 505.
Persecutions, 338, 342.
Personality, explained away by science, 119, 491; heterogeneous, 169; alter- ations of, 198, 210 ff, ; is reality, 499, See Character.
PrTeEr, Saint, oF ALCANTARA, 360.
Pxixo, t
Philosophy, Lecture XVIII, passim; must coerce assent, 433; scholastic, 439 ; idealistic, 448 ; unable to give a theoretic warrant to faith, 455 ; its true office in religion, 455. es
Photisms, 251.
Piety, 339 ff.
Pluralism, 131.
Polytheism, 131, 526.
Poverty, 315, 367.
‘Pragmatism,’ 444, 519, 522-524.
Prayer, 463; its definition, 464; its es- sence, 465; petitional, 467; its ef- fects, 414-4777, 5 523.
f Presence,’ sense of, 58-63.
Presence of God, 66-72, 272, 275 ££., 396, 418.
Presence of God, the practice of, 116.
Primitive human thought, 495.
PRINGLE-PaTTison, 454.
Prophets, the Hebrew, 479.
Protestant theology, 244.
Protestantism and Catholicism, 114, 227,
30, 461. Providential leading, 472. Psychopathy and religion, 22 ff.
INDEX
Purrer, 394, Purity, 274, 290, 848. Quakers, 7, 291.
RamaAxRisena, 361, 365.
Rationalism, 73, 14; its authority over- thrown by mysticism,
RATISBONNE, 223, 257,
ae of unseen objects, Lecture II,
Ruceuae, 407, 509
‘ Recollection,’ 116, 289.
Redemption, 157.
Reformation of character, 320.
Regeneration, see Conversion; by re- laxation, 111.
Ren, 446.
Relaxation, salvation by, 110. See Sur- render.
Religion, to be tested by fruits, not by origin, 10 ff., 331; its definition, 26, 81; is solemn, 87; compared with Stoicism, 41; its unique func- tion, 51; abstractness of its objects,
; ers according to tempera- ment, 75, 135, 338, and ought to differ, 487 ; considered to be a ‘ survival,’ 118, 490, 498; its relations to melan- choly, 145 ; worldly passions may combine wale it, 337; its essential characters, 369, 485 ; its relation to prayer, 463-466 ; asserts a fact, not a theory, 489; its truth, 377; more than science, it holds by concrete reality, 500; attempts to evaporate it into philosophy, 502; it is con- cerned with personal destinies, 491, 503; with feeling and conduct, 504; is a sthenic affection, 505; is for iif, not for knowledge, 506; its essential contents, 508; it postulates issues of fact, 518,
Religious emotion, 279.
Religious leaders, often nervously un- stable, 6 ff., 30; their loneliness, 335.
‘ Religious sentiment, 2.
Renan, 387.
Renunciations, 349.
Repentance, 127.
Resignation, 286.
Revelation, the anzsthetic, 387-393.
Revelations, see Automatisms.
Revelations, in Mormon Church, 482.
Revivalism, 228.
Ret, 407.
Roprieuzz, 313, 314, 317. Rovyog, 454. RoutHERFORD, Mark, 76.
Sasatimr, A., 464, Sacrifice, 803, 462.
‘Sarnt-PieRRE, 83
SarntE-BEvve, 260, 315.
Saintliness, Sainte-Beuve on, 260; its characteristics, 272, 370; criticism of, 826 ff.
Saintly conduct, 356-377,
Saints, dislike of natural man for, 371.
Salvation, 526,
Sanpays, 480,
SaTAn, in picture, 50.
ScHEFFLER, 417.
Scholastic arguments for God, 487.
Science, ignores personality and tele- ology, 491; her ‘ facts,’ 500, 501.
‘Science of Religions,’ "438, "455, 456, 488-490.
eee conceptions, their late adop-
tio:
Second-birth, 157, 165, 166.
SEELEY, 77.
Self of the world, 449,
Self-despair, 110, 129, 208.
Self-surrender, 110, 208.
SENANCOUR, 476.
Sera, 454.
Sexual temptation, 269.
Sexuality as cause of religion, 10, 11,
‘Shrew,’ 347.
Sickness, 113.
Sick souls, Lectures V and VI, passim.
SIGHELE, 263,
Sin, 209.
Sinners, Christ Bed for, 129.
Skepticism, 382 ff.
SKOBELEFF, 265.
Smira, Joszps, 482.
Softening of the heart, 267.
eolmaty, 37, 48.
Soul, 1
Soul, et, of, 273.
SPENCER, 355, 374.
Sprnoza, 9, 137.
Spiritism, 514.
Spirit-return, 524,
Spiritual judgments, 4.
Spiritual states, tests of their value, 18.
SrarsBuck, 198, 199, 204, 206, 208-210, 249, 253, 258, 268, 276, 328, 353, 304,
STEVENSON, 138, 296.
Stoicism, 42-45, 148.
Strange appearance of world, 151.
Strength of soul, 273.
Subconscious action in conversion, 236, 242.
Subconscious life, 115, 207, 209, 233, 236, 270, 483.
Subconscious Self, as intermediary be- tween the Self and God, 511.
534.
Bo ae rge see Subconscious.
Sufis, 40:
eat 112, 234,
Suicide, 147
Supernaturalism its two kinds, 520; eriticism of universalistic, 521
Supernatural world, 518.
Surrender, salvation by, 110, 208, 211.
Survival-theory of religion, 490, 498,
500. Suso, 806, 349. Swinpurnge, 421. Symonps, 385, 390. Sympathetic magic, 496. Sympathy, see Charity. Systems, philosophic, 483.
Taine, 9.
Taynor, 246.
Tenderness, see Charity.
Tennyson, 383, 384.
TERESA, Sarr, 20, "346, 360, 408, 411, 412, 414.
Theologia Germanica, 43.
Theologians, systematic, 446,
*Theopathy,’ 343.
THOREAD, 275.
Threshold, 135.
Tiger, 164, 262.
Tobacco, 270, 290.
Totstoy, 149, 178, 184.
TowiranskI, 281.
Tragedy of life, 863.
Tranquillity, 285.
Transcendentalism criticised, 522,
Transcendentalists, 516.
TREVOR,
Truovg, 101 904,
Truth of religion, how to be tested, 377 ; what it is, 509; mystical perception
of, 380, 410.
[10 ¥S4
INDEX
‘ Twice-born,’ type, 166, 363, 488. TYNDALL, 299.
‘ Unconscious cerebration,’ 207.
Unification of Self, 188, 349.
‘ UNION MORALE,’ 272.
Union with God, 408, 418, 425, 4 509 ff. See lectures on Conversic passim.
Unity of universe, 131.
Unreality, sense of, 63.
Unseen realities, Lecture III, passim.
Upanishads, 419.
Urpnam, 289.
Utopias, 360.
VaAcHEROT, 502. Value of spiritual affections, how tested. 18
VameBiry, 341.
Vedantism, 400, 419, 518, 522. Veracity, 7, 291 ff. VIVEKANANDA, 513. VoLraiRE, 88.
Voysry, 275.
War, 865-367. Wealth-worship, 365. WEAVER, 281.
WESLEY, 227.
Wesleyan self-despair, 108, 211. WHITEFIELD, 318. WHITMAN, 84, 395, 396, 506. Wo rr, 492, 498.
Woon, Hzyry, 96, 99, 117. World, soul of the, 449, Worry, 98, 181.
Yes-function, 261-268, 299, 387. Yoga, 400. Youna, 256.
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