The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 325But in all these matters of sentiment one must have *been there ' one's self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the common God of all.
If sentiments as simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much more is this the case with those subtler rehgious sentiments which we have been considermg ! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious.
Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether.
As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation ; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain ; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards odious, and in certain glows of unselfish excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one's hold of personal possessions.
The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.
LECTURES XIV AND XV THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS WE have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine rehgion and characteristics of men who are devout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation ; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what rehgion adds to human life.
Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a ^Critique of pure Sainthness ' must be our theme. If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man's perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it. Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end ; and his end would be union with his Maker.
That union could be pursued by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively ; and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of reHgious experience we might hear of would thus be given ahnost mathematically into our hands.
If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you remember we p. 327made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method ; and it must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. TFe cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part. We cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects ; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon.
We have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience — judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides — decide that oti the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned.
' On the whole,' — I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer ! I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and ^^ adopt caprice as jDur _pilot. Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up.
A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place. Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion's fruits in merely human terms of value. How can you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them?
If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his rehgion, — it would be
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