The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 361light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike irrelevant and indifferent.

He can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying : If you only love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations.

" He needs no devotional practices," is one of Ramakrishna's maxims, " whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of Hari." ^ And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called * the middle way ' to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes, excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure.

The only perfect hfe, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to gone sometimes eight days without food. . . . His poverty was extreme ; and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the others.

He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman ; but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifPerent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable.

He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm." ^ F. Max Muller : Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.

362 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE US as another, and thus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvana.^ We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications.

Catholic teachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in God's service, health must not be sacrificed to paortification.

The general optimism and healthy- \ mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to-day makes ) mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us.y We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take dehght in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent.

In consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed, unless some special utility can be shown in some individual's discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological. Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem.

For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.

It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. • As against this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the onceborn philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and cir- 1 Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey, London, 1882, p. 127.

p. 43G3 *^ cumstances, escapes the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it exists . ^ in the wider universe outside his private experience, and y he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through hfe - 4 happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our ^ lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt neces- 'X^j sarily is.

Moreover it is but for the individual ; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and unpro- ^ vided for in his philosophy. No such attempt can be a general solution of the problem ; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real dehverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape by.

It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of Satan. The real dehverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal apphcation.

Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome "Ih'Tiiglier excitement, 6r~else their sting "remains essenttalTy "unhroken^ If'~onS has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world's history fairly into his mind, — freezing, drowning, entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases, — he can with difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the game, that he may lack the great initiation.

Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks ; and it voluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded