The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
p. 373fear rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves the hard-earned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great pity — disgust and pity for our human fellows. . . . The morbid are our greatest peril — not the 'bad' men, not the predatory beings.
Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken — they it is, the weakest^ who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning our trust in life, and putting humanity in question. Every look of them is a sigh, — ' Would I were something^ other ! I am sick and tired of what I am. In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten.
Here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment ; here the air smells odious with secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged ; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious ; here the very aspect of the victorious is hated — as if health, success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make bitter expiation.
Oh, how these people would themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen ! And all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be hatred." ^ Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself sickly enough, but I quote him as expressing forcibly the world-old clash between the two ideals.
The carnivorous-minded ' strong" man,' the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing.
The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots : Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation ? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance? ^ Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence.
p. 374The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of ; and in the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint's type or the strong-man's type the more ideal ?
It has (Sten T)een supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man absolutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from economical considerations.
The saint's type, and the knight's or gentleman's type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute ideality ; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, however, all ideals are matters of relation.
It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a definition of ' the ideal horse,' so long as dragging drays and running races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen's packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function. You may take what you call a general aU-round animal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one particular direction.
We must not forget this now when, in discussing saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by its economical relations. I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation.
A society where all were inyariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of socip. 375ety, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bulUes, robbers, and swindlers ; and no one beheves that such a state of things as we now Uve in is the millennium.
It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness, — any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted.
His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. Thei saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the * strong man,' because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. The strong msm would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate.
It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are. But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation, we find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to particular circumstances. There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood.
It must be confessed that as far as this world goes, any one who makes an out-and-out saint of himself does so at his peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained a world- %^tfcrt-A' ling.^ Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.