The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 388them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever h r since remained unshaken.

It is that our normal wak- \0^ ■ I ing consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is^ kVVv I ^^^ ^^® special type of consciousness, whilst all aboutf ^ i it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie [potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

We * may go through life without suspecting their existence ; V^ but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality 1 1 fc" ^^^^^^^ probably somewhere have their field of application >V CAtctA' j( ^^^ adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousf) I c^.^ilZ- ness quite disregarded.

How to regard them is the question, — for they are so discontinuous with ordinary con- '^^^^^^-''■^^^ sciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though '~^'*^ ' they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a _kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconcihation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.

Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority.

I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear;

p. 389to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind? I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaesthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One. " Into this pervading genius," writes one of them, " we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God.

There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. ' The One remains, the many change and pass ; ' and each and every one of us is the One that remains. . . . This is the ultimatum. ...

As sure as being — whence is all our care — so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above." ^ ^ What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal ?

The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling. 2 Benjamin Paul Blood : The Anjesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36.

Mr. Blood has made several attempts to adumbrate the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who died young at Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by the revelation. " In the first place," he once wrote to me, " Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional.

It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past.

The real secret would be the formula by which the * now ' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating ? The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer — we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four ? Because, in fact, four is twice two.

Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation adds : it goes

390 THE VARIETIES OF RELTCxIOUS EXPERIENCE This has the genuine religious mystic ring ! I just now quoted J. A. Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as follows : — because it is aud was a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound huuting his own trail.

The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from ansesthesis, just then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.

The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out ; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there), — which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late — that's all.

'You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,' it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why don't you manage it somehow ? " Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar.

In his latest pamphlet, ' Tennyson's Trances and the Anaesthetic Revelation,' Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows : — " The Anaesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent — it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill.

End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of. " It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things ; but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent — as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.

"Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter of course — so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.

" Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import, — with only this consolatory afterthought : that he