The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 424of 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.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. Thejitmost J;hey^ can ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have an unequivocal 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 rationalism the other way ; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for ^ suggestive,' not for logical reasons : we follow the majority because to do so suits our life. But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is 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 conp. 425f essed, is only a ^ privileged case. It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens 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 pantheistic ; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists.
They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical 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 orisfiual identity.^ How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort.^ f The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own.
It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they * RuYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. Delacroix's book (Essai sur le mysticisme spdculatif en Allemagne au XlVme Sifecle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A.
JuNDT : Les Amis de Dieii au XlVme Siecle, Th^se de Strasbourg, 1879. 2 Compare Paul Rousselot : Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii. ^ See Carpenter's Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and Jefferies's wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.
p. 426can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute ideaUsm, 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 abundant cases in which ^ mystical ideas ' are cited as characteristic 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 ineffable 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 pessimistic : 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 gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience,
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