The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

LECTURE XVIII PHILOSOPHY THE subject of SaintHness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate rehgion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a" universal authority.

But philosophy Y>ublishes results which claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's sense of the divine ? I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending.

I have undermined the authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples.

It is essentially private and individualistic ; it always exceeds our powers of formulation ; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men being Avhat they are, yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus 2p. 431and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from ^ the hope of any Theology worthy of the name. To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly.

I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into j another tongue.

But all such statements are misleading ' from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for ^, me to explain to you exactly what I mean. t\ When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no relig^ious feelincf had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed.

I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done.

In the science they would have left a certain amount of * psychical research,' even as they now wiU probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or ideahstic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities.

These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint. But even if rehgious philosophy had to have its first hint suppHed by feeling, may it not have dealt in a supe3p. 432rior way with tlie matter which feeling suggested ? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude.

Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deHverances, has been reason's task.

I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task.^ We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits.

The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas.

Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion ; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly 1 Compare Professor W. Wallace's Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 &.