The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 452being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and selfsacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man's ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable. " Is there, then," our author continues, " no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual ?

We answer, There is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation into realization ; that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life.

Whether we view religion from the human side or the divine — as the surrender of the ^ soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul — in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be a faroff vision, and has become a present reality.

The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of the Infinite.

" Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will \ is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life — call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will — there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized.

It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive ; but understood in the light of the foregoing idea, religious progress! is not progress towards, but within the sphere of the Infinite^' It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in

p. 453• possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly.

The position of the man who has entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not really belong to him : they are excrescences which have no organic relation to his true nature : they are already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress.

Though he is not exempt\ from temptation and conflict, [yet] in that inner sphere in \ which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory already \ achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the sjsirit / lives.

Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realization of the life of God." ^ You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher.

They reproduce the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing ; they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate ; and the saint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously.

But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird — and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking — transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason ? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public certainty ? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery ?

I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be ^ John Caird : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged.

p. 454excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegehan argumentation.

As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Eraser's and Professor Pringle-Pattison's memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.^ Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive ?

What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of experience : the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, ^ A. C. Eraser : Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps, vii. and viii. ; A.

Seth [Pringle- Pattison] : Hegeliauism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim. The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885 ; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897 ; and lately in his Aberdeen Gilford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London, 1901-02.

I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor Royce's arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion.

In the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.

Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only Professor Royce's arguments, but others for monistic absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.