The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 484It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it.

In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and. our automatisms, sensory or motor ; our life in hypnotic and ' hypnoid ' conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions ; our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects ; our supra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain-head of much that feeds our religion.

In persons deep in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen, — and this is my conclusion, — the door into this region seems unusually wide open ; at any rate, experiences making their en- V^ trance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history.

With this conclusion I turn back and close the cu'cle which I opened in my first lecture, terminatmg thus the review which I then announced of inner religious phenomena as we find, them in developed and articulate human individuals.

I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material may suggest.

LECTURE XX CONCLUSIONS THE material of our study of human nature is now spread before us ; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the significance for hfe of religion, taken ^ on the whole.

Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I wiU formulate them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can. Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs : — 1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance ; 2.

That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end ; 3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof — be that spirit ' God ' or ^ law ' — is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. Rehgion includes also the following psychological characteristics : — 4.

A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.

p. 4865. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections. In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it.

After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies before us. The sentimentahty of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject.

If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information.

To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion.

We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as any one can know them who learns them from another ; and we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question : what are the dangers in this element of life ? and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by ^ other elements, to give the proper balance ?

But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.^ Ought it to be as- ^ For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.