The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 487sumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical ? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements ? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable ? To these questions I answer ' No ' emphatically.

And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions.

Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must stand firm, — in order the better to defend the position assisfned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.

The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So a ' god of battles ' must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another.

We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual Hfe. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our religion ; why need it be one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset ? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance ; but why think so much 2p. 488of deliverance, if we are healthy-minded ? ^ Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world ; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.

But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion ? In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to the active life. Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself.

You remember what Al-GhazzaU told us in the Lecture on Mysticism, — that to understand the causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be di-unk.

A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of rehgion, and might even 1 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162-167), cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them.

The twice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being ' mere morality,' and not properly religion. " Dr. Channing," an orthodox minister is re- \/ ported to have said, " is excluded from the highest form of religious life by ^ the extraordinary rectitude of his character.

It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice-born — holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution — is the wider and completer. The 'heroic' or ' solemn ' way in which life comes to them is a ' higher synthesis ' into which healthy-mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons (see pp. 47- 52, 362-365).

But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the individual ; and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process.

The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject. \ 3p. 489decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true ; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner.

The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith.^ If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who Hves the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much.

Knowledge about life is one thing ;'\ effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic J currents passing through your being, is another. For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion ; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith.

To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced.

Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them,^ work is done, and something real comes to pass.

She has now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered true. ^ Compare, e. g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above. * ' Prayerful ' taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463 £f.