The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 490Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general jDhilosophy inclines.
The socalled scientist is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole the ' influence of science goes againât the notion that rehgion should be recognized at aU. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself.
The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the ' prayerful communion' of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work — even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations — can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of relis-ion is true.
There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of ^survival,' an r\j;>A^ atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlightened examples has outgrown ; and this notion our religious anthropologists at present do little to counteract. This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the ^ Survival theory,' for brevity's sake.
p. 491The pivot round which the religious Hfe, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in — whether by crude savages or by men disciphned intellectually — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls.
Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the reHgious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns. Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view.
She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be.
The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the drif tings of the cosmic atoms, •whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and p. 492undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.
The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us q^uite grotesque,^ represent- ^ How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby-like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural things ?
This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility : — " We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.
Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God's invisible being from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes to the primary purpose of creation : without it the race of man could not be preserved or continued. . . .
The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets ; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us ; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by clay which they would not be able to find at night.
Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth's surface, not only near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible.
If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields. . . .
From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy owes much to the sun. . . . By help of the sun one can find the meridian. . . . But tbe meridian is the basis of our sun-dials, and generally speaking, we should have no sun-dials if we had no sun. Verniinftige Gedanken von den Absichten der naturlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74-84.
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