The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 499subjective part is the inner * state ' in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous, — the cosmic times and spaces, for example, — whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind.
Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself ; its reality and that of our experience are one.
A conscious field 2^^us its object as felt or thought of j^^^^s an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs — such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts ; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the ^ object ' is when taken all alone.
It is 3,full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact ; it is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must belong ; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it ; it is on the line connecting real events with real events.
That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.^ If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed.
The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic ^ Compare Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is * in itself ' is by conceiving it as it is for itself ; i. e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of ' pinch ' or inner activity of some sort going with it.
places, — they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description — they being as describable as anything else — would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid ^ meal. ReHgion makes no such blunder.
The individ- -^ JJ; ual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough ; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ' raisin,' with one real egg instead of the word ^egg/ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality.
The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to ''^^v be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare, i 1 think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound.
But to live thus is to be religious ; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival- / theory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake.
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.^ By being religious we establish ourselves in ^ Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how tlie religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers * verified ' from day to day by p. 501possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in religion and subordinating its intellectual part.
Individuality is founded in feeling ; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making:, and their experience of fact.
' Experience of fact ' is a field with so many things in it that the sectarian scientist, methodically declining, as he does, to recognize such ' facts ' as mind-curers and others like them experience, otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as 'bosh,' 'rot,' 'folly,' certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded in getting itself recorded at all.
We know this to be true already in certain cases ; it may, therefore, be true in others as well. Miraculous healings have always been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed by the scientist as figments of the imagination.
But the scientist's tardy education in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided you expressly call them effects of ' suggestion. Even the stigmata of the cross on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable.
Similarly, the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the \ point of heing admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name J of ' hystero-demonopathy ' by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of occultist phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed — even 'prophecy,' even ' levitation,* might creep into the pale.
Thus the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not ; >, » necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism and Wvirf^wX^ romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be mat- ,, ters so irrevocably outgrown.
The final human opinion may, in short, in ' ' some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line.
If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be.
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