The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 505The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a ^ sthenic ' affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ' dynamogenic ' order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.

In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of hfe/ The Jiame of ' faithstate,' by which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.^ It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces hy which men live.^ The total absence of it, anhedonia,* means collapse.

The faith-state may hold a very minimum of mtellectual content. We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.^ It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the

1 Compare, for instance, pages 203, 219, 223, 226, 249 to 256, 275 to 278. 2 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345. ^ Above, p. 184. * Above, p. 145. 5 Above, p. 400. ^ Example : Henri Perrey ve writes to Gratry : " I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me ; I want to do something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing. ... I would fain do great things.

Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes : " I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late ; but, unheeding. that, 1 took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back — I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up

p. 506When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,^ and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds.

Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming ' religions,' and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ' truth,' we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.

Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,^ goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all. " The truth of the matter can be put," says Leuba, " in this way : God is not known, he is not understood ; he is used — sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love.

If he proves himself useful, the remy nocturnal promenade. A. Gratry : Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89. This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190) : — " 0 to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do. . . . Dear Camerado !

I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and defeated. This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.

Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. ^ Compare Leuba : Loc. cit., pp. 346-349. 2 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July, 1901.