The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 507liglous consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist ? How does he exist ? What is he ? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the rehgious impulse." ^ At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.

We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself. First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously ? And second, ought we to consider the testimony true ? I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative.

The warring gods and ^ Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer's extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. Bender says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38) : " Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man.

All religious views of life are anthropocentric. " Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards the world's ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached. The whole book is little more than a development of these words.

p. 608formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts : — 1. An uneasiness ; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a : sense that there is something wrong about us as we '■■ naturally stand. 2.

The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers. In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge.

I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms hke these : — The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist.

Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage ; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives,* the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself ; and does so in the following way.

He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality , which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on hoard of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. ^ Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.

p. 509It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these very sunple general terms/ They allow for the divided self and the struggle ; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self ; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it ; ^ and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy.

There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual forms. So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena.

They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet ; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of the effects produced.

I now turn to my second question : What is the objective * truth ' of their content ?^ The part of the content concerning which the question ^ The practical difficulties are : 1, to * realize the reality ' of one's higher part ; 2, to identify one's self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.

2 " When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once excessive and identical with the self : great enough to be God ; interior enough to be me. The * objectivity ' of it ought in that case to be called excessivity, rather, or exceedingness. K^c^jac : Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.

' The word ' truth ' is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.