The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 510of truth most pertinently arises is that * more of the same quality ' with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a ' more ' merely our own notion, or does it really exist ? If so, in what shape does it exist ? Does it act, as well as exist ?

And in what form should we conceive of that ^ union ' with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced ? It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light.

They all agree that the ' more ' really exists ; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands.

It is when they treat of the experience of ' union ' with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes.

At the end of my lecture on Philosophy ^ I held out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in terms to wMch physfcal science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief.

I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such an hypothesis. The time has now come for this attempt. Who says 1 Above, p. 455.

p. 511' hypothesis ' renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. The ^ more,' as we called it, and the meaning of our ^ union ' with it, form the nucleus of our inquuy. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the ' more ' as Jehovah, and the ' union ' as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, - would be an over-belief. We must begin by using less particularized terms ; and, since one of the duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the ^ more,' which psychologists may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity ; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all JImU. religious considerations, there is actually and literally 1^,^ 7o»; more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware /^ ^ / ^ of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness ^ is

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1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305. For a full statement of Mr. Myers's views, I may refer to his posthumous work, , ^ /tLr ' Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,' which is already an- ^ nounced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the explora-