The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 521and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.

For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts ; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different ' -ology,' and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain.

It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either -V popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I supjjose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism.

It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves.

In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to 2p. 522believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.^ But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God's existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to entail.

That no concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience en bloc, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view ; but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that.

All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law ; but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as it remains un weakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word ' judgment ' here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems ; it carries, on the contrary, execution with it, is in * Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist.

We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. ' A world ' of fact ! — that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points.

Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us ; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born.

It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David's psalms !