The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 524one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the * subliminal' door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest.
At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs. The difference in natural ' fact ' which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality.
Religion, in fact, for the great majority of Nr our own race means immortality, and nothing else. God _ is the producer of immortality ; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about
'^v immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a Q , secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in \i V eternity,' I do not see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sym- ^ pathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, ^ and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague O yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide.
Jt seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove ' spirit-return,' though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions.
I consej^^Q^ quently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book. The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the ' God ' of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary p. 525men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be ^ one and only ' and to be ^ infinite ' ; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold.
Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only\ thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can 1 experience union with something larger than ourselves / and in that union find our greatest peace.
Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both ' pass to the limit ' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.
Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to ^ his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.
It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.
It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.^ Thus would a sort of ^ Such a notion is suggested in my IngersoU Lecture On Human Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.
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