The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 52stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now. But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts.
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LECTURE III THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN WERE one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there \ is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in / harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
This behef ^ and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. ^' I wish during this hour to call yoiu' attention to some of <3.*^jfw>^' * the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of behef in an object which we cannot see.
All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the '^ objects ' of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought.
In either case they elicit from us a reaction ; and the reaction due $0 things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it.
We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them ; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts. The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them only in p. 54idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their ^ Saviour ; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later.
The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentaHty of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as a model. But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.
God's attributes as such,_ his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian behevers.^ We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths.
Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good. Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its . freedom, and the life hereafter.
These thmgs, he said, 1 Example : " I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us. AUGUSTUS Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare. r
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