The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 55are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the words ^ soul/ ' God,' ' immortality,' cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning /or our practice.
We can act as if there were a God ; feel as if we were free ; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs ; lay plans as if we were to be immortal ; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
Our faith that these unmtelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Ilinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them.
So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.
It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling ; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming p. 56and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron coukl never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly ; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture.
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the backsrround for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ' nature,' as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is * what ' it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions.
We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception. This absolute determinabihty of our mind by abstracp. 57tions is one o£ the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth.
" The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his ' Banquet,' " is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." ^ In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship.
In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. ^ Science ' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a reliofion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the ^Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology ' Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
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