The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 58would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural' world falls apart — the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like ; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.^ As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion.
But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something Uke this : It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective 2^'i^esence, a perception of what we may call ' something there,^ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular * senses ' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality ; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess.
So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often happens that an 1 Example : " Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is. B. de St. Pierre.
p. 69I hallucination is imperfectly developed : the person af- ^ f ected will feel a ' presence ' in the room, definitely local- - i ized, facing in one particular way, real in the most em- ^ phatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as ^J suddenly gone ; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, ''^--' nor cognized in any of the usual * sensible ' ways.
Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more pecuHarly concerned. An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries : — " I have several times within the past few years felt the socalled ' consciousness of a presence.
The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the ' consciousness of a presence. But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth, originating I know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert.
" It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at ray rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder ; but the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night.
After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly Iije^ll9.™^*^""S "^"^"^^ into the room and stay close to ray bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense,^ and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ' sensation ' connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception.
The feeling had soraething of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism — and yet the feeling p. 60was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its cleiaarture as of its coming : an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the ' horrible sensation ' disap^jeared.
"On the third night when I retired mx mind was absorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the coming') of the thing that was there the night before, and of the ' horrible sensation.
I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this ' thing,' if it was evil, to depart, if it was not evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state. " On two other occasions in my life I have had j)recisely the same ' horrible sensation. Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour.
In all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood somctJiin^ was indescribably stronger than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The somethingseemed close to me, and intensely more real than s^ny ordinary perception.
Although I felt it to be like unto myself, so to / speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I did n't recognize it as any individual being or person. Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere.
Yet it may upon occasion do so ; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was fiUed with a quality of joy. " There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good.
Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and
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