The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 109should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. . The 'VW*"'*'**^ whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the CW*-**^''^ emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities*^.^ which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit.
Their - ij wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary ' ' " and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience j and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form.
The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet — our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure.
The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally ^ correct ' type, * the deadly respectable ' type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of tak- ^ ing part in anything \\ke them ourselves.
Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom — at any rate at a certain stage in their development — a change of character for the better, so far from being facihtated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed.
Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. " Be vigilant, day and night," they adjure us ; " hold your passive tendencies in check ; shrink from no effort ; keep your will like a bow always bent. But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure p. 110and vexation in their hands, and only makes them twofold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts/ are so tightened.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the * surrender ' of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity ; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule.
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward re- / lief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one.
Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy ; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power. Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience.
Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They knoic ; for they have actually /e/^ the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
p. 111A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.
If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive ics if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal y strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save. The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within j the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there.
The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of theu' ultimate causal explanation.^ ^ The theistic exglanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up.
The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own ' subconscious ' self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed.
The medico-inaterialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of physiologically (though
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