The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 123ferent conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right ? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.^ The case of mmd-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to-day with this very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more expHcit attention.

APPENDIX (See note to p. 121.)

Case I.

" My own experience is this : I had long been ill, and one of the fii'st results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of 1 Whether the various spheres or sj'stems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer.

What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world's truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.

p. 124immediate and great exhaustion. I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill result.

Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidlylosing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it ; I had no great hope of getting any good from it — it was a chance I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see.

I went to X. in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help ; the treatment was a silent one ; little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind ; whatever influence was exerted was that of another person's thought or feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still together.

I believed from the start in the possibility of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play.

" I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result ; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a^sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, / of power to break tlie bounds' that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb.

I began to read_and walk_as_I^had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later.

The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in