The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 134but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other.
There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a vTrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the seK or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again.
But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy.
On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up ^ of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail ; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.^ These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inchned to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.
Recent psychology has found great use for the word ' threshold ' as a symbolic designation for the point at /which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we 1 Cf . J. MiLSAND : Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim.
p. 135speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressm-e, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold | would be immediately waked.
Similarly, when one is sen- / sitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low * difference-threshold ' — his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question.
And just so we might speak of a ' pain-threshold,' a ^ fear-threshold,' a ^ misery-threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, m darkness and apprehension.
There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to l^cj^, S", their credit ; whilst others seem to have been born close - ' to the pain-threshold, which the shghtest irritants fatally send them over. Does it not appear as if one who hved more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other ?
This question, of the relativity of different types of religion to different types of need, arises naturally at this point, and will become a serious problem ere we have done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue optimistic gospel ; let us not simply cry p. 136out, in spite of all appearances, " Hurrah for the Universe ! — God 's in his Heaven, all 's right with the world. Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.
To begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a staBTe anclioi> age ? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed ?
Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up : a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.
Of course the music can commence again ; — and again and again, — at intervals. But with this the healthyminded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack ; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthymindedness as never to have experienced in his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and class his own lot with that of others ; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security ! What
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