The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 140be all right erelong, i£ you will only drop your morbidness ! ' But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer ? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetf ulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure.

The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us ; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords.

" The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness," said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, " and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.

And so with most of us : a little cooling down of animal excitabihty and instinct, a Httle loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld.

Old age has the last word : the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastic cally it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living In the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be 2p. 141thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish.

The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it ; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed /from the background of possibilities it goes with.

Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order ; let our suffering have an immortal significance ; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits ; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in ; — and his days pass by with zest ; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values.

Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously wiQ be the human creature's portion. The 3p. 142merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the % • more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. The early Greeks are continually held up to us in Ht- ^ erary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness >■ which the religion of nature may engender.

There was ^ indeed much joyousness among the Greeks — Homer's M X flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines [[[[^'^ "^^ upon is steady.

But even in Homer the reflective pas- **^5C;;5^ sages are cheerless,^ and the moment the Greeks grew , ' i systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they ; ^ *^ became unmitigated pessimists.^ The jealousy of the ^ C^ r-&ods, the nemesis that foUows too much happiness, the *• ^Ni all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of 1 E. g., Iliad, XVII.

446 : " Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth. 2 E. g., Theognis, 425-428 : " Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun ; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.

See also the almost identical passage in (Edipus in Colouus, 1225. — The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances : " Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the groimd — why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me ? " — " How did I come to be ? Whence am I ? Wherefore did I come ? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know ? Being naught I came to life : once more shall I be what I was.

Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals." — " For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered. The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility.

Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity.

The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.