The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 161diate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. " In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecui'ity beneath the surface of life.
My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.
On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by these last words, the answer he wrote was this : — " I mean that the fear was so invasjve and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like ' The eternal God is my refuge,' etc., ' Come unto me, all ye that labor an^ are heavyladen,' etc., ' I am the resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I should have grown really insane." ^ There is no need of more examples.
The cases we have looked at are enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things ; another the sense of sin ; and the remaining one 3escriBes the fear of tKe universe; — and in one or other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.
In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split asunder. . . .
Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me ; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet." ^ For another case of fear equally sudden, see Henry James : Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 £f.
p. 162ity or delusion about matters of fact ; but were we disposed to open the chapter of really insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions, it would be a worse story still — desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end.
Not the conception or intellectual perception of , evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of a need of help like this ! Here is the real core of the reHgious problem : Help ! help !
No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect ; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all_ this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthymindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.
With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light ; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is somecyn p. 163thinof almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have .
V/^-'-^-'^ been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present \ ^W^JU-i^ show themselves the less indulgent party of the two. ^Vu'-wU^^ST In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial 6''>v*At. onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel ? It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its '^ survey is the one that overlaps.
The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the /^ light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons ; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose ; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution.
But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes ; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healtliy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion 3 of reality ; and they may after all be the best key to life's . significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to \ ^^^^'^K ^l the deepest levels of truth.
The normal process of Hfe contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization y is founded on the shambles, and every individual exist- /^ ence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself ! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic
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