The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 167ural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other. In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted ; though here as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures.

Practically, however, you all recognize the difference : you understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded morahst ; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth.^ The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.

" Homo duplex, homo duplex ! " writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ' He is dead, he is dead ! ' While my first self wept, my second self thought, ' How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre. I was then fourteen years old. " This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection.

Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other Is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This * E. g., " Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man — never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs," etc. Emerson : * Spiritual Laws.'

p. 168second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks ! " * Recent works on the psychology of character have had much to say upon this point.^ Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset.

Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted ; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme.

Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant's autobiography. "I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.

As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string ; as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly ; as the young mistress of a house I was afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer ; when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it.

Combative on the platform in defense oi any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good ^ Notes sur la Vie, p. 1. 2 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractferes, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibr^s, les Unifies, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incoh^rents, les Emiett^s, as so many diverse psychic types.

p. 169fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly.

An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak my best." ^ This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life. There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand.

Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.

Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance — the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.^ This explanation may pass for what it is worth — it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture.

All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A * degenere superieur ' is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in 1 Annie Besant : an Autobiography, p. 82. 2 Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893.