The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 176regeneration which we are about to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a genus that contains other types as well.
For example, the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity ; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license ; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion.
In all these instances we have precisely the same psychological form of event, — a firmness, stabiHty, and equiHbrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency. In these non-religious cases the new man may also be born either gradually or suddenly. The French philosopher Jouffroy has left an eloquent memorial of his own ' counter-conversion,' as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has been well styled by Mr. Starbuck.
Jouffroy's doubts had long harassed him ; but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the illusions he had lost. " I shall never forget that night of December," writes Jouffroy, " in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn.
I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of the night flowed on and I did not note their passage.
Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
" Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel ; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them p. 177towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me : the inflexible current of my thought was too strong, — parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect.
" This moment was a frightful one ; and when towards morning I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovei'y were the saddest of my life." ^ ^ Th.
Jouffroy: Nouveaux Melanges philosopliiques, 2me edition, p. 83. I add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection, and the narrator is a woman.
" Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or less skeptical about * God; ' skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied ' Yes,' as was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, ' No, you do not.
I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in some terrible way. ... At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then continued the operation until she became insensible.
I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: ' I have no use for a God who permits such things. This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it.
I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any personal relations with him since this painful experience. The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden, or that touch of a needle which
p. 178In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote : — A young man, it appears, " wasted, in two or three years, a large patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt.
Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put an end to his life ; but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion.
He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again ; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not to makes the salt in a supersaturated fluid suddenly begin to crystallize out.
Tolstoy writes : "S., a frank and intelligent man, told me as follows how; he ceased to believe : — " He was twenty-six years old when one day on a hunting e3q)edition, the time for sleep having come, he set himself to pray according to the custom he had held from childhood. " His brother, who was hunting with him, lay upon the hay and looked at him.
When S. had finished his prayer and was turning to sleep, the brother said, ' Do you still keep up that thing ? ' Nothing more was said. But since that day, now more than thirty years ago, S. has never prayed again ; he never takes communion, and does not go to church.
All this, not because he became acquainted with convictions of his brother which he then and there adopted ; not because he made any new resolution in his soul, but merely because the words spoken by his brother were like the light push of a finger against a leaning wall already about to tumble by its own weight.
These words but showed him that the place wherein he supposed religion dwelt in him had long been empty, and that the sentences he uttered, the crosses and bows which he made during his prayer, were actions with no inner sense. Having once seized their absurdity, he could no longer keep them up. Ma Confession, p. 8.
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