The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 194suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being.

Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction ; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a * transformation.

These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine's aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example.

Another would be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it were not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood-chopper were not the wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere velleitates, whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system.

As_Jife goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of Lord Gifford's will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I did not think of being a teacher of philosophy : and what I listened to was as remote from my own life 2p. 195as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.

When I say ' Soul,' you need not take me in the ontological sense unless you prefer to ; for although ontological language is instinctive in such matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in the phenomenal terms which are their favorites.

For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness : yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken.

Talking of this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it from the rest, words hke *here,' ^this,' * now,' 'mine,' or 'me'; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions 'there,' 'then,' ' that,' ' his ' or ' thine,' ' it,' ' not me. But a ' here ' can change to a ' there,' and a ' there ' become a ' here,' and what was ' mine ' and what was ' not mine ' change their places.

What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters. Things hot and vital to us to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us, and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their salhes. They are in short the centres of our dy-^ namic energy, whereas the cold parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness. Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no importance. It is exact enough, if you 3p. 196recognize from your own experience the facts which I seek to designate by it. Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous lecture.

Or the focus of excitement and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain system ; and then, if the change be a religious one, we call it a conversion, especially if it be by crisis, or sudden. Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man's consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works, call it the habitual centre of his personal energy.

It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the centre of his energy ; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain peripheral in him.

To say that a man is ' converted ' means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his con- T" sciousness, now take a central place, and that rehgious aims form the habitual centre of his energy.

Now if you ask of psychology just how the excitement shifts in a man's mental system, and why aims that were peripheral become at a certain moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a general description of what happens, she is unable in a given case to account accurately for all the single forces at work.

Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one's centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act,