The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 14— and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance ? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition.

Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are ; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ^ the liver ' determinins; the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind.

So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-reHgious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting sjjiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change.

Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our c?is-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time. It is needless to say that medical materialism draws m point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion.

It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary 2p. 15spiritual judgment. It has no pliysiologicai theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them ; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents ? No ! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delisfht in them ; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.

When we speak disparagingly of ' feverish fancies,' surely the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem — for aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.

When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.

Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of thiese criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most * good ' is not always most ^ true/ when 3p. 16measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and PhiHp sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely ' feeling good ' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time.

The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience — we shall hereafter hear much of them — that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come.

But they come seldom, and they do not come to every one ; and the rest of life makes either ho connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results.

Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings ; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end. It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius pro-, mulgated by recent authors.

" Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree. " Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, " is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity. " Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, " is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profit-