The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 230they have at any rate been in countless individual instances an original and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely naturalhistory point of view, with no religious interest whatever,', we should still have to write down man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities. What, now, must we ourselves think of this question ?

Is an instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt ? Are there two classes of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class really partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely seems to do so ?

Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration^ even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of man's interior life ?

Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the lighting up of new crises of emotion.

I explained the phenomena as partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such processes of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret that my limits of time here force me to be so short.

\]:i.,jL^ <Q^^^ri^vt^«.c /-v-w rv^x.^V.

p. 231The expression * field of consciousness ' has but recently come into vogue in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured most was the single ' idea/ supposed to be a definitely outlined thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness. As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are 'v>T?i^u-. narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when ^ ^^^.-vx^^- rwe have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations juy^'V^- which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond "^ the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions * which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perr^ ceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted. Different individuals present constitutional differences ^ in this matter of width of field. Your great organizing T"""" geniuses are men with habitually vast fields of mental J vision, in which a whole programme of future operations ^ will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ri ahead into definite directions of advance. In common

C>-^

people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the