The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 235parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers's sense of the word.
These clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy ; and, the path having been once opened by these first observers, similar observations have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural constitution. And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable.
Interpreting the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search whether it be not an explosionj into tlie fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind.
We should look, therefore, for its source in the Sul^ject's subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to be extracted from the patient's Subliminal by a number of ingenious methods, for an account of which you must consult the books.
In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal regions which improvements in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be assumed, — but the assumption p. 236involves a vast program of work to be done in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man must play their part.^ And thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous conversions. You remember the cases of AUine, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxford converted at three in the afternoon.
Similar occurrences abound, some with and some without luminous visions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought on by a higher control.
If, abstracting altogether from the question of their value for the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their psy- ^ T4ie reader will here please notice that iu my exclusive reliance in the last ledtjire on the subconscious 'incubation' of motives deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted principles of explanation as far as one can.
The subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining such a ' tension ' that they may at times enter consciousness with something like a burst.
It thus is * scientific ' to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation.
Some of the cases I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture III were of this order (compare pages 59, 61, 62, 67) ; and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way.
The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a ' discharging lesion ' like that of epilepsy ; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the subject is really complex.
But I shall keep myself as far as possible at present to the more 'scientific ' view; and only as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question of its absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That subconscious incubation explains a great number of them, there can be no doubt. P^\ '-HiA ISOU. f p. 237chological side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of what we find outside of conversion that we are tempted to class them along with other automatisms, and to suspect that what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental work can go on subHminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.
I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and recollect one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture. You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively.
If the fruits for Ufe of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology ; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it. Well, how is it with these fruits ?
If we except the class of preeminent saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the usual run of ' saints,' the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthful or middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or in the spontaneous course of methodistic growth, you wiU probably agree that no splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from
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