The varieties of religious experience : a study in human nature : being the Gifford Lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 / by William James.

  • James, William, 1842-1910.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The varieties of religious experience : a study in human nature : being the Gifford Lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 / by William James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical con- ditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure. The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can ; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies with- out end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recog- nize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.1 1 As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated,