The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesmoralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticismavails to cast doubt on its reality. They know; for they have actuallyfelt the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man whofound himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice.At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remainedclinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loosetheir hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop.He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, hisagony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him,so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if weconfide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relyingon our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelterand safeguards that never save.The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing,by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheranjustification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, iswithin the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and carenothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little privateconvulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. Theresults, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimismand expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonmentof effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matterwhether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medicalmaterialisticview of their ultimate causal explanation.5454 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature withinone the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation(which is that of most mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrowerprivate self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is yourown “subconscious” self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust andanxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebralprocesses act more freely where they are left to act automatically by theshunting-out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually) “higher”ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.—Whetherthis third explanation might, in a psycho-physical account of the universe, becombined with either of the others may be left an open question here.105