The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceon the other. There are plenty of persons to-day—“scientists” or“positivists,” they are fond of calling themselves—who will tell youthat religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to atype of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened exampleshas long since left behind and out-grown. If you ask them toexplain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitivethought everything is conceived of under the form of personality.The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and forthe sake of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeysindividual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementarypowers. Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say,has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary forcein nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces,physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical, which areall impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual accomplishesanything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifiessome universal law. Should you then inquire of them by whatmeans science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discreditedits personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedlysay it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification.Follow out science’s conceptions practically, they will say,the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will alwaysbe corroborated. The world is so made that all your expectationswill be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as youkeep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal.But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy,setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true,she says, and every day will practically prove you right. That thecontrolling energies of nature are personal, that your own personalthoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directlyrespond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions whichyour whole bodily and mental experience will verify. And that experiencedoes largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved bythe fact that the mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not byproclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results.Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority, it carries on an112