The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William James(See note [64].)APPENDIX to Lectures es IV and VCASE I. “My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one ofthe first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopiawhich deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writingalmost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out fromexercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great exhaustion.I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standingboth in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I hadhad great faith, with no or ill result. Then, at a time when I seemedto be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things that gave meinterest enough in mental healing to make me try it; I had no greathope of getting any good from it—it was a chance I tried, partlybecause my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemedto open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see. Iwent to X in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, orthought they had got, great help; the treatment was a silent one;little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind,whatever influence was exerted was that of another person’s thoughtor feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind, into mynervous system as it were, as we sat still together. I believed from thestart in the possibility of such action, for I knew the power of themind to shape, helping or hindering, the body’s nerve-activities,and I thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had nobelief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction norany mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it thatmight have brought imagination strongly into play.“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at firstwith no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenlyand swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, asense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to breakthe bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritablewalls about my life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I117