The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesemphatically irrational, and not to be pinned in, or preserved, orconsecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination tothe Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off andnegated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten.The ideal, so far from being co-extensive with the wholeactual, is a mere extract from the actual, marked by its deliverancefrom all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitiousstuff.Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presentedto us, of there being elements of the universe which may make norational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which,from the point of view of any system which those other elementsmake up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident—so much “dirt,” as it were, and matter out of place. I ask you nownot to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem eitherto forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, Ibelieve that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containingan element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus once moreappears to us as having dignity and importance. We have seen it tobe a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal to imagination tocure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verificationto be not unlike the method of all science; and now here we findmind- cure as the champion of a perfectly definite conception ofthe metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of allthis, you will not regret my having pressed it upon your attention atsuch length.Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, andturn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off theburden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated tosuffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindednessthere are shallower and profounder levels, happiness like that of themere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness, so also arethere different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much moreformidable than the other. There are people for whom evil meansonly a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’slife with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle atleast, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the125