The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesof the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all ourusual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholymetaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel.It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld.Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, howeverenthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic,or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthymindednessdo its best with its strange power of living in the momentand ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is reallythere to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. Inthe practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloomor glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes andhopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing giveit the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, andhowever agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gildingvanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, maylaugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fatenow, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks thesatisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of deathand the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the backgroundof possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences beenveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortalsignificance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deitiespay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which manbreathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects,they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrarythe curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanentmeaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionismof our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrillstops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankindis in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozenlake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowingthat little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawingnear when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned131