The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceperiod, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religionwould call the purely natural man —Epicureanism, which can onlyby great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, andStoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shapeof an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Comparedwith the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regeneratedChristian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, theirreceipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude intheir simplicity.Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally tojudge any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety. Thesecurest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twicebornmake report has as an historic matter of fact been through amore radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered.We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed offfrom the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness sogreat that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and allsentiment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For thisextremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is neededthan observation of life and reflection upon death. The individualmust in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy.As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’svery existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite ofhimself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longerhave the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mentalpain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirelynormal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is thevictim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So wenote here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in myThe wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definiteterm contentment. What education should chiefly aim at is tosave us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, butby no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman’s heartand love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for theaverage man, to force him into working. But the wise man will alwaysprefer work chosen by himself.”134