The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was youngand well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit blowethwhere it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passivelyto all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whateveralternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatusin the gallery.Meanwhile the practically real world for each one of us, the effectiveworld of the individual, is the compound world, the physicalfacts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdrawor pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kindof experience we call pathological ensues.In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever wasfor a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in thewhole expression of reality. When we come to study the phenomenonof conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a notinfrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is atransfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seemsto shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similarchange, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looksremote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath iscold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. “It is as if Ilived in another century,” says one asylum patient.—“I see everythingthrough a cloud,” says another, “things are not as they were,and I am changed.”—“I see,” says a third, “I touch, but the thingsdo not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything.”—“Personsmove like shadows, and sounds seem to comefrom a distant world.”—“There is no longer any past for me; peopleappear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were ina theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; Ican no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats beforemy eyes, but leaves no impression.”—“I weep false tears, I haveunreal hands: the things I see are not real things.”—Such are expressionsthat naturally rise to the lips of melancholy subjects describingtheir changed state.7979 I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La Tristesse et laJoie, 1900.140