The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceother.90 This explanation may pass for what it is worth—it certainlyneeds corroboration. But whatever the cause of heterogeneouspersonality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathictemperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. Allwriters about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominentin their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this traitthat leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A “degeneresuperieur” is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, whofinds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual housein order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings andimpulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the hauntingand insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples,dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperamentwhen it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples ofheterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words,“Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!” whichwould run through his mind a hundred times together, until oneday out of breath with retorting, “I will not, I will not,” he impulsivelysaid, “Let him go if he will,” and this loss of the battle kepthim in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of suchblasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency ofSatan. The phenomenon connects itself with the life of the subconsciousself, so-called, of which we must erelong speak more directly.Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater inproportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversifiedtemptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedlypsychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consistin the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher andthe lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by beinga comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stablesystem of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt tocharacterize the period of order-making and struggle. If the individualbe of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappinesswill take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling in-90 Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September,1893.156