The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesIf you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology,you will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects formdiverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of oneanother. Each ‘aim’ which he follows awakens a certain specific kindof interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas togetherin subordination to it as its associates; and if the aims andexcitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have littlein common. When one group is present and engrosses the interest,all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from themental field. The President of the United States when, with paddle,gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation,changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidentialanxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the officialhabits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those whoknew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not “knowhim for the same person” if they saw him as the camper.If now he should never go back, and never again suffer politicalinterests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intentsand purposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinaryalterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another,are not commonly called transformations, because each of them isso rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but wheneverone aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previousrivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon,and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.”These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a selfmay be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistenceof two or more different groups of aims, of which one practicallyholds the right of way and instigates activity, whilst the othersare only pious wishes, and never practically come to anything. SaintAugustine’s aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for awhile an example. Another would be the President in his full prideof office, wondering whether it were not all vanity, and whether thelife of a wood-chopper were not the wholesomer destiny. Such fleetingaspirations are mere velleitates, whimsies. They exist on the remoteroutskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centreof his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life179