The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes. Now there are twoforms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a strikingdifference in the conversion process, a difference to which ProfessorStarbuck has called attention. You know how it is when youtry to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall byworking for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, andthings with which the word was connected. But sometimes thiseffort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hopethere would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure inits direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then theopposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; thinkof something altogether different, and in half an hour the lostname comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelesslyas if it had never been invited. Some hidden process wasstarted in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased,and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certainmusic teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thingto be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted:“Stop trying and it will do itself!”108There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntaryand unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished;and we find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion,giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the volitional type and thetype by self-surrender respectively.In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual,and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moraland spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at whichthe movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychologicalfact is abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in anypractical accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and startsjust as the growth of our physical bodies does.“An athlete … sometimes awakens suddenly to an understandingof the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just asthe convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps onengaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the108 Psychology of Religion, p. 117.189