The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

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The Varieties of Religious Experienceences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just asthey do in hypnotism.[50 Suggestive therapeutics abound in recordsof cure, after a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which thepatient, left to ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggledin vain. Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in thisway, action through the subliminal seeming thus in many individualsto have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. Ifthe grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates throughthe subliminal door, then. But just how anything operates in thisregion is still unexplained, and we shall do well now to say good-byto the process of transformation altogether—leaving it, if you like, agood deal of a psychological or theological mystery—and to turnour attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter inwhat way they may have been produced.151150 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck’s book, in which a “sensoryautomatism” brought about quickly what prayers and resolves hadbeen unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:—“When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was onme, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God toquit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fiftythree,as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did nothear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said,‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ At once I replied. ‘Will you take the desireaway?’ But it only kept saying: ‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ Then I got up,laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had anydesire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touchedtobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gaveme the least wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.151 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influencesphysiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher andlower cerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in which the association-centresconnected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, isoften reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences… .For example: ‘Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothingwithin to respond to them.’ The ego [here] is wholly identified withthe higher centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Anotherof the respondents says: ‘Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is asit were a wall of brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’” —244
William JamesIf we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, withits different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sidedsolid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we mightliken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies onsurface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up,and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or “relapse”under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far enoughfor its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether, thebody will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there permanently.The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded.The polyhedron has become immune against farther attractionfrom their direction.In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotionalinfluences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity tothe ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotionalinfluence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes itproduces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude.But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, acritical point is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution,equivalent to the production of a new nature.The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character isSaintliness.152 The saintly character is the character for which spiritualemotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; andthere is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, theUnquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebralorgan. But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal conditionis nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so highand strong as to be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we donot know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person andnot in another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help bymechanical analogies.152 I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of “sanctimoniousness” whichsometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exactcombination of affections which the text goes on to describe.245
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The Varieties ofReligiousExperience
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ContentsPREFACE....................
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William JamesLECTURE II CIRCUMSCRIP
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William JamesLECTURES XI, XII, AND
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William Jameseses: 1. The subconsci
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William Jamesmy colleague Dickinson
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William Jamesits heroic obligations
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William Jamesas a guide to life and
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William Jamespower. Yet from the po
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William Jamesthors are actually abl
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William Jamesin favor of the sexual
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William Jamesof our states of mind,
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William Jamesstrictly to the medica
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William Jamesment from origin has s
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William Jamesthe bugaboo of morbid
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William Jamesreligious evolution. T
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William JamesLecture e IICIRCUMSCRI
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William Jamesnot prevent me from ta
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