The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesNow when characters of this latter sort become religious, they areapt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity againsttheir natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that ThomasCarlyle put him into his bath-tub every morning of a freezingBerlin winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism.Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul’s healthto start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther alongthe scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents,an agnostic:—“Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend soon the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me Iwould have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and standfor a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.”Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next casewe probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3— the asceticism becomesfar more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant,whose sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified onno lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly madeburlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in myshoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without anycovering.”The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing,and given it a market-value in the shape of “merit.” But we see thecultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in everyfaith, as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing,when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that—“He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have becomeincapable of any form of self-indulgence. He took the smallest roomin the house for his study, though he might easily have commandedone more light, airy, and in every way more suitable; and chose for hissleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a younger brother.The furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of ananchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot-bedstead, plainwooden chairs and table, with matting on the floor. It was without271