The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesence—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, ourinstincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide thaton the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and anothertype condemned. “On the whole”—I fear we shall never escapecomplicity with that qualification, so dear to your practicalman, so repugnant to your systematizer!I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem tosome of you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt capriceas our pilot. Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can bethe only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. A fewremarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanationof the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appearat this point to be in place.Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of areligion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How can you measuretheir worth without considering whether the God really existswho is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all theconduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be areasonable fruit of his religion—it would be unreasonable only incase he did not exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religionof human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments,and if all the while a deity were really there demandingsuch sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitlyassuming that the deity must be non-existent; you would besetting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholasticphilosopher.To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certaintypes of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. Ifdisbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices,instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theologicalpartisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselvesthe fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking thanthe secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone ofmen, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressivelydevelop. After an interval of a few generations the mental295