The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIf we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me thatthere is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method.The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the godswhose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselvesand on one another. What I then propose to do is, brieflystated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standardsto help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as anideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theologicalbeliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited.If not, then they will be discredited, and all without referenceto anything but human working principles. It is but the eliminationof the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, appliedto religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly andwithout prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in thelong run established or proved itself in any other way. Religionshave approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needswhich they found reigning. When they violated other needs toostrongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needsbetter, the first religions were supplanted.The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. Sothe reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and “on the whole”-ness,which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empiricalmethod as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which theentire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. Noreligion has ever yet owed its prevalence to “apodictic certainty.” Ina later lecture I will ask whether objective certainty can ever be addedby theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails.One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort ofan empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematicskepticism.Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentimentsand needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of theworld can be beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot,therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility againstwhich their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claimexemption from this universal liability. But to admit one’s liability298