The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesNo such attempt can be a general solution of the problem; and tominds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery,such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, inlieu of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, acranny to escape by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still inthe clutch of Satan. The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist,must be of universal application. Pain and wrong and death mustbe fairly met and overcome in higher excitement, or else their stingremains essentially unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact of theprevalence of tragic death in this world’s history fairly into his mind—freezing, drowning entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, andhideous diseases—he can with difficulty, it seems to me, continuehis own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that he mayall the while not be really inside the game, that he may lack thegreat initiation.Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takesthe initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, butsomething we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bittertaste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeedsuch rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple,with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinkingman as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, andcomfort can never be an answer to the sphinx’s riddle.In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinctfor reality, which in point of fact has always held the world tobe essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s suprememystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacitywhatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter whata man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, andstill more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, thefact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way,if yet we cling to life, and he is able “to fling it away like a flower” ascaring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our bornsuperior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-heartedindifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, thathe who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently325