The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesLecture e IICIRCUMSCRIPTION CUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPOPICICMOST BOOKS on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precisedefinition of what its essence consists of. Some of these wouldbedefinitions may possibly come before us in later portions of thiscourse, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any ofthem to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so manyand so different from one another is enough to prove that the word“religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but israther a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to theoversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutismand one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy andreligion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a onesidedview of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outsetthat we may very likely find no one essence, but many characterswhich may alternately be equally important to religion. If we shouldinquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man mighttell us it was authority, another submission, an other police, anotheran army, another an assembly, an other a system of laws; yet all thewhile it would be true that no concrete government can exist withoutall these things, one of which is more important at one momentand others at another. The man who knows governments most completelyis he who troubles himself least about a definition whichshall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with alltheir particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstractconception in which these were unified as a thing more misleadingthan enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equallycomplex?99 I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirableremarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion, in an articleby Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, aftermy own text was written.33