The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesnary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though theycannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to givea map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accountswith reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all convergetowards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribingsome metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably areconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictorinessand conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, weremelted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong toone and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler andbetter one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its oppositeinto itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed interms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority.I feel as if it must mean something, something like what thehegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it moreclearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the livingsense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.231I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaesthetic revelation.For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the other in itsvarious forms appears absorbed into the One.“Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them, “we pass, forgettingand forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is nohigher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded.‘The One remains, the many change and pass;’ and each and everyone of us IS the One that remains… . This is the ultimatum… . Assure as being—whence is all our care—so sure is content, beyondduplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitudethat God is not above.”232231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Beingwith all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his wholephilosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness ofmystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal? The notion isthoroughly characteristic of the mystical level and the Aufgabe of makingit articulate was surely set to Hegel’s intellect by mystical feeling.232 Benjamin Paul Blood: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist ofPhilosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made345