The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesThe phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police force whohas told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home inthe evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization ofhis oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peaceso takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet couldhardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does hebecome by reason of this inflowing tide.”234Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakeningsuch mystical moods.235 Most of the striking cases which Ihave collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemoratedthis fact in many passages of great beauty—this extract, forexample, from Amiel’s Journal Intime:—“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stoodat the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in theimmensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was anatom too small for the notice of Almighty God.”I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to mesometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence,I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the momentsof which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality,but something in myself made me feel myself a part of somethingbigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with thegrass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in themere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the drizzling rain,the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the yearsfollowing, such moments continued to come, but I wanted themconstantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perceptionof supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because thatperception was not constant.” The cases quoted in my third lecture,pp. 65, 66, 69, are still better ones of this type. In her essay, TheLoss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195),234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this fromStarbuck’s manuscript collection:—351