The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesintellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizingwith ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Bothour personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences mustbe interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinkingmind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitablyforces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelingswith one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to usegeneral and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructionsare thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderatoramid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms ofone man’s constructions by another, philosophy will always havemuch to do.It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectureswhich I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards)a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religiousexperience some general facts which can be defined in formulas uponwhich everybody may agree.Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitablyengenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysicaltheologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents ofanother. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have becomepossible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas bywhich the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carriedon. We have the beginnings of a “Science of Religions,” so-called;and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contributionto such a science, I should be made very happy.But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructiveor comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences astheir subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling,not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretendsto be something altogether different from this. It assumes to constructreligious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone,or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjectivefacts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy ofthe absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of385