The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesmals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the “closetnaturalists,”as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, andhandlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to thinkthat a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under thesun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalistsof the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. What is their deductionof metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching ofpedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from humanneeds, something that might be worked out from the mereword “God” by one of those logical machines of wood and brasswhich recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of fleshand blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feelsthat in the theologians’ hands, they are only a set of titles obtainedby a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has steppedinto the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead ofbread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomerationof abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledgeof the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish,but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from thisworld. What keeps religion going is something else than abstractdefinitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and somethingdifferent from faculties of theology and their professors. All thesethings are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomenaof vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I haveshown you so many instances, renewing themselves in saeculasaeculorum in the lives of humble private men.So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the pointof view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which theyoffer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarlymind.What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically,they stand on an entirely different footing. They positivelydetermine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations forthe saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great istheir significance.God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing butthe good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being om-397