The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesmented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very raptureof those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; theyutter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and thesaint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeedgratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously.But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird—and I only usehim as an example of that whole mode of thinking—transcended thesphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, andlaid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he madereligion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a privatefaith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations fromobscurity and mystery?I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he hassimply reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalizedvocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technicallythat the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal,for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, evenreligiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing.The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejectedthe Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need onlymention Professor Fraser’s and Professor Pringle-Pattison’s memorablecriticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.298 Oncemore, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutelyrational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiouslyto be persuasive?The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individualSoul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of mycolleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston,1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897;and lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and theIndividual, 2 vols., New York and London, 1901-02. I doubtlessseem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty whichmy thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to298 A. C. Fraser: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh andLondon, 1899, especially part ii, chaps. vii. and viii. A. Seth [Pringle-Pattison]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim.403