The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesworship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting thespontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science,philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now knownto be scientifically absurd or incongruous.Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave aresiduum of conceptions that at least are possible. With these shecan deal as hypotheses, testing them in all the manners, whether negativeor positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reducetheir number, as some are found more open to objection. She canperhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as beingthe most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definitionof this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocentover-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to beliterally taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between differentbelievers, and help to bring about consensus of opinion. Shecan do this the more successfully, the better she discriminates thecommon and essential from the individual and local elements ofthe religious beliefs which she compares.I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort mightnot eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commandedby a physical science. Even the personally non-religiousmight accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons nowaccept the facts of optics—it might appear as foolish to refuse them.Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance, andcontinually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; sothe science of religions would depend for its original material onfacts of personal experience, and would have to square itself withpersonal experience through all its critical reconstructions. It couldnever get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum.It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that thesubtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations.Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well upinto our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in theliving act of perception always something that glimmers and twinklesand will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. Noone knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley ofnew vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession con-405