The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jameshas assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled outof it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself a few momentsago pronounced. Suppose that she agrees that religion, whereverit is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and abelief that in our prayerful communion with them, work is done,and something real comes to pass. She has now to exert her criticalactivity, and to decide how far, in the light of other sciences and inthat of general philosophy, such beliefs can be considered true.Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only arethe other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed,but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciencesof nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the wholehold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptionstowards which general philosophy inclines. The scientist, socalled,is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic thatone may well say that on the whole the influence of science goesagainst the notion that religion should be recognized at all. And thisantipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religionsitself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquaintedwith so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumptioneasily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probablyis false. In the “prayerful communion” of savages with suchmumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us tosee what genuine spiritual work—even though it were work relativeonly to their dark savage obligations— can possibly be done.The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religionsare as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim thatthe essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us thatreligion is probably only an anachronism, a case of “survival,” an atavisticrelapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its moreenlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religiousanthropologists at present do little to counteract.This view is so widespread at the present day that I must considerit with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Letme call it the “Survival theory,” for brevity’s sake.The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves,is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.435