The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceReligion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of humanegotism. The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by mendisciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personalcalls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, thisbeing, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day,quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells youthat the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating thepersonal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records herlaws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, andconstructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxietiesand fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion,and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over whenit could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the gloryof God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system,with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certainsort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accidentin an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a spanof time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it willhave ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, andsubsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest aswell as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper ofthe scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms,whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale,anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achievingno proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishableultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy.In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind nowfollows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theologywhich satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to usquite grotesque,329 representing, as they did, a God who conformed329 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, inwhose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century wasconcentrated, should have preserved such a baby-like faith in the personaland human character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in hiswork on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is the account he givesof the sun and its utility:—436