The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceverified and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal andthe personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thoughtfit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed,your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted,most things were taken into the mind from the point ofview of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itselfexclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events.330more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the riverstheir conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles arenot, as they are charged such rude and useless excrescences of our illformedglobe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered bythe infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surfaceof the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands andcontinents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain therecould be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but,instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher landsnow afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhapsstink, and also drown large tracts of land.“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler theymay seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of thegreat Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our sublunaryworld.”330 Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. Oneneed only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions byAristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever tomake a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle,to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular movement.The circle is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed pointand a moving line, which contradict each other; and whatever moves in acircle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle isthe most “natural” movement; and the long arm of the lever, moving, as itdoes, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion,and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation byHerodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the southbecause of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over440