The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesHow indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, forexplanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanicalmodes of conception which science uses, was a result that could notpossibly have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity,direction, position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! Howcould the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities andoddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive,fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as themore promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature’s life? Well, it isstill in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delightsto dwell. It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the “promise”of the dawn and of the rainbow, the “voice” of the thunder, the“gentleness” of the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the stars, andnot the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religiousmind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore,the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of thefields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help comein reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fillhim with security and peace.Libya. Or listen to Saint Augustine’s speculations: “Who gave to chaffsuch power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and suchpower to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strangeproperties of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright,and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that ittouches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders? …Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittlethat a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is sostrong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay.” City ofGod, book xxi, ch. iv.Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness thesympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities,their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were inevitably theways in which they originally fastened our attention.If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invokedon every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointmentattributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of receipts, includingusually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear, powdered441