The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesall times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusionwhich we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we havepassed in review.The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychologicalorder do they belong?The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a“sthenic” affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, “dynamogenic”order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. Inalmost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversionand on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamentalmelancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or azest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the commonobjects of life.335 The name of “faith-state,” by which ProfessorLeuba designates it, is a good one.336 It is a biological as well as apsychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate in classingfaith among the forces by which men live.337 The total absenceof it, anhedonia,338 means collapse.The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content.We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence,or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.339 It maybe a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, anda feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air.340335 Compare, for instance, pages 200, 215, 219, 222, 244-250, 270-273.336 American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.337 Above, p. 181.338 Above, p. 143.339 Above, p. 391.340 Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry: “I do not know how todeal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelmsme; I want to do something, yet I can do nothing and am fit fornothing… . I would fain do great things.” Again, after an inspiring interview,he writes: “I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, andstrength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude far from allmen. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and wenton like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenlyan instinct made me draw hastily back —I was on the very edge of a449