The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceThis primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse overdirection is well expressed in Walt Whitman’s lines (Leaves of Grass,1872, p. 190):—“O to confront night, storms, hunger,ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,as the trees and animals do… .Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, andstill urge you, without the leastidea what is our destinationOr whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by itsimportance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, wouldseem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trustin our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive destinies,and faith in the providence of God, all have their source inthat onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of theexceedingness of the possible over the real.When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with afaith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,341 and thisexplains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere tothe minutest details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creedsand faith-state together, as forming “religions,” and treating these aspurely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their“truth,” we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influenceupon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most importantbiological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anaestheticeffect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article,342goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their God, they carevery little who he is, or even whether he is at all. “The truth of theprecipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave upmy nocturnal promenade.” A. Gratry: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872,pp. 92, 89.341 Compare Leuba: Loc. cit., pp. 346-349.342 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536,July 1901.450