The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethe cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix orinterfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keepall their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctivegood they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desireto save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as somany of US insist, that what immediately appears as evil mustbe “good in the making,” or something equally ingenious. Goodwas good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neitherdenied the ills of nature—Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is calledgood is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,” wouldhave been mere silliness to them—nor did they, in order to escapefrom those ills, invent “another and a better world” of theimagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods ofsense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctivereactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, givesa pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this qualityWhitman’s outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntaryand defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and anaffected twist,42 and this diminishes its effect on many readerswho yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the wholequite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is ofthe genuine lineage of the prophets.If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendencywhich looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find thatwe must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntaryor systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntaryvariety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about thingsimmediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceivingthings as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selectssome one aspect of them as their essence for the time being,and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness,conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, de-42 “God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in mypresence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic.The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education inhumility still rankled in his breast.84