The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceno matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? Whatis more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of thedifficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasionedit, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs,then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scoutit in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it isimpossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere withoutzealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darkeraspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thusour resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparativelysmall point within ourselves, may not stop until it has broughtthe entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimisticenough to be congenial with its needs.In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion thatthe total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mysticalpersuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religiousconsciousness, and we must look at it later with some care. But weneed not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical conditionsof rapture suffice for my immediate contention. All invasivemoral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evilin some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot,the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When thepassion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided itbe for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory.In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to beswallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitementwhich engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as thecrowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and Iexult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religiousattitude is therefore consonant with important currents in humannature, and is anything but absurd. In fact. we all do cultivate itmore or less, even when our professed theology should in consistencyforbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death asmuch as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies withoutend on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and nevermentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature86