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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James embarks on a profound exploration of the many dimensions of religious belief and experience. Written in a conversational yet scholarly style, this seminal work integrates empirical observation with philosophical inquiry, drawing from a diverse array of religious traditions. James's approach is deeply personal, as he examines the psychological underpinnings of the religious experience through case studies, rejoicing in the variety of human perceptions of the divine. His nuanced perspective is situated within the broader context of early 20th-century psychology and philosophy, making this work a cornerstone of pragmatism and existential inquiry. William James, a preeminent American philosopher and psychologist, delves into the complexities of religion likely shaped by his own eclectic background in both science and philosophy. His intellectual lineage—including his connections to transcendentalism and his interest in mysticism—creates a fertile ground for engaging with religion as an essential aspect of human life. Living in a time of rapid scientific advancement, James sought to reconcile empirical evidence with spiritual inquiry, making him an innovative thinker in the dialogue between science and religion. I highly recommend "The Varieties of Religious Experience" to anyone intrigued by the intersection of psychology and spirituality. James's insights offer readers a rich tapestry of thought that encourages deep reflection on their own beliefs and experiences. This comprehensive edition not only enhances understanding of religious phenomena but also invites readers into a dialogue that transcends cultural boundaries, making it a timeless and essential read. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Varieties of Religious Experience (Complete Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A scientist of mind steps into the sanctuary of feeling and asks how visions, conversions, doubts, and ecstasies—so intensely private and often ineffable—can be rendered in clear prose without losing their urgency, their paradox, and their power to change a life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is by William James, the American philosopher and psychologist associated with pragmatism. The book grew from the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902, and it was first published in 1902. Its author brought to the topic a rare combination of clinical attentiveness, philosophical range, and stylistic poise, earned through decades of teaching and writing on psychology, philosophy of mind, and the practical meaning of ideas in lived experience.
James sets himself a focused task: to study religion in its most personal register, the inward experiences of individuals rather than the institutions, creeds, or rituals that organize communities. He collects testimonies, autobiographical materials, and first-person accounts from diverse sources to observe what happens when a life is shaken, redirected, or illuminated by what the person understands as the divine. Without arguing a sectarian case, he analyzes the psychological contours of such episodes and considers the kinds of transformation they yield in conduct, perception, and moral energy.
His method is descriptive, comparative, and pragmatic. Rather than defending or dismissing doctrinal claims, he evaluates experiences by their observable consequences in character and behavior. He traces how temperament and circumstance shape religious feeling, and he differentiates types of experience with care, attending to intensity, duration, and integration into daily life. James writes as an empiricist attentive to data, yet he refuses to flatten the phenomena, granting the mysterious its due while asking what, in practice, follows from it for the person who undergoes it.
Part of the book’s power lies in its literary craft. The case histories are arranged like portraits, chosen for clarity and variety, and narrated in prose that balances sympathy with analytic restraint. James’s voice—patient, humane, and exact—moves between close reading of lives and wide, synthesizing views. He can linger over a striking detail and then step back to trace a pattern across many testimonies. The result is a study that reads with the forward motion of narrative while keeping the standards of a disciplined inquiry.
Its classic status rests on this double achievement: an inquiry rigorous enough to engage philosophers and psychologists, and a performance vivid enough to captivate general readers. The book inhabits a distinctive threshold between science and letters, helping to establish a modern, humanistic study of religion that neither pathologizes belief nor romanticizes it. Its themes—crisis and renewal, despair and assurance, the claims of conscience and the yearning for wholeness—are perennial human concerns, articulated here with unusual clarity and generosity.
The influence of the work stretches across disciplines. It provided a durable framework for the psychology of religion, informed comparative approaches to mysticism, and offered a vocabulary for discussing conversion, moral energy, and the varieties of temperament. Writers exploring the drama of inner life—whether in essays, memoirs, or novels—have found in James a method for portraying belief without dogmatic closure and doubt without cynicism. In religious studies, anthropology, and literary criticism alike, the book remains a foundational point of reference for thinking about experience as evidence.
Context deepens its significance. At the turn of the twentieth century, confidence in scientific explanation was expanding alongside new social and intellectual tensions. James, a central figure in American pragmatism alongside contemporaries such as Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey, insisted that ideas gain meaning through their practical bearings in life. In applying this conviction to religion, he addressed an audience wrestling with modern doubt and pluralism, offering a way to take experience seriously without demanding uniformity of doctrine or sweeping metaphysical certainties.
The book maps a wide terrain of phenomena: serene assurance and troubled conscience, gradual and sudden change, visionary insight and quiet fidelity, moral self-discipline and overflowing charity. It asks how such states arise, how they persist or fade, and how they relate to health, habit, and choice. It also considers the tension between what feels healing and what proves durable in conduct, seeking criteria that honor the subject’s testimony while inviting sober appraisal of outcomes over time.
James’s commitment to a pragmatic test—attending to the consequences of belief—does not reduce religion to utility. Instead, it frames a humane appraisal of what experiences do for persons: whether they steady the will, enlarge sympathy, or sustain action under strain. He admits the limits of analysis, especially where language falters, but he does not abdicate judgment. The balance of openness and scrutiny has made the work a model for interdisciplinary conversations about meaning, value, and the varieties of inward life.
Readers approaching this complete edition encounter the lectures as James shaped them for publication, with the range and texture that made the original volume a landmark. The examples span traditions and temperaments, and the arguments unfold with a rhythm that invites pause and reflection. The historical idiom is of its time, yet the analytic posture—patient, comparative, and responsible to evidence—remains remarkably fresh. To read the book now is to enter a dialogue where data and insight, story and assessment, meet on equal terms.
In an age of global plurality, renewed interest in mindfulness and contemplation, and vigorous research into mind and behavior, James’s focus on experience retains urgent relevance. He offers neither a program nor a verdict, but a way of looking that honors complexity and seeks practical bearings for life. The Varieties of Religious Experience endures because it addresses perennial questions—what changes a person, what sustains a conscience, what hope can do—while modeling an inquiry capacious enough to speak across traditions and times.
Synopsis
The Varieties of Religious Experience is William James’s landmark inquiry into personal religion, drawn from the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902 and published in 1902. A psychologist and philosopher, James investigates how religion manifests within individual minds rather than in churches or doctrines. He builds his analysis from first-person testimonies, autobiographical materials, and clinical observations, aiming to describe conversion, prayer, mysticism, and saintliness as lived phenomena. Grounded in an empirical and pragmatic outlook, he asks what these experiences feel like, what occasions them, and what changes they produce in conduct. Complete editions preserve the full sequence of lectures.
Early chapters delimit the field of study. For James, religion is primarily the domain of personal experience—feelings, practices, and inner responses oriented toward a perceived unseen reality. He sets aside institutional theology to focus on the immediate data of consciousness, treating the “sense of the unseen” as a psychological fact whether or not its objects are metaphysically demonstrable. His method is to amass cases and judge beliefs by their practical fruits rather than abstract proofs. He also introduces the role of temperament: different psychological dispositions incline people toward different religious interpretations, shaping both doubts and devotions.
James then contrasts two broad temperaments. Healthy-mindedness emphasizes optimism, a selective attention to good, and the minimizing of evil; it appears in movements that stress spiritual healing and cheerful trust. The “sick soul,” by contrast, dwells on guilt, suffering, and the felt reality of evil, experiencing dividedness and psychic distress. This polarity frames much of the book’s analysis: religious experience often negotiates between these stances, either by reinforcing the bright outlook or by confronting and transforming the darker one. James treats both as genuine pathways into religion, each illuminating distinctive motives, vulnerabilities, and moral energies.
Conversion occupies a central section. Drawing on numerous testimonies, James distinguishes sudden transformations from gradual reorganizations of the self. In both types, a previously divided inner life becomes unified around a new center of value, often relieving conflict and altering habits. He considers psychological mechanisms—including crises of will, shifts in attention, and suggestions arising from subconscious processes—while remaining agnostic about strictly theological claims. What matters for his analysis are the observable marks: a sense of release, moral fervor, and new life-direction. The variety of cases reveals the many routes by which individuals reframe experience and commit themselves to renewed purposes.
James next examines the traits of saintliness: ascetic self-control, purity of motive, charity, fortitude, and a persistent orientation toward an ideal good. He catalogs how such traits manifest in conduct—altruism, service, and self-surrender—while also noting potential excesses, such as fanaticism or morbid self-denial. The question is not only how saints feel but how their dispositions operate in the world, energizing sustained moral action. James weighs both the social benefits and the psychological costs of intense devotion, seeking a balanced judgment that respects the vitality of saintly lives without overlooking their hazards or the diversity of temperaments they may not suit.
Mysticism receives extended treatment as a distinctive form of experience marked by immediacy, insight, and a felt union with the more-than-personal. James analyzes reports of visions and ecstatic states, emphasizing their authoritative force for those who have them and their limited authority for others. He notes recurring features—transiency, passivity, and an impression of knowledge beyond discursive reasoning—yet insists that such states be evaluated by their after-effects in conduct. Prayer, similarly, is studied as an experiential practice oriented toward the unseen, often accompanied by a sense of presence, reassurance, or guidance that may regulate emotion and strengthen resolve.
A recurring theme is the role of subconscious processes. James surveys automatisms, sudden ideas, and inner voices as channels through which novel energies and insights may emerge. He reviews medical explanations that classify some cases as pathological, yet resists reducing religion to illness. Instead, he proposes a pragmatic test: whatever their origin, states are appraised by whether they foster coherence, courage, charity, and sustained usefulness. This stance allows him to respect the complexity of psychological causation while holding open questions about metaphysical truth, keeping the inquiry anchored in observable consequences for character and life.
The later lectures address philosophical issues. James scrutinizes rational theologies and arguments for an absolute unity, finding them less persuasive than the cumulative weight of lived experience. He entertains a pluralistic picture in which reality may include multiple forms of connection with the unseen, and he acknowledges the role of personal “over-beliefs” that exceed strict evidence yet orient practice. Throughout, he stresses tolerance and the fallibility of generalizations: no single theory captures the full range of religious life. The emphasis remains on description, sympathetic criticism, and the practical bearings of belief for individuals embedded in time and community.
The book closes by assessing the value of religion in terms of its moral and psychological fruits, while withholding final metaphysical verdicts. Its enduring significance lies in reframing religion as a legitimate subject for empirical, phenomenological, and pragmatic study, widening the field beyond creeds to the varieties of lived experience. James’s careful attention to temperament, pathology, mysticism, and moral energy continues to inform psychology, philosophy, and religious studies. The work invites readers to weigh claims not by abstract certainty but by the transformations they sponsor, leaving room for diversity in experience and for disciplined openness about ultimate questions.
Historical Context
At the turn of the twentieth century, the transatlantic world James inhabited was defined by rapid industrialization, imperial power, and the prestige of modern science. Protestant churches remained dominant cultural institutions in Britain and the United States, even as universities and professional societies claimed growing authority over knowledge. William James delivered The Varieties of Religious Experience as the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901–1902, within a setting shaped by Scottish Presbyterianism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and a public committed to “natural theology.” The book emerged from this milieu, asking how religion could be examined with the tools of psychology without surrendering its moral seriousness.
James’s intellectual itinerary framed the project. Born in 1842 in New York to a theologically reflective household—his father Henry James Sr. was influenced by Swedenborg—he grew up amid New England’s reformist culture and the afterglow of Transcendentalism. Trained in medicine at Harvard, he turned to psychology and philosophy, teaching for decades and publishing The Principles of Psychology (1890). His career straddled laboratory science and philosophical reflection, and he brought both to Edinburgh. The Varieties channels this dual allegiance: it treats religious life as part of “human nature,” while defending the existential significance of experiences that institutional theology and reductive science often dismissed.
Psychology’s emergence as an independent science provides essential background. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established a laboratory at Leipzig; G. Stanley Hall opened one at Johns Hopkins in 1883; James had already organized a teaching laboratory at Harvard in 1875. Experimental methods, physiological models, and clinical case studies promised to naturalize the study of mind. James’s own work—famously the James–Lange theory of emotion (mid-1880s)—argued that feeling is bound to bodily states. Varieties extends this sensibility to religion: it neither builds a theological system nor confines itself to metaphysics; it analyzes conversion, mysticism, and saintliness as experiences with psychological contours and practical consequences.
The Darwinian revolution and the rise of scientific naturalism set the horizon of debate. After 1859, evolution reframed discussions of life and mind, while public figures such as T. H. Huxley popularized agnosticism. In theology, historical-critical scholarship challenged traditional claims about scripture. James’s answer, influenced by pragmatism (shaped by C. S. Peirce’s ideas in the 1870s and developed by James in later works), was to test beliefs by their “fruits” in conduct and feeling. In Varieties he assesses religion not by proving doctrines true or false, but by observing the moral and therapeutic effects of experiences, thereby sidestepping sterile battles between dogma and materialism.
The venue mattered. Lord Gifford’s bequest (1885) created lectures in Scotland devoted to “natural theology in the widest sense,” inviting inquiry into religion using ordinary reason and empirical evidence rather than sectarian authority. Previous Gifford lecturers had often been theologians or philosophers defending broad theistic positions. James brought a psychologist’s eye to the same remit, foregrounding personal narratives and clinical cases. His approach fit the lectures’ charter yet unsettled some expectations: rather than argue for God’s existence, he analyzed how religious experiences arise and what they do. The shift from institutional doctrine to individual testimony was itself a historical statement.
The religious landscape of the late nineteenth-century Anglophone world was plural and volatile. Revivalism remained strong; Dwight L. Moody’s campaigns drew crowds in the 1870s–1890s. The Holiness movement and the Salvation Army (founded 1865, active in the U.S. by 1880) emphasized personal holiness and social outreach. Catholic and Jewish communities were growing through immigration. Alongside these, heterodox currents—spiritualism, Theosophy, “mind-cure,” and Christian Science—attracted adherents. Varieties registers this mixed ecology by treating conversion and sanctity across denominational lines and by taking seriously the therapeutic claims of new movements, while evaluating them critically through their ethical and psychological outcomes.
The mind-cure and Christian Science movements exemplify the era’s therapeutic turn. Mary Baker Eddy published Science and Health in 1875 and organized the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, teaching that illness has a mental dimension accessible to spiritual healing. “New Thought” networks spread related ideas through lectures and magazines. Physicians simultaneously diagnosed “neurasthenia” as a diffuse nervous exhaustion of modern life. James encountered these currents firsthand and, in Varieties, appraised mind-cure testimonies with sympathy for their practical relief yet skepticism toward sweeping metaphysical claims. His attention to efficacy over doctrine reflects how late nineteenth-century Americans reframed religion in therapeutic and experiential terms.
Psychical research formed another live borderland between science and religion. The Society for Psychical Research began in London in 1882; an American counterpart followed in 1885, with James among its leading figures. He investigated trance mediumship, notably the case of Leonora Piper, while insisting on rigorous controls and acknowledging pervasive fraud. Thinkers like Frederic W. H. Myers proposed a “subliminal self” to account for dissociated mental processes. French clinical work by Charcot and Pierre Janet on hysteria and automatisms reinforced this perspective. Varieties incorporates these debates by exploring conversion, inspiration, and mystical states as phenomena with subconscious dynamics without collapsing them into pathology.
Comparative religion flourished in the same decades. Philologists and Orientalists such as Max Müller edited the Sacred Books of the East (from 1879), and missionaries transmitted reports from Asia and Africa. Western readers encountered Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic texts in unprecedented quantity, albeit through lenses marked by translation and colonial bias. James drew eclectically from this expanding archive, juxtaposing Christian accounts with examples from non-Western traditions to isolate structural features of religious experience. The book reflects the moment’s comparative ambition while revealing its limitations: it relies primarily on sources available in English and on interpretations shaped by the scholarly conventions of the day.
Print culture and new research methods enabled James’s case-based approach. Expanded literacy, cheap editions, and periodicals spread autobiographies, sermons, and medical reports. Leo Tolstoy’s My Confession (early 1880s) circulated widely; classic testimonies by Augustine and John Bunyan remained staples. Within psychology, Edwin D. Starbuck’s The Psychology of Religion (1899) and early studies by James H. Leuba used questionnaires to map conversion and belief statistically. James synthesized these materials, favoring vivid first-person narratives while engaging with emerging survey data. The Varieties thus mirrors a culture in which personal testimony and empirical collection coexisted and fed public debate.
Concurrently, medicine and psychiatry reorganized understandings of distress. Neurology expanded; Emil Kraepelin’s classifications shaped late nineteenth-century psychiatry; hypnotic techniques and talk-based therapies gained ground. Diagnoses such as melancholia and neurasthenia provided shared vocabularies for sufferers and clinicians. James himself endured periods of depression and a celebrated crisis in the 1870s, after which he embraced a practical doctrine of willing. In Varieties, he neither stigmatizes religious melancholy nor treats it as mere disease. He articulates a spectrum—from fragile to resilient dispositions—arguing that the moral “fruits” of transformation warrant attention regardless of pathological antecedents.
Industrialization and urbanization altered everyday life. Railroads, factories, and corporate consolidation reorganized labor and intensified class tensions; dense cities became sites of both reform and dislocation. Religious movements responded in different ways: some pursued social activism, while others emphasized inward regeneration. The Social Gospel gathered momentum in Protestant circles in the 1890s, with figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch later systematizing its program. James’s analysis in Varieties centers on individual ethical effects—charity, temperance, courage—more than institutional reform. Even so, by evaluating religion through pragmatic outcomes, he offers a framework compatible with civic responsibility without tying it to a particular political platform.
The Scottish setting contributed distinctive resonances. Edinburgh’s universities stood in the lineage of the Scottish Enlightenment—Hume’s skepticism, Reid’s common-sense philosophy, and a robust tradition of moral inquiry. Presbyterianism, including the legacy of the 1843 Disruption and the Free Church, shaped public life and theological education. Addressing this audience, James positioned psychology as a legitimate partner to natural theology, inviting hearers to consider religious facts as data of human life. The reception mixed curiosity and caution: his shift from creedal propositions to experiential analysis challenged entrenched habits while respecting the intellectual seriousness expected of a Gifford lecturer.
Technological change accelerated transatlantic exchange. Steamships, railways, the telegraph, and an expanding press created a common intellectual market between Britain and America. Lecturers toured; books crossed oceans quickly; controversies rippled through reviews and correspondence. James’s Edinburgh lectures were promptly published in 1902 and reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic. The speed and breadth of this reception helped cement the book’s influence beyond academic theology or psychology, bringing its arguments into public conversation about science, faith, and the meaning of modern life.
Gender shaped the religious innovations James studied. Women were prominent in spiritualism, holiness revivals, and healing movements; organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874) linked piety with reform. Diaries, testimonies, and illness narratives by women supplied crucial evidence for the psychology of religion. Varieties draws on such first-person sources, treating them as authoritative documents of experience rather than as curiosities. In doing so, the book reflects a democratization of religious authority—one that elevated lay voices and domestic spirituality, and that unsettled clerical monopolies in an age when expertise was otherwise consolidating.
Political debates formed a background note. The United States moved onto the imperial stage after 1898, sparking an anti-imperialist movement that included James, who criticized coercive power and defended pluralism. While Varieties does not argue political positions, its pluralistic ethos—preference for tolerant judgment, suspicion of absolutism, and emphasis on the concrete effects of beliefs—aligns with a broader liberal culture wary of monolithic authority. By framing religion as a domain of diverse, testable experiences, James offered a civic model for negotiating deep differences without collapsing them into either relativism or dogmatic uniformity.
Finally, Varieties stands as a mirror and a critique of its era. It registers the authority of science while rebuking scientism; honors religious aspiration while resisting ecclesiastical control; embraces comparative learning while acknowledging the primacy of concrete lives. Its method—case-based, phenomenological, pragmatic—belongs to a world of laboratories, surveys, mass print, and reformist energies. Its conclusions challenge that world to judge religion by its capacity to enliven conscience and enlarge sympathy. In doing so, the book helped define the modern conversation about faith as a human fact, testing belief by the lives it helps create.
Author Biography
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist whose work helped define the intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Trained as a scientist yet deeply engaged with philosophical and religious questions, he became a principal architect of pragmatism and a pivotal figure in establishing psychology as an academic field in the United States. James wrote in a lucid, accessible style that bridged laboratory findings, everyday experience, and metaphysical inquiry. His books addressed how minds work, why beliefs matter, and how experience should guide inquiry, leaving a durable framework for thinking about truth, action, and the varieties of human life.
James studied at Harvard, where he pursued chemistry, physiology, and medicine, ultimately earning a medical degree in the late 1860s. He also spent formative periods in Europe, encountering contemporary physiology and psychology, and reading widely in British empiricism and post-Kantian thought. Evolutionary theory strongly shaped his outlook, as did the voluntarist philosophy of Charles Renouvier, which influenced his reflections on agency and commitment. In the United States, discussions with contemporaries such as Charles Sanders Peirce sharpened his interest in pragmatic approaches to meaning and truth. This mixed training—scientific, philosophical, and cross-cultural—gave James a distinctive voice that resisted rigid system-building while remaining empirically oriented.
James taught for decades at Harvard, moving from physiology to psychology and then to philosophy, and his lectures attracted students across disciplines. His early essays culminated in The Principles of Psychology (1890), a two-volume synthesis that surveyed sensation, habit, attention, will, emotion, and the self. The book was widely recognized for its breadth and psychological realism, even as it questioned narrow laboratory methods then gaining prominence. James wrote a shorter Briefer Course to reach classroom audiences, and he continued to publish influential essays that connected mind, conduct, and belief. By the turn of the century, he had become an authoritative voice in both psychology and philosophy.
In psychology, James advocated a functional understanding of mental life, emphasizing how consciousness serves adaptation rather than presenting discrete, atomistic elements. He introduced the enduring metaphor of the stream of consciousness, analyzed the formation of habits, and explored attention as a selective, effortful process. His account of emotion, often linked to the James–Lange theory, proposed that bodily changes play a central role in emotional experience. Though selective in his use of experiments, he encouraged rigorous observation anchored in lived experience. Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) distilled his insights for educators, helping shape early educational psychology and practical approaches to classroom learning.
Turning more explicitly to philosophy, James advanced pragmatism as a method for clarifying ideas by tracing their practical consequences. In The Will to Believe (1897), he defended the permissibility of commitment under genuine uncertainty, especially in moral and religious contexts. Pragmatism (1907) popularized the approach, while The Meaning of Truth (1909) elaborated a pragmatic account of verification and the practical bearings of true beliefs. Complementing these themes, his radical empiricism argued that relations and transitions are as much given in experience as discrete things, supporting a pluralistic metaphysics. James framed these positions as tools for inquiry rather than dogmas, inviting ongoing testing by experience.
James’s engagement with religion culminated in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), based on his Gifford Lectures. Treating religion as part of human psychology, he examined conversion, saintliness, and mystical experience with sympathetic rigor, neither reducing faith to pathology nor insulating it from critique. He drew on case histories and first-person reports to understand how transformative experiences alter conduct and outlook. Beyond religion, he investigated unusual mental phenomena with an open but critical stance, arguing that science should not prejudge what experience may disclose. His writings helped legitimize the empirical study of spirituality and continue to inform contemporary debates on belief and experience.
In his later years, James traveled widely, lectured in the United States and Britain, and continued to revise his philosophical positions. Health difficulties eventually limited his teaching, but he remained intellectually active until his death in 1910. Posthumous works, including Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), consolidated his mature views. James’s legacy spans multiple fields: functionalist psychology, pragmatist philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theories of education. He influenced later thinkers across traditions and remains a touchstone for discussions of truth, agency, and pluralism. His insistence on testing ideas by their experiential consequences keeps his work continually relevant.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (Complete Edition)
Preface
This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on 'Man's Religious Appetites,' and the second a metaphysical one on 'Their Satisfaction through Philosophy.' But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to pages 511–519, and to the 'Postscript' of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form.
In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.
My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck, of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express.
Harvard University, March, 1902.
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Lecture I
Religion and Neurology
It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe-struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's class-room therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.
But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.
As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Pyschology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed[1q]. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.
If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The documents humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition—they lie along the beaten highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.
The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I have referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still further question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs.
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because there are many religious persons—some of you now present, possibly, are among them—who do not yet make a working use of the distinction, and who may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must be considered. When I handle them biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life.
Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the point.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are ‘geniuses’ in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox[1]. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects to·day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:—
"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I went into the marketplace, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! And no one laid hands on me. As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do: then, I after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it The bloody city! For though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian[2]'s time a thousand Christians were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the marketplace, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord."
Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspect of the subject. We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "l am no such thing," it would say; "I am Myself, Myself alone."
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And elsewhere be remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform—menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion—probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.1
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism[5] could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa[3] as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.2
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does that of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.
Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life. When we speak disparagingly of 'feverish fancies,' surely the fever-process as such is not the ground of our disesteem for aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour. When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health's peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most 'good' is not always most 'true,' when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience we shall hereafter hear much of them that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.
It is, however, a discordancy that can never be resolved by any merely medical test. A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, be inevitably falls into the morbid category. … And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness."3
Now do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the value of the fruits? Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical arguments.4 But for the most part the masterpieces are left unchallenged; and the medical line of attack either confines itself to such secular productions as every one admits to be intrinsically eccentric, or else addresses itself exclusively to religious manifestations. And then it is because the religious manifestations have been already condemned because the critic dislikes them on internal or spiritual grounds.
In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake—such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the origin of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test. Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance generally, these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way.
They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:—
"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective—if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic. … Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude,—namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among mankind."5
In other words, not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards[4]
