The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James

Author:William James [James, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

have been cured in this way, action through the sub-The ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher liminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness.

prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If Another of the respondents says: ‘Since then, al-the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably though Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of operates through the subliminal door, then. But just brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’”

how anything operates in this region is still unex-

—Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort plained, and we shall do well now to say good-by to must occur in the cerebral organ. But on the side ac-the process of transformation altogether—leaving it, cessible to introspection, their causal condition is noth-if you like, a good deal of a psychological or theologi-ing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at cal mystery—and to turn our attention to the fruits last so high and strong as to be sovereign, and it must of the religious condition, no matter in what way they be frankly confessed that we do not know just why or may have been produced.[151]

how such sovereignty comes about in one person and

[151] Professor Starbuck expresses the radical denot in another. We can only give our imagination a cer-struction of old influences physiologically, as a cut-tain delusive help by mechanical analogies.

ting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in which If we should conceive, for example, that the human the association-centres connected with the spiritual mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, 264

William James

might be like a many-sided solid with different sur-tained by the new emotion, a critical point is passed, faces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.

equivalent to the production of a new nature.

As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger a character is Saintliness.[152] The saintly character for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease is the character for which spiritual emotions are the to urge it, it will tumble back or “relapse” under the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond sur-the same in all religions, of which the features can face A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface easily be traced.[153]

B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls of

[152] I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of “sanc-gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be timoniousness” which sometimes clings to it, because disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune no other word suggests as well the exact combination against farther attraction from their direction.

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