The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

“I could recount many experiences which prove a brand‐new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a...

“When I was a monk,” he says, “I thought that I was utterly cast away, if at any time I felt the lust of the flesh: that is to say, if I felt any evil motion, fleshly lust, wrat...

We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton a...

But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are...

“Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my father’s church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money I wanted by...

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which the...

“Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that ‘indefinite consciousness’ which Herbert Spencer des...

“It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying‐jib, and I s...

The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other lo...

I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the subdivisions...

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would‐be definitions may possibly come before us i...

“God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to...

“This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone till it should please God to show her what she...

“These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossib...

The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholl...

“I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) wi...

In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness becomes most personal and definite. “The compensation,” writes a German author, “for the loss of that se...

The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our e...

If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively i...

All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind‐cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both c...

This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a subject, and this in spite of...

139 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd’s s...

Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam‐pressu...

The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we heard of? With this question...

You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To co...

Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least, decide that, since they corroborat...

It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabatier’s contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiast...

For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we a...

“I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe‐lace was...

“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes, “of the reality in which all intelligence rests?” He replies: “Two things may without difficulty be proved, viz., that this rea...

The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret...

Preface. Lecture I. Religion And Neurology. Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic. Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen. Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy‐Mindedne...

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds. Not only does the human instin...

I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. _It is on th...

“In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don’t condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleas...

“I believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a...

On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious. Next, experience s...

“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully r...

88 See, for example, F. Paulhan, in his book Les Caractères, 1894, who contrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifiés, with les Inquiets, les Contrariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés,...

198 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to Christ’s wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ’s childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint...

Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institution of “the great variety throughout the world of men’s faces, voices, and handwriting,” given in Derham’s Physico‐theolo...

The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of...

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...

291 For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL’S Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER’S Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy...

“During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother,...

The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is neverth...

GOD, 31; sense of his presence, 66‐72, 272, 275 ff.; historic changes in idea of him, 74, 328 ff., 493; mind‐curer’s idea of him, 101; his honor, 342; described by negatives, 41...

“If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you come in and begin to weep and wail, ‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a...