William James

It is with no small amount of trepidation that a man trained in the methods of natural science addresses such an audience as this, with the subject of natural religion upon his lips and the Gifford lectures behind his name.

The questions that deal with religious experience, as I propose to treat them, lie very close to the borderland where science and philosophy meet. It is in the very nature of such questions that the student’s personal sympathies and antipathies, his philosophical pre-possessions, his religious or irreligious experience, are almost certain to determine in advance what he shall find true and what he shall find false, what significant and what not, among the multitudinous facts that solicit his attention.

Religious feelings are for the most part not shareable, not describable, not reproducible at will. The individual alone can decide, not only what these experiences mean for him, but whether they have any objective meaning whatever. And yet these experiences determine our destiny! They are either momentous or else the greatest delusion to which our race has ever fallen a victim.

The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?

Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses.

This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either pessimistic or optimistic, religious or irreligious. So at this point I will ask you to assume with me that religion primarily consists in the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

Now, it is important to notice that this definition deliberately excludes institutional, ritual, theological, and metaphysical elements from our field of inquiry. By doing so I hope to enable us to confine ourselves as far as possible to personal religion pure and simple.

As regards the psychopathic question, I wish to speak once for all and have done with it. 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 as a hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a 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.

But such crude talk as this about the physical basis of mental phenomena is surely scientifically as well as spiritually shallow. Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up with all sorts of persons whom it calls morbid, whenever they happen not to be concerned about the same narrow range of topics that engross the so-called normal mind.

Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Mental states are everywhere as a general thing more composite than they appear to be. But in the religious life we have a phenomenon of undoubted experiential reality, whatever be our theory as to its further significance.

The only genuine refutation which such a theory of religious experience can receive must come from someone who will recount, with equal skill and sympathy, experiences of a different type, and show them to be more genuinely significant of the nature of reality. Otherwise, criticism is idle; and the religious consciousness bears on its face credentials of veracity that nothing can destroy.

In the religious life, however, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion makes no such bargain. It commonly recommends poverty, chastity, and obedience; and if we are not to be Puritanical about it, why not be frankly worldly?

The long discourses which I foresee that I must hold with you will have to be in some degree apologetic. But I shall try to be as little so as possible. Psychology is after all a branch of science, and science means a dispassionate and impartial inquiry. The religious experience which we study may indeed be subject to interpretation on natural as well as on supernatural lines; but whichever line we take, the experiences are equally real occurrences in the mental life of the individuals concerned.

The question whether the God exists or not, I leave entirely on one side. Religion is a uniquely significant phenomenon, whether God exists or not. The experiences themselves are our data, the God-question being a subsidiary theoretical problem.

So I propose to conduct these lectures on the assumption that the experiences I shall analyze are genuine experiences, and the fact that they are experiences will constitute their primary interest for us. Whether their value is more than subjective is a question we need not decide. Their reality as mental facts is all that psychology needs to care about.