The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 2

charity-- The perfect man is adapted only to the perfect environment-- Saints are leavens-- Excesses of asceticism---- Asceticism symbolically stands for the heroic life-- Militarism and voluntary poverty as possible equivalents-- Pros and cons of the saintly character-- Saints versus "strong" men-- Their social function must be considered-- Abstractly the saint is the highest type, but in the present environment it may fail, so we make ourselves saints at our peril-- The question of theological truth.
LECTURES XVI AND XVII MYSTICISM Mysticism defined-- Four marks of mystic states-- They form a distinct region of consciousness-- Examples of their lower grades-- Mysticism and alcohol-- "The anaesthetic revelation"-- Religious mysticism-- Aspects of Nature-- Consciousness of God-- "Cosmic consciousness"-- Yoga-- Buddhistic mysticism-- Sufism-- Christian mystics-- Their sense of revelation-- Tonic effects of mystic states-- They describe by negatives-- Sense of union with the Absolute-- Mysticism and music-- Three conclusions-- (1) Mystical states carry authority for him who has them-- (2) But for no one else-- (3) Nevertheless, they break down the exclusive authority of rationalistic states-- They strengthen monistic and optimistic hypotheses.
LECTURE XVIII PHILOSOPHY Primacy of feeling in religion, philosophy being a secondary function-- Intellectualism professes to escape objective standards in her theological constructions-- "Dogmatic theology"-- Criticism of its account of God's attributes-- "Pragmatism" as a test of the value of conceptions-- God's metaphysical attributes have no practical significance-- His moral attributes are proved by bad arguments; collapse of systematic theology-- Does transcendental idealism fare better? Its principles-- Quotations from John Caird-- They are good as restatements of religious experience, but uncoercive as reasoned proof-- What philosophy CAN do for religion by transforming herself into "science of religions."
LECTURE XIX OTHER CHARACTERISTICS Aesthetic elements in religion--Contrast of Catholicism and Protestantism-- Sacrifice and Confession-- Prayer-- Religion holds that spiritual work is really effected in prayer-- Three degrees of opinion as to what is effected-- First degree-- Second degree-- Third degree-- Automatisms, their frequency among religious leaders-- Jewish cases-- Mohammed-- Joseph Smith-- Religion and the subconscious region in general.
LECTURE XX CONCLUSIONS Summary of religious characteristics-- Men's religions need not be identical-- "The science of religions" can only suggest, not proclaims a religious creed-- Is religion a "survival" of primitive thought?-- Modern science rules out the concept of personality-- Anthropomorphism and belief in the personal characterized pre-scientific thought-- Personal forces are real, in spite of this-- Scientific objects are abstractions, only individualized experiences are concrete-- Religion holds by the concrete-- Primarily religion is a biological reaction-- Its simplest terms are an uneasiness and a deliverance; description of the deliverance-- Question of the reality of the higher power-- The author's hypotheses: 1. The subconscious self as intermediating between nature and the higher region-- 2. The higher region, or "God"-- 3. He produces real effects in nature.
POSTSCRIPT Philosophic position of the present work defined as piecemeal supernaturalism-- Criticism of universalistic supernaturalism-- Different principles must occasion differences in fact-- What differences in fact can God's existence occasion?-- The question of immortality-- Question of God's uniqueness and infinity: religious experience does not settle this question in the affirmative-- The pluralistic hypothesis is more conformed to common sense.
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 501-509, 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