postscript

POSTSCRIPT

In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at

simplification that I fear that my general philosophic position

received so scant a statement as hardly to be intelligible to

some of my readers. I therefore add this epilogue, which must

also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect. In

a later work I may be enabled to state my position more amply and

consequently more clearly.

Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all

the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited

in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately

be classed under a familiar head. If one should make a division

of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists, I should

undoubtedly have to go, along with most philosophers, into the

supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more

refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that

most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular

transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian

direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering

causally in the course of phenomenal events. Refined

supernaturalism is universalistic supernaturalism; for the

\"crasser\" variety \"piecemeal\" supernaturalism would perhaps be

the better name. It went with that older theology which to-day

is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found

among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is

thought to have displaced. It admits miracles and providential

leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the

ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences

from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine

the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists

think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For

them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never

bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The

ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the

meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts. It

appertains to a different \"-ology,\" and inhabits a different

dimension of being altogether from that in which existential

propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of

experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct

portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine

aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.

Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular

Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that

in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and

new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed

among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type.

Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too

easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical science at

their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism

finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad.

It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole,

sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not

be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this

universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of

practical religion seems to me to evaporate. Both instinctively

and for logical reasons, I find it hard to believe that

principles can exist which make no difference in facts.[362] But

all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the

question of God's existence seems to me to lie in the

consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected

to entail. That no concrete particular of experience should alter

its complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an

incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which

(implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling.

It is only with experience en bloc, it says, that the Absolute

maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of

detail.

[362] Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal

world makes THIS difference, that facts EXIST. We owe it to the

Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. \"A world\" of

fact!--that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the

smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our

finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this

world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our

ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no

piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls

compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken

earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world

was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this

blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at

last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever,

who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of

our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the

God of David's psalms!

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely

in order the better to describe my general point of view; but as

I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in

principle with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are

under the judgment of higher law; but for Buddhism as I interpret

it, and for religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by

transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word \"judgment\" here means

no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it

means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on

the contrary, EXECUTION with it, is in rebus as well as post rem.

and operates \"causally\" as partial factor in the total fact. The

universe becomes a gnosticism[363] pure and simple on any other

terms. But this view that judgment and execution go together is

that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the

present volume must on the whole be classed with the other

expressions of that creed.

[363] See my Will to Believe and other Essays in popular

Philosophy. 17, p. 165.

I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought

in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who

must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not

wish to see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so

shocking to the reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a

candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete

discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to be

the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate

requirements are met. That of course would be a program for

other books than this; what I now say sufficiently indicates to

the philosophic reader the place where I belong.

If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to

God's existence come in, I should have to say that in general I

have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of

\"prayerful communion,\" especially when certain kinds of incursion

from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately

suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something

ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another

sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our

centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects

unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of

being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be

forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating

condition of the effects be the openness of the \"subliminal\"

door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of

religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the

importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which

they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it

would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will,

produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the

rest of our experience belongs.

The difference in natural \"fact\" which most of us would assign as

the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make

would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for

the great majority of our own race MEANS immortality, and nothing

else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts

of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther

trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or

the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our

ideals are only cared for in \"eternity,\" I do not see why we

might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than

ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present

ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague

yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me

that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I

think, are yet lacking to prove \"spirit-return,\" though I have

the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers,

Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable

conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this

brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to

why immortality got no mention in the body of this book.

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the

\"God\" of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by

philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical

attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such

disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be \"one and

only\" and to be \"infinite\"; and the notion of many finite gods is

one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and

still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of

intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious

experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as

unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing

that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience

union with SOMETHING larger than ourselves and in that union find

our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and

mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both \"pass to the limit\"

and identify the something with a unique God who is the

all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to

their authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to

me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a

fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is

friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is

that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious

selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to

trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be

solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more

godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the

mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a

collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness,

with no absolute unity realized in it at all.[3] Thus would a

sort of polytheism return upon us--a polytheism which I do not on

this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the

testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper

bounds. [Compare p. 130 above.]

[3] Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human

Immortality, Boston and London, 19.

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism

(which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common

people, and is so still to-day) that unless there be one

all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect.

In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, ALL is saved. If

there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion

of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and

our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It

goes back to what was said on pages 129-131, about the

possibility of there being portions of the universe that may

irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less sweeping in its

demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and

can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly

lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation

of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit

does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a

most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only

difficulty being to determine the details. Some men are even

disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant

as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that

their cause will prevail--all of us are willing, whenever our

activity-excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact,

that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the

pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been

willing to consider it. For practical life at any rate, the

CHANCE of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more

characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The

existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney

says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a

life of which the keynote is hope.[365] But all these statements

are unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I

hope to return to the same questions in another book.

[365] Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.

WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910)

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF \"THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE\"

The road by which William James arrived at his position of

leadership among American philosophers was, during his childhood,

youth and early maturity, quite as circuitous and unpredictable

as were his father's ideas on the training of his children. That

Swedenborgian theologian foresaw neither the career of novelist

for his son Henry, nor that of pragmatist philosopher for the

older William. The father's migrations between New York, Europe

and Newport meant that William's education had variety if it did

not have fixed direction. From 13 to 18 he studied in Europe and

returned to Newport, Rhode Island, to study painting under the

guidance of John La Farge. After a year, he gave up art for

science and entered Harvard University, where his most

influential teachers were Louis Agassiz and Charles W. Eliot.

In 1863, William James began the study of medicine, and in 1865

he joined an expedition to the Amazon. Before long, he wrote:

\"If there is anything I hate, it is collecting.\" His studies

constantly interrupted by ill health, James returned to Germany

and began hearing lectures and reading voluminously in

philosophy. He won his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. For

four years he was an invalid in Cambridge, but finally, in 1873,

he passed his gravest physical and spiritual crises and began the

career by which he was to influence so profoundly generations of

American students. From 1880 to 1907 he was successively

assistant professor of philosophy, professor of psychology and

professor of philosophy at Harvard. In 10, the publication of

his Principles of Psycholog brought him the acknowledged

leadership in the field of functional psychology. The selection

of William James to deliver the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh was

at once a tribute to him and a reward for the university that

sponsored the undertaking. These lectures, collected in this

volume, have since become famous as the standard scientific work

on the psychology of the religious impulse. Death ended his

career on August 27th, 1910.

End