LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this

desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of

receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of

European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not

a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from

Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or

literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to

cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were

visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the

Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans

listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure

it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.

Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American

imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of

this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.

Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the

first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe‐

struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s

class‐room therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first

philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was

immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of

reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self

promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official

here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries

with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that

it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic

obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say

only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to

run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go

by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the

Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the

United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher

matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament,

as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English

speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.

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As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this

lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the

history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch

of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the

religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other

of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem,

therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to

invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.

If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather

religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must

confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in

literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works

of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of

a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its...

LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

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 in later portions of this course,

and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.

Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one

another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any

single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The

theorizing mind tends always to the over‐simplification of its materials.

This is the root of all that absolutism and one‐sided dogmatism by which

both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall

immediately into a one‐sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit

freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many

characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we

should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might

tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an

army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it

would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these

things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at

another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles

himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying

an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would

naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a

thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a

conception equally complex?(9)

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Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so

many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.

In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the

authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to

the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others

connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling

of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of

themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific

thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious

sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious

objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains

nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious

fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But

religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a

religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so

to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion

of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic

thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only

this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations;

and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play

in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of

a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course

are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but

there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to

exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in

every religious experience without exception.

As there thus seems to be no one elementary...

LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and

most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief

that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in

harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment

are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call

your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an

attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our

attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due

to the “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to

exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may

be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In

either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to

things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to

sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may

make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently

more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of

making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is

based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a

weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.

The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they

worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for

example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of

their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by

way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force

of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine

personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in

general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in

the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.

But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,

religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.

God’s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his

absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri‐unity, the various

mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,

etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian

believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible

images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all

religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation

of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and

abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the

believer’s subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.

Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,

the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.

These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our

conceptions always require a sense‐content to work with, and as the words

“soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense‐content whatever,

it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any

significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our

practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;

consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as

if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a

genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_...

Note: Lectures 4 & 5 are combined in the text; this is approximately half of that combined chapter.

“Philosopher and psychologist William James championed the value of individual experience with an eloquence and zeal that places him beside Emerson and Whitman as a classic exponent of American democratic culture. Regarded by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as “a milestone in religious thought,” The Varieties of Religious Experience takes on “the very inner citadel of human life” by focusing on intensely religious individuals from different cultures and eras, in order to explore from within how religion enriches human lives.” — Library of America

Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete

accounts of experience with the mind cure religion. I have many answers

from correspondents the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I

shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as

follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power,

by which all mind cure disciples are inspired.

"The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or

depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine

Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in

serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene, 'I and my

Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing.

This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for

wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine

union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on

this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific

Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the

consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?

"This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been

abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a

record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and

lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they

are to day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was

dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I

have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a

vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a

moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly

with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For

how can a conscious part of Deity be sick? since 'Greater is he

that is with us than all that can strive against us.' "

My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement,

"Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking

down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous

prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of

insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the

digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of

doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed

up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never

recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.

"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) with that essence of

life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost

unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually , that

is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest

consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination

from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and

invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that

to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence

of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the

objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have

engrossed you without.

"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily

health as such , because that comes of itself, as an incidental

result, and cannot be found by...