by a curse nor a jest.”

James is still not quite satisfied, however, with his characterization of the religious attitude, for it does not clearly distinguish the religious attitude from what might be called the purely moral, such as the stoic attitude. The solemn and serious reaction and attitude of the religious person is distinguished by an element of joy or happiness. It is not a simple joy that results from a person’s being liberated from oppressive moods; it is a solemn joy, or happiness, that embraces within it the negative, or tragic, side of life and holds it in check. The religious reaction and attitude, which is the subject of these lectures, as a consequence, has a depth and strength that is lacking in the purely moral.

After delimiting the kind of experiences with which he is concerned in his study, James turns to the testimony concerning concrete religious experiences, and this occupies the bulk of his lectures. The amount, as well as the variety, of the testimony that he has collected is phenomenal and any summary will appear a lifeless skeleton compared to the richness of his concrete cases and his own colorful commentary. In this main section, however, James is primarily concerned with reporting what religious persons concretely describe, not with an evaluation of the experiences. These experiences by and large involve a sense of an unseen reality—that is, a reality that is not present to the special and particular senses—yet these experiences are as convincing to the person who has them as any direct sensible experience can be. In fact, one could say, James tells us, that “the life of religion . . . consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” It is with this sense of the unseen and the variety of reactions to it that James is concerned here, not with the various ways in which the unseen has been conceptualized. The latter are creedal and theological, and, consequently, primarily institutional concerns. His concern is with the concrete personal experiences, including the reactions of the person having the experience. In addition to the solemnity, seriousness, and joy that he sees characterizing these experiences in general, James finds a variety of reactions—and consequently, “varieties of religious experience.”

It is an underlying thesis of these lectures that this variety of reactions to the divine, and consequently, the varieties of religious experience, is due to the varieties of human personality. The solemn joy of which we spoke earlier will exemplify a continuum of responses depending, for example, on how sanguine or somber the personality of the person experiencing is. For the two extremes here, the more optimistic one and the more pessimistic one, James coined the colorful phrases “the healthy-minded” (“the once born”) and “the sick soul” (“the twice born”). Either extreme can be quasi-pathological, he tells us; but it is the extremes that interest James for, as was mentioned earlier, there one can see the religious reactions enlarged.

The healthy-minded, or optimistic, response can be either immediate and involuntary, or systematic and voluntary. In either case, the person looks on all things, finds them good, and refuses to admit their badness or ignores their presence. “The sanguine and healthy-minded,” he writes, “live on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy [the sick souls] live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.” He includes among his collection of reports of the sick souls, experiences of the vanity of all mortal things, a very deep sense of sin, and a general panic fear of the universe. To the sick soul, the healthy-minded appears blind and shallow; to the healthy-minded, the sick soul appears unmanly and diseased. It is only natural to expect these two extreme types of personality to react to the presence of the divine in quite different ways.

Having already suggested that the sick soul perhaps has a deeper sensitivity to evil in the universe and, as a consequence, perhaps a deeper religious insight, James devotes three lectures to the “divided self” and the process of its unification and conversion, summarizing and quoting from the testimonies concerning these experiences and loosely classifying them in terms such as “sudden” or “prolonged” and “unconscious and involuntary” or “conscious and voluntary.” From the wealth of testimony, James finds three general characteristics of the converted state: The first is the loss of all worry, the sense that ultimately all is well with one, and a willingness to be, even though outer conditions may remain the same; the second is the sense of perceiving truths that one did not know before; and the third is that the world itself appears to undergo an objective change, a newness seems to beautify every object. The converted state is almost the precise opposite of the state of “the sick soul” or “the divided self.”

In the fact that James devotes three lectures to saintliness and two more to the value of saintliness one can observe something of James’s pragmatic interest in religious experience. He has told us that immediate luminousness, or philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness were the only relevant criteria of evaluation. Saintliness, the “fruits of genuine religion,” and frequently the fruit of conversion, provides the factor in religious experience for the application of the “moral helpfulness” criterion to religious experience. Consequently, saintliness is very important for James in evaluating religious experience, and he devotes five lectures just to this one topic, by far the most allotted to any one topic in the series. In examining the lives of the conventional religious saints, James finds that the saintly characteristics are frequently taken to excess, excesses of devotion, purity, charity, and asceticism. These excesses, however, are, he thinks, the result of an imbalance within the individual due to a weakness of the intellect.

James now turns to the possible data for the other criterion of evaluation of religious experience, namely, immediate luminousness, or philosophical reasonableness, and he devotes two lectures to mystical experiences and one to religious philosophy. James lists four marks for what he takes as mystical states: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity. By their very nature, these experiences, James concludes, are invulnerable: The mystic has been there, the nonmystic has not. By virtue of this same fact, however, the experiences can have no authority over the nonmystic. What these experiences can do is to offer us a hypothesis of another world or of a wider world than is given to us in sensation. However, James then points out, the religious experiences of the nonmystic also offer us such a hypothesis. Consequently, mystical experiences offer us no more for the application of the criterion of philosophical reasonableness than religious experience in general does.

What James appears to mean by “religious philosophy” is a philosophical attempt to prove or to justify religious belief by some form of coercive argument. Here James is probably more emphatic than at any other point in his series of lectures: “We must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.” The history of the apparent failure of this attempt is perhaps now well known. Before giving us, however, his own conclusions concerning the evaluation of this vast testimony concerning the phenomenon of religious experience, James treats in one lecture a number of more minor elements in religious experiences, such as aesthetic elements, sacrifice, confession, prayer, and automatism.

As James looks at the reports of religious experiences of the previous lectures, he finds them containing three general beliefs and two psychological characteristics. The beliefs are: (1) that the visible world is a part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; (2) that union, or harmonious relations, with that higher universe is our true end; and (3) that prayer or communion with the spirit thereof is a process in which spiritual energy produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. The two psychological characteristics are: (1) a new zest that adds itself like a gift to life; and (2) an assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affection.

Before evaluating these beliefs and psychological characteristics, James considers the position that religion, from the standpoint of modern science, is an anachronism because of its concern with personal destiny and the preponderance of feeling involved. He rejects this thesis on the grounds that it is precisely here that we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. “Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

As suggested earlier, the psychological characteristics are evaluated on the basis of their moral helpfulness; but James here raises the question of the objective “truth” of the religious beliefs, the philosophical problem of evaluation. They must at least, he suggests, be in harmony with our scientific beliefs and not conflict with them. This James finds to be the case with these three general religious beliefs in their above vague formulation. He takes the existence of such a spiritual universe to be a hypothesis evoked to explain the religious effects, particularly the above two psychological characteristics. Here he falls back on what he calls “the instinctive belief of mankind,” that something is real if it has real effects. To be a good hypothesis, however, the beliefs must be spelled out and related to facts other than the ones the hypothesis is invoked to explain. It is in the spelling out of the religious hypothesis in more specific ways, which he terms “over-beliefs,” that we find the religious beliefs frequently conflicting with each other and with our accepted scientific beliefs.