The Varieties of Religious Experience - Lecture 3: The Reality of the Unseen

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, or 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.[21] 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.

[21] Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the
passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his
distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that
requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so
much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and
its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its
effect on us." Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H.
Hare.

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 these unintelligible objects actually exist
proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant
calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of
WHAT they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive
them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind
believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things
of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to
express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth
part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of
human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in
its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so
strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized
through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the
thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite
description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It
is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative
faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner
capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals
of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it
might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies.
Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the
agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their
presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely
aware through every fibre of its being.

It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have
this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent
articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with
them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from
Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of
concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a
transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher
universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time,
space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract
and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak
through all things good, strong, significant, and just.

Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all
our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of.
They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing.
Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of
these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are
bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by
their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with
helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental
objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of
classification and conception.

This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the
cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us
as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold
them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete
beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they
inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human
feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been
known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for
example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which
the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing
beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the
often quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other
Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from
fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions,
until from fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty,
and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is."[22] In our last
lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like
Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral
structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those
various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the
world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of
the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object.
"Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion.
Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as
objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of
Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were
only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of
abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart--the
sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as
even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the
breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these
phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.[23]

[22] Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.

[23] Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect
she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman
weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is."
B. de St. Pierre.

As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion
something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness
a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of
what we may call "something there," more deep and more general than any
of the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were
so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as
they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but
anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it,
would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of
sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to
touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of
criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be
almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in
point of WHATNESS, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to
be.

The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated
sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It
often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the
person affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely
localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic
sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet
neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual
"sensible" ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to
the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned.

An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has
had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response
to my inquiries:--{59}

"I have several times within the past few years felt the so- called
'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in mind
are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I
have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also
call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the difference for me
between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference
between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and
standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses
alert.

"It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the
previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in
College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm,
which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense
of presence properly so called came on the next night. After I had got
into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the
previous night's experience, when suddenly I FELT something come into
the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two.
I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a
horribly unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirred
something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception.
The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital
pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism--and yet
the feeling was not PAIN so much as ABHORRENCE. At all events,
something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely
than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I
was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost
instantaneously swift going through the door, and the 'horrible
sensation' disappeared.

"On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some
lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when
I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the COMING) of the
thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.'
I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if
it was evil to depart, if it was NOT evil, to tell me who or what it
was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel
it {60} to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly
recovered its normal state.

"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same
'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In
all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there
stood SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty
of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living
people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than
any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so
to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't
recognize it as any individual being or person."

Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the
religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same
correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had
the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness,
only then it was filled with a quality of joy.

"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in
the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable
good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or
scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close
presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory
persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a
dream, but not that."

My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it
would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation
of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we
shall have much more to say upon this head.

Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will
venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter,
merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of
fact. In the first case, which I {61} take from the Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a
few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination--but I leave
that part of the story out.

"I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was
thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and for
the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly without a
moment's warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of
tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily
imagined by those who had never experienced it, that another being or
presence was not only in the room, but quite close to me. I put my
book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite
collected, and not conscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my
position, and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my
friend A. H. was standing at my left elbow but so far behind me as to
be hidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes
round slightly without otherwise changing my position, the lower
portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized the
gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared
semitransparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"[24]--
and hereupon the visual hallucination came.

[24] Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.

Another informant writes:--

"Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had been
aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into
the house.... I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and
immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and
singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a live person, but
of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell
you the facts as they occurred to me. I do not know how to better
describe my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a
consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I felt also at the same time
a strong feeling of superstitious dread, as if something strange and
fearful were about to happen."[25]

[25] E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.

Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a
friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary
writing:--

"Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is
not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of a
foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so definitely
characterized that I could point to its exact position. This
impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies in
intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom the
writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel it
immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems to recognize
it."

In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case
of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure
of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing
himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the
room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is
an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal
visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is
positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in
this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception
rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly
attached to it--in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized
IDEA.

Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for
quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing
of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty
problem--nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the
muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating
themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or
"made our flesh creep"--our senses are what do so oftenest--might then
appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But
with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our
interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.

Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has
its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by
which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears
complaint:--

"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident
upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the
catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself
surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself,
and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange
feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and
suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will
be, 'I have been dreaming.'"[26]

[26] Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66.

In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of
the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to
suicide.

We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious
sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess
the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which
their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of
quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the
real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates
between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring
this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed
immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one,
deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from
an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his
religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of
reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual
operation properly so-called.

"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic
and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite
consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute
Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure
Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my
childish prayers to God, and never prayed to IT in a formal manner, yet
my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to IT
which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any
trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either
domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in
spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall
back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to
this fundamental cosmical IT. It was on my side, or I was on Its side,
however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always
strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its
underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing
fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I
instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me
out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it,
because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me,
and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail
to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when
sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make
connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at night in
bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry. I turned
this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar
sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be
close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support,
but there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of IT: I
couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of
getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to
confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and {65} indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the
orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of
as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own
instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy,
but whom somehow I have lost."

Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way
in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as
alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of
particular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct
perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and
overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell
Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of
this kind:--

"I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and
happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said,
I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me
on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up
before me like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before
so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around rue. The whole room
seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the
presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and
clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I
have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and
then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur."[27]

[27] Letters of Lowell, i. 75.

{66} Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript
collection:--

"I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where
my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a
rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was
deep calling unto deep--the deep that my own struggle had opened up
within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond
the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty
of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not
seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The
ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but
an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossible fully to
describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great
orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling
harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his
soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion.
The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn
silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt
because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was
there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the
less real of the two.

"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me.
I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round
about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of
the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God,
and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden
change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception,
had, as it were burst into flower. There was no destruction of the
old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion
that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence has been able to
shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have
never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his
existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision in the memory of that
supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and
reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God.
I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not enough
acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any other charge.
I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather than
put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described
it as carefully as I now am able to do."

Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the
writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.[28]

[28] I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich
collection of psychological documents.

"I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in
good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet.
I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was
equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was
subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide,
and there was not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should
follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it
a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of
being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God--I tell of the
thing just as I was conscious of it--as if his goodness and his power
were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent
that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I
then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes
overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he
had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both
on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged
him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his
will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day
to day in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be
judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more
conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I
felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I
was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed
by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for
several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions
to see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes,
although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited
for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five
or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can remember, they
said that I had kept them back for about half an hour. The impression
had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself
if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate
communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of
mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the
feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate
localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed
by the presence of a SPIRITUAL SPIRIT. But the more I seek words to
express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of
describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the
expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present,
though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my
consciousness perceived him."

The adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often. to states
that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the
last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later
lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged
record of another mystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind
evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck's
collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man
well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The
suddenness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's
presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up
in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when in Germany, after
being talked to by Christian friends, she read the Bible and prayed,
and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream of
light.

{69} "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with
religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my Father's
cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition.

I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my
Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me,' answered my
God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my
Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single
question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good
enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought
of his church, or ... to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied!
I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not
love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I
might enter? ... Since then I have had direct answers to prayer--so
significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his
answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."

Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven,
in which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less
vividly described:--

"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of
intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and
unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration
of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life....
Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a
gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean
that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I
could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on
the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was
on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors.

What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity,
accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper
significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this
that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed
communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this
would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence."

Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence
the following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection
may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine--probably
thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical
account.

"God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel
his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with
his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or
rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly
describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and
praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and
again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must
have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions.
Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his
love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of
instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties,
etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding
joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless,
trackless waste."

I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.
They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection, and their number
might be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty-seven
years old:--

"God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers.
Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining come to
my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over a year ago
I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the trouble first
appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two or three hours) I
could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture: 'My grace is sufficient
for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear
this quotation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or
had him drop out of my consciousness. God has frequently stepped into
my affairs very perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little
details all the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered
ways for me very contrary to my ambitions and plans."

Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so
decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:--

"Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and
before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me, singing
and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel as if I could
sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When I am
taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to get with him and generally
feel his presence."

I let a few other cases follow at random:--

"God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me
than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my
being."--

"There are times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk
with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and
overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There are
times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault."--

"I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing,
which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining
arms."

Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the
convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are
realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an
hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the
vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which
each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has
notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when
his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents
her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him
through and through. I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings
of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are
as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences
can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results
established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without
them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any
marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly,
the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine
perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no
adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from
your belief.

The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of
as RATIONALISM. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought
ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds,
for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable
abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite
hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically
drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the
rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid
intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of
it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result.

Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on
the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and
science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to
confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is
relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige
undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs,
and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to
convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are
opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come
from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which
rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses,
your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises,
of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and
something in you absolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than
any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may
contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding
belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when
it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's
existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so
overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in
libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to
believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God
may be, we KNOW to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor
of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our
great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this
we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to
ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion
that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than
that Being.

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate
reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of
reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.
Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great
world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic
philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets
up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized
philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned
and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument
is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but
follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the
fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never
so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.

Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is BETTER that
the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the
religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do
so hold it as a matter of fact.

So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me
now say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically
awaken.

We have already agreed that they are SOLEMN; and we have seen reason to
think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may
result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense of the
kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with
determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon
is more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of
the subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn.
The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives
voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none
the less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore
tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes
secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter
state of things, being the more complex, is also the more complete; and
as we proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason for refusing to
leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religion
with the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in the completest
possible terms, a man's religion involves both moods of contraction and
moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative mixture and
order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from one
system of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may
insist either on the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the
freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remain materially
within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the
constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite
aspects of what lies before their eyes.

The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his
religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air
about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. It were
sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into
twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the
imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the
hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence
of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its
author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?--deeper
than hell; what canst thou know?" There is an astringent relish about
the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for
them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious
joy.

"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which
the intellect of man can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT everywhere. This is
the burden of every verse, and is the secret if there be one, of the
poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more.... God is
great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if
we possess our souls in patience, we MAY pass the valley of the shadow,
and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not! ... What more
have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand
five hundred years ago?"[29]

[29] Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.

If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that
deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether
overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions
that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to
leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different
from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude
might be called religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice
or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any
"habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,[30]
"is worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks that our
Music, our Science, and our so-called "Civilization," as these things
are now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine
religions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way
in which we feel that we must inflict our civilization upon "lower"
races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much
as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its religion by the sword.

[30] In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d
edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122.

In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr.
Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious
exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. I quoted
this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our
scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It
is far too complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly that
we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.