Review by Edward Tanguay January 20, 1996

"Why does man go out to look for a God? . . . It is your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it for something external." --Swami Vivekananda

I've always been attracted to people with strong religious experiences as is they were doors to hidden but powerful and fantastic worlds. They are players in this world that we see, but they have nailed their souls to another unseen world and follow the commandments which come from this realm. They do this because they have personally experienced and communicted with these worlds. These are the people who William James is also interested in.

James is not interested in churchs and their functions or in relgion at all. He is interested in personal relgious experience. He's interested in you in your room alone crying because you feel there is a God and you don't know him; he's interested in the person who starves himself because he's ashamed of being human; he's interested in those who don't go to church anymore because they feel it is blocking their relationship with God; he is interested in people who FEEL religion, who feel that there is something wrong with us, with mankind, and who sense a purer spiritual and moral plane towards which we can strive. Like all pragmatists, he's interested originally in experience:

The problem I have set myself is a hard one:  first, to defend . . . 'experience' against 'philosophy' as being the real backbone of the world's religious life . . . and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function." 

For James, logic and philosophy and religious doctrines cannot produce the intensity of feeling which accompanies religious experiences, nor are they convincing as personal experiences can be. James included many examples of people saying phrases like "I don't know what it was but I know it was true." Philosophy can analyze facts but it cannot produce them. Religious experiences produce these "facts" which make people change their lives.

I liked James' distinction of "once born" people and "twice born" people. If you want to know if you are once born or twice born, ask yourself this question:  How do I accept the universe? If the universe is OK to you, you are once-born. The perfect example of the once-born person is Walt Whitman:

When I first knew him, I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absense or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibitied fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it.

However, if you feel there is something inherently wrong with the universe, if you feel that something is terribly amiss with the way things are and must be rectified, then you are twice-born. These are the sick souls of the world, those with a demeanor of natural pessimism:

There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.

. . . and their life outlook often resembles this poignant analogy:

Mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. (!)

But both once-born and twice-born people have intense religious experiences. Whitman is often refered to as a new Jesus of sorts, and the whole once-born Transcendental movement in the 19th century with Emerson and his undying optimism on the forefront cannot be ignored as being religious at its core. The only difference is that the once-borners don't need another world to praise and exalt--THIS one is fantastic, and wholesome, and healthy. The twice-borners, on the other hand, reject this one and need another world to praise and exalt. Jesus started us all of on this mind set. He condemed this life and praised the next.

You have to love James' innocent, unfettered pragmatism. He judges relgious experiences by their usefulness. He judges relgion by "the absolute value it adds to human life". Even our Gods of old must be renewed, as they are no longer useful to us:

What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented.

Saintliness is also dragged out into the pragmatic examination room and exposed: purity, nonselfishness, poverty, devoutness, fanaticism, renunciation of complication, . . . is it useful? James suggests that some of it is and some of it isn't, but just the fact that you are a saint doesn't automatically make you a better person. James analyses:

Early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the Xaviers, Brebeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way for the world's welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin's head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. (!)

On the positive side, James recognizes saints as torch bearers for future societies in that they are the ones "in their charitable fever" who are bold enough to love when fighting is called for, for instance. This helps societies to socially evolve to be fairer and more tolerant institutions.

When the religious experience is exalted as the most important part of relgion, then those who are mentally unstable may be some or our truest saints. "The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down." James praises the religious experience and therefore has to let in the fact that many people who have religious experiences are not entirely normal, in fact, it is more often the case that they are not, as Maudsely points out:

What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.  It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective--if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic."

And if lunatics in their madness can contribute insights into the religious sphere, why not the heightening effects of alcohol?

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.

In any case, we don't want to be reduced to the physical. We don't just want to live like a dog and then die some day. The once-born praise this life and the twice-born the next, but we all feel a need to react strongly to this thing called life. Religion is man's total reaction upon life.

Men will inevitably intellectualize their religious experiences and, based on the relgious experiences that they have had, tell you about how reality really is constituted. That God or the world is this way or that, I expect to hear from everybody, but to know someone and talk to someone who truly has personal religious experiences, that is a beautiful thing.

That reason is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.

* * *

This is a book to send your thoughts in all directions. It's not just about religion but about psychology and about life. The mark of a great book is that it gives us new definitions, new ways of interpreting our world. Another mark of a great book is that it starts off questions in your head. Here are some of mine:

Is religion fully explainable by psychology? Or is religion a characteristic of mankind that needs to be understood in terms of faith and our feelings?

Given the ontological blurriness of religion (is God really, really there?), what is the nature of prayer? When we pray, what is being transacted? What is happening?

Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? This sentence from James rings in my mind "From the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded."

Will religion die out? Will religion melt into psychology?  Will religion be made uninteresting by science?

What is religion over and above morality?

* * *

Well, I have to agree that this is the most influential book written on religion in the twentieth century (I don't know of a better one at least). James healthy dose of examples were one of the best points of this book, I remember them the most. This book has definately widened my concept of religion.

If he proves himself useful, the religious conscieusness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

Edward Tanguay

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