July 14, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



39 



lands. It has even received the signal 

 honor of an official papal condemnation. 



For my own part, I have ventured to say 

 elsewhere that the new doctrine, viewed in 

 one aspect, seems to leave religion in the 

 comparatively trivial position of a play 

 with whimsical powers — a prey to endless 

 psychological caprices. But James's own 

 robust faith was that the very caprices of 

 the spirit are the opportunity for the 

 building-up of the highest forms of the 

 spiritual life; that the unconventional and 

 the individual in religious experience are 

 the means whereby the truth of a super- 

 human world may become most manifest. 

 And this robust faith of James, I say, 

 whatever you may think of its merits, is as 

 American in type as it has already proved 

 effective in the expression which James 

 gave to it. It is the spirit of the frontiers- 

 man, of the gold seeker, or the home 

 builder, transferred to the metaphysical 

 and to the religious realm. There is our 

 far-off home, our long-lost spiritual for- 

 tune. Experience alone can guide us to- 

 wards the place where these things are; 

 hence you indeed need experience. You 

 can only win your way on the frontier in 

 ease you are willing to live there. Be, 

 therefore, concrete, be fearless, be experi- 

 mental. But, above all, let not your ab- 

 stract conceptions, even if you call them 

 scientific conceptions, pretend to set any 

 limits to the richness of spiritual grace, to 

 the glories of spiritual possession, that, in 

 case you are duly favored, your personal 

 experience may reveal to you. James 

 reckons that the tribulations with which 

 abstract scientific theories have beset our 

 present age are not to be compared with 

 the glory that perchance shall be, if only 

 we open our eyes to what experience itself 

 has to reveal to us. 



In the quest for the witness to whom 

 James appeals when he tests his religious 



doctrine, he indeed searches the most 

 varied literature; and of course most of 

 the records that he consults belong to for- 

 eign lands. But the book called "The 

 Varieties of Religious Experience" is full 

 of the spirt that, in our country, has long 

 been effective in the formation of new re- 

 ligious sects; and this volume expresses, 

 better than any sectarian could express, 

 the recent efforts of this spirit to come to 

 an understanding with modem naturalism, 

 and with the new psychology. James's 

 view of religious experience is meanwhile 

 at once deliberately unconventional and 

 intensely democratic. The old world types 

 of reverence for the external forms of the 

 church find no place in his pages; but 

 equally foreign to his mind is that barren 

 hostility of the typical European free 

 thinkers for the church with whose tradi- 

 tions they have broken. In James's eyes, 

 the forms, the external organizations of the 

 religious world simply wither; it is the 

 individual that is more and more. And 

 James, with a democratic contempt for so- 

 cial appearances, seeks his religious geni- 

 uses everywhere. World-renowned saints 

 of the historic church receive his hearty 

 sympathy; but they stand upon an equal 

 footing, in his esteem, with many an ob- 

 scure and ignorant revivalist, with faith 

 healers, with poets, with sages, with here- 

 tics, with men that wander about in all 

 sorts of sheepskins and goatskins, with 

 chance correspondents of his own, with 

 whomsoever you will of whom the world 

 was not and is not worthy, but who, by 

 inner experience, have obtained the sub- 

 stance of things hoped for, the evidence of 

 things not seen. 



You see, of course, that I do not believe 

 James's resulting philosophy of religion to 

 be adequate. For as it stands it is indeed 

 chaotic. But I am sure that it can only be 

 amended by taking it up into a larger view, 



