174 Science Religion and Reality 



and nature issue forth from the enclosed mass of their infinity 

 which weighed upon us from without. We shall see them draw 

 near to us to give warmth to our souls. Let us put arbitrary con- 

 structions on one side. It is of no use to talk of a thing within us 

 or of a spirit within us. Reality exists in our integral experience, 

 of which God, the soul, and the world are indivisible aspects. God 

 and the world are complete ab aeterno outside ourselves, but live 

 and are transformed with us, and with us rise to higher levels of 

 truth and harmony. Our thought is not the passive reflection of 

 reality in its stereotyped nature, but an active elevation of it to a 

 higher form ; for the world is not, as intellectualism thought, 

 already pruned into a definite shape, already arranged in a change- 

 less design with perfect harmony, but is always on the road to 

 completion and to harmony along the conflicts and active ex- 

 periences of the difficult and ever-open road of history. James 

 calls us back from intellectualism to the experience which we have 

 lived, and which is not constituted entirely of clearly distinguished 

 parts which we can distinguish by means of representations and 

 concepts from those parts which, isolated from the remainder, go 

 to make up the common world of science. It is a dynamic con- 

 tinuity in which these clearer phenomena are immersed as in a 

 stream, of which the beginning and the end fall away into the 

 darkness of the sub-consciousness. There is no separation between 

 the one state and the other, but merely an imperceptible passage. 

 Thus our personality which can be clearly grasped lives in con- 

 tinuity with a more vast, obscure life of which it has direct 

 experience. This feeling of living contact by which the spirit 

 attains peace and energy, this communion with a more extensive 

 Ego from which we feel that salvation and liberation come to us, 

 is, according to James, the essence of religion. The rest — rites, 

 dogmas, intellectual representations — are an accessory super- 

 structure. 



The mysticism of James, although distinguished from tradi- 

 tional mysticism by its dynamic character, according to which 

 participation in the more vast subconscious life is not static union 

 but energetic activity, does not escape the defect of subjectivism. 

 It might be remarked against the old mysticism that the soul of the 

 mystic experienced what he described, and it could also be admitted. 

 But it is one thing to say " I have had these subjective experi- 

 ences," and another to assert that they are brought about by a real 



