Lecture XX by William James Essay

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William James finds that religious experience is useful on the whole, even amongst the most vital mankind's biological operations, but he also says that this does not make it true. Nevertheless, James presents his own belief, which he does not claim to prove, that religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world. The further limits of our being plunge into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world:"Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whatever it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best" (488).



James states that the conclusions of human nature can be reached through spiritual judgements only. He says that the "visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; that union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof, be that spirit God or law, is a process wherein work is really done and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychologically or material within the phenomenal world" (485). When it comes to the individuality of the human nature and whether lives of all men should show identical religious elements, James openly states "No. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties" (487). According to him, every person believes and sees religion from his "peculiar angle of observation" (487) and deals with it on his own unique way.



James explains the presence of an unseen order of some kind in that has the riddles of the natural order. Here, we either have a blind faith in traditional religious answers, or we presume some future state whereby this "unseen world" will be discovered and verified by science. Presently, we might say that these answers are represented by either fundamentalists who dogmatically assert the ultimate truth of their religious beliefs irrespective of evidence, or New Age thinkers who dogmatically assert that science and religion will ultimately be reconciled at some distant time in the future: "Science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith" (489).

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However he also mentions conflicts between science and philosophy that makes it an impossible task to decide: "Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still farr from being completed, but in their present state, we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy inclines" (490).



James rejects both ways of overcoming pessimism. James rejects both belief in the world of the scientist and the "invisible world" invoked by our religious demands as somehow ultimate. However, he suggests that we trust the idea that "a still wider world may be there" as a "maybe," "a mere sign or vision" and then act as if the invisible world thereby suggested was real, enabling us to live in the light of our religious demands. Our very risk of acting "as if" there is an ultimate meaning to life will produce a certainty in our hearts that is denied by the rational mind. Once the horizon of one's life points to something beyond it, one is opened to the possibility of achieving very high states of consciousness that are denied to those who hesitate to act: "The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism....religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact" (491).



According to James,….....

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