two orders of inquiry concerning anything. LOCATION: 126
what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? LOCATION: 127
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? LOCATION: 127
The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. LOCATION: 128
The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. LOCATION: 128
the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem. LOCATION: 143
ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. LOCATION: 153
We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever LOCATION: 156
first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. LOCATION: 190
“I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. LOCATION: 193
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. LOCATION: 193
M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” LOCATION: 197
Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks. LOCATION: 202
It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther’s wish to marry a nun:—the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. LOCATION: 213
Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. LOCATION: 219
God’s Breath in Man is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris), and in certain non-Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration. LOCATION: 233
The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. LOCATION: 236
Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. LOCATION: 237
One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:—but LOCATION: 238
What immediately feels most “good” is not always most “true,” when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. LOCATION: 290
it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness.”[3] LOCATION: 303
religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. LOCATION: 315
Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. LOCATION: 317
In other words, not its origin, but THE WAY IN WHICH IT WORKS ON THE WHOLE, is Dr. Maudsley’s final test of a belief. LOCATION: 338
By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. LOCATION: 344
The ROOTS of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians. LOCATION: 345
The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.” LOCATION: 349
certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. LOCATION: 376
“What shall I think of it?” a common person says to himself about a vexed question; but in a “cranky” mind “What must I do about it?” is the form the question tends to take. LOCATION: 382
Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of association by similarity. LOCATION: 392
In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. LOCATION: 404
What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? LOCATION: 406
If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. LOCATION: 410
the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. LOCATION: 418
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. LOCATION: 424
As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling PLUS a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; LOCATION: 438
there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception. LOCATION: 439
a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, LOCATION: 441
personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete. LOCATION: 470
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us THE FEELINGS, ACTS, AND EXPERIENCES OF INDIVIDUAL MEN IN THEIR SOLITUDE, SO FAR AS THEY APPREHEND THEMSELVES TO STAND IN RELATION TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER THE DIVINE. LOCATION: 478
Such is the Emersonian religion. The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. LOCATION: 506
The sentences in which Emerson, to the very end, gave utterance to this faith are as fine as anything in literature: “If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”[11] [11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186. LOCATION: 511
We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds “religions”; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to “what he considers the divine,” we must interpret the term “divine” very broadly, as denoting any object that is god- LIKE, whether it be a concrete deity or not. LOCATION: 519
For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. LOCATION: 524
Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man’s religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to be the LOCATION: 526
primal truth. LOCATION: 527
Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? LOCATION: 528
Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses. LOCATION: 528
For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a SERIOUS state of mind. LOCATION: 563
It is precisely as being SOLEMN experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. LOCATION: 574
The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. LOCATION: 576
Hesitation as to whether a state of mind is “religious,” or “irreligious,” or “moral,” or “philosophical,” is only likely to arise when the state of mind is weakly characterized, LOCATION: 583
we learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. LOCATION: 586
The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme. LOCATION: 587
the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. LOCATION: 606
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. LOCATION: 613
The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the Christian God is there to be loved; LOCATION: 623
How much more active and positive the impulse of the Christian writer to accept his place in the universe is! Marcus Aurelius agrees TO the scheme—the German theologian agrees WITH it. He literally ABOUNDS in agreement, he runs out to embrace the divine decrees. LOCATION: 646
The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. LOCATION: 661
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain. LOCATION: 666
Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well—morality suffices. LOCATION: 678
death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not. LOCATION: 684
There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. LOCATION: 687
Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste. LOCATION: 696
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. LOCATION: 698
A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. LOCATION: 706
A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent. LOCATION: 707
religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. LOCATION: 718
religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, LOCATION: 719
the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. LOCATION: 724
in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. LOCATION: 744
Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; LOCATION: 747
if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. LOCATION: 747
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. LOCATION: 754
“objects” of our consciousness, LOCATION: 758
the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. LOCATION: 758
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. LOCATION: 765
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. LOCATION: 767
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. LOCATION: 776
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. LOCATION: 779
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. LOCATION: 781
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. LOCATION: 783
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. LOCATION: 796
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. LOCATION: 797
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. LOCATION: 802
“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. LOCATION: 818
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. LOCATION: 824
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. LOCATION: 884
the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. LOCATION: 886
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. LOCATION: 915
“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. LOCATION: 930
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. LOCATION: 935
awe mingled with a delicious restfulness LOCATION: 993
Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.” LOCATION: 997
“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.”— LOCATION: 1008
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. LOCATION: 1016
The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as RATIONALISM. LOCATION: 1021
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. LOCATION: 1022
If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. LOCATION: 1029
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. LOCATION: 1030
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. LOCATION: 1039
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. LOCATION: 1040
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. LOCATION: 1041
The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. LOCATION: 1042
Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. LOCATION: 1043
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. LOCATION: 1045
The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes. LOCATION: 1058
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. LOCATION: 1059
Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. LOCATION: 1069
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. LOCATION: 1069
J. R. Seeley,[30] LOCATION: 1073
In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122. LOCATION: 1077
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. LOCATION: 1082
it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. LOCATION: 1090
If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. LOCATION: 1091
It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. LOCATION: 1104
Rousseau LOCATION: 1109
Diderot, LOCATION: 1110
B. de Saint Pierre, LOCATION: 1110
and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type. LOCATION: 1110
They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good. LOCATION: 1111
He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. LOCATION: 1120
Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; LOCATION: 1181
In its involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. LOCATION: 1217
In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. LOCATION: 1218
Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; LOCATION: 1220
happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. LOCATION: 1223
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; LOCATION: 1227
the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. LOCATION: 1352
The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. LOCATION: 1354
defined the word ‘worry’ as fearthought in contradistinction to forethought. LOCATION: 1362
By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. LOCATION: 1389
Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills, he never spends time in asking whether the sick one ‘deserves’ to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the saviour within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well.” LOCATION: 1390
“Suggestion” is only another name for the power of ideas, SO FAR AS THEY PROVE EFFICACIOUS OVER BELIEF AND CONDUCT. LOCATION: 1561
In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. LOCATION: 1591
Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination. He whom Reason leads, according to Spinoza, is led altogether by the influence over his mind of good. Knowledge of evil is an “inadequate” knowledge, fit only for slavish minds. LOCATION: 1773
For it is manifest that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. LOCATION: 1777
The Catholic practice of confession and absolution is in one of its aspects little more than a systematic method of keeping healthy- mindedness on top. LOCATION: 1783
For the godly trust not to their own righteousness. LOCATION: 1799
If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. LOCATION: 1821
On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.[70] LOCATION: 1863
undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this way of feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study. LOCATION: 1866
Recent psychology has found great use for the word “threshold” as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. LOCATION: 1868
Thus we speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. LOCATION: 1869
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other? LOCATION: 1876
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. LOCATION: 1915
life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it. LOCATION: 1930
To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one’s brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. LOCATION: 1934
The fact that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill at all, is what perplexes us; LOCATION: 1936
the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. LOCATION: 1936
We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. LOCATION: 1937
sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. LOCATION: 1944
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. LOCATION: 1945
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. LOCATION: 1951
Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. LOCATION: 1951
Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling. LOCATION: 1954
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, 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, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. LOCATION: 1956
The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. LOCATION: 1963
“Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—”How LOCATION: 1969
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. LOCATION: 1972
The Epicurean said: “Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked with pain; therefore hug the safe shore, and do not tempt the deeper raptures. Avoid disappointment by expecting little, and by aiming low; and above all do not fret.” LOCATION: 1978
The Stoic said: “The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies.” LOCATION: 1980
Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature’s boons. LOCATION: 1981
The Epicurean still awaits results from economy of indulgence and damping of desire. The Stoic hopes for no results, and gives up natural good altogether. LOCATION: 1983
although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul.[75] LOCATION: 1986
They mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man —Epicureanism, which can only by great courtesy be called a religion, showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will. They leave the world in the shape of an unreconciled contradiction, and seek no higher unity. Compared with the complex ecstasies which the supernaturally regenerated Christian may enjoy, or the oriental pantheist indulge in, their receipts for equanimity are expedients which seem almost crude in their simplicity. LOCATION: 1988
passive joylessness and dreariness. discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. {143} Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition. LOCATION: 2010
anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia,” LOCATION: 2012
melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. LOCATION: 2042
Yes, indeed, there is more pain in life than gladness—it is one long agony until the grave. LOCATION: 2061
the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious systems. LOCATION: 2064
there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. LOCATION: 2074
Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not {148} come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves GIFTS—gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always nonlogical and beyond our control. LOCATION: 2080
the practically real world for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues. LOCATION: 2090
One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply. LOCATION: 2126
“The oriental fable of the traveler surprised in the desert by a wild beast is very old. “Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots “The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture. “Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice—I cannot turn my gaze away from them. LOCATION: 2128
What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy? “These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on. LOCATION: 2138
he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice—”and LOCATION: 2148
or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts—which LOCATION: 2149
or manly suicide; LOCATION: 2150
or seeing the mice and dragon and yet weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life. LOCATION: 2150
The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear. LOCATION: 2205
Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much. LOCATION: 2239
To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would {160} at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two. LOCATION: 2243
It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. LOCATION: 2249
even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. LOCATION: 2253
The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. LOCATION: 2256
provisionally, and as a mere matter of program and method, since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope. LOCATION: 2276
The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life. LOCATION: 2279
the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, LOCATION: 2287
In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. LOCATION: 2289
The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution. LOCATION: 2301
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. LOCATION: 2326
The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us—they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. LOCATION: 2342
Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle. LOCATION: 2343
For I was afraid thou wouldst hear me too soon, and heal me at once of my disease of lust, which I wished to satiate rather than to see extinguished. LOCATION: 2371
Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all. LOCATION: 2554
The idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God—these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. LOCATION: 2555
clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. LOCATION: 2575
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. LOCATION: 2595
in these inner alterations one may find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of character lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence we have no premonitory knowledge. LOCATION: 2623
If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each ‘aim’ which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have little in common. LOCATION: 2676
whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.” LOCATION: 2686
the hot place in a man’s consciousness, LOCATION: 2713
THE HABITUAL CENTRE OF HIS PERSONAL ENERGY. LOCATION: 2713
mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent. LOCATION: 2726
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity. LOCATION: 2757