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A Review
of
Lecture II
of
William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience
by Doug Renselle
Doug's Pre-review Commentary
Start of Review


By the
Same
Author
Title
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Copyright
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Dedication
Page
Preface Contents I II III IV, &
V
VI, &
VII
VIII IX X XI,
XII, &
XIII
XIV,
&XV
XVI,
&XVII
XVIII XIX XX Postscript Index
   

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Lecture II...............Circumscription of the Topic

PAGE

QUOTEs
(Most quotes verbatim William James, some paraphrased.)

COMMENTs
(Relevant to Pirsig, William James Sidis, and Quantonics Thinking Modes.)

26

"Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word 'religion' cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we should inquire for the essence of 'government,' for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities"

(Our bold, color, brackets, links, underlines, and violet bold italic problematics.)

James uses European spelling. He hyphenates to-day. He contracts 'not' as n't stand alone! He is profoundly gender biased, however, he often respectfully refers Nature and creation "she." He proliferates some old English, which we must say, we enjoy immensely. He has some enormous footnotes which run most of multiple pages. Strange, indeed. We retain page integrity to best of our abilities from original 1902 copyrighted first edition text. We offer intra text commentary in various ways: highlights, brackets and links according to this -

Our bold and color highlights follow a code:

  • black-bold - important to read if you are just scanning our review
  • orange-bold - text ref'd by index pages
  • green-bold - we see James suggesting axiomatic memes
  • violet-bold - an apparent classical problematic
  • blue-bold - we disagree with this text segment while disregarding context of James' overall text
  • gray-bold - quotable text
  • red-bold - our direct commentary
  • [] - our intra text commentary
  • link - example of what a link looks like (takes you to page top)

Our many Quantonics' local~online references include:

  • Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology
  • Bergson's works
  • Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
  • Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
  • Encyclopedia Britannica
  • EB's Great Books
  • Errol E. Harris' Foundations of Metaphysics in Science
  • Google online (our preferred search engine)
  • James' Some Problems of Philosophy
  • James' Varieties of Religious Experience (text for this review)
  • Language references for French (Crown), German (Mueller), Greek (OXF and Ayers-Worthen), Italian (Google), Latin (Cassell's and Ayers-Worthen-a favorite learning assistant), Spanish (Doubleday), etc.
  • Pirsig's works
  • Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
  • Quantonics Web Site
  • Teachers' and Pupils' Encyclopedia
  • Treasury of Philosophy
  • Volume Library
  • William James Durant's The Story of Philosophy
  • Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of English Language
  • WWW (multiple online access means)

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27

"in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex? 1

"Consider also the 'religious sentiment' which we see referred to in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity [thus making 'religious sentiment' dialectically objective].

"In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors attempting to specify just what entity ['entity' usually is a classical thing, an object] it is. One man allies [alloys] it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling of the infinite; and so on.

[No mention of religionings as quantum cohereings, animate, ever changing, absolutely changing and emerging and growing and blossoming and flowering and absolutely becoming and being interrelationshipings with an ever changing quantum reality. I.e., religionings as quantons.]

Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term 'religious sentiment' as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably ... contains nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature.

[We agree, wholeheartedly. Quantum reality and all its manifestationings are n¤n specific, everywhenings and everywhereings and everyhowings and everywhatings and everywhyings and everywhoings. Only apparently so, i.e., "pschologically specific," to naïvely realistic dialecticians. See our discussions of naïve realism near page top of our Bell Theorem Chautauqua.]

There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of

 

"1I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion, in an article by professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written."

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28

"religious persons. [In other words, religion can distill to simple human sentiment. Our view, n¤t the view, is that usually it does.] As concrete [See our prereview comments on '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; but 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.

"As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act.

"The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly impossible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition against all corners, yet this need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or, out of the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbitrarily that when I say 'religion' I mean that. This, in fact, is what I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the field I choose.

"One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the subject we leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier says [1841-1928, French professor of protestant theology; author of a world famous biography of St Francis of Assisi; Sabatier was a subjectivist which shows James gravitation toward him], one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Students of Quantonics shall re cognize ( REIMAR ) our major partition of topics for our 2003-2004 Chautauqua of societal and individual thence their classical and quantum versions. It is valuable for readers to fathom those partitions' nexi as practiced since about Aristotle vis-à-vis how Robert M. Pirsig suggests we need to change them now. Our Chautauqua, in its first, October, 2003, installment, illustrates that comparison quite well. Doug - 22Jan2005.

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29

"view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.

"Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to wear the general name. 'It is a part of religion,' you will say, 'but only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had better call it man's conscience or morality than his religion. The name 'religion' should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element.'"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice that James quantum~agrees here with Pirsig (and vice versa) that Individual (person) is above Society (institution). It will be interesting to see whether James views this as a major revolution, as Pirsig and we do. Similarly, and importantly, it will be of great interest to see (we believe that James already does) if and how James views Value and 'truth.' I.e., Value above truth (a corollary of Individual above society) and truth above Value (a corollary of insititution above person).

 

Classical institutions cannot even thingk, let alone have feelings, thought, etc. James sees it and Pirsig sees it and we see it: this is why individuals are quantumly above societies and institutions! To have one individual represent an institution and claim to thingk and speak for it, is pure fascism. It removes (we say, "drives out") personal and individual freedom, period. Hitler was a fascist, Mussolini was a fascist, Popes are fascists, Fundamental evangelists are fascists, and so on... They deny and usurp personal and individual freedom. They tell individuals how and what to thingk. One size classical thing-king, theirs, fits all. OGT in OGC. This is why we say, "Beware society. Beware organizations. Beware institutions."

If you sense paradox here, you are entrenched in classicism, SOMiticism!

What you sense is:

dichon(individual_represents_society, individuals_cannot_represent_society).

And then Doug says individuals are above society. How can individuals be above an individual who represents society?

You have omniscovered crux!!! Good for you!

N¤ single individual and n¤ group of individuals (except all of us, only as a quantum coherent ensemble of autonomies) can represent us! (See our recent, 2004, quantum coherence.)

Any government which does not accomplish this quantum feat is n¤t a quantum government. N¤ generalism like society can describe its whole of individuals. Similarly n¤ GUTs and ToEs can describe any omniverse, any multiverse.

Sense this:

quanton(quantum_cohesively_all_individuals_are_s¤ciety,while_each_individual_issi_above_s¤ciety).

We believe James is agreeing with J. S. Mill and Mae-wan Ho. We believe he is saying that n¤ society is above any individual. Individual person issi exceptional, Kuhnian extraordinary, regardless. Any society which disagrees with that statement issi n¤t a quantum society!

So, then, n¤ individual (¤hr sub group) can rule and run society, and when they attempt to do so, they must be admonished.

All individuals must learn to responsibly quanton(isobecome,become) while corespecting themselves in a quantum s¤ciety which worships and believes in individuality! (What "responsibly" means, for Doug, is yet problematic. Our best response here at this juncture is quanton(Haganah,havlagah). For great detail and memeotics on all this please read our six month Feuilleton Chautauqua which commences October, 2003 TQS News.)

Our USA is close, ever so close, but it still uses dialectic and ancient Greco-Roman thought to elect individuals as representatitves. But by direct experience it does not work. That is why anarchism is so favored now. A quantum society from a dialectical conspective is anarchic!

However, from a quantum perspective, there is n¤ anarchy! Rather, there is Mae-wan Ho's quanton(quantum_ensemble_societal_coherence,individual_autonomy)! Wow! By the way, WWW's internet is a deep-playing-field of direct experience of processings very similar to what we are describing here. A great example is how individuals in groups cohere yet globally-individually cowithin group-locally evolve member responsibilities.

Classical
Society
Classical
Individual
Quantum
Ihndihvihdual
Quantum
S¤ciæty

©Quantonics, Inc. 2005-2027 - by Doug Renselle
ScA-SPoVs IcA-SPoVs IqQ-SP¤Vs SqQ-SP¤Vs
indoctrinates truth over value rote totes truth over value lihves Valuæ ¤vær truth pulls Valuæ ¤vær truth
ABSI ABSI IhSBA IhSBA

judgment
hierarchy dialectically teaches:

  1. truth
  2. proof
  3. falsifiability (Popper)
  4. contradiction (Aristotle)
  5. negation (India ~700 ad & China, thence zero: Eastern concept from Fertile Crescent ~200-500 bc)
  6. independence (Parmenides and prior; Aristotle's excluded-middle)
  7. stability

judgment
hierarchy mechanically learns:

  1. truth
  2. proof
  3. falsifiability (Popper)
  4. contradiction (Aristotle)
  5. negation (India ~700 ad & China, thence zero: Eastern concept from Fertile Crescent ~200-500 bc)
  6. independence (Parmenides and prior; Aristotle's excluded-middle)
  7. stability

jihudgmænt
hierarchy curi¤uhsly ass¤ciatæs:

  1. emergent good
  2. dynamic good (Pirsig)
  3. static good (Pirsig)
  4. likelihood (issi quantum positive)
  5. probability (issi quantum positive)
  6. provability (Gödel's metameme of proof)
  7. truth
  8. pr¤¤f
  9. falsihfiabilihty
  10. comtradihcti¤n
  11. nægati¤n (quantum included~middle based on sunyata)
  12. independence
  13. stability

jihudgmænt
hierarchy c¤heræntly gravihdatæs:

  1. emergent good
  2. dynamic good (Pirsig)
  3. static good (Pirsig)
  4. likelihood (issi quantum positive)
  5. probability (issi quantum positive)
  6. provability (Gödel's metameme of proof)
  7. truth
  8. pr¤¤f
  9. falsihfiabilihty
  10. comtradihcti¤n
  11. nægati¤n (quantum included~middle based on sunyata)
  12. independence
  13. stability
dictates society over individual adheres society over individual intuits individual over society reveres individual over society
dogmatizes institution over person abets institution over person respects person over institution complements person over institution
teaches hegemony over freedom learns and practices hegemony over freedom quantum coheres freedom over hegemony gravidates freedom over hegemony
pushes monism over pluralism lives monism over pluralism curiously acquires pluralism over monism
while intuiting quantum coherence above quantum decoherence
pulls pluralism over monism while gravidating quantum coherence above quantum decoherence
opposition over respect opposition over respect respect over opposition respect over opposition

©Quantonics, Inc. 2005-2027 - by Doug Renselle

Classical
Society

Classical
Individual

Quantum
Ihndihvihdual

Quantum
S¤ciæty

30

"But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names. Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion — under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall soon seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word 'religion' to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation to them.

"In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case ; so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.

"There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism and magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically — at least our records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite"

Call it belief. Call it spirit. Call it breath of life.

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31

"apart from the fact that many anthropologists — for instance, Jevons [1835-1882; British subjective valuist] and Frazer [1854-1941; Scottish anthropologist author of The Golden Bough - a text about historical development of human thought; William James Sidis had great interest in and apparently read all 16 volumes] — expressly oppose 'religion' and 'magic' to each other, it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal one again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought and feeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther discussion would not be worth while.

"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. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

"We escape much controversial matter by this arbitrary definition of our field. But, still, a chance of controversy comes up over the word 'divine,' if we take it in the definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic. Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in"

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32

"things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract [thus Platonic] laws was what made the scandal of the performance. [It is not a scandal if we simply admit that we do not know. And we probably will never know as humans and humanity. We can believe without a classical know ledge of a concrete and state-ic, positive deity. To claim to know that which we do not and cannot is at least hypocrisy and potentially worse: sacrilege.]

"'These laws,' said the speaker, 'execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity [a pure dichon(impurity, purity)]. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. [We agree here with some reservations. We think that most religious humans see themselves and God dialectically: dichon(God, humanity). What Emerson appears to be saying is what we already believe and adhere in Quantonics: quanton(God,humanity), i.e., "we are in God and God is in us."] If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. [Unless there is OGT, how does one know this?] Character is always known. [How? What standard? Is culture singular? Homogeneous? Is not culture omniversal? Do one set of laws and mores fit all? Please explain.] Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish [actually, they almost always do via nurtured dependency]; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie — for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance — will instantly vitiate the effect [pure dialectical bilge]. But speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness, For all things proceed out of the same spirit [one spirit fits all: pure dialectical bilge], which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. In so far as he roves from these ends, a man bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries. His being shrinks . . . he becomes less and less, a mote, a point [a classical problematic], until absolute badness [ESQ] is absolute death [this is a classical dialectical and bogus notion]. The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness [certainly, this is a point of view, not the point of view]. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world [Lenin similarly called it an "opiate of one's mind." But then isn't that what "anyone believes" is? We sense James, via Emerson, is selling, marketing, a single homogeneous one size fits all belief system. But James just converted from monism to pluralism at least 30 years prior to his remarks here… Odd.]. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. When he says 'I ought'; when love warns him; when he chooses,'"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emerson is mostly full of bogus dialectical hyperBoolean bilge, here. Doug's opinon...

Who decides what is good and mean? Which goods are good for how long and when and where? Which meannesses are mean when, where, why, how? Is abortion good? Is it mean? Is Bush's declaration of war on Iraq good? Mean?

Anyone who tells anyone else they know "one size fits all" what good is and what mean is and their specific, classical, dialectical H5Ws is a profoundly ignorant locally naïve realist. A SOMite par excellence. See our QQA on ethics and morality.

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33

"warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. [They] [James', possibly Emerson's, brackets.] affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of the olden time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.'1

"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. [Doug views this last sentence as a Jamesian religious description of quantum reality. Note its potent included~middle, and its absolute expression of morality. What is missing in that sentence is a memeo of flux.] But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight. 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."2

"1 Miscellanies, 1868, p. 120 (abridged).

"2 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186."

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34

"Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. 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 godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.

"But the term 'godlike,' if thus treated as a floating general quality, becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is that essentially godlike quality — be it embodied in a concrete deity or not — our relation to which determines our character as religions men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed farther.

"For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. 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, towards what he felt to be the primal truth." [Bilge! Truth is a pure dialectical classical notion. See our QELR of truth.]

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35

"Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. 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 ? 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 every one possesses. This. sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may be, in one sense of the word 'religious,' they yet belong to the general sphere of the religious life, and so should generically be classed as religions reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious Zeal.

"But so very broad a use of the word 'religion' would be inconvenient, however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are trifling, sneering attitudes even towards the whole of life; and in some men these"

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"attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the ordinary use of language too much to call such attitudes religious, even though, from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy, they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon life. Voltaire [1694-1778 French philosopher; prolific writer of over 100 texts; see William James Durant's Story of Philosophy for a good review; Voltaire significantly aligns Quantonics' and Doug's views of reality], for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over."

"Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a valetudinarian [sickly old fart], to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Je m'en fiche is the vulgar French equivalent for our English ejaculation 'Who cares?' And the happy term je m'en fichisme recently has been invented to designate the systematic determination not to take anything in life too solemnly. '[James' distillation of Voltaire is a tad shallow...] All is vanity' is the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite literary genius Renan [1823-1892 French writer; wrote some religious material, mostly Christian] took pleasure, in his later days of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the 'all is vanity' state of mind. Take the following passage, for example, — we must hold to duty, even against the evidence, Renan says, — but he then goes on —

"'There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy pantomime of which no God has care. [Does this remark, for you, make God appear dialectically, objectively separate, as it does for us?] We must therefore arrange ourselves so that on neither hypothesis we shall be'"

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"'completely wrong. [very quantum] We must listen to the superior voices, but in such a way that if the second hypothesis were true we should not have been too completely duped. If in effect the world be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic people who will be the shallow ones, and the worldly minded whom the theologians now call frivolous will be those who are really wise [incredibly sophist and quantum].

"''In utrumque paratus, then. Be ready for anything — that perhaps is wisdom. Give ourselves up, according to the hour, to confidence, to skepticism, to optimism, to irony, and we may be sure that at certain moments at least we shall be with the truth. . . . Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile. We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous; but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal. In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us. Saint Augustine's phrase: Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee! remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling. Only we wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly. We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely.' 1"

[We shall have to read more of Renan. It seems he intuited reality so closely to what quantum reality is to us, yet appears classically strawman 'sophist' to nearly all dialecticians. Doug - 25Jan2005.]

"Surely all the usual associations of the word 'religion' would have to be stripped away if such a systematic parti pris [inclinitive, affective judgment; very quantum; see affectation vis-à-vis cause] of irony were also to be denoted by the name. [Could, would, James mean that quantum reality is irreligious?] For common men 'religion,' whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, 'All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.' If it can stop anything religion as commonly apprehended can stop just such chaffing talk as Renan's. It favors gravity, not pertness; it says 'hush' to all vain chatter and smart wit.

[So James' version of religion is hegemonic, indeed. It does tell others what they can and cannot think. Ugh! This is so ugly. Any 'religion' worth its salt can put its arms around all of reality and all of G¤d's creation, else, for us, 'tis n¤ religion, n¤ religion at all. Seven sins are part of reality, not emergent aspects of any Devil. Even war, however much we disdain it, is part of reality. What James' version of religion wants to eliminate must be emerscitected and emerscentured cowithin reality and reality's creation, similar as Percy Bysshe Shelley said, "...within the hearts of men..." James hegemonous religion, in our view, cannot do that. Our G¤d would laugh at anyone who claimed s-hæ were only serious...J ...our G¤d would say, "Wæ ¤nly æv¤luti¤narily~cræatæd y¤u, wæ d¤ n¤t tæll y¤u H5W t¤ d¤. Iht issi y¤ur duty, y¤ur pr¤blæm, ræsp¤nsibilihty, ¤pp¤rtuhnihty, amd agæncy c¤wihthin uhs t¤ figure that ¤ut wihth ¤ur EIMA ræserve~ænærgy~assistance." Doug's assumptions here include a quantum memeo of, "G¤d issi in us and we are in G¤d," therefore each of us issi quanton(G¤d,G¤d's_c¤mplement_us).]

 

"1 Feuilles détachées, pp. 394-398 (abridged)."

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"But if hostile to light irony [thence hostile to quantum reality...ugh!], religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche [James' spelling.], — and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle, — though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.

"There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose — arbitrarily again, if you please — to narrow our definition once more by saying that the word 'divine,' as employed therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without restriction might well prove too broad. 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. [Ugh!]

"But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted"

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"that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. [Yes!] The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously 'scientific' or 'exact' in our terms would only stamp us as lacking in understanding of our task. Things are more or less divine, states of mind are more or less religious, reactions are more or less total [This appears more quantum, but does he mean ideally EOOO, dialectical?], but the boundaries are always misty [No! 'Misty' hints an included~, even complementary~middle.], and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree [This could just be classically 'fuzzy,' but it can also be quantum.]. Nevertheless, at their extreme of development, there can never be any question as to what experiences are religious. The divinity of the object and the solemnity of the reaction are too well marked for doubt [This is purely classical!]. 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 [Analogously "ill-defined," but that is what "quantum uncertainty" means, isn't it? I.e., 'describable,' while 'indefinable.'], but in that case it will be hardly worthy of our study at all [In our view (our quantonic interpretation) James is saying here that quantum uncertainty is hardly worth our study since it is uncertain.]. With states that can only by courtesy be called religious we need have nothing to do [we shall have nothing to do with quantum uncertainty], our only profitable business being with what nobody can possibly feel tempted to call anything else [we shall deal only with dialectical certainty]. I said in my former lecture that 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 [Are phenomena factual?] as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme [Not quantum uncertain!]. Its fainter [quantum] manifestations we may tranquilly pass by. Here, for example, is the total reaction upon life of Frederick Locker Lampson [1821-1895; Englishman, ill nearly his entire life yet was "gay, not grave"], whose autobiography, entitled 'Confidences,' proves him to have been a most amiable man.

"'I am so far resigned to my lot that I feel small pain at the thought of having to part from what has been called the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of life. I would not"

At this juncture, we are beginning to wonder whether Geertz did a better job of assessing James than we. We are also beginning to wonder whether we should have undertaken this review effort.

We felt similarly, though, at early stages of our reviews of Bergson, Geertz, Kuhn, et al.

But with them all, we do not see purity rather we see mixtures of classical and quantum which for this stage of humanity's development, probably, isn't too bad. It is certainly more real than their being purely classical or purely quantum. What we do see is quanton(quantum,classical), not dichon(quantum, classical). Doug - 25Jan2005.

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"'care to live my wasted life over again, and so to prolong my span. Strange to say, I have but little wish to be younger. I submit with a chill at my heart. I humbly submit because it is the Divine Will, and my appointed destiny [perverse, formal and mechanical classical cause-effect predictability]. I dread the increase of infirmities that will make me a burden to those around me, those dear to me. No! let me slip away as quietly and comfortably as I can. Let the end come, if peace come with it.

"'I do not know that there is a great deal to be said for this world, or our sojourn here upon it; but it has pleased God so to place us, and it must please me also. I ask you, what is human life? Is not it a maimed happiness — care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation, the strange cozenage of a brighter to-morrow? At best it is but a froward [disobedient] child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.' 1

"This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and a graceful state of mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name. But what matters it in the end whether we call such a state of mind religious or not? It is too insignificant for our instruction in any case; and its very possessor wrote it down in terms which he would not have used unless he had been thinking of more energetically religious moods in others, with which he found himself unable to compete. It is with these more energetic states that our sole business lies, and we can perfectly well afford to let the minor notes and the uncertain border go.

"It was the extremer cases that I had in mind a little while ago when I said that personal religion, even without theology or ritual, would prove to embody some elements that morality pure and simple does not contain. You may remember that I promised shortly to point out

 

"1 op. cit., pp. 314, 313." [We have no idea why these page numbers are descending.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our view, in Quantonics, James is saying that quantum uncertainty has no place in what he is attempting to describe as his version of 'religion.' He appears, now, as purely dialectical. But, from his eight year later text Some Problems of Philosophy, we know he is a quantum being. We have a long way to go here, so perhaps we shall see some Quantum Lightings. His then, wholly dialectical environs would ask any sensible human to avoid all those quantum complexities, and his goal is classical state-ic simplification, so...

But, now (i.e., early in Millennium III,) we are k~nowings more about quantum reality, and how quantum uncertainty represents a totality of unlimited quantum interrelationship nexi which are source and agency of all spiritual experiences (Bergson might-would say, "elan vitale" experiences. Polanyi might say, "dwelling [co]within unspecifiables." Stein might say, "dwelling cowithin nonspace." Pirsig might say "dwelling cowithin DQ." Doug says, "We are in It and It is in us." Quantum reality makes it possible and real.). It is how we quantum superluminally tunnel. It is how we quantum tap into reserve energy. You can see how this frustrates us, how James' simple, static, dialectical-ignorance frustrates us... But he intuits that he is on to something very big, and we must recall that James is a person who coinvented with Boris Sidis that phrase, "reserve energy," along with classical notions of how to quantum compenetrate it, what Doug now refers as "straddling." For Doug, straddling issi n¤t just-only religion, it issi, indeed, reality! Doug -26Jan2005. Please see Bergson on "state as complex and dynamicity as simple."

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"what those elements were. In a general way I can now say what I had in mind.

"'I accept the universe' is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: 'Gad! she'd better!' At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? [If you believe in quantum reality, you cannot do otherwise. Doug - 18Jan2005.] Shall our protests against certain things [this is an ultimate and ugly classicism: in quantum reality naught is 'certain' and there are no 'things'] in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission, — as Carlyle would have us — 'Gad! we'd better!' — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart and never cease to feel it as a yoke [To us, this is lightest weight description of morality we have encountered. It is just simple-minded and fundamental. In a quantum sense what James describes is actually immoral!]. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke [Oh! Bobbi Streisand! Classical religion AKA 'religiosity' is always a yoke. James, you are not that senile are you?]. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome [surely only James' view, and n¤t the view; classical religiosity is "dull," it is an anthropocentric (n¤t, in our view, G¤d centric) humanistic religion], which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.

"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints [Bat scat!]. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialectic's dichotomy trumpets its either-or here: EOOO(good, evil), but James admits there is more than one "ways of living that must lead to good." There is an implication, though, that only two choices are possible: ways to evil and ways to good. Thence that good is some kind of absolute at which we can arrive, finally. Bipolarly, ditto, evil.

But if we could arrive at good or evil, who decides what that is? What authority? Can that authority represent a plurality of multiversal sentients? Only Earth's humans? Which howings and whyings, whatings, whenings, whereings, whoings does that authority represent? Can any authority represent quantum ensemble heterogeneity? Can social common sense decide 'either' good 'or' evil? Which social common sense can decide 'either' good 'or' evil? Quantumists assume and k~now that quantum s¤cieties and their IqQ-SP¤Vs are heterogeneous.

Quantum reality shows us that incremental quantal~better is reality's g¤¤d and there issi n¤ way of assessing any memeo of global: one size fits all better. Better issi l¤cal ch3ings, and we have to assume there are unlimited l¤cal ensembles of l¤calities, all up to Planck rate asynchronously and phasically ch¤¤sing their own l¤cal versions of incremental quantal~betterings. We should say, "Betterings are l¤cal quantum tentative ch¤¤sings." Any quantum ensemble whose quanta are individually seeking their own l¤cal better coheres an overall better which issi in endless quantum pr¤cessings of ev¤lution. And that last sentence quantum~recursively scales...

And we cann¤t k~nowingly accept our whole environment since its wholeness is beyond our intellectual, emotional, and sensorial reach. We can believe in its whole existence abstractly, and we can dæscrih our direct interrelationshipings' experiences cowithin It, but we cann¤t "accept Its wholeness" in any dialectically valid way

(e.g., we cann¤t induce its wholeness from its partialness, which is what 'scientists' ("GUTs and ToEs") and some 'religionists' ("our God is the God") try to do),

regardless what crapola fundamentalist slicksters push.

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"grow from one state into the other [an oxymoron; coprolytic dialectical legacy], many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a ‘critical point’ has been overcome.

"If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason that has ordered things, there is a. frosty chill about his words which you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of religious writing. The universe is 'accepted' by all these writers; but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!" [Read Boris Sidis' Nervous Ills chapters XXX and XXXI.] and you immediately see the difference I mean. The anima mundi [~windy elegancies], to whose disposal of his own personal destiny the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the Christian God [which respectfully appears, to Doug, in Quantonics, as an anthropocentric-humanistic spiritual Santa Clause] is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics, though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.

"'It is a man's duty,' says Marcus Aurelius,

'to comfort himself and wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find refreshment solely in these thoughts — first that nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for there is no man who can compel me to transgress.1 He is an abscess on the'

 

"1 Book V., cli. x. (abridged)."

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"'universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature [this is pure anthropocentrism, period; humanism as though humans are our multiverse's only sentients; its like saying, "Earth is the center of our universe"], through being displeased with the things which happen. For the same nature produces these, and has produced thee too. And so accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe and to the prosperity and felicity of Zeus. For he would not have brought on any man what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole [this is social objective anthropocentrism]. The integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything [ditto]. And thou dost cut off, as far as it is in thy power, when thou art dissatisfied, and in a manner triest to put anything out of the way [Roman dialectical social condescension].' 1

"Compare now this mood with that of the old Christian author of the Theologia Germanica:—

'Where men are enlightened with the true light, they renounce all desire and choice [but quantum reality demands us to make choices, take chances and accept their anticipatory, expectatory, yet unpredictable changes…quantum choosing, chancing, and changing is quantum enlightenment bearing quantum freedom], and commit and commend themselves and all things to the eternal Goodness, so that every en1ightened man could say: 'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.' Such men are in a state of freedom [state and freedom taken together are a classical oxymoron], because they have lost the fear of pain or hell, and the hope of reward or heaven, and are living in pure submission to the eternal Goodness, in the perfect freedom of fervent love. When a man truly perceiveth and considereth himself, who and what he is, and findeth himself utterly vile and wicked and unworthy, he falleth into such a deep abasement that it seemeth to him reasonable that all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up against him. And therefore he will not and dare not desire any consolation and release; but he is willing to be unconsoled and unreleased; and he doth not grieve over his sufferings, for they are right in his eyes [suffering appeased is never righteous; it is antithetical aretê], and he hath nothing to say against them. This is what is meant by true repentance for sin; and he who in this present time entereth into this hell, none may console him [pure fundamentalist BS]. Now God hath not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying his hand upon him, that the man may not desire nor regard anything but the eternal Good only [ditto]. And then, when the man neither careth for nor desireth anything but the eternal Good alone, and seek-'

 

"1 Book V., oh. IL (abridged)."

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"'eth not himself nor his own things, but the honour of God only, he is made a partaker of all manner of joy, bliss, peace, rest, and consolation, and so the man is henceforth in the kingdom of heaven. This hell and this heaven are two good safe ways for a man, and happy is he who truly findeth them.'1

"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.

"Occasionally, it is true, the Stoic rises to something like a Christian warmth of sentiment, as in the often quoted passage of Marcus Aurelius: —

'Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt thou not say, Dear City of Zeus? '2

"But compare even as devout a passage as this with a genuine Christian outpouring, and it seems a little cold. Turn, for instance, to the Imitation of Christ:

'Lord, thou knowest what is best; let this or that be according as thou wilt, Give what thou wilt, so much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things. . . . When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, behold there death and hell.'3

 

"1Chaps. x., xi. (abridged): Winkworth’s translation.

"2Book IV., § 23.

"3Benham's translation: Book III., chaps. xv., lix.

"Compare Mary"Moody Emerson: "Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the..."

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"It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of its functions which no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the same maxim holds good m our present quest. 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. And such a quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.

"Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are tempted to call them philosophical rather an religious, we find a character that is perfectly distinct. That character, it seems to me, should be regarded as the practically important differentia of religion for our purpose; and just what it is can easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived.

"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. This is the good side of war [discuss issues of individual IqQ-Sp¤Vs vis-a-vis social ScA-SPoVs; e.g., society says it is "noble" for individuals to sacrifice themselves in service of their nation, but can a society know and tell an individual that whether said individual sees self sacrifice as noble?], in so far as it calls 'volunteers'! And for morality [Which morality is it of which he speaketh? Individual? Social? Classical? Quantum?] life is a war [ditto], and service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral [i.e., social ScA-SPoVs; issues here of morality as ScA-SPoVs] warfare. He can willfully [as an individual, but n¤t as a social cog; again see Boris Sidis' Nervous Ills, ch. XXX] turn his attention away from his own"

 

"...loneliest sufferer, with one proviso, — that I know it is His agency. I will love Him though He shed frost and darkness on every way of mine." R. W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 188."

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"future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people's affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination.

"The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the 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. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is an ugliness shared by Muslim terrorists. "Kill the God damned infidels. Jihad!" Doug's opinion.

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"is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and 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.

"And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. 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 [this is ever so close to a quantum notion of c¤mplementarity which we show as quanton(spiritual_birthday,moral_death)]. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present [this is what naïve realists seek: stasis of now, ideal state, a vast abyss of stayssyss; in a reality of absolute change this 'physicist's' zero momentum cannot be; quantum reality is absolute flux and thus incapable of "eternal present"], with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away. [James is making it dialectically clear. Classicists fear change and revere absolute stasis. Bergson has shown us that this (classical stability) is one of classicists' greatest delusions.]

"We shall see abundant examples of this happy state [absolute stasis is the classical ideal] of mind in later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment coming as a gift when it does come, — a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say, — is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become"

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"possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. 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.

"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. It ought to mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and everlasting possession spread before our eyes.1

"This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion [i.e., we find absolute stasis nowhere but in religion; science too, Mr. James...]. It is parted off from all mere animal happiness, all mere enjoyment of the present, by that element of solemnity of which I have already made so much account. Solemnity is a hard thing to define abstractly, but certain of its marks are patent enough. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple — it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy [a classical oxymoron] preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent, But there are writers who, realizing that happiness of a supreme sort is the prerogative of religion, forget this complication, and call all happiness, as such, religious. Mr. Havelock Ellis, for exam-

 

"1Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religions life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical differentia."

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"ple, identifies religion with the entire field of the soul's liberation from oppressive moods.

"'The simplest functions of physiological life,' he writes, 'may be its ministers. Every one who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement — singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement — has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise. . . . Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul — there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it.'1

"But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religions happiness out. The more commonplace happiness which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask how religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In, the Louvre there is a

 

"1 The New Spirit, p. 232."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of this, in Doug's opinion, quantumly, issi omnispositional.

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"picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it [one of said devil's subtler manifestations is classical society itself…], so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

[In our view, only IqQ-SP¤Vs can keep their feet on ScA-SPoVs’ neck. Notice, eidetically, ad oculos, that religions are quintessentially ScA-SPoVs. We believe James understands this huge problem, and we can offer quotes, which probably emerge subsequently in this text as examples.]

In the religious consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view?

[Classically objective negation is not emotionally rich, indeed it is emotionally hollow and shallow. Quantum negation is subjective and billowing with emotional and hermeneutic personal, individual non-societal, potentia.]

We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death, — their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable [we call this, "religious insanity"]. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass [again, huge issues here of societal vis-a-vis individual]. And it is for that reason that when we ask our question about the value of religion for human life, I think we ought to look for the answer among these violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderate hue.

"Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible form to start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And if in these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way of judging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion's value and treat it with respect, it will have proved in some way its value for life at large. By subtracting and toning down extravagances we may thereupon proceed to trace the boundaries of its legitimate sway.

"To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so much with eccentricities and extremes. "How can

 

"1I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and friend, Charles Carroll Everett."

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"religion on the whole be the most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and pruned away?" Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain reasonably, — yet I believe that something like it will have to be our final contention. That personal attitude which the individual finds himself impelled to take up towards what he apprehends to be the divine — and you will remember that this was our definition — will prove to be both a helpless and a sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice some amount of renunciation, great or small, to our souls alive. The constitution of the world we live in requires it:

        "Entbehren sollst du I sollst entbehren!
        Das ist der ewige Gesang
        Per jedem an die Ohren klingt,
        Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
        Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."

"For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice 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. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty"

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"stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfil. From the merely biological point of view, so to call it this is a conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.

"But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities [which classically have become, instead, extreme specificities, laws, principles, facts, etc.] which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts [classically problematic]."

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To contact Quantonics write to or call:

Doug Renselle
Quantonics, Inc.
1950 East Greyhound Pass, Suite 18, Box 368
Carmel, INdiana 46033-7730
USA
1-317-THOUGHT

-©Quantonics, Inc., 2005-2027 Rev. 18Nov2014  PDR Created: 20Jan2005  PDR
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