The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James -- CHAPTER02

LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.
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 in turn, he would
naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a
thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a
conception equally complex?
Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so
many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.
In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the
authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies 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. 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. 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 religious persons. 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; 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.
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