V
I have stated what I call the religious paradox. The whole of what I have hereafter to tell you is needed in order to throw such light as I can here attempt to throw upon the solution of the paradox. You will not expect, then, an immediate answer to the question thus brought before you. Yet you see our present situation: Unless there is something in our individual experience which at least begins to bring us into a genuine touch, both with the fact that we need salvation and with the marks whereby we may recognise the way of salvation, and the essentially divine process, if such there be, which alone can save--unless, I say, there is within each of us something of this interior light by which saving divine truth is to be discerned, religious insight is impossible, and then no merely external revelation can help us. Let us then, without further delay, turn directly to the inner light, if such light there be, and ask what, apart from tradition, apart from external revelation, apart from explicit theories or reports concerning the universe, apart from all other sources, our own individual experience can tell us as to the need and the way of salvation, and as to the marks by which we may recognise whatever real influences, or divine beings, can intervene to help us in our need. We shall not upon this occasion answer the question; but we may do something to clarify the issue.
My dear friend, the late William James, in his book called "The Varieties of Religious Experience," defined, for his own purposes, religious experience as the experience of individuals who regard themselves as "alone with the divine." In portraying what he meant by "the divine," James emphasised, although in language different from what I am using, the very features about the objects of religious experience which I have just been trying to characterise in my own way. Those who have religious experience, according to James, get into touch with something which, as he says, gives "a new dimension" to their life. As a result of their better and more exalted religious experience, they win a sense of unity with "higher powers," whose presence seems to them to secure a needed but otherwise unattainable spiritual unity, peace, power in their lives. This "divine" thus accomplishes inwardly what the individual "alone with the divine" feels to be saving, to be needed, to be his pearl of great price. This is James's way of defining the objects of religious experience.
Now James's whole view of religious experience differs in many ways from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight, namely, the experience of the individual "alone with the divine," I feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of [{28}] James and my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.
Let me refer you, then, at this stage, to James's great collection and analysis of the facts of individual religious experience. Let me presuppose some personal acquaintance, on your part, with individual experiences of the various types that James so wonderfully portrays. And then, in my own way, and as independently of James's special theories as possible, let me tell you what, to my mind, is the essential substance of these elementary religious experiences which may come to the individual when he is alone with the problem of his own salvation and alone with his efforts to know the divine that can save. Let me try to show you that the individual, thus isolated, is indeed in touch with a genuine source of insight. Let me try to indicate both the value and the limitations of that source in such wise as to prepare us to view this first source in its needed relation to the sources hereafter to be studied.
The religious experience of the individual may concern three objects: First, his Ideal, that is, the standard in terms of which he estimates the sense and the value of his own personal life; secondly, his Need of salvation, that is, the degree to which he falls short of attaining his ideal and is sundered from it by evil fortune, or by his own paralysis of will, or by his inward baseness; thirdly, the presence or the coming or the longing for, or the [{29}] communion with something which he comes to view as the power that may save him from his need, or as the light that may dispel his darkness, or as the truth that shows him the way out, or as the great companion who helps him--in a word, as his Deliverer. The Ideal, the Need, the Deliverer--these are the three objects which the individual experience, as a source of religious insight, has always undertaken to reveal. James's collection of the facts of religious experience richly illustrates what I here have in mind. To that collection, and to your own individual experience, I appeal as my warrant for thus characterising our first source of insight. Can we say that this source gives us genuine insight and is trustworthy? Does it teach us about anything that is real; and if this be so, how far does this source of insight go? What is the extent, what are the limitations of the truth that one can hope in this way to gain?
As to the first two objects of the individual religious experience, namely, the individual's own personal ideal and his sense of his need, you will readily agree that one's private experience is, indeed, a source of genuine insight. You will, however, find it hard at first to define just how far that insight extends. For the world of a man's private ideals and estimates is a world of precious caprices, because not only does one man's private feelings or intuitions about ideals and values differ from another man's, but every man's own ideals, and his sense of [{30}] need, tend to alter endlessly with the play of his passions, with the waxing and waning of all his natural powers, with his health, with his age. One form of the religious paradox may, in fact, be stated thus: Without intense and intimate personal feeling, you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable-- like the passing hour, doomed to pass away.
James, as a psychologist, well knew this truth about the value and the limitations of private experience; yet it was characteristic of his enterprising soul that he was always looking, in his "pluralistic universe," for the strange, new religious experiences of other and still other individuals, without being able thereby even to define what all these ardent souls were seeking, namely, some genuine home land of the spirit, some place or experience or insight in which is to be revealed that for the sake of which all the feelings, the caprices, the longings, the efforts of individuals are justified--and fulfilled.
Now the best way of defining what it is which our inner experience of our ideal and of our need shows us is, I think, this: We are indeed, and so far just as the Buddhists said, naturally the creatures of transient feelings, of passing caprices, of various and wilful longings. But, just because of this fact, we can get an insight, as intimate as it is fragmentary, into one absolutely valuable ideal. I do not [{31}] think that the Buddhists best expressed our ideal by the words "the extinction of desire." It is rather the ideal of triumph over our unreason. It is the ideal that the reign of caprice ought to be ended, that the wounds of the spirit ought to be healed. In the midst of all our caprices, yes, because of our caprices, we learn the value of one great spiritual ideal, the ideal of spiritual unity and self-possession. And both our ideal and our need come to consciousness at once. We need to bring our caprices into some sort of harmony; to bind up the wounds of what James calls the divided "self"; to change the wanderings of chance passion into something that shall bring the home land of the spirit, the united goal of life into sight. And so much all the great cynics, and the nobler rebels, and the prophets and the saints and the martyrs and the sages have in common taught us. So much Socrates and Plato and Marcus Aurelius, and our modern teachers of the wisdom of life, and, in his noblest words, the Buddha also, and Jesus, have agreed in proclaiming as the ideal and the need revealed to us by all that is deepest about our individual experience: We need to give life sense, to know and to control our own selves, to end the natural chaos, to bring order and light into our deeds, to make the warfare of natural passion subordinate to the peace and the power of the spirit. This is our need. To live thus is our ideal. And because this need is pressing and this ideal is far off from the natural man, we need salvation.
So much, I say, our individual experience can bring before us. This ideal and this need can become the objects of an insight that is as intimate as it is, by itself, unsatisfying. This need, I think, all the devout share, however unlearned their speech, however simple their minds, however various their creeds. Unity of Spirit, conformity to an universal Will, peace with power--this is our need.
It remains for the individual experience to show to us, if it can, the presence of our Deliverer, the coming of that which we shall recognise as divine, just because it truly and authoritatively reveals to the Self the fulfilment that we need, by bringing us into touch with the real nature of things. We need to find the presence that can give this unity and self-possession to the soul. This presence is what all the higher religions seek to reveal. But if we are to learn of such an object of insight we must, indeed, come into touch with a Power or a Spirit that is in some true sense not-Ourselves. And so we must be able somehow to transcend the boundaries of any merely individual experience. Our individual experience must become some sort of intercourse with Another. And this Other must be in some sense the Master of Life, the Might that overcometh the world, the revealer of final truth. Without ceasing to be personal and intimate, our experience must in some way come into direct touch with the very nature of reality.
Is such a direct touch with the divine possible? The mystics of all ages have maintained that it is [{33}] possible. Are they right? To answer this question adequately would be to solve the religious paradox. It would be to show whether and how the individual, even in his isolation, "alone with the divine," can come to be nevertheless in unity with all other spirits, in touch with all that lies beneath and above himself, and with all that constitutes the essence of reality. Perhaps this is indeed possible. Unless it is possible, revelation, as we have seen, loses precisely its most intimate significance, as an appeal of the divine spirit directly to the interior light. But, on the other hand, all the mystics confess that, if this is possible, and if it happens in their own cases, they alone, viewing their experience merely as an individual experience, know not how it happens, but must accept their revelation as an insight without knowing in what precise sense it is insight.
It follows that individual experience remains a source of religious insight as indispensable and as fundamental as it is, by itself, inadequate and in need of supplement. Unless you have inwardly felt the need of salvation, and have learned to hunger and thirst after spiritual unity and self-possession, all the rest of religious insight is to you a sealed book. And unless, in moments of peace, of illumination, of hope, of devotion, of inward vision, you have seemed to feel the presence of your Deliverer, unless it has sometimes seemed to you as if the way to the home land of the spirit were opened to your sight by a revelation as from the divine, unless this [{34}] privilege has been yours, the way to a higher growth in insight will be slow and uncertain to you. But, on the other hand, no one who remains content with his merely individual experience of the presence of the divine and of his deliverer, has won the whole of any true insight. For, as a fact, we are all members one of another; and I can have no insight into the way of my salvation unless I thereby learn of the way of salvation for all my brethren. And there is no unity of the spirit unless all men are privileged to enter it whenever they see it and know it and love it.
Individual Experience, therefore, must abide with us to the very end of our quest, as one principal and fundamental source of insight. But it is one aspect only of Religious Experience. We shall learn to understand and to estimate it properly only when we have found its deeper relations with our Social Experience. In passing to our social experience, however, we shall not leave our individual experience behind. On the contrary, through thus passing to our social experience as a source of religious insight, we shall for the first time begin to see what our individual experience means.
II
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
II
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
The results of our first lecture appear to have brought the religious problems, so far as we shall attempt to consider them, into a position which in one respect simplifies, in another respect greatly complicates our undertaking.