【英文文学】The Varieties of Religious Experience 宗教经验种种.docx

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1、【英文文学】The Varieties of Religious Experience 宗教经验种种PREFACEThis book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as GiffordLecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects ofthe two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus

2、became responsible, it seemed to me that thefirst course might well be a descriptive one on Mans Religious Appetites, and the second ametaphysical one on Their Satisfaction through Philosophy. But the unexpected growth of thepsychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second s

3、ubject being postponedentirely, and the description of mans religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In LectureXX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader whodesires immediately to know them should turn to pages 501-509, and to the Postscript of

4、 thebook. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form.In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possessionof abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I havechosen these among the

5、extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I mayconsequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of thesubject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they will have thepatience to read to the end, I believe

6、 that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I therecombine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctivesof exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due

7、 to Edwin D. Starbuck, of StanfordUniversity, who made over to me his large collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin,of East Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to TheodoreFlournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller of Oxford, and to my colleague Ben

8、jamin Rand, fordocuments; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, toconversations with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at Glenmore, aboveK

9、eene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well express. Harvard University, March, 1902.Lecture I RELIGION AND NEUROLOGYIt is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face thislearned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from t

10、he living voice,as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University ofHarvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English,French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries

11、whomwe have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they werevisiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contraryhabit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makesth

12、e adventure it begets certain of apology being due for presumptuous an act.Particularlymustthisbet(a) hecaseona(sense) soilassacredtotheAmerican(so) imagination as that ofEdinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on myimagination in boyhood. Professor F

13、rasers Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the firstphilosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from theaccount of Sir William Hamiltons classroom therein contained. Hamiltons own lectures were thefirst philosophic writings I ever forced mysel

14、f to study, and after that I was immersed in DugaldStewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and Iconfess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the timean official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illus

15、trious names, carries with it a senseof dreamland quite as much as of reality.But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it would never do todecline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without furtherdeprecatory words. Let me say only t

16、his, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, hasbegun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope thatmany of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places withScotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hope tha

17、t our people may become in all these highermatters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiarpolitical temperament, that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade andinfluence the world.As regards the manner in which I shall have to admini

18、ster this lectureship, I am neither atheologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology isthe only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religiouspropensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of

19、the facts pertaining to his mentalconstitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be toinvite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings andreli

20、gious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developedsubjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men,in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject alwaysare, yet when one s

21、eeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its morecompletely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will mostconcern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best ableto give an intelligible account of t

22、heir ideas and motives. These men, of course, are eithercomparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. Thedocuments humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the hauntsof special erudition-they lie along the beaten highway

23、; and this circumstance, which flows sonaturally from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturers lack of specialtheological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession,from books that most of you at some time will have had already in y

24、our hands, and yet this will beno detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader andinvestigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that willmake a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Ye

25、t I doubt whether hewill necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material, get much closer to theessence of the matter in hand.The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophicsignificance? are two entirely different orders of question

26、from the logical point of view; and, as afailure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a littlebefore we enter into the documents and materials to which I have referred.In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concer

27、ning anything.First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history?And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? Theanswer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to

28、theother is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like,denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other.They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only bymaking them first

29、separately, and then adding them together.In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two orders of question. Everyreligious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents. What isnowadays called the higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of t

30、he Bible from this existentialpoint of view, neglected too much by the earlier church. Under just what biographic conditions didthe sacred writers bring forth their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had theyexactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their utteran

31、ces? These aremanifestly questions of historical fact, and one does not see how the answer to them can decideoffhand the still further question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of cominginto existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other qu

32、estionwe must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in athing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeedde

33、duce another spiritual judgment as to the Bibles worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-valuewere to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by thefree caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express nolocal or p

34、ersonal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand,our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions anddeliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souledpersons wrestl

35、ing with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. Yousee that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the bestadepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritualproblem. With the same

36、 conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and some another,of the Bibles value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the foundation ofvalues differs.I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because there are many religiouspersons-some of you no

37、w present, possibly, are among them-who do not yet make a working useof the distinction, and who may therefore feel first a little startled at the purely existential point ofview from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must beconsidered. When I handle them biologic

38、ally and psychologically as if they were mere curiousfacts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so sublime a subject, andmay even suspect me, until my purpose gets more fully expressed, of deliberately seeking todiscredit the religious side of life.Such a result is of cou

39、rse absolutely alien to my intention; and since such a prejudice on yourpart would seriously obstruct the due effect of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a fewmore words to the point.There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend tomake the

40、 person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer,who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, orMohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition,determined to fixed forms by

41、 imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study thissecond-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which werethe pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences wecan only find in individuals for

42、 whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute feverrather. But such individuals are geniuses in the religious line; and like many other geniuses whohave brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, suchreligious geniuses have often shown symptoms of

43、 nervous instability. Even more perhaps thanother kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations.Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led adiscordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career.

44、 They have known nomeasure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances,heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed aspathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have help

45、ed to give themtheir religious authority and influence.If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person ofGeorge Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible tooverpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity r

46、ooted in spiritual inwardness, and areturn to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. Sofar as our Christian sects today are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence tothe position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No

47、 one can pretend for amoment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Foxs mind was unsound. Everyone whoconfronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems tohave acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constituti

48、on, Foxwas a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:-As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw three steeple-house spires,and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately theword o

49、f the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, Iwished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As soonas they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mileof Lichfield where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I commandedby the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like afire in me.