POSTSCRIPT
403
consequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible pro-
position, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate)
refined supernaturalism seems to cling. It is only with experience en
bloc, it says, that the Absolute maintains relations. It condescends
to no transactions of detail.
I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and
merely in order the better to describe my general point of view; but
as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in prin-
ciple with that. All supernaturalists admit that facts are under the
judgment of higher law; but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for
religion generally so far as it remains unweakened by transcend-
entalistic metaphysics, the word “judgment” here means no such bare
academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic
or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on the contrary, execution
with it, is in rebus as well as post rem, and operates “causally” as
partial factor in the total fact. The universe becomes a gnosticism
1
pure and simple on any other terms. But this view that judgment
and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way
of thinking, so the present volume must on the whole be classed
with the other expressions of that creed.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought
in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must
set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to
see it closed and locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the
reigning intellectual tastes, I believe that a candid consideration
of piecemeal supernaturalism and a complete discussion of all its
metaphysical bearings will show it to be the hypothesis by which
the largest number of legitimate requirements are met. That of
course would be a program for other books than this; what I now
say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where
I belong.
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to
God’s existence come in, I should have to say that in general I
have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of
“prayerful communion,” especially when certain kinds of incursion
from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests.
The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which
1
See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897, p. 165.
404
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not our-
selves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal
energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other
ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our
every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us
are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the
openness of the “subliminal” door, we have the elements of a theory
to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so
impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the
hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least,
I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you
will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which
the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural “fact” which most of us would assign as
the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make
would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for
the great majority of our own race means immortality, and nothing
else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts
of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial.
I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief
therein, for to me it seems a secondary point. If our ideals are only
cared for in “eternity,” I do not see why we might not be willing
to resign their care to other hands than ours. Yet I sympathize with
the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of
impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not
how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to
testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove “spirit-return,” though
I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs. Myers,
Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favor-
able conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this
brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why
immortality got no mention in the body of this book.
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection,
the “God” of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by phil-
osophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes
which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect.
He is assumed as a matter of course to be “one and only” and to be
“infinite”; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly
any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold.