religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power.
God’s attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his
absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri‐unity, the various
mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments,
etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian
believers.(22) We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible
images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all
religions as the _sine qua non_ of a successful orison, or contemplation
of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and
abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the
believer’s subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.
Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God,
the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.
These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our
conceptions always require a sense‐content to work with, and as the words
“soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense‐content whatever,
it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any
significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our
practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free;
consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as
if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a
genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_ these
unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent
in _praktischer Hinsicht_, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of
our action, for a knowledge of _what_ they might be, in case we were
permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon,
as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real
presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion
whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express
any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his
philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature
which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our
object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so
to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet
that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be
present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or
sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be
strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if,
through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going
in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different
attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an
outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so
strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life,
it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have
this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent
articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them
the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson
which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects,
as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but
for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend
it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all
things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength,
significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant,
and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our
facts, the fountain‐head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They
give its “nature,” as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we
know is “what” it is by sharing in the nature of one of these
abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless
and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their
means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with
helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects,
these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification
and conception.
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the
cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as
they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate
them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings
they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing
things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human
feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been
known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for
example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the
intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing
beauties of the earth. “The true order of going,” he says, in the often
quoted passage in his “Banquet,” “is to use the beauties of earth as steps
along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going
from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to
fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair
notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows
what the essence of Beauty is.”(23) In our last lecture we had a glimpse
of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the
abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a
fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to‐
day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies,
we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed
in as an ultimate object. “Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the
place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of
Nature” as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of
interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the
Greek gods were only half‐metaphoric personifications of those great
spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls
apart—the sky‐sphere, the ocean‐sphere, the earth‐sphere, and the like;
just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the
breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these
phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.(24)
As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion
something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a
_sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception_ of what
we may call “_something there_,” more deep and more general than any of
the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we
might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so
habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else,
any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that
same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally
possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality‐
feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they
might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though
they might be such non‐entities in point of _whatness_, as Kant makes the
objects of his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense
of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often
happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person
affected will feel a “presence” in the room, definitely localized, facing
in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often
coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard,
touched, nor cognized in any of the usual “sensible” ways. Let me give you
an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence
religion is more peculiarly concerned.
An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had
several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my
inquiries:—
“I have several times within the past few years felt the so‐called
‘consciousness of a presence.’ The experiences which I have in
mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience
which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons
would also call the ‘consciousness of a presence.’ But the
difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great
as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I
know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with
all the ordinary senses alert.
“It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On
the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms
in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the
arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but
the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night.
After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake
awhile thinking on the previous night’s experience, when suddenly
I _felt_ something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It
remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any
ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant
‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the
roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had
something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain
spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism—and yet
the feeling was not _pain_ so much as _abhorrence_. At all events,
something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more
surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living
creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an
almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the
‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.
“On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some
lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these
when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the
_coming_) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the
‘horrible sensation.’ I then mentally concentrated all my effort
to charge this ‘thing,’ if it was evil, to depart, if it was _not_
evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain
itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the
previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.
“On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same
‘horrible sensation.’ Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In
all three instances the certainty that there in outward space
there stood _something_ was indescribably _stronger_ than the
ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close
presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to
me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although
I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small,
and distressful, as it were, I didn’t recognize it as any
individual being or person.”
Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the
religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same
correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had
the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only
then it was filled with a quality of joy.
“There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused
in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some
ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of
some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge
of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it
went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality.
Everything else might be a dream, but not that.”
My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would
clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the
deity’s existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have
much more to say upon this head.
Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture
to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show
that we are dealing with a well‐marked natural kind of fact. In the first
case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly
visualized hallucination,—but I leave that part of the story out.
“I had read,” the narrator says, “some twenty minutes or so, was
thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and
for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly
without a moment’s warning my whole being seemed roused to the
highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an
intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced
it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but
quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement
was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense
of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the
fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left
elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in
which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without
otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg
became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray‐blue material
of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi‐
transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in
consistency,”(25)—and hereupon the visual hallucination came.
Another informant writes:—
“Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had
been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was
breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to
sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in
the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a
live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a
smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I
do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply
stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I
felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious
dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to
happen.”(26)
Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend
of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:—
“Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it
is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of
a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so
definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position.
This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies
in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom
the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I
feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems
to recognize it.”
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of
presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a
gray‐bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself
under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room
towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi‐hallucination is an
exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual
imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive
that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the
feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—in
other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_.
Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for
quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental
machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of
the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem—nothing
could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the
feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action.
Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or “made our flesh creep,”—our
senses are what do so oftenest,—might then appear real and present, even
though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we
have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather
than with its organic seat.
Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has
its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which
persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:—
“When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by
accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of
the catastrophes of the heavens,” says Madame Ackermann; “when I
see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible
as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I
experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me
as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a
dream. My last word will be, ‘I have been dreaming.’ ”(27)
In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the
unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.
We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious
sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the
objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their
intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi‐sensible
realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these
objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness
in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than
abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first
example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I
have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my
acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that
the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an
intellectual operation properly so‐called.
“Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more
agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
‘indefinite consciousness’ which Herbert Spencer describes so
well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality
was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer’s philosophy, for although
I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to _It_
in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have
been in a relation to _It_ which practically was the same thing as
prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict
with other people, either domestically or in the way of business,
or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now
recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious
relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical _It_.
It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to
term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me
and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and
supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of
living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively
turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know
now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of
late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I
am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to
find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when
sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to
make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at
night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of
worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped
mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind
which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing
the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric
current. A blank was there instead of _It_: I couldn’t find
anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting
into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to
confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of
the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have
spoken of as ‘It’ was practically not Spencer’s Unknowable, but
just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for
higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost.”
Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in
which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as
alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of
particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct
perception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence, swept in and overwhelmed
the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell’s
correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:—
“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and
happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I
said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an
argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the
whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from
the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me
and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air
seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew
not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I
cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied
it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear
it and acknowledge its grandeur.”(28)
Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman,—I take it from Starbuck’s manuscript
collection:—
“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop,
where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there
was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep,—the deep that my own struggle had
opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without,
reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me,
and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even
temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my
spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For
the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained.
It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the
effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have
melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener
conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards,
and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of
the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held
a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I
could not any more have doubted that _He_ was there than that I
was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of
the two.