LECTURE 03: THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

The Varieties of Religious Experience

LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and

most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief

that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in

harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment

are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call

your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an

attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our

attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due

to the “objects” of our consciousness, the things which we believe to

exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may

be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In

either case they elicit from us a _reaction_; and the reaction due to

things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to

sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may

make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently

more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of

making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is

based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a

weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.

The more concrete objects of most men’s religion, the deities whom they

worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for

example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of

their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by

way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force

of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine

personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in

general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in

the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model.

But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,

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...