James Baquet

    For much of human history, religion was something to be felt, to be experienced, but not to be thought about too much. But with the Age of Enlightenment, even God became a subject of scientific scrutiny.

    Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James examined religion in the lectures gathered under the title “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” No. 2 in the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.”

    But James returned to talking about religious experience, something that cannot be subjected to science. Some even accused him of establishing a justification for irrationality. Philosopher George Santayana wrote that the greatest weakness of the book was its “tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition.”

    James justifies this abandonment of rationalism by saying, “If we look ... on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly ... it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.”

    On the other hand, “Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.”

    The deeper parts of ourselves, then, win over our intellect, just as much “when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it.” Whichever way one argues, it is the “gut instinct” that prevails.

    The result of all this is what James calls “Saintliness,” a surrender to things beyond this world, an “immense elation and freedom,” and “a shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections.”

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. take apart

    2. intuition

    3. defense, explanation

    4. close examination

    5. attempts to discover secret knowledge

    6. argue ineffectively

    7. unable to speak

    8. not deep or meaningful

    9. excitement, great happiness

    10. lack of sense