The Varieties of Religious Experiences: Lecture III

by William JamesThe reality of the unseen

Roxine Ami

“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”

“The memory of an insult may make us more 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.”

“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.”

“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our while 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.”

Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things

1. Definitely statable abstract principles2. Definite facts of sensation3. Definite hypotheses based on such facts4. Definite inferences logically drawn