It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes […]

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact […]

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. […]

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life’s chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they […]

At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual’s character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of […]

The last lecture was a painful one, dealing as it did with evil as a pervasive element of the world we live in. At the close of it we were brought into full view of the contrast between the two ways of looking at life which are characteristic respectively of what we called the healthy-minded, […]

The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the practical fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions as those we heard of? With this question the really important part of our task opens, for you remember that we began all this empirical inquiry not merely to open a […]

We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. Today we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to […]

Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest, […]

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS Aesthetic elements in religion–Contrast of Catholicism and Protestantism– Sacrifice and Confession– Prayer– Religion holds that spiritual work is really effected in prayer– Three degrees of opinion as to what is effected– First degree– Second degree– Third degree– Automatisms, their frequency among religious leaders– Jewish cases– Mohammed– Joseph Smith– Religion and the subconscious region […]

Summary of religious characteristics– Men’s religions need not be identical– “The science of religions” can only suggest, not proclaims a religious creed– Is religion a “survival” of primitive thought?– Modern science rules out the concept of personality– Anthropomorphism and belief in the personal characterized pre-scientific thought– Personal forces are real, in spite of this– Scientific […]

DOES ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ EXIST?[2] ‘Thoughts’ and ‘things’ are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it, and may be expected to vary in the future. At first, ‘spirit […]

A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE[25] It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one […]

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[43] Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions. When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it […]

HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING[68] In [the essay] entitled ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ I have tried to show that when we call an experience ‘conscious,’ that does not mean that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being (‘psychic’ being) as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it […]

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE[75] Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating […]

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[85] BRETHREN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: In casting about me for a subject for your President this year to talk about it has seemed to me that our experiences of activity would form a good one; not only because the topic is so naturally interesting, and because it has lately led to […]

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM[105] Humanism is a ferment that has ‘come to stay.'[106] It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are […]

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE[1] Je voudrais vous communiquer quelques doutes qui me sont venus au sujet de la notion de Conscience qui regne dans tous nos traites de psychologie. On definit habituellement la Psychologie comme la Science des faits de Conscience, ou des phenomenes, ou encore des etats de la Conscience. Qu’on admette qu’elle se […]

IS RADICAL EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC?[1] If all the criticisms which the humanistic Weltanschauung is receiving were as sachgemaess as Mr. Bode’s,[2] the truth of the matter would more rapidly clear up. Not only is it excellently well written, but it brings its own point of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly straight reply. The […]