It is conditioned by many sensory factors and bodily reactions which blend into what we call our feeling states. Of these, the most significant are often those which are most hidden from casual recognition. Such are the kinesthetic sensations, or sensations of strain in various parts of the body, and the organic sensations which have their seat in the deeper-lying tissues. These often appear in such complex relations with one another that we experience them as a vague blending of sensations, difficult to locate, which enter into our "common feeling" or general bodily tone. These and similar elements are significant factors in all our attitudes, including our attitude toward God. A study of the words of Jesus, for example, indicates that his deeper experiences, those which mark the most worshipful moments of which we have record, were conditioned by such feelingful elements. The attitudes to which he commends his disciples are indicated by such terms as hungering and thirsting after righteousness, being pure in heart, worshiping the Father in spirit, having within one a well of water springing up unto eternal life. The God-experience for him is not a mere cognition of God; it is an attitude as toward a father, a feeling of union with him. This book does not profess to be a complete analysis of the Godexperience. No number of formulæ of physical and mental characteristics which might be presented would be sufficient to the infinite variety of personalities. But if, in the midst of the variations, there may be distinguished order and system, this study may not be without practical value. Whatever worth it contains is due in great degree to many friends who have rendered effective co-operation, especially to Professor Edwin D. Starbuck, whose encouragement and wise counsel have been its chief inspiration. THE GOD-EXPERIENCE I The God-Experience As Organically Conditioned IT HAS been the misfortune of many writers to mistake the Godidea for the God-experience. The history and logical relations of various conceptions of God, often utterly inharmonious with each other, have been discussed; their relative significance has been estimated; and then the book has been closed, like the door of a mausoleum, upon a collection of lifeless intellectual gods. Were the God-experience nothing more, it would lie quite contentedly between the covers of the treatises. But it is more than an intellectual conception, however logical and complete. To say nothing of its metaphysical implications, and to consider it psychologically, the God-experience affects and is affected by every element of the mental life, and is vitally conditioned by a great variety of bodily attitudes, sensations of every sort, images in terms of every sense, and various affective relationships. A complete picture of the mental elements involved in a conscious attitude toward God would require a knowledge of many things. To comprehend such a picture would surely be to "know what God and man is." And even if such a picture were procureable, it would be true to only one moment of life, and would be invalidated by the shifting experiences of the next moment. This study does not pretend to give such a picture. It is an attempt to discover the psychological basis for the phenomena involved in thinking of God or sustaining any conscious relation to God. This experience is central in religion, and the problems which it presents are of the highest importance to the psychology of religion. A thorough study of any mental process reveals complexities which a casual observation may overlook. Even the simplest sensation is conditioned by a complex of feelings, images, and doubtless other sensations, so that it becomes one of the serious problems of experimental psychology so to reduce these competing elements that a sense experience may stand out in relative clearness Sense- for purposes of mental analysis. Every experience involves a senseFeeling feeling complex. One element may be so prominent as to give its plexes name to the entire complex, but to treat this single element as con Com stituting the experience is absurd. In many cases the element which names the complex derives its greater significance from other and less conspicuous elements. Let us select one or two concrete examples. My neighbor, Mrs. Brown, stands watching a marching regiment, and sees her own boy among the khaki-clad men. Το casual thought this is a visual experience. She herself says: "I saw my boy." But the experience is far more than vision. It involves a complex of organic and kinesthetic sensations conditioning the feeling aspect of the experience. Her heart beats faster, her breathing is affected, and thousands of inner strains and tensions accompany a multitude of imaginal processes. These constitute the essential, intimate, significant features of the total experience; yet we call it a visual experience, and Mrs. Brown says simply: "I saw my boy." Even in a so-called visual experience which lacks the emotional significance involved in such a personal relationship, vision may be little more than a cue to a total complex. I see from my window an umbrella which a man is carrying along the street. An essential and conspicuous element in this experience is a visual sensation; but the meaning and significance of the experience are conditioned by a great number of other elements, without which the moving black area before my eyes would be totally insignificant. There is motor strain, imaged or real, elicited by the motion of the umbrella, downward strain involving my experience of the weight of an umbrella, and upward strain due to the tugging of the wind. There are images of the tactual and kinesthetic feel of the handle, the ribs, the cover, the sliding ferrule; and probably all these images elicit actual sensations of strain. The complex may also include an olfactory image of the smell of the cloth of a wet umbrella. Beside all these, the experience is conditioned by related images connected with the use of an umbrella, the thermal, tactual and other elements related to rain, feelings of shrinking and shivering, or of the comfort and relaxation of being protected, and a variety of inner strains which add to the total meaning of the word umbrella. It is clear that even in so distinctly visual an experience as the above there is a blend of factors. We label the experience visual, for it is the visual element in it which distinguishes and sets it off |