The Varieties of Religious Experience

fond of the term “Over-soul,” but as a rule they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion. “God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion, and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize. ↩

Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world makes this difference, that facts exist. We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world” of fact!⁠—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd evolution from the God of David’s psalms! ↩

See my Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897, p. 165. ↩

Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality, Boston and London, 1899. ↩

E. Gurney: Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149. ↩

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The Varieties of Religious Experience
was published in 1902 by
William James.

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