idual
consequences. The fruits of the spirit accrue to the general
advantage; and the saint, in James's opinion, must indeed undertake to
edify, not only himself, but also his brethren. But the effects of
religious insight must not be confused with the sources. James insists
that the sources are mainly from within the individual and are only
incidentally social. A religious discovery has in common with a poetic
creation the fact that the religious genius, like the artist, sees his
vision, and produces his spiritual miracle, in solitude.

If you ask whether this position which James assumes is anything more
than his own private opinion, and if you want to know his grounds for
it, a closer examination of his book will show you why he thus
deliberately turns his back upon the favourite recent interpretation
of religion as an essentially social phenomenon. James, in common with
the traditional faiths, although not in conformity with their
formulas, always conceived religious experience as an intercourse with
objects and with powers that, whatever their deeper bases in our
"subliminal" nature, do not adequately express themselves in our
everyday, worldly, overt human nature. And in our social life, where
the conventional reigns, where man imitates man or contends with man,
where crowds bustle and the small-talk or the passionate struggle of
the day fill the mind, where lovers pursue their beloved and are
jealous {64} of their rivals, and laborers toil and sweat, and worldly
authorities display their pomp, you meet not the solution, but the
problem of life. James, as man, was full of social interests, and, as
psychologist, was fond of studying social processes. But when a man
wants peace and spiritual triumph, James observes that, as an
empirical fact, he does not readily find them in the market-place, or
on the battle-field, or in the law courts, unless, indeed, he comes to
these places already full of the light that the saintly souls have
often found in the wilderness or in their meditations. In brief, James
always emphasises the mystical element in religious experience and is
full of the assurance that religion cannot find its food in the
commonplace; while our social life is a realm where the commonplace
holds sway. Or again, James holds that when the faithful have thought
of their religious experience as an intercourse with beings of a level
wholly superhuman, they may, indeed, have been wrong in their creeds,
but were