Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature by William James
page 22 of 677 (03%)
Dieu, vii. ch. i.



In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a
perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the
language of respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my
breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my
strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the
night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so my
soul panteth after thee, O my God:" God's Breath in Man is the
title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas
Lake Harris), and in certain non-Christian countries the
foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of
the inspiration and expiration.

These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in
favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will
then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere.
The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and
conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of
adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of
sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the
asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is
not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher
mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as
well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics,
chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up
during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion,
is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:--but that would be
DigitalOcean Referral Badge