Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on ‘The Characteristics of the Religious Life’)

“The characteristics of the religious life…[include] the following beliefs: that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; that union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; [and] that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit 'God' or 'law'—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world." — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Religion and an ‘Unseen Order’)

"Were one asked to characterise 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 our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” —American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on the Objective of Religion)

“Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Faults Charged to Religion)

“The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.”—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)