had done it already.  Religious experience of the lutheran type brings all our naturalistic standards to bankruptcy.  You are strong only by being weak, it shows.  You cannot live on pride or self-sufficingness.  There is a light in which all the naturally founded and currently accepted distinctions, excellences, and safeguards of our characters appear as utter childishness.  Sincerely to give up one’s conceit or hope of being good in one’s own right is the only door to the universe’s deeper reaches.

These deeper reaches are familiar to evangelical Christianity and to what is nowadays becoming known as ‘mind-cure’ religion or ’new thought.’  The phenomenon is that of new ranges of life succeeding on our most despairing moments.  There are resources in us that naturalism with its literal and legal virtues never recks of, possibilities that take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and power, based on giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us, and these seem to show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine.  Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, indeed because of certain forms of death—­death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and worry, competency and desert, death of everything that paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to.

Reason, operating on our other experiences, even our psychological experiences, would never have inferred these specifically religious experiences in advance of their actual coming.  She could not suspect their existence, for they are discontinuous with the ‘natural’ experiences they succeed upon and invert their values.  But as they actually come and are given, creation widens to the view of their recipients.  They suggest that our natural experience, our strictly moralistic and prudential experience, may be only a fragment of real human experience.  They soften nature’s outlines and open out the strangest possibilities and perspectives.

This is why it seems to me that the logical understanding, working in abstraction from such specifically religious experiences, will always omit something, and fail to reach completely adequate conclusions.  Death and failure, it will always say, are death and failure simply, and can nevermore be one with life; so religious experience, peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy.

The sort of belief that religious experience of this type naturally engenders in those who have it is fully in accord with Fechner’s theories.  To quote words which I have used elsewhere, the believer finds that the tenderer parts of his personal life are continuous with a more of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board