t he meant by
"the divine," James emphasised, although in language different from
what I am using, the very features about the objects of religious
experience which I have just been trying to characterise in my own
way. Those who have religious experience, according to James, get into
touch with something which, as he says, gives "a new dimension" to
their life. As a result of their better and more exalted religious
experience, they win a sense of unity with "higher powers," whose
presence seems to them to secure a needed but otherwise unattainable
spiritual unity, peace, power in their lives. This "divine" thus
accomplishes inwardly what the individual "alone with the divine"
feels to be saving, to be needed, to be his pearl of great price. This
is James's way of defining the objects of religious experience.

Now James's whole view of religious experience differs in many ways
from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a
question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but
also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight,
namely, the experience of the individual "alone with the divine," I
feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of {28} James and
my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.

Let me refer you, then, at this stage, to James's great collection and
analysis of the facts of individual religious experience. Let me
presuppose some personal acquaintance, on your part, with individual
experiences of the various types that James so wonderfully portrays.
And then, in my own way, and as independently of James's special
theories as possible, let me tell you what, to my mind, is the
essential substance of these elementary religious experiences which
may come to the individual when he is alone with the problem of his
own salvation and alone with his efforts to know the divine that can
save. Let me try to show you that the individual, thus isolated, is
indeed in touch with a genuine source of insight. Let me try to
indicate both the value and the limitations of that source in such
wise as to prepare us to view this first source in its needed relation
to the sources hereafter to be studied.

The religious experience of the individual may concern three objects:
First, his Ideal, that is, the standard in terms of which he estimates
the sense and the value of his own personal life; secondly, his Need
of salvation, that is, the degree to whic