h he falls short of attaining
his ideal and is sundered from it by evil fortune, or by his own
paralysis of will, or by his inward baseness; thirdly, the presence or
the coming or the longing for, or the {29} communion with something
which he comes to view as the power that may save him from his need,
or as the light that may dispel his darkness, or as the truth that
shows him the way out, or as the great companion who helps him--in a
word, as his Deliverer. The Ideal, the Need, the Deliverer--these are
the three objects which the individual experience, as a source of
religious insight, has always undertaken to reveal. James's collection
of the facts of religious experience richly illustrates what I here
have in mind. To that collection, and to your own individual
experience, I appeal as my warrant for thus characterising our first
source of insight. Can we say that this source gives us genuine
insight and is trustworthy? Does it teach us about anything that is
real; and if this be so, how far does this source of insight go? What
is the extent, what are the limitations of the truth that one can hope
in this way to gain?

As to the first two objects of the individual religious experience,
namely, the individual's own personal ideal and his sense of his need,
you will readily agree that one's private experience is, indeed, a
source of genuine insight. You will, however, find it hard at first to
define just how far that insight extends. For the world of a man's
private ideals and estimates is a world of precious caprices, because
not only does one man's private feelings or intuitions about ideals
and values differ from another man's, but every man's own ideals, and
his sense of {30} need, tend to alter endlessly with the play of his
passions, with the waxing and waning of all his natural powers, with
his health, with his age. One form of the religious paradox may, in
fact, be stated thus: Without intense and intimate personal feeling,
you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its
ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know
only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable--
like the passing hour, doomed to pass away.

James, as a psychologist, well knew this truth about the value and the
limitations of private experience; yet it was characteristic of his
enterprising soul that he was always looking, in his "pluralistic
universe," for the strange, new religious