📔 The Varieties of Religious Experience

mystical states seem [...] full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. […] I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name.

The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related.

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since.