the varieties of religious experience a study in human nature

We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly-the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. “Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.

They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.” The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. “This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.

The varieties of religious experience a study in human nature