Presence
Losing It
Historical account — 1902
VBG Archives·Cambridge, US
presencedoubtlossnightscience
Modern language summary…
A scientist described drifting from belief in his twenties, yet retaining, for years, a felt relation to something he could only call It -- a supporting presence he leaned on in trouble, which steadied him and never failed. Then, gradually, the connection stopped working. He'd reach for it in sleepless nights and find a blank. Nearing fifty, he admitted the ability had left him entirely, that life had gone strangely flat, and that what he'd been doing all those years was, he now realized, prayer. (Location not recorded; account collected and published by William James, Harvard, 1902.)
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"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena... Whenever I had any trouble... I used to fall back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical It. It was on my side, or I was on Its side... it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence... I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss... A blank was there instead of It: I couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life... What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost."
Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture III. Public domain. View source