We're listening to the Partially Examine Life episode 345. Part 2, we've been discussing William James the variety of religious experience.

I think we've been focusing a lot on the conclusions of final lecture,

20, and I wanted to look at page 489 because I feel like this is a bad

argument. It runs about a page and a half here. Let me just read some of it. The world

of our experience consists at all times of two parts,

an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than

the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed.

So the objective might be most of our experience.

The objective part is a sum total of whatsoever at a given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the

inner state in which thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,

the cosmic times and places, for example, whereas the interstate may be the most

fugitive and paltry activity of mind, yet the cosmic objects so far as the experience yields them,

are but ideal pictures of something whose existence do not inwardly possess, but only point at outwardly while the interstate is our very

experience itself. This reality and that of our experience are one, a conscious

field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object, plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs.

Such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts, not hollow, not a mere abstract

element of experience such as the object is when taken all at once.

It is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact, it is of the kind to which all realities

whatsoever much belong, the motor currents of the world run through the like of it.

It is on the line connecting real events with real events that unshareable feeling which each one of us has

of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels that rolling out onto

Fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific,

...