varieties of religious experience

i am reading william james, slowly. in part because some parts of his concepts are complex (!) and in part to savor what i have just read.

today:

writing about the “higher and wider universe of abstract ideas” he says “Such ideas, and others equally abstract (abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice), form the background for all facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ‘nature,’ as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is “what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, be we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception” (56)

A marvelous articulation of the sense, when experiencing (what shall we call it?) joy or pleasure that seems like it must be involved with something more than merely the thing that brings joy or pleasure, of the larger thing behind it. Look, I can’t even get close enough to look at it askance.