The Crisis of the Modern World (The Collected Works of Rene Guenon)

by René Guénon

From rationalism, religion was bound to sink into sentimentalism, and it is in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the most striking examples of this are to be found. What remains is therefore no longer even a dwindling and deformed religion, but simply ‘religiosity’, that is to say vague and sentimental aspirations unjustified by any real knowledge: to this final stage correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine. At this stage the final products of religious and of philosophical decline mingle together and ‘religious experience’ becomes merged in pragmatism, in the name of which a limited God is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God, insofar as one can feel for him sentiments comparable to those one would feel for a higher man.