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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt
Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other
naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian
sort.[285] The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement,
union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content
whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial
alliances with material furnished by the most diverse
philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place
in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no
right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in
favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism,
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