A higher happiness

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James asks whether most of us, beings of feeling, can do without a private relationship to the divine. Science, increasingly separated from religion, offers rational and wholesale answers to the cosmos but perhaps we seek emotional, personal, and ideal.

Is it possible that inner piety followed an earlier era of ceremonial magic and fetishism. Along with an attitude of solemnity, practices of sacrifice, confession, and prayer serve quietly as its ingredients.