 Shaftesbury also opposes religion that purports to be based entirely on direct revelation of an enthusiastic experience. Enthusiasts (or, rather, the kinds of enthusiasts Shaftesbury opposes; below we will discuss enthusiasm he approves of) are those who base their religious views on what they claim to be their immediate spiritual experiences of God. Such experiences are passionate, emotional, non-rational. And while Shaftesbury does not deny that true contemplation of the divine has an emotional component, he argues that we cannot determine merely from the character of a passionate experience itself whether it is the result of divine inspiration or human distemper. A single individual in a cave can make noises that, because of echoing and darkness, cause a group of people to feel great fear and thus give them to believe they are under threat from a huge gang of monsters. Their feeling of fear—their panic—is certainly real, but that feeling does not on its own constitute proof of the belief about what caused it. In the same way, a group of people can experience some powerful emotion that they attribute to the experience of God, but the power of the emotion itself is no proof of the divine cause. For