William James and Religious Experience

The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure.

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.... Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. --William James

In the pragmatic movement Charles Peirce is associated with science, John Dewey with education and morals, and William James with religion. The designation, philosopher of religion, should not be taken as a testimonial to conviction, however, for James personally shunned all sects, dogmas, and revelatory creeds. "He did not really believe," remarked Santayana a trifle unfairly; "he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you believed."

Even as a phenomenon for study, institutionalized religion did not attract James. Religious experience, he felt, should be first-hand, vital, and the remedy for otherwise incurable maladies of the soul. "At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?" Assuredly the moralist assents to the reigning order, but he may endure it with "the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke." The religious man, on the other hand, in his strongest and most fully developed form, never feels the demands of life as an odious burden. "Dull submission," according to James, "is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place."

When James received his appointment to the Gifford Lectureship at Edinburgh University, he viewed it, firstly, as an opportunity for an act of filial devotion. Immediately after his father's death in 1882 he had written his wife: "you must not leave me till I understand a little more of the value and meaning of religion, in Father's sense, in the mental life and destiny of man. It is not the one thing needful, as he said. But it is needful with the rest. My friends leave it altogether out. I as his son (if for no other reason) must help it to its rights in their eyes." Twenty years later he orally fulfilled the pledge and subsequently published the lectures as The Varieties of Religious Experience.

By way of introduction James admits in The Varieties that the incidence of abnormal psychical conditions among religious leaders has been exceedingly high. He even grants that the "pathological" aspects of their personalities have contributed greatly to their prestige and authority. Nonetheless, James insists that the prevalence of such traits and tendencies does not constitute a refutation of their teachings.

Ultimately, he declares, good religious beliefs must be determined by the empiricist criterion. "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots." "Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true."

Another Dichotomy

Just as James divides thinkers into the tough-minded and the tender-minded, he categorizes religious believers as healthy-minded or sick-souled. It is with the religion of healthy-mindedness--ranging from the creeds of professional mind healers to the poetry of Whitman--that he deals first. "It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of a sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden."

Healthy-minded individuals, James notes, possess temperaments "organically weighted on the side of cheer." For some people healthy-mindedness consists simply of involuntarily feeling happy about things--it occurs as an immediate, spontaneous response.

Voluntary Form

In its more voluntary form healthy-mindedness becomes an abstract way of conceiving things as good. It deliberately rejects evil from its perceptual field, holding the good as the essential aspect of being. James maintains that the emotional state of happiness carries with it blindness and insensibility to opposing facts as an instinctive device of self-protection. Yet he recognizes that healthy-mindedness can be employed as a conscious religious policy, and he takes pains to give it a fair hearing.

"Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern."

Beyond Health

Cheery and salubrious though it be, healthy-mindedness for James could never qualify as an ultimately satisfactory credo. "It seems to me," he writes, "that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution.

"But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth."

Conversion Experience

Regeneration by the conversion experience, James felt, is what enables the sick-souled individual to escape from the dark nights of his soul. He found this type of experience particularly fascinating but, as usual, treated the grandiloquent claims of "twice-born men" with pragmatic reservations:

"If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it." The then newly proposed theory of subconscious mental processes appealed to James as highly useful for understanding the sudden shifts in character that often attend conversion experiences. Indeed, he lauds the discovery of phenomena outside the "primary consciousness" as "the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science."

A person with a strongly developed, intrusive subliminal region, James argues, will have a proclivity for hallucinations, obsessive ideas, and automatic actions that seem unaccountable by ordinary experience. As a simple illustration, he cites the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. In addition, he refers to the work of Freud, Janet, and Prince on hysteria. Though James explicity credits this research with shedding "a wholly new light upon our natural constitution," he refuses to employ it to "explain away" conversion.

"Just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material," he writes, "so it is logically conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open."

Mystical States

From personal experimentation with nitrous oxide James received what he emphatically believed to be a form of mystical experience. Trances and other exceptional mental states preoccupied his attention for many years. Throughout his career, in fact, James was unflaggingly open-minded about seances, mind cures, and other academic black sheep. His conclusions regarding the nature of myticism might reasonably be considered an important key to his own religious interests and hope.

The so-called rational consciousness, he felt, is only one special kind of consciousness, "whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different." Though one can live an entire lifetime without knowing about them, James writes, the proper drug or other stimulus will promptly make them accessible.

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded.... They may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.... Looking back on my own experience, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity."

Saintliness

The saint, as James treats him, epitomizes the Jamesian attitude toward religion and the religious life. "Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person.... Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity--these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the completest measure.

"But ... all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating his total function."

Whole Personality

For James the basic concern is always with the whole personality in its functional relationship to its environment. In The Varieties he therefore presents innumerable "case histories" of concrete individuals. Carlyle, Bunyan, Tolstoi, St. Teresa--all receive warm and sensitive treatment.

Nothing bears truer witness to James's compassion than these skillfully rendered descriptions. And nothing provides a better indication of the ultimate aim of his inquiry: transcendence of one's own limitations through familiarity with the entire spectrum of human experience. "Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the self-hood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule."

(This is the fifth in a series of six articles on William James.)