Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in Human Nature, Centenary Edition

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INTRODUCTION:  SECTION  ONE

Berkeley  and  then  Johns  Hopkins.  He  was  also  a  man  who  had

studied  under  Wundt  and  Fechner  in  Leipzig.  Royce  presented

himself as James’s replacement that sabbatical year, and with James’s

help, managed to stay on as the stone against which James sharpened

his  philosophical  sword  of  pragmatism  for  the  remainder  of  their

two  careers.  Royce  would  transform  himself  from  an  apologist  for

Christian monism into a philosopher of science interested in ethics,

loyalty,  and  idealism,  as  well  as  symbolic  logic  and  the  logic  and

philosophy of science. He would become a steward of the then still

uncollected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce and create a seminar

that  would  attract  an  elite  of  Harvard’s  younger  generation  who

would after his death in 1916 became some of the key powerbrokers

in  the  University.

33

  More  than  that,  Royce  became  the  beloved

friend of William James, and his constant analysis of the pragmatic

ideal  in  a  Christian  spiritual  context  helped  make  a  more  mature

philosopher  out  of  his  mutually  beloved  colleague.  Royce’s  pres-

ence also permitted James to range far and wide beyond the purely

Christian scheme of salvation alone in order to look for the generic

roots of spiritual experience across cultures.

34

William James, himself, finally came out with his textbook, The

Principles of Psychology, but twelve years late. Instead of the slim and

efficient volume he had forecast, it came to over 1,200 pages in two

volumes. Exhausted, he said he was finally glad to get that “dropsical

tumescent  mass”  off  his  desk.  The  work  received  international

acclaim and two years later he produced the cut-and-paste version,

Psychology: Briefer course, which became one of the most used intro-

ductory textbooks in psychology over the next twenty years.

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His students dubbed The Principles “The James” and Briefer course,

“the  Jimmy.”  Both  works  had  a  common  theme  focused  almost

entirely  on  a  psychology  of  the  individual,  what  goes  on  inside

people’s inner lives, their feelings, sensation, cognitions and percep-

tions; the working of the individual will, the relation of the instincts

33

Costello,  Harry  Todd,  Josiah  Royce’s  seminar,  1913–1914:  As  recorded  in  the  notebooks

Harry  T.  Costello.  Edited  by  Grover  Smith,  with  an  essay  on  the  philosophy  of  Royce  by

Richard Hocking. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

34

Taves, A, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from

Wesley to James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

35

James,  W.  Principles  of  psychology,  2  vols.  New  York:  Henry  Holt,  1890;  James,  W.

Psychology: Briefer course. New York: Henry Holt, 1892.

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INTRODUCTION:  SECTION  ONE

xxix

to the emotions, and what kind of a self individuals become in light

of  James’s  claim  that  each  of  us  is  comprised  of  many  selves.  He

would later articulate this focus on the individual as his doctrine of

pluralism, acknowledging that there is very little difference between

people, “but what difference there is,” he said, “was very important.”

The  problem  with  The  Principles,  however,  was  that  it  had  two

centers  of  gravity  —  a  scientific  and  a  philosophical  one.  From

the  standpoint  of  science,  James  wrote  from  the  perspective  of

reductionistic positivism. He did this, he said, because there was no

epistemological system yet developed that was powerful enough to

challenge  it.  From  the  standpoint  of  philosophy,  he  left  open  the

possibility that an alternative epistemology might be found to the

way science was conducted. Pragmatism demanded, after all, that two

different approaches leading to the same ends were for all intents and

purposes equal, even if not the same. So, in addition to the central

theme  of  the  work,  that  the  thinker  is  the  thought,  and  nothing

more  need  be  posited  of  a  scientific  psychology,  James  engaged  in

numerous forays into dissociation, multiple personality, and alterna-

tive  states  of  consciousness.  It  was  a  definition  of  consciousness

that deviated significantly from the normative psychologists’ almost

exclusive focus on simple reaction times, knee jerk reflexes, and the

object  at  the  cognitive  center  of  the  field  of  attention,  and  it  was

destined to become James’s central focus after 1890.

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Four  years  later,  in  his  presidential  address  to  the  American

Psychological  Association,  James  reminded  his  audience  of  the

epistemological conundrum he had presented in The Principles. But

he shocked them there by saying that, rather than take up the old

arguments, he was going to throw them over, and instead, argue for

a new epistemology for experimental science. It took him two more

years  to  give  it  a  name,  when  it  appeared  for  the  first  time  in  his

first philosophical work, The Will to Believe.

37

 There in the preface,

he called it radical empiricism, by which he meant a radical trans-

formation  of  the  reductionistic  outlook  in  psychology  and  science

generally by shifting to a focus on pure experience in the immedi-

ate moment.

36

Taylor, E. I., William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1996.

37

James, W., The will to believe. New York: Longman’s, Green, 1896.

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