William James

Who they were

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, the founder of the psychology of religion as a field, and the person most responsible for the fact that a site like this one can treat mystical experience as evidence of something rather than as a symptom.

He wrote the first major American psychology textbook, co-founded pragmatism, and delivered the Gifford Lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience. He was also, throughout, a man arguing his way out of his own despair in public, which is part of why the work still reads as though something is at stake in it.

Where they came from

He grew up in a wealthy, restless, intellectually ferocious New York family — his father a Swedenborgian theologian, his brother the novelist Henry James. He trained in medicine at Harvard and never practised.

In his late twenties he collapsed into a severe depression, with what he later described as a horror of his own existence, and he located the cause in a philosophical conviction: that if the world is a machine, his choices were already made and his efforts meaningless. The resolution, recorded in his diary in 1870, was a decision rather than a discovery. Having read Charles Renouvier on the freedom of the will, he wrote that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will.

That episode is the key to nearly everything he wrote afterwards. His philosophy is consistently the philosophy of someone who found that certain beliefs were not idle — that what you take to be true about agency and meaning changes whether you can get out of bed.

What they taught

Pragmatism. The meaning and truth of an idea lie in its practical consequences — what difference it makes if it is true. James pushed this further than his colleague Charles Peirce liked, into a theory of truth itself: an idea is true insofar as believing it works, in the long run and on the whole.

Radical empiricism. Experience includes the relations between things, not just the things. Connection, transition and continuity are given in experience rather than added by the mind afterwards — an argument aimed at the atomised sensory picture inherited from Hume.

The will to believe. Where a question is genuinely live, cannot be deferred, and cannot be settled on evidence, you are entitled to let your whole nature decide. This is his most attacked essay and is examined further in faith, belief and knowledge.

Religious experience as data. In Varieties he set aside institutions, doctrines and the question of God's existence, and looked at what people report. He distinguished the healthy-minded, for whom religion is a natural expansion of a fundamentally sunny temperament, from the sick soul, who has looked at suffering and evil without flinching and needs religion to be a rescue rather than a decoration. He was clear that he considered the sick soul's view the more complete of the two — and clear about which one he was.

What we can and cannot say

We can say Varieties has lasted for over a century and is still the standard entry point, which almost nothing in psychology from 1902 can claim.

We can say his pragmatic theory of truth is the least well-regarded part of his work. Bertrand Russell's objection has stuck: an idea that works is not thereby true, and James's account struggles to explain what makes beliefs work other than their being true in a more ordinary sense.

We can say his method built in limits that later scholarship has pressed on. He worked from written accounts by literate, mostly Protestant, mostly Western individuals, and he chose extreme cases deliberately, on the grounds that religious geniuses show the phenomenon most clearly. The result privileges solitary interior experience over communal and institutional religion — which suited his temperament and matched the assumptions of his period, and which critics including Grace Jantzen have argued is not a neutral description of religion but a particular and consequential construction of it.

We cannot say he settled anything, and he did not claim to. He ended Varieties with a carefully hedged suggestion that religious experience might connect to something wider, and described his own conclusion as over-belief — his term for what a person may reasonably hold beyond what the evidence carries. That honesty about the join between what he had shown and what he hoped is, more than any of his doctrines, the thing worth taking from him.

Further reading

• The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — free in many editions.
• "The Will to Believe" (1896) — short, and best read alongside Clifford.
• Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006) — the standard biography.