William James

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and The Will to Believe (1897).

Religion as experience

William James studies religion where it is lived. For his lectures he defines it as the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Churches, theologies and rites come after; first-hand experience is the root, and it is best studied in its extreme cases, the saints, mystics and converts in whom it burns strongest. He judges it not by where it comes from but by what it does: by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. Its tests are immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.

The once-born and the twice-born

Temperaments divide. The healthy-minded, the once-born, see the world as good and look away from evil; their religion is gladness, and the mind-cure movement of his day is one of its forms. The sick soul cannot look away. It feels the evil at the heart of things, the vanity of success and the fear beneath pleasure, and it needs to be born a second time. Its self is divided, and conversion is the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, through its firmer hold on religious realities.

In conversion, ideas that stood at the edge of a person's mind move to its hot centre and become the habitual centre of his personal energy. Often the change comes when striving stops and the person surrenders, and the work finishes itself below the threshold of awareness.

The fruits of saintliness

Saintliness has the same marks in every creed. The saint feels a wider life than this world's selfish little interests, and a friendly continuity with an ideal power; an immense elation and freedom as the outlines of the confining self melt down; and a shift of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections. Its practical fruits are asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity. James weighs them honestly. Carried to excess, devotion becomes fanaticism, purity a shrinking from the world and austerity self-torment, and these he does not praise; but taken as a whole he finds the saints' way of life justified by its fruits.

Four marks of the mystical

Mystical states have four marks. They are ineffable: they defy expression and must be experienced to be known. They are noetic: they feel like states of knowledge, insights into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are transient: half an hour, or at most an hour or two, is their usual limit before they fade into the light of common day. And they are passive: though they may be prepared for, by fixing the attention or by other practices, when they come the subject feels his own will in abeyance, as if grasped and held by a superior power.

Our normal waking consciousness, he concludes, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves them disregarded.

What the mystic may claim

He draws three conclusions. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. No authority goes out from them that should make it a duty for those who stand outside them to accept their revelations uncritically. And they break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based on the understanding and the senses alone, by showing it to be only one kind of consciousness, and so they open out the possibility of other orders of truth.

The more

At the end of the lectures he names what all religions share: an uneasiness and its solution. The uneasiness is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand; the solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers. The person who finds it becomes conscious that his higher part is continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside him and which he can keep in working touch with.

On its hither side, James suggests, the more is the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. On its farther side it goes where each faith's over-beliefs carry it, and a person's over-beliefs, honestly held, are often the most interesting and valuable things about him.

The will to believe

Where evidence cannot decide, a person may rightly choose. An option is genuine when it is living, both sides being real possibilities for us; forced, with no way to stand aside; and momentous, the chance unique and the stakes high. Faced with such an option on a question the intellect cannot settle, our passional nature not only lawfully may but must decide, for to refuse to choose is itself a choice, with the same risk of losing the truth. Against the rule that it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence, he sets his own: on such questions the risk of error is better than the loss of the truth.

The stream and the habit

Two teachings of his psychology reach furthest. Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits; it is nothing jointed, it flows, and a river or a stream is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described: the stream of thought. And habit is the enormous flywheel of society, which keeps each person in his groove, and its law can be put to work. Launch every new habit with as strong and decided an initiative as possible; never suffer an exception until it is securely rooted; seize the very first chance to act on every resolution; and keep the faculty of effort alive by a little needless exercise every day.

Trees joined at the roots

His long inquiry into mediums ended, as he said, where it began in theory, but it left him an image. We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, separate on the surface and joined beneath, for the trees commingle their roots in the darkness underground. There is, he suggests, a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea.

In his lecture on immortality he gives the reason it may be so. The brain may not produce thought, as a kettle produces steam, but transmit it, as coloured glass or a prism transmits light, so that the death of the brain need not be the end of the mind. He offers this as a possibility left open, not as a proof.