William James · Philosophy
Can visions and conversions count as evidence - or only symptoms to explain away?
A man describes the night his dread broke. The divided self came together, the horror went out of the world, and the life that followed was not the old one.
The reply is quick. He was feverish. He had the temperament for it, or a nervous system in disorder. Name the cause and the testimony is gone.
Answering that move took a whole book. Invited to give the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, a psychologist rather than a theologian treated religion the way a naturalist treats specimens. He set aside the questions that usually dominate: whether God exists, which church is right. He set aside the institutions too, as second-hand religion, the crust that forms once a founder’s fire has cooled.
What William James wanted was the living thing: religion as individuals actually undergo it in their most solitary moments. So he gathered hundreds of first-hand accounts of conversion, prayer, despair and ecstasy, and treated them as data. But the accounts were not all worth the same to him, and his rule for choosing was not obvious.
Some people see the skull beneath the skin and cannot stop seeing it. James called them sick souls - not invalids, but those who see evil first. Evil is not an error to be looked past but the key to reality, and the self divides against itself and lives at war. For such a person religion is rescue, not birthright. The divided self is unified in a crisis of conversion: the man must be born a second time.
The other temperament he called healthy-minded, or once-born - at home in existence by disposition. The world is fundamentally good to them. They turn toward the light, minimize evil, and feel a congenital gladness in being alive. James was drawn that way himself, and ruled against it anyway. A religion reborn out of evil is more complete, he argued, than the sunny faith that never faced it; the completest religions, he wrote in the Varieties, are ‘the religions of deliverance’.
A generation later, Sigmund Freud would answer that all of it is illusion, a wish-fulfilment to be outgrown, and that tracing a belief to its root unmasks it. If he is right, this sympathetic method has been reading symptoms as testimony. And the crisis that heals the twice-born looks, from outside, a great deal like an illness.
Ordinary waking consciousness is only one type among several, James held, and the others lie a screen away. He reached that claim through the mystics. Since a state cannot be disqualified by its cause, their reports were admissible, and he read them as evidence about reality. At the centre of personal religion he placed mystical experience - direct, overwhelming contact with a larger reality - the living root from which creeds and theologies grew later.
Four marks identify such a state. It is ineffable: words will not carry it, and you have to have been there. It has a noetic quality, arriving as knowledge rather than emotion, a revelation of something that was hidden. It is transient, rarely lasting more than an hour before it fades. And it is marked by passivity: the mystic feels grasped and held by a power that is not his own.
From these James took a suggestion he could not shake. If rational consciousness is one form among others, the accounts he had collected are not curiosities at the edge of psychology but reports from near its centre. Which leaves the question the rest of the book has to answer: if the feeling comes first, what are the creeds for?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You studied how James investigated religion. Say where he looked for evidence, name the two temperaments he found there, the four marks he gave mystical states, and the test he used instead of naming causes.
Leads to Sigmund Freud.
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