The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 14-29

A Study in Human Nature Entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience

James Campbell
The University of Toledo

Shortly after the appearance of William James's volume, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in June 1902, Josiah Royce commented on contemporary religious life at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Royce noted that, on the one hand, "Religion, in its higher sense, constitutes the most important business of the human being. . . ." By this he was referring to his conviction that

man's present and worldly life, as experience shows it to us, is, even in the most fortunate cases, a comparatively petty affair, whose passing joys and sorrows can be viewed as of serious and permanent importance only in case this life means what it at present never empirically presents to us, namely a task and a destiny that have, from some higher point of view, an absolute value.

On the other hand, Royce complained that "in human history, Religion in proportion to its importance, characteristically appears as amongst the worst managed, if not the very worst managed, of all of humanity's undertakings" (1903, 280-81). Here he pointed to the array of contending faiths whose sectarian pursuits have resulted in an endless stream of misunderstandings and conflicts.

In his Gifford Lectures in Natural Religion, delivered in two series between May 1901 and June 1902, James said little about Royce's latter point but much about the importance of religion to human life. In this discussion of Varieties, I want to examine four general issues. The first is James's psychological method for approaching the topic of religious [End Page 14] experience. The second is his understanding of the meaning of religious experience, and religion in general, in human life. James's prior commitments to the importance of the religious interpretation of life are my third concern. Fourth and finally, I offer my own evaluation of what James accomplished in Varieties.

1.

From the start of his lectures in Edinburgh, James admitted to being "neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist." What James was, of course, was a skilled psychologist; as he notes, "To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution" (James [1902] 1985, 12). Thus, the reports of nervous instability and psychical visitations, trances and voices and visions, melancholy and obsessions and fixed ideas that he details in Varieties should draw the interest of the psychologist just as strongly as other mental phenomena do. Considering the phenomenon of instantaneous conversion, for example, James writes, "Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities." Whether we are ultimately to interpret such a conversion as "a miracle in which God is present as he is present in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt" or as "a strictly natural process . . . neither more nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or low, of man's interior life . . . " (188), the conversion experience is an event to which the psychologist should attend. In the careful quasi-clinical setting into which his lectures introduced his audience, James the psychologist proceeds with an inquiry that attempts to provide "a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate . . ." (14).

James tells us that physiological psychology maintains "definite psycho-physical connexions to hold good" and assumes that "the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete" (20). He continues that, even though its methods are far different from those traditionally associated with inquiries into spiritual matters, this psychological mode of inquiry does not amount to a rejection, or even a disparagement, of religion. He...