Abstract

In "The Sick Soul" chapter of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, the author includes as his last anecdote a cryptic revelatory experience that purportedly comes from an anonymous French correspondent. Scholars have assumed that James' subsequent admission that the anecdote was "his own case" means that James himself experienced what the Frenchman describes: fear of his own existence and a vision of an epileptic patient in an asylum, from whom James could not comfortingly distinguish himself. I argue, however, that the anecdote is best understood as fictional and that attempts to place the story into James' life are relatively fruitless. A better approach to this compelling and important text is to assume that James fabricated the story as a pithy illustration of the individualistic origin of religious pragmatism. Using Continental European thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre and Julia Kristeva as helpful comparisons, this work explores James' religious philosophy first from the individualistic perspective of the Varieties, and then from the social perspective of "The Moral Equivalent of War." My conclusion is that James' religious pragmatism indeed begins with the experiences of solitary, often times sickly individuals, but is realized only in a relatively healthy society that sublimates the morbid feelings of its individual members into tasks productive of humanity