William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Psychologist Studies the Sacred

In 1901 and 1902 a Harvard psychologist gave a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh on natural theology, and took an unusual approach. Instead of arguing for or against God, he drew on diaries, letters and autobiographies of people who said they had been converted, healed or flooded with sudden certainty, and asked what such experiences are like and what they do to a person. The lectures became The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, and the book has stayed in print for more than a century. This article covers what William James studied, his ties to the New Thought movement and psychical research, and why the book still matters.

Who William James Was

James was born in New York City in January 1842 into a wealthy and unusual family. His father, Henry James Sr., was a theologian in the tradition of Emanuel Swedenborg. His brother Henry became the novelist. James trained in medicine at Harvard and earned his MD in 1869, but he never practiced. His twenties were marked by physical ailments and long periods of depression, during which he contemplated suicide for months at a time. A turning point came in 1870, after he read the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. In his diary James wrote: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

He spent nearly his whole career at Harvard and taught his first course in experimental psychology there in the 1875 to 1876 academic year. His two volume The Principles of Psychology (1890), about twelve hundred pages and twelve years in the making, made his name, and his description of the mind as a stream of consciousness went on to influence modernist writers. He went on to develop the philosophy of pragmatism, which judges ideas partly by their consequences in practice. He died in 1910.

The Gifford Lectures

The Gifford Lectures were founded to bring natural theology, the study of religion through reason and evidence, to a general audience. James gave twenty of them. He drew heavily on personal documents collected by the psychologist Edwin Diller Starbuck and on published testimony from saints and mystics.

His working definition set the frame. For these lectures, he said, religion would mean "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 and theologies were set aside. In his view they lived second hand off the original experiences of their founders, so he went to the experiences directly.

The Healthy-Minded and the Sick Soul

The book's best known contrast comes in Lectures IV to VII. Healthy-minded people, as James described them, see the world as basically good and tend to look away from evil or treat it as unreal. Borrowing a phrase from Francis W. Newman, he called them the once-born: their religious happiness needs no rescue from some earlier burden.

The sick soul cannot look away. For this temperament, evil and suffering are real and central, and peace comes only through a crisis and a kind of second birth. These are the twice-born. James included a vivid account, presented as a free translation from a French sufferer, of a man seized by panic at the memory of an asylum patient and the thought "That shape am I." The account is now known to be autobiographical. Although James presented the two types as neutral descriptions, he wrote that "the completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed," naming Buddhism and Christianity.

Mind-Cure and New Thought

Healthy-mindedness led James straight to the movement now called New Thought. He gave it "the title of the 'Mind-cure movement,'" noting that its followers also called it New Thought, and described it as "a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side." He traced its sources to the Gospels, Emerson's transcendentalism, Berkeley's idealism, spiritism, popular evolutionary optimism and a strain of Hinduism.

James treated the movement as a serious psychological fact. He called it the American people's "only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life," and said its spread was due to practical fruits: people reported that changing their habits of thought relieved worry, fear and illness. He was not uncritical. He wrote that some mind-cure literature was "so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed" that a trained reader could hardly get through it, and his sympathy for the sick soul shows he did not think optimism answered everything.

The mind-cure writers he studied belong to the same wave that produced books such as Thought Vibration (1906), subtitled the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, and later The Kybalion (1908) with its Principle of Mentalism. Modern readers will also think of the placebo effect, which offers a measured test of what expectation can and cannot do for the body.

The Four Marks of Mystical Experience

James devoted two lectures to mysticism and proposed four marks which, when an experience has them, justify calling it mystical.

1. Ineffability: the person says it defies expression, so its quality must be experienced directly and cannot be handed on in words.
2. Noetic quality: although it resembles feeling, it seems to be knowledge too, "states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect," carrying a lasting sense of authority.
3. Transiency: it cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare cases, he wrote, "half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit."
4. Passivity: preparation such as fixing the attention can help bring it on, but once it begins the person feels their own will is in abeyance, sometimes as if held by a superior power.

The first two marks, he said, are enough to call a state mystical, and the other two are usually present. He also described his own experiments with nitrous oxide, which left him convinced that "our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness," with other forms lying about it, "parted from it by the filmiest of screens." Readers will recognize the same four features in many modern accounts of deep meditation and of near-death experiences, and his remark about other forms of consciousness anticipates current debates about consciousness and the brain.

The Psychical Researcher

James also examined claims most scientists ignored. He was a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research and served as president of the British Society for Psychical Research. In 1885, the year after the death of his young son, he had his first sitting with the medium Leonora Piper. He became convinced she knew things she could not have learned by ordinary means, and he famously called her his white crow, the single case that would overturn the rule that all crows are black. Yet he did not accept that spirits spoke through her. He weighed telepathy and natural explanations, and judged the spirit hypothesis incoherent. Later scholars noted a more ordinary possibility: a maid in the James household was friendly with a maid in Piper's, and gossip may have carried private details.

Why the Book Still Matters

Critics have pressed hard. The philosopher George Santayana complained of its "tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition." Nicholas Lash argued that James wrongly cut private experience off from the communities and traditions in which it happens.

Yet its method remains a model. James kept apart three questions that are still often blurred: what an experience is like, what it does in a life, and whether it is true. On the last he was careful. He concluded that religion was on the whole good for people while admitting this did not establish its truth, and he labeled his own belief in a wider reality beyond ordinary awareness an over-belief, held but not proven. That is close to what this publication means by spiritual science. His contemporary Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, took a different route and presented his visions as research findings. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote of the Varieties, "This book does me a lot of good." For anyone curious about mystical states, New Thought or the limits of evidence, it remains one of the best places to start.

Sources and further reading

• William James (Wikipedia)
• The Varieties of Religious Experience (Wikipedia)
• New Thought (Wikipedia)