In Our Time - William James's 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'

Episode Date: May 13, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James. The American novelist Henry James famously made London his home and himself more English than the English. In contrast, his psychologist brother, William, was deeply immersed in his American heritage. But in 1901, William came to Britain too. He had been invited to deliver a series of prestigious public lectures in Edinburgh. In them, he attempted a daringly original intellectual project. For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. When the lectures were printed, as 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', they were an instant success.They laid the ground for a whole new area of study - the psychology of religion - and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley. To date, James's book has been reprinted thirty-six times and has been hailed as one of the best non-fiction books of the twentieth century.With:Jonathan ReeFreelance philosopherJohn HaldaneProfessor of Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsGwen Griffith-DicksonEmeritus Professor of Divinity at Gresham College and Director of the Lokahi FoundationProducer: Natasha Emerson.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one day in the 19th century in America, a man locked himself in a room and refused food and water. He fell to the floor in a faint. When he came to, he found himself on his knees, praying,

infused with a deep sense of peace. He'd been converted, he said, to God. It was accounts like these of an intensely personal moment of conversion that inspired the American psychologist William James to attempt a daring project. In 1901, he spoke of his examination of the psychology of religion as a means to explore not the doctrines of belief but the nature of the individual experience itself.

In 1901, William James, the brother of the novelist Henry James, made a voyage from America to deliver a series of public lectures on his findings to the people of Edinburgh. When the lectures were published as the varieties of religious experience, they're an unexpected and influential success. In the century since, they've been reprinted 36 times and had a wide and deep influence, inspiring figures

from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung to the novelist Elders Huxley. With me to discuss William James and the variety of religious experience are John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, Gwen Griffith Dixon, a Emeritus Professor of Divinity, Gresham College, and Jonathan, a freelance philosopher. Jonathan, can you give us some sense of William James' background, his intellectual context? First of all, I think William James is one of the greatest philosophers ever, and he's untypical of, 20th century philosophers, I think, fall into two groups.

They're either nitpicking, pettifogging bureaucrats or else they're egomaniacs with delusions with delusions of genius. He wasn't like that. He was honest, witty, modest, flexible, generous, a very creative, open-minded thinker, and he produced prose, which looks as though it was a spontaneous flow, a very colonial. but is actually incredibly carefully crafted. And he was a great phrase maker too. I mean, he came up with phrases like the divided self, the very phrase mental states, the sick soul, the will to believe subliminal consciousness,

the stream of consciousness. It was obviously very important for his brother than novelist Henry. And indeed religious experience itself is one of his great phrases. He was an American. He was a New Yorker originally, born in 1842, so he was just coming up to 60 when he came to Edinburgh to give the Gifford lectures.

And he'd been teaching in Harvard for 30 years by then. But before that, he'd had an incredibly broad education. His father had taken him around him and Henry around Europe. So they became steeped in the languages, the philosophy, the art of Europe. It was a fantastic education. After that, he'd become a naturalist. he'd gone to South America, become a sort of field naturalist, a Darwinian, and then he'd gone to Harvard, started teaching biology,

got interested in psychology, and his first great work was a book called The Principles of Psychology, published in two volumes in 1890. So he was primarily a Darwinian scientist who then turned to philosophy later in his life. And he was invited to Edinburgh to give what were called the Gifford Lectures. Can you just briefly say why there were the Gifford lectures and why he accepted?

He was very nervous about accepting he thought that he could, he was very, I mean, in fact, he postponed it for a couple of times because he was so worried that he wouldn't be up to the job. The lectures had been set up by Adam Gifford, who was an Edinburgh lawyer, who'd made a lot of money, and the most important thing in Gifford's life, he said, I'm a lawyer, but the most important thing that happened to me was, I think in 1848, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the kind of poetic American philosopher had come to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution and given talks about Rolfo Aldo Emerson,

religion, which had blown Gifford's mind. Gifford had been brought up as what we would think of as a sort of narrow-minded, moralistic, Scots Presbyterian, and Emerson blew his mind. He started thinking that religion is not about obedience to a punishing God, but it's about recognizing a principle in the universe that is, he calls it the awe, which deserves our worship and that suffuses the universe us with love. He set up the Gifford lectures in his will in order to spread wide discussion about natural religion. And it's quite interesting he said there should be no religious tests.

The lecturers can be of any religion or of none. John, hold on. He was speaking at the beginning of the 20th century, obviously, 9101, 92, as an American in Europe, at an American in Edinburgh, with all the glory of the Enlightenment still glowing around the globe from Edinburgh. What did the Americanism and the Enlightenment of Edinburgh? What about that juxtaposition?

How did they affect him? It's interesting. He actually begins the lectures by saying that Americans have been used to sit and listen while Europeans speak, and this is now an occasion of which are European. And he hopes that the European audience will be listening to an American. He hopes that this will be the beginning of an interflow between across the Atlantic. I think what he was alert to there was something that's been mentioned by Jonathan already, which was the prefiguring of this in a way through Emerson.

Emerson had written an essay, I think, called the American scholar in which he talked about the need of Americans to find an authentic and distinctive voice. This is really the beginning of a kind of self-conscious development of American intellectualism that doesn't see itself as exclusively dependent upon Europe and so on. So I think he comes to Scotland, on the one hand, with a sense that America is developing its voice, and to some extent it falls to him to carry that forward to the next stage, but also with deep respect for the intellectual traditions that Edinburgh represents.

And I think it's worth just emphasizing here that so far as an English-speaking, North American was concerned, the dominant intellectual influence is, Germany comes to have its voice as well a little later on, but within the English-speaking world, Scotland, and in particular Edinburgh,

is seen as the focus of European intellectualism, not London, for example. And so he comes very humbly, as it were, to the city of Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson, and so on. And he's going to lay out some ideas of a new and radical sort, but he's conscious that he's doing so within a tradition that is on the one hand scientific,

the matter of naturalism, the study of man and so on, but also philosophical, and this third strand, which is theological. Let's just caricature a little. So he comes to these stern Presbyterian persons in Edinburgh, sitting as it were, in their pews, John, and he's very much a Yankee, unlike his brother Henry James,

who tailored himself into an English gentleman, he comes in with rough... But you're not quite straw in his hair, but quite a bit of Mark Twain about him with a good accent. What happened when he turned up? Well, a very good audience. I mean, one of the interesting things about Gifford lectures, and I say this as having myself been a Gifford lecturer, is your terror as you begin these,

is that you're going to lose your audience by week by week and so on, lecture by lecture. But in fact, and I'm afraid I've seen that. Not in my own case, I have to say, but I've seen that in the case of others. But in his case, 250 people turned up for the first lecture, and thereafter the audience grew and grew. Because people then were used to listening at some length to lectures. You know, it wasn't very long before that John Stuart Mill had given his rectorial address in St Andrews that I think had lasted two and a half hours.

So people were used to sitting and listening to elaborate argumentation being set out. So that was okay. But he was going to say things and in a style that they were unused to, though not completely unfamiliar with, because as we've heard, Emerson had been there some decades before. So I think one further note I doubt I suppose is this. It was a period of crisis in a way among the intellectual classes, not just in Scotland but in England as well, because what Matthew Arnold had talked about,

the Ebbing Sea of Faith, people were losing belief in traditional Christianity, and so they were looking for philosophical substitutions for that. Hegel had been a great influence from the Germans and so on. So I think they were primed to hear how religion could be made sense of in ways that didn't involve just the rehearsing of traditional dogma. What in terms did his father have on him, this Swedenborgian? Yes, it's rather interesting.

His father had, the family were Irish, actually. They had originated in Ireland, and then I think in the grandfather's generation who had come over. The father himself was very interested in philosophical ideas, and Emerson, again, features in that. It's part of that that people are engaging a kind of synthesis, I suppose a less appreciative way would be, say, syncretism, adding bits and pieces together.

But I think that's more favourably, let's say, a synthesis. and looking beyond the traditional forms of Christian thought and so on. His father had got interested in Swedenborgianism, which is a religious movement, which has aspects of sort of pietism about it, Unitarianism as well. Swedenborg had thought that the core of the Christian message is essentially a message of love and of self-annihilation, that sort of embracing universal humanity,

and that this brings a kind of salvation, a mystical dimension. The key to it, though, was a sort of experience of, disclosure of the universe as a place of being and goodness in which life is to be shared. His father had undergone such an experience at a moment of crisis, and that's going to be a recurrent feature through James' religious experience, and that had influenced James. Gwen Griffiths-Dixon, how significant is it that William James was attempting a psychological study,

not a history of religion, not the institutions, not the anthropology, but a psychological study quite distinct. It's very powerful and leaves the very last, inheritance behind it. I think we shouldn't run away with the idea that it's somehow completely unique. You actually look back several thousand years there's been reflection on the psychological factors involved in religious experience, but you need to look somewhere else. You need to look at the mystical writers and the spiritual directors. And in this country, in the English language, say the author, the anonymous author of the cloud of unknowing, in fact, writers like that

have a lot of sophisticated, subtle awareness that may be what's going on in a religious experience has nothing to do with God and it's coming from something else. But in the Gifford lectures and in the context of speaking to philosophers, this is actually quite an exciting revolutionary development. There were other psychologists of religion in America in particular writing about religious experience with James. So he's part of a small band, people like Professor Starbuck, nicely named, Professor Lubar. But it's really him situating himself amongst the philosophers and theologians, I think, that is really extraordinary. And part of what he's trying to do, I think, is to carve out the legitimacy of a discipline called psychology

that's allowed to talk about the mind over against philosophers and allowed to take claim and ownership with things like emotions. And I think particularly for him, there's a subtext that he's really bringing in another part of the mind, which is the subconscious. I think this is a great love song to the subconscious this book in some ways. And he's trying to assert that this is another kind of the mind and human experience that psychologists should be allowed to look at,

whereas philosophers can talk about the doctrines and truth. So he's really trying to carve out a different language with speaking about, in a way, what are still philosophical and theological questions, I think, but bringing in a new discipline. Although this has happened before thousands of years ago and in this country and other countries, with the mystics and so.

Nevertheless, in the context of that particular nanosecond of Western philosophy the last couple of hundred years ago, so it was a new development and it came as a new revelation for a great number of people. Can you give us some idea of his feeling of the newness of it. Yes, and I think one of the aspects of it is a first personal account,

which is very different from psychology, to some extent, he's distinguishing himself from existing psychology, which at that time was very kind of mechanistic. It was talking about functions and faculties like the will and the memory, and he's actually bringing psychology a little closer to philosophy. But over against philosophy, there is, an attempt to distance itself from what he would see as maybe sectarian

or theological disputes about truth. The truth of doctrines is this religion experience true? Is it valid? Is it theoretically correct? And he's trying to bring a greater emphasis maybe on the usefulness he stresses, the fruits of the experience. And officially, he's trying to distance himself

from whether it's really authentic, religiously, whether there really is a god out there is what he's almost saying. In fact, I think he finds it difficult to distance himself from that question. But you can see in the early parts of the Gifford lectures, I'm not surprised he was nervous, that he's a little bit defensively trying to defend himself

that he's not a historian, he's not a church historian, he's not talking about doctrine, he's trying to get across to this Scottish European audience, something that's valid to be speaking about personal experience, very private matters, apart from whether they should be subjected to kind of rational analysis in the way that a theologian reference. philosopher might try to do.

Jonathan, can we attempt to define what James means by religion in a variety of religious experience? Can I put one question to add to that? I'm sorry to ask two questions. Why did you think that this sort of experience, why did he call it religious? Truth

breathed by cheerfulness, a spontaneous wisdom, and so and so forth? Why did he put the word, why did you think it was a religious experience rather than all sorts of other experiences? So, Two questions. I'm very sorry. Well, I think he was discussing

religious experiences that people thought of as religious. So he's taking no word for it. He was taking their definition of the field. But I think it was something rather sly and ingenious about the way he approached these lectures. He began in a very modest tone saying, look, I'm only an American, and what's more,

I'm only a scientist, and I'm only a psychologist. So I'm afraid I can't really talk about theology. I can't talk about proofs of the existence of God. I can only talk about the psychological aspect of things. But actually, he was making a big philosophical point by saying that. He was making – and at some point he says what he's against is intellectualism about religion. About if people who think that the point of religion is to have doctrines that are true about the structure of the universe, he says maybe actually the point of religion is to have a certain attitude towards the universe,

an attitude of solemnity, a lack of pertness, he says. Unreligious people aren't people who don't people who don't believe in. God. Indeed, he's happy to allow that humanists, people who believe in the religion of humanity, are religious in just the same sense as theists are. Irreligious people, his prime example is Voltaire.

People who, he says, a geomphychism about the universe, a complete carelessness about cosmic and moral matters. The religious person is the person who cares, who is capable of having a tender and solemn attitude towards the universe.

But does, I come to one second, Second John, I just want, does God come into this in his, where does he see God? Because most people think about religion, whatever religion is, I think there's a figure up there, out there. Is that figure in William James's philosophy? I would say in a negative kind of way. I mean, the point about religious experience is that it's a sense of the unimportance of self. And I think the idea that there's some important thing called God, is another way of expressing the idea that your own selfhood is not important.

So it's a self-abnegation is expressed by saying that I worship God. But I think for William James that's equivalent to saying, I don't take myself terribly seriously. John Holden, does this take us to the notion, or his notion, of the distinction between first and second-hand religion? And if so, can you tell us what he means by that? I mean, I think your previous question to Jonathan was an excellent one, which is what makes this religion.

What makes it the case of what he's talking about as a matter of religion. Because antecedently, historically one would think of religion as being defined, say, in terms of certain external orientation that you're turned towards, for example, the idea of a god or what exists out there, transcendently in heaven or whatever it may be, or perhaps in terms of creeds or institutions, liturgies, all of that, these sort of external objective features. What's going on here is an inward turn. And we will get to this. I mean, one criticism of James, you might say, is that this is sort of subjectivising, individualising, rendering existential, something that really ought to be oriented towards an external reality.

We can perhaps pick that up. But certainly, I mean, maybe I could just quote his definition of religion because it's worth having us, well, on the table before us. And it's interesting in this respect. He talks about religion as the feelings, acts and experiences, 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. Now, the emphasis on all of that is feeling subjectivity, individuality, and so on. I think that, and this plays in his distinction, as you say, between first and second-hand religion. So the idea is something like this. Religion originates in particular and perhaps dramatic existential moments, moments of experience, which are transformative for the subject. and somebody who has those and develops their attitudes to them in an appropriate way, seeks to understand them, engages in this personal quest for meaning.

If they're authentic, if they're real, will tend to attract disciples, sympathizers and so followers. Over time, this will get codified, represented through a text, something of that sort. Institutions will build up around it. But here we've got the transition from as we're authentic, first personal, originating religious experience, to these externalities of a church and institution, a dogma. And he thinks that as that happens, effectively life is lost. So he'd say that most people, when they talk about religion, are thinking of kind of obedience to certain inherited traditional forms

of literature or practice and so on. But this is essentially inauthentic. The core of religion lies elsewhere in this transformative experience. That's what the geniuses of religion, as you will say, how they motivate it. But it's also what we must seek for if we are going to be authentically. religious. Could apply to institutions all over the place. Absolutely. The good of the institutions, the more

life is lost. We're in the BBC, but I think we won't be for our occasion. No, no, no, I was not about BBC. Gwen Griffiths Dixon. And James, so which we know is interested in our individual psychers, we've got first and second hundred religion. There was also another

distinction he made between healthy-mindedness and the six-old. Could you talk to us about what he meant by healthy-mindedness? Yes, healthy-mindedness is the once-born. as he says, whereas the six souls are twice born. Healthy-minded are people whose souls are a sky-blue color, as he puts it. These are the spiritual optimists.

They happily go along developing and spiritually like a flower opening to the sun. They never have any doubts. They don't struggle and strive and have inner torments and wrestle with a sense of sin. God loves them. God forgives them. What could be wrong with that? Those are what he calls the healthy minds. He speaks of another group of people.

called Six Souls or the Divided Self. He's a great phrase maker, as Jonathan said, very vivid writing. These are the people who wrestle with their inner demons, who are overwhelmed by a sense of sin, feel divided amongst themselves, inner conflict, and need to be redeemed by some dramatic personal experience from the outside. As it stands, that's, in a way, not a terribly original observation. It's not unique to say they're optimists and pessimists.

We've noticed that. There's Eeyore and there's Tigger. I think, in fact, the interesting. interest of that is somewhere deeper, which he half sees and doesn't entirely see. I think he's really interested in the process and two different kinds of process, because once he tells us about these healthy-minded people, in a book that's full of accounts of people's religious experience, he only actually gives us one healthy-minded person. The rest of his examples, I would say, are six souls who have found what he calls the mind cure. Is that Walt Whitman, the healthy-minded

person? Yes, yes. He would be a good example of one, and Tolstoy and Bunyaner would be some of his examples of sick souls who wrestle. And I think the distinction actually that is underneath this is a deeper question about whether the state of nature, if you like, is that we are happy and healthy and being miserable is something that we need to be cured from and the cure can be natural. So he describes what he's calling this mind cure, which looks very much like positive thinking or cognitive therapy actually in our terms. People correcting their thoughts and being more disciplined, not being gloomy, pulling themselves out of a whole. So is it that this misery and this transformation to happiness is a natural process with therapy or is the natural state to be miserable and sinful and disordered

from which you need to be saved by something supernatural? John Holden, would you like to just elaborate on his example of Tolstoy in that regard? Yes, Tolstoy is very interesting. He does talk also about the people who he regards as somewhat superficially moving towards a kind of state of happy souls where he talks about these sort of, I think Mary Baker Eddy is one of his examples, and liberal Christianity is another in which people really don't take seriously existential angst or evil or the disturbance of the conflictedness of nature.

Can I just one thing? It strikes me that's very interesting what Gwen said earlier on about. This is prefigured actually in the spiritual writers. I mean, Augustine, for example, emphasizes the conflictedness of the human soul. He says, you know, our hearts are restless until they come to rest in you. So this is an old theme in a way in the spiritual writers. Now, when he comes to Tolstoy, Tolstoy, he gives serious attention to. Tolstoy, in his work, My Confession, had written about a life that had been going well,

but which seemed progressively to be drained of meaning. A life has been going spectacular. It's a point, doesn't it? I mean, an aristocrat, as it were, publicly married, children, great fame, international fame, all that sort of stuff. Absolutely. By any adding up spectacularly more. Exactly.

But what starts to happen in Tolstoy's life? as it were, the colour drains out of that world. And nothing changes in the external realities, as it were, but what changes is his response to those realities, that they just seem to, whatever meaning they might once have had for them seems to be draining away. And Tolstoy feels this existential angst. And at a sense of the absurdity of life, you know,

its mortality and so on. What does all this add up to? What does it mean in such like? And Tolstoy quotes this Eastern fable or allegory, as well, the person who is on a plane, I think, has been chased by some wild animal and dives into the well. And in the well, there is, he's hanging by, you know, a small branch that's growing up the side of the well. And then two mice appear and start to know at the branch. And what do you do under these circumstances?

And he talks about different options. One is that you see a droplet of honey, as it were, and you just lick them out of the honey, as it was. So you just savour the moment for as long as it lasts. Another one is that you, you know, you scramble and make every effort to get it out. another one is that you just release yourself, you fall into the jaws of the dragon. And these are really meant to represent different attitudes to this sense of existential angst.

One response is to say, look, just enjoy the moment for as long as it lasts. Another one is to say, no, life is absurd. Another one is to say, go on scrambling and such like. And what Tolstoy does, he describes this process of transformation in which he comes to rest.

Actually, the Augustinian phrase is helpful here. You know, our hearts are restless until they come to rest. rest in you. Tolstoy finds himself coming to rest in an understanding of human life as motivated by love of other. That really what we're to do is, as it was

to live with others, to be with others, to share with others, and in this, as a kind of satisfaction comes, and a sense of deeper, sort of existential well-being, but beyond that, that is the answer to the mystery of life. He's very interested,

Jonathan, right, in the moment of conversion, and in the fact of conversion. Did that happen to him? And could you tell us in as much detail as you want to about the fascination with conversion and why it was important? Yes, I mean, in a way, this is the same story

as the Six Souls business. I think one of the very interesting things about the way he sets it up is he says there are different kinds of religion will suit different kinds of people. And in a way, I mean, whenever a philosopher says, well, there are basically two kinds of people in the world, you should be ready to yawn.

But I think his distinction between the once-born and the twice-born, is actually a tremendously useful distinction. The once born, yeah, they're the happy people who are never troubled. The twice born, and he definitely included himself in that, are people who, insofar as they're capable of happiness in their adult life, it's because they've been through terrible sadness, terrible doubt, and they've somehow triumphed over it.

And his account of all these conversion stories, as Gwen says, Bunyan and Tolstoy, particularly, is about how people have been through these experiences. And one of the things which makes this interesting psychologically is that it says you can't just ask people whether people are happy or not. You have to know the story of how they came to it. And I think that that's a very important insightful point, not just about religion, but about human happiness in general.

As I see it, he was preferring experience to concepts, that the idea that you could organize the world and have a view of the world that would never change was absurd. It was changing all the time. Everything might be different tomorrow, as it were. That's one thing. Another thing that interested me,

although a Darwinian, he wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that religion was just a passing phase and we'd grown out of it, that this was an absurd... I'm sorry to use that word again, you started it, John. This is an absurd notion,

and you could be a Darwinian, which he was, but at the same time simply not accept that religion had been a passing phase in evolution. He hated the faith vetoers, as he called them, the survival theorists who said, well, modern religion is just a survival of primitive superstition. He says, well, you could say that, but on the other hand, modern science is also just a survival of primitive,

you know, modified survival of primitive superstition. He regarded himself as a scientist, but he did say that the worst thing about science is what he called the religion of scientificism. and the religion of scientificism was a kind of fear. He said his fellow scientists crippled themselves with their fear of doing something that might be suspected of being unscientific. And they therefore closed their minds.

And the great thing about Darwin was not just that as a scientist he'd been open-minded, but that his theory of evolution gave scope for the unexpected. I mean, you know, the random variation. James Fixes on this as the most important point about Darwinism. It isn't deterministic. It says flukes happen and then suddenly a new possibility for life

emerges. And he says it's exactly the same in the life of the intellect. We have to realise that flukes are going to happen. We have to realise that our minds are going to change. We have to be open to the thought that what seems absolutely intellectually unavoidable to us today may seem really stupid to us tomorrow.

So we should never close down on any intellectual possibilities whatsoever. So he doesn't. There's in terms of James doesn't ever point out a right past to follow, John? No, I think he's pluralistic in that respect. One thing just picking up, I mean, I think it is, why he's important, it seems to be, and continues to be important, is that he represents in his own period,

but anticipates for our period, a kind of continuing struggle which is to reconcile, on the one hand naturalism, the idea that human beings are products of nature in some sense, with a kind of humanism, you know, finding a place for human values within a world of nature. and in his day Darwinianism,

in particular sort of Herbert Spencer and certain developments of that in a more reductive direction he's reacting against. But in our day things like evolutionary psychology, genetic determinism and so on, present the same question. What places are in a world of moving objects?

The world's seen as a place of particles for something like values of philosophy and ethics, religion and so on. So he is trying to engage with that. But what he, what this takes him to, I think, and this is the sort of existence institutionalist individualistic aspect of this, that we have to contour our philosophy,

or our take on the world, or our overview, as he calls it at one point, in the light of our own experience, and you can't generalise from that. There isn't, as it were, the unique right path. Each of us has to find our own way. Of course, given that the repeating patterns in human life and human experience,

there will be convergences. But what doesn't emerge from this, it seems to me, is the idea that, aha, these are the people who got it right. And Gwen Griffiths Dixon, Freud's life, Siegman's Freud life, overlapped with that of William James. And yet in the index to the rights of religion, there isn't a single reference to Freud.

And yet James talked about what he called as subconscious and Freud about the unconscious. They seem to mean the same thing. So was this just an idea in the air? There was no contact between the two? It was an idea in the air. there are, I think, oblique references to Freud. I think it's quite interesting he chooses not to name him.

He does early on... He's name checked once. Oh, he's name checked once? Oh, I've missed that. I've missed that. He's not indexed. He's theory-checked once, and that quite early on, James mentions more or less just to rubbish and dismiss the notion that religion is basically repress sexuality. He raises that and then dismisses it along with other things he calls medical materialism. You can explain away religion on the basis of your memory.

medical state. The same could apply to atheism. He's an atheist because he's a liver complaint. He's not something that we often hear. So he actually just dismisses the kind of the theory side of Freud, but the subconscious, as he calls it, he says, is the greatest single discovery that psychology has given us. And that's clearly a very important theme that he's going to take up. I think throughout the book, I think that's one of his solutions, particularly to the problem that John just mentioned and Jonathan was speaking about earlier what place for God is there in this. How much authority does it give it in terms of the definition of an individual? The subconscious is huge, if I could put it that way.

And I think at the end of the book, what we find is a formula that basically says, God is the subconscious, and it doesn't really matter which. That is the origin of these experiences. It's larger and it's friendly. That's the point. And it doesn't feel like it's us. So it's his way of basically doing justice to all these people's experiences of something outside themselves, something greater than themselves, something powerful than themselves is what

they're encountering in its experience. And he's saying, yes, but then the subconscious is larger, more powerful and doesn't feel like you. That's almost by definition. The subconscious is that bit of yourself you don't know. It feels like something other. He says, whatever it is on its farther side, and he can't speak about God, the subconscious is really what these whole experiences are really coming from and they're about. So mysticism and conversion are very, I think that's why he focuses on those experiences, because those are moments where something erupts dramatically. And that's his sort of picture of how the subconscious works.

There's this stuff this fermenting away and you're not aware of it until suddenly finally it breaks open. But one of the interesting things in contrast to Freud is it's clearly a benign thing. It's not this seething mass of repressed stuff we can't cope with. It seems to be on our side. It's not undermining us. This is James' belief, or did you find enough evidence for it?

I think it's James' belief. But I think one of the ways he's not a modern psychologist, He's a commentator, really, on all these experiences and what was coming out from what John and Jonathan was just saying, this highly individual thing, you can't generalise. You can't be a modern empirical psychologist in a sense if you're not generalising across the mass of experiences and saying 60% of people have this.

Each person is very uniquely dealt with and interpreted and interpreted in his particular direction as supporting this idea of the subconscious. He also gives great emphasis to introspection in psychology. This is not just a kind of third-person perspective on people's lives. It's very important that there's exploration, its interior exploration. And he built that into his psychological

method in the principles of psychology, which is, again, it's very unusual. I'm going to study psychology by looking at my own experience is not something we're frequently here now. John and Ray, William James was one of the founders of the philosophy pragmatism. How did

that play into the writers of religious experience? Well, the idea of pragmatism is really, it's the it's the philosophy of open-mindedness. It's the idea that you can never tell what ideas are going to work. You should consider ideas not in terms of their roots, but in terms of their fruits, as he puts it.

And he applies that directly to religion. And that's to say, don't ask where religious ideas come from. But just think about what the feelings are and what good it does people to have this belief. And one of the points he makes about religion is that to be religious is like loving somebody. The difference between a person capable of religion and the person incapable of religion is like love. If you're not prepared to take any risks, then love will not come to you.

It will not be part of your life. And it's just like that with religion. You start loving the world. And that turns you into, well, it makes you receptive to dimensions of reality that will otherwise be concealed from you. So that his philosophy of pragmatism, you have to just wait and see what comes from using these concepts rather than those concepts. And so his theory of religion is that actually if you give religion a chance, forget about God. Just think about taking the cosmos seriously. Then you will find that the world is more interesting to you and that your life is happier.

So that that's his pragmatic theory of what makes religion valid. I come back to something else. You've right at the beginning, Jonathan, is the word religion key to this? Or is experience a better word? Well, I think it's experience. Or, you use the word or he used the word, or, didn't he? He says somewhere that the key to it is taking seriously the question of individual destiny. And the sort of grand historians, grand philosophers say the individual doesn't really matter. And so I think that would be, he would say that's, his interpretation of the whole history of religion's thought is that that's what's most important about it.

It takes individuals seriously. So I think that would be his justification for using the word religion to mark off this area of experience. I think I'm hearing a note of scepticism or you're asking a good question which is what's the place of religion and all of this and I think maybe we're responding to that is to say a little bit more about pragmatism just building on what Jonathan has said

Jonathan has emphasised quite rightly something that's in practising which is the test of practice you know at the end of the day this has to feed into human life and how we act and that provides a test or a criterion of adequacy but the other side of pragmatism goes back to an ancient philosophical dispute which was certainly live in the Edinburgh

of the period in which he gave his lectures which Hume is one representative and it's really a fundamental question about the relationship of the mind to the world if you like so we've got a traditional realism that thinks of the world has constituted in and of itself quite independently of human subjects the opposite extreme is represented by somebody like Mill working in the empiric tradition

which is phenomenalism that the very idea of the world is simply a logical construction out of immediate experience the world is just as it were shaped by our experience and that's all that is to be said about this there's an intermediary position which he comes to adopt which is fine so prefigured in others like Kant and so on in which as one sometimes put the mind and the world jointly make up one another

there are facts there are interpretations but we can't really separate off our interpretations from the idea of the world so there's this interpenetration and experience is the place where that interpenetration happens is it where subjectivity of the human mind meets the objectivity of things but we can't describe those independent

independently of one another. So there's this intermingling of the human subject with the world. And I think that in a sense, if you like, that's the religion. I mean, that is the metaphysical scheme in which we find our fulfillment, rather than a traditional notion of religion. Which means he actually comes very close, not just to pragmatism, but to phenomenology. I think an almost stronger connection there, the movement in the early 20th century, that says, I'm going to do philosophy by focusing on my experience. An interesting result from that, I think, is precisely what impacts on your question,

Melbourne, which is critical, this religion versus something else question, and he's throwing open the door as to, anyone who's had an experience, come and tell me, and I'll put it in my book, is almost what it feels like, and you read it now, and you think, yes, this person clearly has got bipolar disorder. Well, this person got generalized anxiety disorder. Ah, this person's having a genuine religious struggle. And I think if you've got some of those cases in and let them speak to a psychiatrist and a theologian, the two would be in agreement, nope, this one's for you. Some of them quite clearly, I think, for us, would fall into a different category, and we, even theologians, priests, rabbis, would

struggle to call it religious. But I think in a sense there's a wisdom in that. These are, in human life, they're not separated cleanly out, psychology from religion. It's just this web of experience. We are unfortunately. We're not out of time, but we're running out of time. I just want to ask two questions.

What impact did the lectures have at the time on the thinking of the time? That's the first one. Let's get that first. Who wants to kick off? John, would you like to say something? Well, they were very popularly received. I mentioned that the audience grew, the book sold well and so on. I think that their influence within philosophy, for example, however, was not immediate and great, though it does start to get picked up.

I mean, Wittgenstein's, for instance, was very interested in aspects of James and took that quite seriously. But I think that he was ahead of his time, and as much as people, the study of religion in that period, and you can see this from other Gifford lectures around that period, tends to be anthropological or historical or theological and so on. And he's doing something different, and it takes a while for people to understand what that might be. Jonathan, were people who, John's mentioned, anthropological, historical, did they resent what he did?

Was there a backlash saying, well, that's all very well, but that's just a small part of what the whole thing is about? Well, there was certainly a backlash amongst the philosophers. I mean, I think James was very conscious of trying to create a movement in philosophy. He was aware of this clever young man, Bertrand Russell, who was trying to do the same, and he really wanted to outflank him. And I suppose the history of 20th century philosophy

in the English-speaking world has been the defeat of James and the triumph of Russell. So the triumph of what James would have regarded, and I think rightly, as an over-investment in logic and a lack of interest in the diversity of human experience. So he did lost out. I mean, maybe his time has come.

This is, you know, this is, 2010 is the 100th anniversary of his death, and it is astonishing that there are not great celebrations. Even in Harvard there are no celebrations. They aren't even running the William James lectures in Harvard this year. I think there has been a systematic avoidance of it. I think that's because he's such an intelligent challenge to the dominant orthodoxy in English-speaking philosophy.

People are afraid of him. In your end is your beginning, Jonathan, right? I think he had a later impact in a way on philosophy of religion in that when philosophers of religion now, write about religious experience, I suppose I'm guilty as well. We can't ignore psychology. You just can't write about topics like, does the fact that so many people have religious experience mean that this is some kind of evidence for the existence of God without taking into account the contributions of psychology of religion? And I think he did kick off a huge amount of research

interest in religion on the psychology side. So I think it's kind of a long, slow burn, both in philosophy and psychology. Is Jonathan's notion that there will be is a re-emergence? Is this Jonathan's passion or is it around? I think there's a bit of a revival actually of pragmatism. I think that the kind of philosophy you were talking about as well the abstracted

logical philosophy, I mean it has its place, but I think there is a revival in part because that hasn't nourished the appetite that people have. Could I just very briefly add one thing which is that Gwen right at the beginning talked about the spiritual writers there's a taxonomy in those purgation, illumination, unification

You find this running through these three stages of development. What I'd say about James is he's got something to say about purgation, ridding yourself of things. He's got something to say about illumination, coming to understand something. What he doesn't have and what traditional mysticism tended to have was the idea of unifying yourself with a source of being other than yourself. I think he tries to unify the subconscious of God.

Exactly. Well, that's a subjectification. Rather than being, one to being at God, which is a very interesting difference. I think it's, John mentioned that one of, James's great fans in the 20th century was Wittgenstein who liked almost no other. It said that the only book that Wittgenstein had, the only philosophical book that Wittgenstein had on his bookshelf was the varieties of religious experience.

Thank you very much. No, thank you very. I'm awful. Sorry. Really, really. Make you feel rude. No, Jonathan Ray, Gwen Griffiths Dixon and John Haldane. Thank you very much indeed. Next week, the aristocratic Cavendishers, Aristocracy and British Science for three centuries. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.