Religious experiences
In the Varieties, James explicitly excludes from his study both theology and religious institutions, choosing to limit his study to direct and immediate religious experiences, which he regarded as the more interesting object of study.[6] Churches, theologies, and institutions are important as vehicles for passing on insights gained by religious experience but, in James's view, they live second-hand off the original experience of the founder.[7] A key distinction in James's treatment of religion is between that of healthy-minded religion and religion of the sick soul; the former is a religion of life's goodness, while the latter cannot overcome the sense of evil in the world.[6] Although James presents this as a value-neutral distinction between different kinds of religious attitudes, he, in fact, regarded the sick-souled religious experience as preferable, and his anonymous source of melancholy experience in lectures VI and VII is, in fact, autobiographical.[8] Following these autobiographical sections, James transitions into two lectures (IX and X) examining religious conversion from a psychological point-of-view, along with its importance in religious history. James considered healthy-mindedness to be America's main contribution to religion, which he saw running from the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. At the extreme, the "healthy-minded" see sickness and evil as an illusion. James considered belief in the "mind cure" to be reasonable when compared to medicine as practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century.[9]
James devotes two lectures to mysticism, and in the lectures, he outlines four markers common to mystical experiences. These are:
- Ineffability: the experience is incapable of being described, and must be directly experienced to be understood.
- Noesis: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned.
- Transience: the experience is of limited duration.
- Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience.[6]
He believed that religious experiences can have "morbid origins"[10] in brain pathology and can be irrational, but nevertheless largely positive. Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of, say, fevers or drunkenness, after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually still make sense to the person, and are often valued for the rest of the person's life.[11]
James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experiences. Further, despite James' examples being almost exclusively drawn from Christianity, he did not mean to limit his ideas to any single religion. Religious experiences are something that people sometimes have, under certain conditions. In James' description, these experiences are inherently very complex, often life-altering and largely indescribable and unquantifiable through traditional means, yet measurable in the profound changes they have on the individuals that report such experiences.
Pragmatism
Although James did not fully articulate his pragmatic philosophy until the publication of Pragmatism in 1907, the approach to religious belief in the Varieties is influenced by pragmatic philosophy. In his Philosophy and Conclusions lectures, James concludes that religion is overall beneficial to humankind, although acknowledges that this does not establish its truth.[6] While James intended to approach the topic of religious experience from this pragmatist angle, Richard Rorty argues that he ultimately deviated from this methodology in the Varieties. In his lectures on saintliness, the intention is to discover whether the saintly virtues are beneficial for human life: if they are, then, according to pragmatism, that supports their claim to truth. However, James ends up concluding that the value of the saintly virtues is dependent on their origin: given that the saintly virtues are only beneficial if there is an afterlife for which they can prepare us, their value depends on whether they are divinely ordained or the result of human psychology. This is no longer a question of value but of empirical fact. Hence, Rorty argues that James ends up abandoning his own pragmatist philosophy due to his ultimate reliance of empirical evidence.[12]
James considers the possibility of "over-beliefs", beliefs which are not strictly justified by reason but which might understandably be held by educated people nonetheless. Philosophy can contribute to shaping these over-beliefs — for example, traditional arguments for the existence of God, including the cosmological, design, and moral arguments, along with the argument from popular consensus.[13] James admits to having his own over-belief, which he does not intend to prove, that there is a greater reality not normally accessible by our normal ways of relating to the world, but which religious experiences can connect us to.[6]
