The Varieties of Religious Experience

Someone you know has turned religious, and someone else at the table explains it away: she is just lonely, he is just anxious, it is her age. You have probably done it yourself. James opens the book with this move and lists its everyday forms. Alfred believes in immortality because his temperament is emotional. William's melancholy about the universe is a torpid liver.

The trick always rests on the same two words. The belief is nothing but its cause, and once the cause is named, the belief is supposed to be finished.

James notices something else. We use the move freely on people whose states of mind we find overstrained. When it is turned on our own highest moments, we feel outraged, because we know those moments meant something, whatever our organism happened to be doing.

James gave the move a name: medical materialism. In its grander form it does not stop at Alfred and William. It goes after the founders.

It disposes of Saint Paul by calling the vision on the road to Damascus a discharge in the brain of an epileptic. It files Saint Teresa under hysteria and Saint Francis under hereditary degeneracy. George Fox's hunger for honesty in an age of shams becomes a disordered colon; Carlyle's great organ-tones of misery, a catarrh of the gut.

Then it rests its case. Once the gland or the lesion has been found, the spiritual authority of these people is supposed to be gone. The whole lecture takes aim at that single assumption: that finding the bodily cause of an experience has already settled what the experience is worth.

Before arguing anything, James pulls apart two questions people constantly run together. The first: what is this thing, how did it come about, what is its history? The second: now that it is here, what is it worth?

The answer to the first he calls an existential judgment, the answer to the second a spiritual judgment, and he insists that “neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other.”

His example is the Bible. Scholars of his day were working out who wrote which book, when, and under what pressures. That is a question of fact. Whether a book made that way can guide a life is a different question, and two scholars holding identical facts can answer it in opposite ways, depending on what they think makes a book worth trusting in the first place.

A historian proves that a much-loved hymn was written by a composer in the grip of a high fever. In James's terms, what has she established?

• Both at once, because origin and worth are tied together
• A spiritual judgment: the hymn's worth is now in doubt
• An existential judgment: a fact about the hymn's origin✓Correct answer
• Neither, because a fever cannot be studied as history

She has answered the question of where the hymn came from. Whether it is worth singing is a separate, spiritual judgment, and no fact about the fever decides that on its own.

Here is what surprises first-time readers. James does not defend the saints by denying they were strange. He concedes it, and generously.

Religious geniuses, he says, have often shown nervous instability: trances, voices, visions, fixed ideas, long spells of melancholy. His prime case is George Fox, whose Quaker faith James praises as a religion of truthfulness rooted in inwardness. Yet judged by his nerves, Fox was about as unbalanced as a man can be. His journal records him taking off his shoes in winter and walking through Lichfield crying woe to the bloody city, seeing the market-place as a pool of blood.

James wants both facts on the table at once. Spiritual sagacity and a disordered nervous system lived in the same man, and pretending otherwise would simply be bad psychology.

Then comes the argument, and it is short. Modern psychology assumes that every state of mind depends on some bodily process. Suppose that is true. Then it is true of all of them.

The scientist's theory has a bodily condition. So does the sceptic's doubt. If we knew enough, James says, we would see the liver shaping the verdicts of the sturdy atheist as surely as those of the Methodist anxious about his soul. Alter the blood one way and you get the believer; alter it another way and you get the unbeliever.

So the body cannot be used against religion alone. If a bodily cause discredited a belief, it would discredit every belief, including the belief that religion is a symptom. Medical materialism never draws that conclusion, which shows it was never really reasoning from the body at all.