The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

At the core of James’s arguments in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the psychologist’s adherence to pragmatism, a theoretical framework James developed with his colleagues Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Pragmatism suggests that everything—including thought and experience—has a function: All parts of human experience are tools for navigating the world. James explains to his audience in the first lecture that he is not interested in defining religious institutions or understanding how they relate to political or societal structures. Instead, he limits his study to the personalized religious experiences of individuals and how religion functions in their lives. In these first five lectures, James begins to outline The Functional Value of Religion. Personal religious experiences provide happiness and optimism for the individual, assurance that the individual is doing what is right, and greater societal well-being by attaching joy to morality.

James reveals his pragmatism early on as he considers philosopher Immanuel Kant’s assertion that concepts like religion and morality cannot be perceived with the senses and, therefore, have no connection to real knowledge. This approach suggests that reality only exists within the realm of the tangible. James counters Kant’s claim by suggesting that these concepts do matter because they have practical implications for people’s lives:

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life (55).

James outlines that there is a different kind of religious knowing which has an immediate impact on how people behave and act. It does not matter what the source of the divine is within the religion, so long as the experience is personal and produces a psychological effect. Humans act in accordance with their religious perceptions, and those actions represent a tangible functionality. This means that something is real to the individual because it feels real. Therefore, it has the same impact as a tangible external stimulus.

The psychologist’s argument is reflective of one of his major ideas, which he expands upon in a later work, The Meaning of Truth (1909). In this text, James defines “radical empiricism,” a way of examining evidence that considers the relationship between experience and the abstract world. He argues that it is insufficient to look only at interactions with the concrete realm. Radical empiricism defines the layered and textural nature of human experience. James argues that human experience is about more than a collection of sensory data; instead, it embraces a complex web of connections and meaning.

Consider a common ghost story. A friend explains that she saw a ghost in her bedroom. She has no tangible proof of the experience, and she recognizes that the figure she saw was not physically present. However, she argues that the ghost was spiritually present. Traditional examinations of such a story may only consider concrete evidence: room temperature, the friend’s pulse, etc. Radical empiricism, however, suggests that it is as important to study the woman’s abstract experience as it is these physical pieces of evidence. A broader understanding of reality provides a more comprehensive study of how humans think and experience the world. Considering Radical Empiricism and Belief thus magnifies the basic processes of the human mind.

James argues that religious revelations are experienced as real events. The abstract concepts and images of God which emerge through personal religion are as palpable to the individual as any other person or concrete object. Such radical empiricism was new for James’s 19th-century listeners: The Age of Enlightenment had emphasized rationalism; now James was proposing that the radical spiritual experiences of individuals were as important as concrete evidence. In his lectures, James asks his audience to keep an open mind and to set aside personal bias about religious beliefs. He proposes a new way of looking at religious experiences as magnified mental processes. A person’s religious experience functions in the same way as a concrete experience and influences behavior; however, the emotionality attached to religious experiences is far more intense. These experiences magnify the inner workings of the mind.

To fully understand how this works, James encourages his listeners to examine individual experiences with an objective eye. He advocates for Pluralism and Universal Experience, arguing that a comprehensive study must consider religion’s many forms. Multiple examples from a wide variety of texts support commonality of experience. All personal religious revelations connect the individual to “the divine,” a term which James defines as an all-encompassing presence.

Divinity can take many forms. For nondenominational institutions, people may see the divine as a type of moral law. For Emersonians, the divine is the soul of man. For Christians, the divine is God. James asserts that encounters with any of these manifestations of divinity cause similar psychological principles: “They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth” (34). Any type of religious experience is built upon the assurance that divinity brings truth, and this is a feature that transcends all types of belief. This makes religious experience as real to the individual as any concrete object.