William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience (review)

Wayne Proudfoot, ed. William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. This is a brief and tightly focused anthology of six essays by stellar scholars from many fields, with each one adding slices of distinct and sophisticated insights about James's 1902 pioneering psychological study of religion. The essays are the result of a colloquium held during the centennial of the book's publication at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Science and Religion and sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The contributions can be read individually for their sharp insights from prominent scholars in history, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy, or together for their combined attention to James as a precursor to contemporary secular concerns about the truth of religion. The essayists are all predisposed to emphasize James's "lifelong project to ... adjudicate . .. the relation between science and religion" (pp. 3—4), a contextualizing point that many psychologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers overlook in specialized James scholarship within those respective fields. Sharing this context and centering their critical wares on one book, the essayists also have a central concern, namely, evaluation of James's claim to be engaged in a science of religions. A brief and flippant summary of their assessment is that The Varieties is a glorious failure—but that's not bad for trying to do the impossible. Of course, there is a lot of nuance to add to this snapshot. In examining this classic text, the authors do an admirable job in showing its previously neglected continuities with pragmatism; most notably, in the introduction, Wayne Proudfoot notices ways that James's concern with the relation of theism and materialism during his first mention of pragmatism in "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results" (1898) set the stage for Varieties, and Varieties then implemented the pragmatic approach by "considering] actual religious experiences and their practical consequences" (p. 2). With this specific contribution, there is little mention of the relation of Varieties to James's psychology, or more oddly, given the book's subtitle, TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 845 00 "Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience" there is general neglect of ^ its connection to his Radical Empiricism essays; moreover, the text and notes n make little mention of scholarship making connections between Varieties and ^ most of James's works. , "The Will to Believe" (1895) plays a significant role in this anthology, often presented in relation to pragmatism, and as David HoUinger reads this earlier essay, it and the Varieties, were each stages toward James's pragmatic epistemology. According to HoUinger, "The Will to Believe" maintained "separate spheres," to protect religion from the critical scrutiny of scientific inquiry, while pragmatism included "the epistemic unity of all experience and belief" (p. 10); Varieties was composed hesitantly, while James was changing his mind. This narrative contains important points about each text, with an argument that echoes Henry Levinson's argument in The Religious Investigations of William James (1981, p. 58) that "The Will to Believe" was "a stopgap measure .. . until a science of religions could be sufficiently constituted" in Varieties, but this stage argumentation posits artificiaUy sharp edges on James's mental turns. Throughout his attention to science and religion, James kept them ultimately separate, but parallel in their mutual reach for the character of reality and in their epistemological residence on the spectrum from doubt to belief. HoUinger also produces keen insights about James's cultural leanings. He shows that many of James's defenses of religion were of Protestantism, in its liberal version most particularly—"his own religious tribe" (p 25), as HoUinger smartly suggests. This interpretation harbors an ambiguity between James's Protestantism in sharp contrast to science and his Protestantism as a faith coinciding with science; of course, liberal Protestantism was a center of attempts at reconciliation of science and religion. Jerome Bruner offers a glancing overview of James's contributions to psychology , which have been "more atmospheric than substantive" in Bruner's magisterial phrase. Although James has often been neglected by psychologists , his inspiration helped to launch the Cognitive Revolution, in particular through the "crypto-radical constructivism...