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William James on an Unseen Order*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Wayne Proudfoot
Wayne Proudfoot
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

In one of his earliest articles, William James says that the radical question of life is whether this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe: moral or unmoral, not moral or immoral. James is not asking whether the universe is good or bad, but whether i t is coordinate with the inner lives of persons, their desires, and their purposes. The sense of “moral” here is not restricted to ethics, but is the sense in which the moral sciences (comprising what we now call the humanities and the social sciences) were contrasted in the nineteenth century with the natural sciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 51 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2000

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References

1 James, William, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” Princeton Review 2 (July 1882) 81.Google Scholar This article was largely incorporated into “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) 57–89.Google Scholar Subsequent references will be to this edition. The passage appears on p. 84.

2 Compare Mill, John Stuart, The Logic of the Moral Sciences (London: Duckworth, 1987)Google Scholar.

3 , James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” Will to Believe, 70Google Scholar (italics in the original).

4 James uses “block universe” to describe a world in which everything is determined, and there is no chance, novelty, or free will. See James, William, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” The Will to Believe, 123, n. 139Google Scholar.

5 , James, Will to Believe, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 73–4.Google Scholar This echoes a passage from Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “All the great ages have been ages of belief,” from “Worship,” The Conduct of Life, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (12 vols.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) 6. 216Google Scholar.

6 James, William, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) 21Google Scholar.

7 By the early 1970s James was included in several of Niebuhr's courses.

8 Royce, Josiah, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1885), 384–35Google Scholar.

9 , James, Will to Believe, xlGoogle Scholar; Peirce, Charles Sanders, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Kloesel, C. J. W., ed., Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (5 vols.; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986)3. 242–57.Google Scholar Peirce's essay was published in 1877 and James's “The Sentiment of Rationality” in July, 1879.

10 , Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” 253Google Scholar.

11 , James, “The Dilemma of Derminism,” Will to Believe, 115Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 115-16.

13 Ibid., “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 86.

14 Ibid., “The Will to Believe,” 20.

15 Ibid., 5.

16 Ibid., 8-9.

17 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978) 54Google Scholar.

18 James, William, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 219Google Scholar.

19 , James. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” Will to Believe, 157–59Google Scholar.

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21 Ibid., 159.

22 See James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 520–23Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 533.

24 Letter to Frances Morse, quoted in ibid. 530-31.

25 See, for instance, ibid. 340-45. For a critique of attention to feeling at the expense of belief and doctrine, see my Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

26 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 51Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 34.

28 James paraphrases Peirce's pragmatic criterion as follows: “To attain perfect clearness i n our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.” James, William, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in Pragmatism, 259.Google ScholarCompare Peirce, Charles Sanders, “How to Make Our Ideals Clear,” in Kloesel, C. J. W., ed., Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, (5 vols.; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986) 3. 266Google Scholar.

29 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 523Google Scholar; idem, Pragmatism, 266.

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32 Ibid., 299.

33 Ibid., 21.

34 Ibid., 338.

35 Arnold, Matthew, Literature and Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1902) 52Google Scholar.

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37 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 51Google Scholar.

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39 , James, “The Will to Believe,” Will to Believe, 30Google Scholar.

40 Rorty, Richard views it this way in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in Putnam, R. A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 93Google Scholar.

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42 Throughout his writings, James criticizes the monistic doctrine of the Absolute held by philosophical idealists. Monism entails determinism, he thinks, but life is experienced as contingent and risky, in which some things are really at stake. On both moral and epistemo-logical grounds, he defends a pluralistic view of the universe. James, William, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

43 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 414Google Scholar.

44 , James, Pragmatism, 55Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., 142-43.

46 Ibid., 143-44.

47 James, William, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) 144–45.Google Scholar For an excellent account of this book, and of the work leading up to it, see Lamberth, David, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 146–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 , James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” Will to Believe, 75Google Scholar.

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50 , James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” Will to Believe, 83Google Scholar.

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53 Ibid., 161.

54 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 400 (italics in the original)Google Scholar.

55 , James, Pluralistic Universe, 139Google Scholar.

56 , James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 197Google Scholar.

57 , James, Pragmatism, 144Google Scholar.

58 Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 163Google Scholar.

59 , James, Pragmatism, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” 264; see also 55Google Scholar.

60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “The Anti-Christ” in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale, R. J.; New York: Penguin, 1968) 136Google Scholar.

61 This is stated clearly in The Will to Believe and in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” James subscribes to a belief in powers, not ourselves, that make for righteousness, in the postscript to Varieties and the final chapter of Pragmatism.

62 James includes the relevant passage from the Berkeley lecture in Pragmatism of 1907, even though he acknowledges there that a guarantee is neither possible nor required.

63 See Gustafson, James, “Tracing the Order of Nature: Niebuhr and the Secular Mind,” in Lee, S., Proudfoot, W., and Blackwell, A., eds., Faithful Imagining (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) 61–78Google Scholar.

64 Rockefeller, Steven, John Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 512–27Google Scholar.

65 For an interesting discussion of ways in which projection can be employed to advance self-knowledge by artists and practitioners of religious ritual, see Wollheim, Richard, “The Sheep and the Ceremony,” in Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 1–21Google Scholar.

66 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 199Google Scholar.