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A Measured Faith: Edwin Starbuck, William James, and the Scientific Reform of Religious Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Christopher White
Christopher White*
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

A number of recent studies have drawn attention to how the study of religion and religious seeking were intertwined in European and American cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ann Taves, Leigh Schmidt and Hans Kippenberg, for example, have pointed to ways that particularly Protestant anxieties and dilemmas shaped scholarly thinking about categories such as experience and “mysticism.” Scholars have been less interested, however, in the other side of the exchange—less interested, in other words, in how scholarship has reshaped religious belief and practice. The first Americans to study religion scientifically, American psychologists of religion, serve as a particularly useful illustration of how scholarly methods influenced modern ways of believing, but there is still little historical scholarship on the key figures involved. There remain few critical works, for example, on the pioneer psychologists of religion—Edwin Starbuck (1866–1947), George Coe (1862–1951), James Bissett Pratt (1875–1944), and G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)—and their ways of studying and attempting to reform religion. The notable exception is, of course, the literature on William James, which includes an enormous number of dissertations and monographs, including several important studies examining the Varieties of Religious Experience and James's other efforts to help fashion a science of religion. But even the scholarship on James does not consider how he and others used the sciences to reform religious belief and revitalize American culture. Given the fact that James identified himself as a psychologist, engaged a wide range of neurological, physiological and psychological thinkers in his work, and drew extensively on psychologists like George Coe and Edwin Starbuck, it is remarkable that these contexts have been overlooked. His debt to the psychologist Edwin Starbuck is particularly striking. In his Varieties, he uses or refers to Starbuck's empirical work twenty-six times, he draws from Starbuck's questionnaire data thirty-seven times, and he mentions Starbuck by name a total of forty-six times, which is roughly the equivalent of once in every six pages of text.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 101 , Issue 3-4: Centennial Issue 1908–2008 , October 2008 , pp. 431 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © President and fellows of Harvard college 2008

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References

1 Half a century ago David Bremer noted the “deficiency of historical study in the psychology of religion” and called for new, serious studies of the pioneers in the field—but his call, according to Howard Booth, was ignored. See David Henry Bremer, “George Albert Coe's Contribution to the Psychology of Religion” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1949) 7; and John Howard Booth, “Edwin Diller Starbuck: Pioneer in the Psychology of Religion” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1972) 1. Other than James, the only major figure in the psychology of religion to attract attention has been the founder of American psychology and its driving force, G. Stanley Hall. Unfortunately, the only scholarly biography of Hall mentions very briefly Hall's strong religious feelings and his key role in the psychology of religion. The author, Dorothy Ross, regretted the omission and anticipated disappointment among historians of religion who might have expected “an analysis of the institutional and doctrinal context of American Protestantism to which Hall's mature psychology of religion was directed” (Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972] xvi). One recent work that does succeed in putting psychologists of religion in larger contexts is Ann Taves's Fits, Trances and Visions, a book to which I am much indebted and one that devotes at least one chapter to how these thinkers explained religious experiences and attempted to reform them. Examining the contributions of James and Coe in particular, Taves argued that psychologists of religion embraced the subconscious as a crucial mediating category and developed this category into an important analytical tool in the study of religion. Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 253–307. See also Leigh Schmidt, “The Making of Modern Mysticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (2003) 273–302; and Hans Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

2 Edwin Diller Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness (London: Walter Scott, 1900) 10.

3 Edwin Diller Starbuck to William James, 23 August 1902, William James Papers, Houghton Library.

4 Edwin Starbuck, “Religion's Use of Me,” in Religion in Transition (ed. Virgilius Ferm; New York: Macmillan Co., 1937; repr. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969) 215.

5 Ibid., 222–23.

6 Ibid., 223.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 12–13.

9 Another pioneer in the psychology of religion, a Swiss-born graduate student at Clark University named James Leuba, conducted empirical studies—questionnaires and interviews—of religious experience and published his studies the year before Starbuck (in 1896). But Starbuck initiated his work at Harvard first. See Booth, “Edwin Diller Starbuck,” 40–41.

10 Edwin Starbuck, “A Student's Impressions of James in the Middle ‘90s,” Psychological Review 50 (1943) 129

11 Ibid.

12 Starbuck, “Religion's Use of Me,” 225.

13 Ibid., 226.

14 His two articles were “A Study of Conversion,” American Journal of Psychology 8 (1897) 268–308 and “Contributions to the Psychology of Religion,” American Journal of Psychology 9 (1897–1898) 70–124. Starbuck's book was the first in the genre, and his articles were the most ambitious quantitative studies done before 1900. There were, however, other scholars working along the same lines, especially those interested in relating conversion to life-cycle stages. All of them were associated with G. Stanley Hall at Clark University. The very earliest studies were: G. Stanley Hall, “The Moral and Religious Training of Children,” Princeton Review 9 (1882) 26–45; A. H. Daniels, “The New Life: A Study in Regeneration,” American Journal of Psychology 6 (1895) 61–103; and J. H. Leuba, “The Psychology of Religious Phenomena,” American Journal of Psychology 7 (1896) 309–385. Leuba's study was the most quantitative.

15 Starbuck, “Religion's Use of Me,” 223.

16 Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, 25–27, 186. There were several prominent social scientists who argued that conversions and other religious states were unhealthy, including the well-known French pundit Gustav Le Bon and the American psychologist Boris Sidis. Starbuck quarrels with Sidis and others in Psychology of Religion, 163–79.

17 Ibid., 10, 6–7.

18 Ibid., 73.

19 On liberal conversion failures see William Hutchison, “Cultural Strain and Protestant Liberalism,” American Historical Review 76 (1971) 410. See also George Coe, The Spiritual Life: Studies in the Science of Religion (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1900) 120. The agnostic psychologist of religion James Leuba is well known for his efforts to document how education militated against evangelical beliefs. For a summary of his work see David M. Wulff, “James Henry Leuba: A Reassessment of a Swiss-American Pioneer,” in Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of Psychology of Religion (ed. Jacob Belzen; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) 25–44. See also Booth, “Edwin Diller Starbuck,” 8. For more on Coe, Starbuck and other liberals who studied experience see Christopher White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

20 Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, 231.

21 George B. Cutten, The Psychological Phenomena of Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908) 4, 171–73, 165. See also Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, 167–168.

22 For more on how commonly held opinions on race and gender shaped psychological views on religious experience see White, Unsettled Minds, chs 4 and 5.

23 Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, 406.

24 See James's preface to Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, vii.

25 James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 10 September 1898, William James Papers.

26 James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of Wil liam James (2 vols.; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1935) 2:323.

27 See also William James to Edwin Diller Starbuck, 30 September 1898, William James Papers. Unfortunately, Starbuck's questionnaire data have been lost or destroyed. James thought Starbuck's work was important and he recommended it to other philosophers and psychologists. See, e.g., William James to James McKeen Cattell, 10 June 1903 in William James: Selected Unpublished Correspondence, 1885–1910 (ed. Frederick J. Down Scott; Columbus: Ohio State University) 312–13.

28 Quoted in Perry, William James 2:327. James and Hall wrote two separate pieces for one issue of The Nation that were printed back-to-back. See William James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in our Colleges,” The Nation 23 (1876) 178–79 and G. Stanley Hall, “College Instruction in Philosophy,” The Nation 23 (1876) 180.

29 See Henry Samuel Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 73–76.

30 Hall is quoted in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 95.

31 Edwin Diller Starbuck, “The Feelings and their Place in Religion,” The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education 1 (1904) 183–85.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid. See also Edwin Diller Starbuck, “Reinforcement to the Pulpit from Modern Psychology: IV. As a Man Thinketh in His Heart,” Homiletic Review 54 (1908) 23.

34 Quoted in Perry, William James 2:327–28.

35 William James to James Henry Leuba, 17 April 1904, in Letters of William James (ed. Henry James; 2 vols.; Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920) 2:211–12.

36 Ibid.

37 See James's preface to Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, viii–ix.

38 William James to Frances R. Morse, 12 April 1900 in Letters, 2:127. In the preface to Starbuck's book James recognized that Starbuck's examples were drawn from one very particular source—namely, American evangelicalism. Yet James also suspected that these experiences pointed to universal religious proclivities. See Starbuck, Psychology of Religion, x.

39 Edwin Starbuck, “The Feelings and their Place in Religion,” The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education 1 (1904) 175; see also Edwin Diller Starbuck, “The Intimate Senses as Sources of Wisdom,” The Journal of Religion 1 (1921) 129–45.

40 Starbuck, “Religion's Use of Me,” 204, 219.

41 William James to Edwin Diller Starbuck, 24 August 1904 in Letters 2:209–10.

42 William James to Edwin Diller Starbuck, 12 February 1905, William James Papers. Others, like the philosopher William Hocking and psychologists of religion such as James B. Pratt, also pointed to experience as evidence that God existed. See Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) 484–86.

43 James Bissett Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1907) 228.

44 James Bissett Pratt, “The Psychology of Religion,” Harvard Theological Review 1 (1908) 452.

45 Ibid.

46 James Bissett Pratt, The Religious Consciousness: A Psychological Study (New York: Macmillian, 1924) 479, 228–29, 474.

47 Edwin Diller Starbuck, “The Scientific Study of Religion,” Homiletic Review 49 (1903) 102.

48 Starbuck, “The Scientific Study of Religion,” 102–3.

49 Charles A. Brand, Decision Day and How to Use It (Boston: Pilgrim, 1908) 6–7. From the George Albert Coe Papers, Yale Divinity School Archives, New Haven.

50 Ibid., 3.

51 Starbuck, “Religion's Use of Me,” 205.

52 P. Hopkins, “A Critical Survey of the Psychology of Religion,” in Readings in the Psychology of Religion (ed. Orlo Strunk; New York: Abingdon, 1959) 46.

53 H. Shelton Smith, Faith and Nurture (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1941) 100–4.