William James

Invited to give the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, James made a methodological choice that created a discipline. He would not discuss the truth of religious doctrines, and he would not begin with churches, since institutions are second hand by the time they exist. He would begin with what he called the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, and he would take his evidence from what those individuals wrote down.

So the book proceeds through documents: conversion accounts, letters, journals, the autobiographies of the devout and of the wretched. Out of them he draws distinctions that are still in use. There is the religion of healthy mindedness, which finds the world good and evil unreal, and there is the sick soul, for whom the world's horror is the primary datum and any religion that ignores it is trivial. There is the once born and the twice born temperament. And there are four marks by which he proposes to identify mystical states of consciousness: they are ineffable, resisting adequate report; they are noetic, presenting themselves as knowledge rather than emotion; they are transient; and they are passive, arriving rather than being achieved.

His conclusion is careful and characteristically pragmatic. The value of a religious experience cannot be settled by its cause, since a state of mind is not refuted by an account of the nerves that produced it. It is to be judged by its fruits: what it does to the person who has it, over time, in life.

James joined the American Society for Psychical Research at its founding, served as president of the British society in 1894 and 1895, and spent twenty five years investigating mediums, an activity his Harvard colleagues largely regarded as an embarrassment. His attitude was neither credulous nor dismissive, and he stated the logic of it in a line that has outlived most of the research: to upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstration that no crow is black; it is enough if one crow is proved to be white.

His white crow was Leonora Piper, the Boston trance medium, whom he began studying in 1885. He never claimed she demonstrated survival of death, and he never found an explanation he was satisfied with either. What he concluded was narrower and more interesting: that in her trances she produced information he could not account for by any ordinary channel he had been able to test, and that the question therefore remained open.

He was equally clear about the state of the field as a whole. After a quarter of a century he wrote that he was baffled, that the evidence never quite closed and never quite collapsed, and that this baffling persistence was itself the most characteristic fact about the subject. The atlas holds the Victorian psychical researchers as a group, and James sits inside it, as the one member of it whose day job made his participation genuinely costly.