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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.

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Type
Research Article
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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.

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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.

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

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34 Ibid., 338.

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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.

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53 Ibid., 161.

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

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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.