A Pluralistic Universe is America's favourite philosopher's last complete work before he died in 1910. Nevertheless, it has been somewhat neglected as a final self-reckoning. Indeed, the term “pragmatism” occurs pretty rarely in it, while “experience” and “pluralism” abound. As introduced and annotated by H. G. Callaway, the Cambridge Scholars edition offers some valuable background on James and the text itself, particularly to the nonspecialist reader. Besides retaining James's notes, Callaway has also provided his own glosses on important philosophical terms, translations of the foreign phrases James so often fell back on, and an expanded index and new bibliography to the text. It is, as Callaway says, a “reading and study edition” (ix). It is also appropriate that A Pluralisic Universe be paid attention at this particular time, since a William James and the Transatlantic Conversation conference was held in Oxford, 23–25 September 2010, on the centenary of his death, and one of its sessions was held at Manchester College where James delivered the Hibbert Lectures that he turned into A Pluralistic Universe.

All this aside, what does A Pluralistic Universe give us that we cannot get from James elsewhere? For one thing, James is perhaps more expansive here than elsewhere in his attacks on Hegel, monism, absolute idealism and all the other things James felt had taken philosophy (and religion) down the wrong path. He also devotes chapters to the relatively unknown German thinker Gustav Fechner, and the better-known but now neglected Henri Bergson, as philosophical champions of positions of the kind of that James will champion in his philosophy of pluralism. In his Introduction and notes, Callaway also stresses the continuities between James's panpsychism and Emersonian transcendentalism. Thus Callaway belongs with those who identify James's pragmatism primarily with the tradition of American idealism rather than with Millsian utilitarianism. In championing Fechner and attacking the easy atheism, materialism and naturalism of his time, James poses the question, “But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness than our consciousness?” (81).

Put another way, much of A Pluralistic Universe sketched in the philosophical and religious territory that James had explored in experiential and psychological terms in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903). There, James, not without considerable pulling and hauling, opts for belief in some sort of “more” in the universe that feeds into and enlivens our worldly possibilities and energies. In fact, there was, he felt, something more to the nature of things than just human thought and consciousness, and yet, against the absolute idealists and monists, that something “more” was not all-encompassing and all-powerful. “God,” if we want to use the term, is finite, which is to say that “he” can be framed in terms of something else. Paradoxically, there is no “God's-eye view” of the nature of things or of the universe. God is in the universe, available to us for the achievement of our purposes but by no means a force ready and able to sweep all before it.

There are of course all sorts of responses possible to James's views and their implications. One is that James is revealed as very much a thinker who refuses the wager of modernity. What he calls god fits no very important modern concept of god. At one point, James himself uses the term “finite God” (77), itself a contradiction in terms for some. Still, James clearly wants to find a way to talk in terms of a universe filled with consciousness and purpose, a kind of polytheism. In all this it is hard to avoid the feeling that James's thought on these matters was a matter of wish doing the work of intellect. Yet there are interesting modern implications to his position. For instance, in dismissing the notion of a unified, all-powerful deity, James undermines not just the traditional answers to the problem of theodicy (why is there suffering and evil in the world?); he also renders otiose the very question of evil itself. Just as God becomes purposive spirit in James's worldview, so evil becomes specific concrete faults, flaws and outrages. “In any pluralistic metaphysics,” James asserts, it is not “why evil should exist at all, but how we can lessen the actual amount of it” (77). Thus, for James, evil seems to be a personal or historical experience or happening, not a metaphysical entity; an effect, not a cause of what plagues us.

Overall, just as James was ambiguous about the power of spirit in the modern world, so we must be about James's pragmatism, here folded into a pluralistic, fallibilistic, empirically oriented view of the world. In its enlivening moments, it urges new ways of thinking about old concepts and sanctions acting to address new issues. This creative form of pragmatism allies itself with artistic and aesthetic activity as well as political and social action. On the other hand, James on religion can sound both jejune and desperate in his hope that we are not alone in the universe. Indeed, his finessing of the problem of evil and/or his swerve away from even discussing specific evils suggests that pragmatism itself was hardly equipped to understand the great historical evils that preceded or followed it.