ex THE HIE ROPHANT’S APPRENTIO )BUIL DING A E PRESENTS FORTEAN LIBRARY 7. NOTHING BUT, OR SOMETHING MORE Titles like The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience ought, one ‘would think, to excite the interest of forteans. Time, then, to hang out their shingle and make with some drum. Their author is William James (1842-1910), physiologist, psychologist and philosopher; also brother of the novelist Henry James. His matter ‘in both these books is mainly religion, but without theology: he concentrates rather on religious apprehension and intuition which, he believed, if understood aright, Jed toa richer and more fulfilling life. But this is not dry stuf. In his day James was a forerunner of such as Timothy Leary, sans the trviality and banality: intrigued bby mystical states, he willingly ingested peyote and nitrous oxide ~ with hilarious results. His conviction that humans have souls led him to study spiritualism, and he became a founding member and vice-president of the American Society for Psychic Research (whose work he discusses in The Will to Believe) which gives him another claim to forteans’ attention. [liam James was hardly / the first, but was probably / the most interesting, of those 19th-thinkers who reacted unsympathetically to the claim that scientific endeavour would, or even could, eventually ‘explain everything’ and by implication solve all the world’s puzzles and problems. James (as have many others after him) pointed out that to take the rationalist, superlogical, materialist and fundamentally utilitarian ~ outlook as the only realistic way to view the world is to deny actual everyday human experience. ‘As he puts it in the chapter ‘The Reality of the Unseen’ in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “{I}f we look on man’s whole ‘mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, fr it has the loquacit, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it wil fail to convince or convert you all the same, ifyour dumb intuitions are ‘opposed to its conclusions. f you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious Ievel which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, hhave prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than 5 rose any logiechopping rationalistc talk, hhowever clever that may contradict it” So James reasons after a dispassionate analysis of various mediums’ accounts, reports of ‘psychic’ experiences, and religious revelations. “We may now lay it down as certain,” he says, “that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many persons... possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as tru, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.” But, as noted, his instances range beyond the religious. This breadth of evidence allows him to say: “The whole universe of concrete objects, as wwe know them, swims... for al of us, ia wider and higher universe of abstract {deas, that lend it its significance... Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of." This isnot far from Michael Polany’s concept of tacit knowledge, and his insistence that we gain objective knowledge (scientific or otherwise) only by exercising subjective value judgements, James has a chapter called “The Divided Self, which title will intrigue those of a certain age for whom RD Laing’ tract of that name —along with the yet more bizarre The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise was once a sacred text. Old hippies will be downcast or reassured to discover that James here treats of the inner discord between impulse (or Appetite) and self-control (or morality), and its resolution into equilibrium. He says much of interest about St Augustine, but does emphasise thatthe religious solution to such inner conflict is but one possibility; itis only one aspect of “a general psychological process”, and may 80 the other way entirely, from strictness and inhibition to unbridled licence - wa hoo! for instance. Not to he missed is the long chapter on mysticism, which gives a cornucopia of reports of the mystic state, and touches om his own experience with nitrous oxide. From which, he concluded, “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there le potential forms of consciousness entirely different, We ‘may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in ll their completeness, definite types ‘of mentality which probably somewhere hhave their field of application and adaptation. No account ofthe universe ints totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question... Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid 1 premature closing of our accountswith reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards ‘akind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. ‘The keynote of itis invariably a reconciliation Ivis as ifthe opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and ‘troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to ‘one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, i itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its ‘opposite into itself This is a dark saying, know, when thus expressed in terms of ‘common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority” James nonetheless observes that: ‘The fact i that the mystical feeling of enlafgement, union, and emancipation hhas no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. [tis capable of forming matrimonial alliances with ‘material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided ‘oly they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional ‘mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief...” On the other hhand, “the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states tobe the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.” {As for scientism, James says inhi ‘Conclusions’ (which, incidentally, it does no harm toread before the rest of the with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description = they being as describable as anything else - would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.” We have commented before in these pages on the sterility of the science-versus-eligion ‘debate’ Fames is an expert witness that militant atheism’s dismissal of the non-rational, immaterial or spiritual life and its value is worse than ignorant it is mendacious. ‘The Will t Believe was gathered together five years before Varieties (delivered as lectures in 1901). Irs an thology of papers given before various professional and student societies, and. ranges from reflections on physiology ~ which manages to veer into theism and {gnosticism on its travels - to whether life is worth living, determinism, great men (Thomas Carlyle was still aforee to be reckoned with, even 20-odd years post- mortem), moral philosophy, Hegelianism, ‘and What Psychical Research Has ‘Achieved’. This last has dated a bit, and is slightly credulous, but full of insight. Its all worth reading, and some of the presentations expand on themes that aD Oo ENJOYABLE BOOK INTHE WORLD IS THE PHONE BOOK, BECAUSE THINK CO) AVP Pe Ma Dae] THAT WENT INTO. CREATING THE. CONTENT a IE James compressed in the later work. For example, if you ever want a quote swith which to bash scientism, try this for concision and urbanity: “There is included jn human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. ‘Of this sort of mind the entity called ‘science’ isthe idol. Fondness forthe word “scientist is one of the notes by which ‘you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any ‘opinion that it disbelieves inis to call it ‘unscientific’. It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this, Science has made such glorious leaps in the last 300 years, and. extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues, that itis no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, have heard more than one teacher say ‘that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will sulfice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it s hard to see how ‘one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.” Elsewhere he says drily: “A Beethoven. string-quarter is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application ofthis description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability ofan entirely different description.” But for sustained entertainment, urn to the chapter ‘On Some Hegelisms’. Hegel’s works are hardly side-spitting stuf, but James puts on a nearslapstick turn in Sticking a huge pin into the side of the ghastly old windbag, “a mind monstrous even in its native Germany, where mental excess is endemic”. As James says: “Heegel’s philosophy mingles mountain- loads of corruption with its scanty merits, and must, naw that it has became quasi official, make ready to defend itself as ‘well as to attack others.” And so James sirds his loins, despite his judgement that Hegel's “system resembles a mouse- trap, in which if you once pass the door ‘you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering.” There is much more, dismantling with unremitting glee what ~ for Hegel ~ passes as thought. A typical flight: “But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear? Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require? Muddle! Is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? . Is friction other than ‘a kind of lubrication? Is not a chasm a filling?” And so Hegel's vacuous edifice begins to tumble, Sadly, most of these demolitions are too lengthy to quote here, but James really elobbers Hegel in recounting the “perfect delirium of theoretic rapture” (which “to the sober reader seems] meaningless drivel") that overcame him ‘when intoxicated with nitrous oxide. ‘James - desperately scribbling notes the while - was drenched in a shower of Hegelite oppositions and ostensible syntheses. “The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this: ‘There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference? This phrase has the true Hegelian ring. Laughing gas indeed. After this extended Jeu d’esprit, James concludes that Hegel's “identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a set consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating, either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.” ‘Now why, one wonders, weren't we directed to this uproarious Zerstorungyest ‘when we were aspiring philosophes at ‘Varsity? Never mind. These books are part of the deep background of forteana, worth anyone's time to read in exploring the variety of anomalous experience. [ai William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in human nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902, Longmans, Green & Co, 1902 Still in print in various paperback formats Free download from www.gutenbergore) ebooks/621 William James, The Will to Believe, and other essays in popular philasoph, Longmans, Green & Co, 1897 Sill in print in various paperback formats Free download from www.gutenberg.org) ebooks!26659 “SL