29

William James on Pure Experience and

Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga

E U G E N E TAYLOR

Western analytic philosophers who interpret William James tend to ignore his tripartite
metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism and focus instead on just his
pragmatism (Taylor, 2005). Further, they tend to interpret James through the pragmatism of
Peirce and Dewey instead of dealing with James in his own context. So it is no wonder that
they would remain incredulous that any of James's ideas could have been somehow influenced
by non-Western sources, such as the Hindu Darsana, since the philosophers might not be in
full possession of what James actually meant in the first place. While we have no actual smoking
gun on the matter, there is compelling circumstantial evidence to suggest that James's doctrine
of pure experience, the heart of his metaphysic of radical empiricism, was influenced by his
knowledge of Samkhya philosophy.
The first question to address is what is James's tripartite metaphysics? Let me state in
abbreviated form my conclusion that James's tripartite formula was a statement of his own
unique philosophy but couched in the manner of Peirce's three categories. Aristotle had proposed
a list of the basic and irreducible categories of existence; Kant, whom Peirce had studied
intensely in the 1860s, had produced his own list. In 1867, Peirce himself delivered "On a new
list of categories", as one of the papers celebrating his election to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences at the young age of 26. According to contemporary philosophers, Peirce's
categories were described as Firstness, a stage in which a sign is realized as something in itself,

John McDermott and his student Charlene Haddock Sigfried maintain that radical empiricism was
the core of James's metaphysics. This seems plausible, especially since radical empiricism appeared
the more profound idea when compared to pragmatism, even though James left the elaboration of
radical empiricism unfinished. Both McDermott and Sigfried, however, are at pains to explain what
James must have been getting at by describing all three as major constructs during his later
philosophical phase. A simple examination of each of these constructs reveals an internal consistency,
a task which misinterpreters of James such as Richard Rorty, included in the Proudfoot collection,
have yet to perform (Taylor, 2005).

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 556 Handbook of Indian Psychology

self-existent, a pure psychic state; Secondness, a stage in which two signs can be related through
opposition or through acting and reacting, a condition where the original undifferentiated state
is objectified as an object; and Thirdness, a stage in which the betweeness or mediation of a
dyadic relationship becomes apparent, the object is given a name, and the name then comes to
stand for the original thing it relates to. These are the irreducible ontological categories of
reality.
Peirce, however, was dealing with ideas, logic, and language. James, on the other hand, was
talking in terms of experience, its potential unity within the person, and the relation of one's
beliefs to one's actions insofar as one's ideals were concerned. Both, however, had in mind the
essential relationship between subject and object. For Peirce, it was expressed in terms of the
logic of signs, for James in terms of experience as a whole.
We know that at many points in his own career, William James's ideas were a retailed
version, often in slight but important variation, of Peirce's more cryptic philosophy. Also,
toward the end of his career James aspired but did not complete a fully detailed elaboration of
his metaphysics. They remained his unfinished arch. Nevertheless, we see in their initial
articulation the outlines of a Peircean triad. To understand any one of James's constructs, then,
one has to view them in their dynamic relation to each other. One cannot study just one and
then presume to be in possession of the whole of James's philosophy.
James's tripartite metaphysics has three parts: pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism.
Radical empiricism means pure experience in the immediate moment before the differentiation
of subject and object (James, 1904). By the time differentiation takes place, which is almost
instantaneous, we also have the full flowering of personality invested with the person's
predilections, attitudes, conceptions, and habits.
Science, and particularly that kind of psychology that considers itself a science, generates
models of reality based on the rational ordering of sense data alone. The two warring camps in
the philosophy of science have been the rationalists and the empiricists. The rationalists deal in
universals - the ideal categories - in terms of laws and generalizations, while the empiricists
deal at the level of facts, considering theories to be secondarily derived. Whereas most rationalists
were monists, James was an empiricist because he was a pluralist (since monism can always be
one of the pluralist's options), but he objected to the definition of empiricism as one of sense
data alone. He argued instead that empiricism meant the full spectrum of human experience in
not only its differentiated forms, but its raw, uncut, and undivided condition as pure experience.
The revolutionary implications of this view suggested that any science worth its salt had to
account for all parts of experience, not just those segments of it that were most easily measured
in terms of the prevailing logic of science or most commonly used methods. His metaphysics
therefore became a critique for the way normative science, particularly psychology, is conducted.

As pragmatism started to become an international movement, James declared one did not have to
know radical empiricism to talk about pragmatism. My position is that James had not yet completely
worked out this relation, so in order to keep the international discussion going, provisionally separated
pragmatism from radical empiricism. To this day, however, most philosophers refer to pragmatism,
but have no idea what radical empiricism entails.
On the microgenesis of perception from the standpoint of neuroscience, see Ogmen, H., and Breitmeyer,
B.G. (Eds.). (2005). The First Half-Second: The Microgenesis and Temporal Dynamics of the
Unconscious and Conscious Visual Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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 William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga 557

The second part of his tripartite metaphysic was pluralism (James, 1909). By this he meant
the irreducible nature of the single, unique individual. There is very little difference between
us, he had once said, but what difference there is, is very important (James, 1880,1890). It was
probably the least developed of his constructs, but he did give a rather remarkable description
of it in his lectures in 1906 on Pragmatism (1907), when he was trying to discuss the relation of
the one to the many (James, 1907, pp. 259, 293).
There he said that the monist maintains that we are all one because he sees the whole
through the idea that all people are connected up to all people all at the same time. The implication
is that in the transcendent experience, we witness this union as 'All is One.' The pluralist, on
the other hand, sees the matter quite differently. Namely, we are not all connected together at
the same time, but are instead linked through a concatenated union, in which each one of us is
connected to about thirty others at any given time and that these networks, which are also
interconnected, keep changing.
The implication is that each individual is capable of experiencing reality in terms of its
Oneness, except that it may not be the same Oneness from person to person (James, 1890).
Moreover, the individual monad always experiences a few loose ends, which initially can be
conveniently ignored given the vastness of the original visionary experience of unity in
consciousness. But these hanging entrails James considered to be the "ever not quite", the
unintegrated residuum that accounts for the true differences between human beings. To make a
contribution to the whole, each individual is called upon to do their level best to perfect their
own gifts and not infect others with their incompleteness. For this reason, he spoke of "noetic
pluralism", the ability of the individual to experience the transcendent, even though the
experience itself might not be the same for each person (James, 1907, pp. 135, 166, 277).
Pragmatism, the third part of his tripartite metaphysic, the idea that beliefs are tested by
their consequences, became, then, a way to mediate between apparently incompatible beliefs
about the nature of ultimate reality (James, 1907,1920). If two or more contradictory assumptions
led to the same outcome, then, from a pragmatic standpoint, for all intents and purposes, they
were equal.
It is important to note, however, that this equality does not mean they were the same. They
may lead to the same outcome and still be radically different with regard to their source and
expression. "By their fruits, not their roots, ye shall know them." In this way, James was still
able to argue for the preservation of the uniqueness of each source. With regard to religious
beliefs, for instance, it is not necessary that we all believe in the same catechism, but that each
different tradition leads to the same consensually validated way of tolerating the existence of
the other traditions.
Vivekananda, too, once said something like this when he proclaimed that some day he
hoped there would be as many different religions as there were people on the face of the earth.
But the difference between James and Vivekananda was that James was a pluralist and
Vivekananda a monist when it came to articulating the nature of ultimate reality. That they
were acquaintances and shared their ideas with each other was a testament to the efficacy of
both their teachings (Taylor, 1986). This is highlighted in James's predilection for the Samkhya

James further postulated that we are not even a single unitary self within the individual, but rather a
plurality of selves. See James, W. (1890). 'The hidden self. Scribner's Magazine.
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 558 Handbook of Indian Psychology

rather than the Vedantic metaphysic of the Hindu Darsanas. Royce, the Christian monist, on
the other hand, was most attracted to Hindu monism.
As we have said, even modern analytic philosophers remain incredulous that there might be
any influences on James other than the Aristotelian, Kantian, and Hegelian line of thinking.
But the philosophers at Harvard in the late nineteenth century were quite capable of
differentiating between Hinduism and Buddhism, and understood the epistemological differences
between the Vedanta and the Samkhya during James's era. The question is, what did they
know and when did they know it?
To begin with, Vedanta argues for the undifferentiated oneness of all things and the complete
identity of the individual jiva and the Supreme Atman, as expressed in the Upanisads. Samkhya,
on the other hand, remains a dualism and argues for the completely separate identity of the
purusa, or pure consciousness, fromprakrti, lifeless inert matter. In the fusion of the two darsana,
one being the Samkhya and the other yoga, the interaction of the gunas - sattva, rajas, and
tamas - causes the light of pure consciousness to reflect through prakrti, creating an individual
personality in the form of the differentiated functions of consciousness (citta) - manas, buddhi,
and ahathkara. These extend through the sensory and motor tracts to thefivesenses, and through
them consciousness extends out into the external world and grasps objects, latching onto them
in either a pleasurable or painful way. Samkhya is the interaction of purusa andprakrti, leading
to the evolution of consciousness from mind into matter, while yoga is the devolution of matter
back into mind and the isolation of pure consciousness from lifeless inert matter.

Purusa— Prakrti
I
Sattva
Rajas Tamas
I
Manas
Buddhi
Ahamkara
I
Consciousness [citta vrtti]
I
Sensory nerve tracts
I
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling
I
Objects in the external world

Figure 1 A simplified representation of the Samkhya Tattvas

We may consult the scholarship of the late Professor Dale Riepe, who is able to help us
discover where James may have derived his knowledge of Samkhya, although we are not
entirely in agreement with him regarding his knowledge of or conclusions about James's attitude
toward Hindu thought (Riepe, 1970).
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 William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga 559

As it is pointed out elsewhere, Riepe notes that probably the most knowledgeable about Hindu
thought at Harvard was Charles Rockwell Lanman. Lanman, James's neighbour and younger
friend, was a Sanskrit scholar, who had brought back some five hundred manuscripts in Sanskrit
and Prakrit from India. He was also editor of the Harvard Oriental Series. There was also Henry
Clarke Warren, Sanskrit and Pali scholar, who had originated the Harvard Oriental Series in
1891. He was known for his Buddhism in Translation (1896), and published posthumously, his
translation of Buddhaghosha's Visuddhimagga (1950 edition). He had studied Sanskrit under,
among others, James Bradstreet Greenough, who was professor of Latin from 1874 to 1901.
Thereafter, Warren spent his professional career at Princeton. Crawford Howard Toy, a longtime
friend of the James family, was Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard
from 1880 to 1909. As well, William Ernest Hocking, one of James's students, had attended the
World Parliament of Religions in 1893 and written about Swami Vivekananda, whom James later
invited to Harvard to lecture. James also knew William Sturgis Bigalow, physician and professor
at Harvard Medical School, who had a deep interest in Buddhism, was knowledgeable about
Hindu philosophy, and spoke directly of the concepts of consciousness in these different systems
(Bigalow, 1908). There was also C.C. Everett, Dean of the Divinity School, who taught world
religions, and one of James's own spiritual counsellors, an Episcopal priest named Elwood
Worcester, who also taught world religions. James also knew George Foote Moore, a theologian
who knew Indian philosophy and contributed to the literature on the history of religions. Although
a Yale man, Moore taught at Harvard after 1904. Indeed, James, himself, attended dinners of the
History of Religions Club at Harvard, rubbed shoulders with these scholars, and engaged in
extensive conversations with them, according to Lanman's daughter, Mrs Robert Cushman.
James was also close to one of his own students, James Houghton Woods, whom he encouraged
to study Hindu philosophy. Woods was subsequently the translator of the Yoga-Sutras ofPatanjali
for the Harvard Oriental Series, the interpretation of which was based on the Samkhya metaphysic.
Woods, in turn, inspired many of his own students in the same direction, including William
Ernest Hocking, James Bissett Pratt, and Daniel S. Robinson (Riepe, 1970, p. 92).
Josiah Royce, logician, philosopher and defender of Christian monism, and James's close
friend and colleague at Harvard, studied Sanskrit at both Johns Hopkins and Leipzig, and was
attracted to the theory of universal oneness of Vedanta. He was also attracted to Hinayana
Buddhism and had knowledge of Japanese culture. He quoted the difference between Samkhya
and Vedanta in his published writings in 1904:
Salvation for the Samkhya philosophy depends on coming to know precisely this utter
independence of the true soul and the material world. In fact, the soul is not only separated by
a chasm from matter; it is even really unaffected by matter. What seems to be affections of the
soul are, according to the Samkhya psycho-physical theory, material states, which merely
appear to be in the soul, as, according to a favourite Samkhya similitude, the red Hibuscus
flower is reflected in a crystal that all the while remains inwardly unaltered by the presence of
the flower. The result is a theory of a sort of psychophysical parallelism, founded, to be sure,
according to the Samkhya, upon an illusion.
(Royce, 1904, p. 103)

5
Author is grateful to his Sanskrit Professor at Harvard, Daniel H. H. Engels, for introducing him to
Mrs Cushman in 1977 before she died, one of the two people with whom the author has ever talked
who knew William James when he was alive. The other was the physiologist, Edmund Jacobson.
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 560 Handbook of Indian Psychology

But the colleague who went most overboard on the Samkhya metaphysic in the Philosophy
Department at Harvard was George Santayana (Riepe, 1970). Although an avowed materialist,
Santayana was aware of Indian philosophy as early as the 1880s. He was later called "an
unamalgamated compound of Aristotle and the Hindus in metaphysics', a devotee of Plato,
Lucretius and the Samkhya" (Riepe, 1970, p. 106). Eventually, he incorporated Indian ideas
not only into his philosophy but also into his sonnets.
James, himself, referred to the difference between Samkhya and the Vedanta as early as
1895 in an article on person and personality, published in Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia
(James, 1983). James began his entry by deriving the word person, which comes to us through
Old French, but originally from the Latin persona, meaning a theater mask, the part one has, as
in a play, personage, or person, which he took to be a loan word from Greek for mask, or face.
Its presumed etymology comes from per, meaning through, and sonare, sound, meaning sound,
or 'to speak.'
Insofar as usage is concerned, personality came to denote a man's corporal appearance
rather than his inner attributes. Later the word came to represent relationships with others, as
in personage, and still later it came to refer to a spiritual function. So James said, "In common
parlance today 'person' means an individual man in his typical completeness as uniting a human
body with a free and rational soul" (James, 1983, p. 315). This, he assured his mainly Christian
readers, excludes "pure spirits, the souls of the departed awaiting resurrection, idiots, maniacs,
and animals other than humans".
In psychology the term referred, James said, to personal identity, either as the ultimate
principle at the core of man or a subsidiary derived from other principles. He then turned to
Hindu philosophy, where he contrasted the Samkhya from the Vedanta on the subject. "Absolute
plurality or independent finite souls" in the Samkhya, James compared to the Vedantic doctrine
that "there exists only one self, the supreme Brahman, with whom all particular selves (Atman)
are really coincidental, but (until they are redeemed by knowledge) dwell in the illusion of
finite personality through not distinguishing themselves from the organisms with which they
are severally conjoined" (James, 1983, p. 316). He then proceeded to give a description in the
Vedanta system of how, after the disintegration of the physical body after death, the subtle
body, with the senses, active powers, including consciousness and will, the breath, and the
person's karma, or "moral worth acquired," form principles of individuality which enter future
bodies, and through an indefinite series of transmigrations keep up one's finite personal life.
He then commented that the Theosophists's doctrine of personality is almost wholly constructed
on the Vedanta system.
Then in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James deals directly with the
experience of samadhi in his chapter on mysticism. Mystical states, he maintained, had four

James had been a member of the Theosophical Society in Boston since 1888, read their literature,
and commented regularly upon it, especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The
local lodge of which he was a member was run by the American branch under Katherine Tingley and
William Q. Judge, who had separated from the International Sociey by then. The current Theosophical
Society dates its beginnings in Boston from the 1920s, when Katherine Tingley died in an auto
accident and Annie Besant brought the Boston Lodge back under the wing of the International Society,
dating its inception from that later period. Acknowledgments to Sylvia Cranston for providing me
with documentation for James's membership in the earlier Theosophical Society.
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 William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga 561

qualities: they were noetic, ineffable, and transient, and the experiencer remained passive, in
the sense of total surrender to the experience, not being able to control it. He covered numerous
secular examples, described mystical awakening in the context of Christianity, and then laid
out similar experiences in various non-Western religious traditions, such as Islamic Sufism and
also Hindu yoga. In the text he refers more to the Vedantic interpretation of samadhi presented
by Vivekananda in his Raja Yoga (1896), but James also refers the reader to a more complete
reading of samadhi found in Vihari Lai Mitra's translation of the Yoga Vasista Maha Ramayana
of Valmiki in four volumes (1891-1899). However, in that section, James did not specifically
equate samadhi, pure experience, and the Samkhya (James, 1902, pp. 400-401).
James was formulating the idea of pure experience in his unpublished notes at about this
same time but announced it most clearly in a series of essays published in 1904 and thereafter.
These essays are the seminal documents we have on his radical empiricism. In "Does
consciousness exist?" (1904), his thesis was that:
If we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a
stuff of which everything is composed and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing
can be easily explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions
of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its
'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the
object known.
(James, 1904, p. 8)
He then took a pot shot at the Neo-Kantians, who are still around but now call themselves
analytic philosophers. Then as now, they think that consciousness is dualistic; subject-plus-
object is the minimum it can be. Of consciousness as such, James went on to say "nothing can
happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part"
(James, 1904, p. 5).
Later on, he makes a very Upanisadic sounding point when he says: "The instant field of
the present is at all times what I call the "pure" experience. It is only virtually or potentially
either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence,
a simple that" (James, 1904, p. 13).
And elsewhere:
Pure experience is the name which I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the
material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men
in semicoma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience
pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho' ready to be all sorts
of whats; full both of oneness and manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction
or of identity, can be caught.
(James, 1905, p. 46)
He might as well have said that all evolution takes place through the interaction of the
gunas and the activation of prakrti, which is animated by the light of purusa, or pure
consciousness. This same formulation in his own words allows James to discuss the relation of
subject and object as both operating within the same theater of experience. It takes the discussion
out of the usual plane of opposing them to each other and then demanding that objectification,
through the suppression of the subjective, is somehow a superior way of knowing, when they
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 562 Handbook of Indian Psychology

are both equally the product of the interaction of prakrti, illuminated by the light of purusa. It
also suggests the dynamic relation that always exists between the subject perceiving and the
object of one's perception. So James says that, according to radical empiricism, there are not
two glasses, the one out there in the environment and the model of it in our mind, as modern
visual science supposes. Rather, there is only one glass, which exists at the intersection of the
history of that particular glass and our autobiography as lived experience at that moment. The
glass is real enough, contradicting the idea of maya in Vedanta, which says it is an illusion. But
its reality is inextricably related to the illuminating quality of pure consciousness that is the
light illuminating the field of consciousness.
The statement that James acknowledged the reality of the transcendent experience within
the person and at the same time affirmed the independence of individual consciousness as
experienced is a paradoxical one. In Human Immortality: Two supposed objections to the
doctrine (1899), he maintained that the individual in the physical body has a brain that could
just as easily be a conduit for a greater field of consciousness as it could be a producer of it,
generated by himself for his own finite purposes, as modern biology supposes (James, 1899).
This made it sound as if he was apparently positing a collective unconscious not unlike that
later posed by the Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung. James clarified in a new preface, which he
added to a later edition of the work, that he had only meant there may be a domain of
consciousness that goes beyond individual identity, but it remained a domain within. He only
maintained elsewhere that its farther reaches are what the individual calls God, the Absolute,
the transcendental "I" or some other infinite principle (James, 1901).
The independence of individual consciousness and its ability to experience the transcendent
which seems to affirm "All within all", also suggests a dynamic relation between James's
statements about the mystical experience in The Varieties (1902), especially its noetic quality
as a source of the discursive intellect, and his discussion of noetic pluralism in his Lowell
Lectures on Pragmatism, delivered in 1906 and published in 1907. Such an association would
add a mystical element to our understanding of rational intelligence in psychology, at the same
time that it would slightly alter the common understanding of ethical behaviour as based solely
on the inculcation of acceptable rules of behaviour from external sources. The ability to
discriminate right from wrong could just as easily be based on the depth and power of inner,
transcendent experiences, the difference in ethical behaviour between individuals being
accounted for through direct acquaintance with rather than merely knowledge about the
transcendent.
Finally, noetic pluralism helps us to understand James's affinity for the metaphysics of
Benjamin Paul Blood, the American businessman whom James lauded in "A pluralistic mystic,"
in 1910. Blood, James claimed, was the only other pluralist he had ever known who had
acknowledged as well the reality of the transcendent experience of oneness without confusing
a statement about personal experience with the monist's desire to declare his or her catechism
that all transcendent states of consciousness were the same.
Thus, James's knowledge of the Samkhya metaphysic appears in his writings at just the
time when he began to clearly articulate the three legs of his tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism,
pluralism, and radical empiricism. Pragmatism surged ahead as an international movement,
radical empiricism, the actual core of his metaphysics, received barely a gesture towards its
development, while pluralism nearly fell by the wayside, as far as James's reputation in Western
psychology and philosophy were concerned. When taken collectively as his formal, though
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 William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga 563

tragically incomplete, philosophical statement on the irreducible categories of existence,

however, we suddenly see a new relationship between philosophy and psychology; namely,
that objective science the way it has been traditionally defined in the West as the rational
ordering of sense data alone cannot possibly stand for the whole of reality. The subjective
experience of the perceiver must be seen as neither suppressed nor neutral, but interrelated
with the object. James adds the emotional dimension of spiritual experience and the intuitive
insights that come from mystical awakening. His metaphysics at least had these in common
with the Samkhya.

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