William James
- George Elder
- Jul 29
- 8 min read
Updated: Sep 8
By George Elder, 7/30/25
When I finished my recent Post on “Fundamentalism,” I thought how much the distinction between Christian “modernists” and “fundamentalists” is like a famous distinction between the “healthy-minded” and “sick souls” made by William James in his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh during the academic year, 1901-1902. Published as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, the lectures have had great influence on the field of religious studies and on the educated public both here and abroad. (I will be citing the 55th printing by Penguin, 1985)
As a noted American philosopher and pioneer psychologist, James lent legitimacy to “religious experience” in an age enamored of what he called “medical materialism.” (13) That meant the
reduction of all life to brain and body (the bias of our own age)—dismissing the invisible realities of mental life in general and the spiritual life in particular (in favor of the more visible and tangible sciences and technology). At the same time, he legitimized the “variety” of religious experiences of invisible divine Forces, acknowledging their range and respecting their appearance outside his own religion of Christianity.
James seldom went to church, however, since for him religious institutions were a pale “second-hand religious life” derived from primary religious feelings and impulses. (6) In many ways, he sounds modern, his metaphysical projections in the process of withdrawing. He also sounds American with his focus on individual experience and not European with its venerable traditions.
While emphasizing particulars (for which he has been criticized), James did classify two basic types of religious experience. They are rooted, however, in a typology of natural temperaments—the one optimistic ("So happy to be here!") and the other pessimistic ("How difficult!").
Discussing the first as “healthy-minded,” James says:
Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. (168)
By contrast, there is the “sick soul” (this label has shifted, let us note, from “mind” to “soul,” already a charged religious term):
There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zig-zags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes. (169)
Understandably, James says, the first type is not concerned or even very aware of evil in the world. The second is all too aware of evil and suffers personally, sometimes deeply, from its existence.
Should these natural temperaments be open to “religious impulses” (which James says is not necessarily the case), it is clear that the religion of the healthy-minded is one of gratitude to a good and gracious God for so wonderful a life. It is the religion of Christian “modernists” (the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, etc.) who encourage us to look on the bright side, to think positively—television’s “prosperity gospel” being only a variant. By contrast, the religion of the sick-soul is a cry with upraised arms to a judgmental God for deliverance from misery, in the hope of being “born again” into a very different kind of life. This is the religion of Christian “fundamentalists” (the Baptists, Pentecostals, etc.) who say being “born again” is not only possible but necessary to be genuinely religious.
Speaking of the “once born” as opposed to the “twice born,” James observes:
Arrived at this point, we can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased. With their grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. (162-163)
However we read the tone of this passage, the author adds: “Please observe, however, that I am not yet pretending finally to judge any of these attitudes. I am only describing their variety.” (144, his italics)
C. G. Jung recalled meeting Williams James in the United States in 1909 during a conference on the new psychology. He wrote in a letter forty years later: “I spent two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices.” (Letters I.531) Although twice Jung’s age and famous, James was apparently not the least condescending and encouraged the younger man’s interest in parapsychology and the psychology of religion. James would die the following year, however, and Jung would have to rely on the American psychologist’s books. He continued to be tremendously impressed and said closer to his own death when feeling intellectually isolated: “There are only a few heaven-inspired minds who understand me. In America it was William James.” (C. G. Jung Speaking, 221)
This praise is an overstatement, however, since it was too early for James to understand what Jung would discover. It is more the case that Jung understood James. When we hear the mature Jung criticizing the “nothing but” attitude—that dismisses psychic suffering as “nothing but” sexual repression, etc.—we hear William James who said it first in his criticism of medical materialism. When Jung says often, “truth is what works,” that is James’ formula expressed in his philosophy of pragmatism, i.e., evaluating a thought or action by its fruits and not by its roots.
Jung differed from James, however, by actually judging the “sick soul” experience as profounder and potentially more fruitful than that of the “healthy-minded”:
Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 14)
Yes, Jung was of the “sick soul” type as were all his patients crying out for some relief from a painful life.
But their “cure” did not amount to becoming merely “healthy-minded.” Instead—as James himself put it in rich metaphors while speaking of Bunyan and Tolstoy—“They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep.” 187)
Here we get a hint that William James himself was of the “sick soul” type. It could not have been otherwise for a man who suffered both physically and mentally throughout his life—traveling to Europe (with his urbane “healthy-minded” brother, Henry) not only for the culture but to find a cure for his eyes, back, digestion, and suicidal depression. James’ occasional tone in favor of the happier type, therefore, is an attempt to be fair to the “variety” within human nature. After all, the younger Henry James wrote wonderful, psychologically sophisticated novels.
In a more revealing passage, William James concludes:
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. (163)
Jung could have said that—but he would not have softened it with “may after all” or “possibly.”
There are stunning passages in the Varieties where James intuits the existence and significance of an unconscious psyche:
I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least [in everyone, Jung would find], there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual center and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. (233)
He would go on to suggest that the feeling of God’s “presence” may come from this “extra-marginal” region outside consciousness—but misinterpreted as supernatural.
Lest that offend the traditionally religious in his Edinburgh audience, James adds:
But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. . . If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door. (242-243)
Jung would say that we cannot know if there are “higher powers” outside the unconscious psyche, i.e., outside nature, since we are trapped inside the “epistemological limit” of being merely human.
Nor do we need to know if we experience the sacred residing within our deepest reaches from which we find “something welling up . . . . a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable.” (187) These are James’ words and very likely a personal confession accounting for his ability to carry depression, his creative brilliance, his durability.
Privately, James confessed that he never had a “religious experience” of the kind he recounts in The Varieties of Religious Experience. But I believe he had something better—a genuine “religious attitude,” that is not all that dramatic but does not come and go and can develop over a lifetime. It is the attitude of an ego that is open and alert to the promptings of the “subliminal self” every day. That is the “door” to the Divine.
With that attitude, we can say that C. G. Jung was correct—the American William James really did understand him.
A NOTE ON ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
William Wilson (“Bill W.”), co-founder of AA, wrote Jung a letter just months before Jung died. In it, he confided that Jung’s discussion in therapy with the alcoholic “Roland H.” decades earlier was the first link in an “astonishing chain of events” that led to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung had told the man he could not help him but that a religious experience might—“spiritus contra spiritum,” as Jung would write in reply to this letter. (Letters II.625)
After several more “links” in the chain, the desperate alcoholic “Bill W.” did in fact experience a dramatic religious breakthrough that freed him from his destructive compulsion.
Shortly afterward, a friend gave him a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience. And he could see that religious breakthroughs for a defeated “sick soul” came in many different ways and in different degrees, nor did they have to be Christian. Serious persons could understand God not as a personal deity in heaven but as a “higher power”—or “whatever they may consider the divine,” as James put it.
“Friends of Bill” will recognize the language. They can be grateful to C. G. Jung and William James who meet again, in a sense, at AA—at the beginning and end of an “astonishing chain of events.”