Chapter 9

 

THE I-THOU QUEST FOR INTIMACY AND RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM

  The preceding chapter presented the first lap of William James's quest for intimacy, in which he adopted the insider's approach to understanding the nature of his own Self through an introspective analysis of its conditions of identity over time. The next lap in his journey is his attempt to achieve a deep intimacy, ultimately a union, with the inner life of other persons, both natural and supernatural, even with the world at large.

            I. The I-Thou Experience

            James begins with a special inward manner in which one person experiences another as a "Thou" rather than an "It," and then extends this to the experience of the world at large, resulting in panpsychism. His analysis of the I-Thou experience bears a striking resemblance to that offered by Martin Buber some thirty years later. Buber starts with the "It" mode of experience.

The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object. I perceive something. I feel something. I want something. I sense something. The life of a human being does not consist merely of all this and its like. All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It. But the realm of Thou has another basis. (IT 54)[1]

Buber's I-It experience is James's pragmatic mode of experiencing worldly individuals  in terms of how we can ride herd them and use them for the achievement of our goals. Toward this end we conceptualize them in a way that enables us effectively to use them .

            Unlike the experience of It, the experience of a Thou, Buber tells us, does not have something for its object in the sense of one object among others that border on it and delimit it, since "Thou has no borders. Whoever says Thou does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation." (IT 55) The relata in an I-It relation are external and separate from each other, but in the I-Thou relation they exist within the relation in the sense of entering into each other. "The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-Thou establishes the world of relation." (IT 56) Through a fusing of their originally separate consciousnesses they enter into, what Buber terms, "relational processes and states" in which they partially fuse or mush together. (IT 70)

            The best place to begin the exposition of James's version of the I-Thou experience is with his great account of the lovers, Jack and Jill. To a disinterested, objective observer they might look completely uninteresting, just another ordinary guy and gal, except maybe for the fact that they have a penchant for falling down hills and breaking their crowns. Each of them, however, because they have a deep empathetic awareness of the other's inner consciousness, experiences the other as something wondrously unique. Through this reciprocal merging of psyches each expands their own consciousness and gains a deeper knowledge of the other than could be gotten from an objective, scientific account. James's description of their reciprocal I-Thou-ing of each other, though he doesn't yet use this language, reserving it for the religious person's experience of nature at large, warrants full quotation.

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles towards a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic [doesn't James mean empathetic or sympathetic!], and important way. (TT 150-1)

            This might be the most profound passage in James, hardly, as James feared, "the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers." (TT 4) It requires considerable fleshing out, though. This passage might be read by some as imputing to the lovers a special mode of access to each other's minds that renders their judgments about each other incorrigible. This, however, would fly in the face of James's deep commitment to fallibilism, even to the extent of denying in The Principles of Psychology that introspective reports could not be mistaken. James's point, rather, is that there are features of another person's consciousness that can be known in the full-blooded existential sense only through an act of sympathetic intuition. To know what-it-is-like-to-be-Jill, which is the really important fact about Jill for James, one must enter into her inner life and experience the world the way she does. This is what is meant by James's claim that "Jack realizes Jill concretely," Because he does, he has a "truer" grasp of Jill than does the detached observer: "The truer side is the side that feels the more and not the side that feels the less." (TT 133) This has the consequence that you can really know someone only if you love them.

            James's romanticism comes to the fore in his ecstatic descriptions of the marvelous ponderousness of the inner life that one grasps through the I-Thou experience. He speaks of its "vital secrets," "zest," "tingle," "excitement," "mysterious inwards," and "mysterious sensorial life" (TT 132, 135, 137, 149), along with its "acutest internality" and "violent thrills of life." (ERM 99) To miss the joy of this inner consciousness in another person is to miss all, for it is this that makes her life significant, provided it is coupled with the requisite strength of character to see to it that it gets properly expressed in her overt behavior. James prizes this inner life so highly that he holds that "In every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other." (WB 111)

            James deduces different normative conclusions from this "sacredness" of an individual's inner life, some benevolent and others less so. Among the benevolent consequences is his principle of democracy requiring us to respect other persons, even nations, and adopt a live and let live hands off policy. He calls this "respect for the sacredness of individuality...the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant."[2]  It served as the basis of his opposition to what he saw as American imperialism in the Phillipines. (TT 4) He even goes so far as to deploy this democratic principle to oppose the "Aristocratic" or snob objection to immortality, namely, that if there were immortality, heaven would become too crowded with a bunch of undesirable riff raff. He charges this objection with displaying a blindness to other creatures due to a failure to properly I-Thou them.

You take these swarms of alien kinsmen as they are for you: an external picture painted on your retina, representing a crowd oppressive by its vastness and confusion...But all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most violent thrills of life. 'Tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking on. You open your eyes upon a scene of which you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast. (ERM 99)

And, for good measure, he adds that "The heart of being can have no exclusions akin to those which our poor little hearts set. The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our power of sympathy and insight." (ERM 101) To deny immortality to these "poor little hearts" on the grounds of their worthlessness would be a case of "letting blindness lay down the law to sight." (ERM 101)

            There were, however, less benevolent uses that James made of the sacredness of the inner life. At times it led him to indulge in overly romantic sentimental glorification of the inner life to the exclusion of the social and economic conditions that are necessary for such inner flourishing. Max Otto was quite right to criticize James for being blind "to the character-forming significance of the economic conditions under which men live and work." Like Emerson, he adds, James "was captivated by the ideal of absolutely unentangled and unfettered individuality." (CB 189) For James, in sharp distinction from Dewey, "man is in, but not of, the environment." James's socialism was one of the spirit that was divorced from economic realities. His glorification of the stoic person who manages to cultivate and keep alive a rich inner life regardless of how unfortunate her external circumstances is its result. James admitted that "society has...got to pass towards some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change," but immediately adds that such changes will not make "any genuine vital difference...to the lives of our descendants....The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing--the marriage...of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's pains.--And whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place." (TT 166) And "no outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from signing in all sorts of different men's hearts." (TT 167) He naively thinks that the conflicts between rich and poor, workers and owners, result largely from the fact that "Each...ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody else's sight." (TT 166) Romantic sentimentalism does have its price.

            James's reactionary use of his romanticism about the inner life also underlies his account of habit.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to treat therein...It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. (PP 125-6)

In a letter to sister Alice in 1865 from the Amazon he expresses the same conservative sentiment. "The boy has acted so far as cabin boy. His blue black hair falls over his eye brows, but he is a real willing young savage & we hope, by keeping him low & weak to make an excellent servant of him for all the time we are on the Amazons." (CWJ, 4, 114)

            The same reactionary spirit runs throughtout his Talks to Teacher on Psychology. Instead of making his pragmatism the basis of his theory of education, as Dewey did, he leans heavily on associationist psychology and its rote methods of training, because the purpose of education is to inculcate in students the right set of habits so that they will fit into a preexistent society. Education "consists in the organizing of resources in the human being which shall fit him to his social and physical world." (TT 27) This conservative emphasis is especially prominent in "The Will" Chapter of the book, in which it is said: "Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention that they can exert in holding to the rights ones, however unpalatable; and third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter to which they have been successfully trained." (TT 110) Whereas Dewey wanted to use the educational system to radically reconstruct society, his only difference from Plato being that Plato cultivated Dionysius of Syracuse and Dewey the teacher's union, James wanted to use the educational system to propogate a society with which he basically was quite content. His numerous letters to the established members of Boston society attest to this, as does the good-old boy mentality that is expressed by his numerous derogatory references to Jews, Blacks, Italians and others in his letters. (See: LWJ  Vol. 1, 51, 56, 94, 112, 114, 121, 172, 233, 275, and Vol. 2, 60-1, 148, 196, 199, 223, 228, 245) No harm was meant by his use of "niggers," "boys," "darkies," "dagoes," "a faithless Israelite," "a Shylok," "old clothes men," "ambitious young Jews," since in real-life he was totally without prejudice, and, in fact, was exceedingly kind and helpful to minority individuals. It was just James's way of being affable by letting his correspondent know that he was a member of their club.

            To return to the I-Thou experience, what requires further elucidation is James's all too brief description of how Jack "struggles toward a union with [Jill's] inner life."[3] He is supposed to achieve this through an act of sympathetic or empathetic intuition, but just what is that? James, of course, cannot give a straight-forward literal answer. Since the inner life that is the object of this intuition is said to be mysterious and ineffable, so is the act that intuits it. Indirect communication, of the sort practiced by mystics, is needed. Buber followed this path in his account of the I-Thou experience in the preceding quotations, which is why many readers, no doubt, were mystified. Maybe the best that can be done is to write a novel or play or, better yet, a typical Tin Pan Alley song. Jack takes one look at Jill and “Whamo! Zing Went the Strings of His Heart." As he peers deeply into her eyes he feels he has known her all his life. His focus of orientation has radically altered so that now he perceives the whole world through her. He locks in on her inner joy and tingles, which is what bestows meaning and value on her life. Jack’s I-Thouing of Jill is reciprocated by Jill, thus bringing about a mutual partial merger of their consciousnesses.

            It is interesting to compare James's sympathetic intuition with Sartre's experience of the  "glance" in Being and Nothingness. Both involve a mysterious sort of direct awareness of one conscious being by another that renders otiose a need to employ a Cartesian argument from analogy for the existence of other minds. But here is where they part company. For Sartre, the other person is a threat, being, if not a member of the Gestapo, then at least a collaborator. Through his judgmental perception he makes you into an object on public display and thereby subject to being judged by him in ways that you cannot control, resulting in a restriction on your freedom to control your world through your own subjectivity. Whereas hell is other people for Sartre, as depicted in his play No Exit, they are heaven for James since he sees them as presenting him with the occasion for expanding his consciousness through merger with theirs. In short, James likes people and Sartre doesn't. Buber certainly is squarely on James's side in this matter, being one of the biggest I-Thou-ers of all time if the scurrilous rumors are to be trusted.

            James did not stop with I-Thou-ing his fellow humans. He even wanted to I-Thou the beasts and fishes, as well as nature. He writes in a letter of 1873: "Sight of elephants and tigers at Barnum's menagerie whose existence, so individual and peculiar, yet stands there, so intensely and vividly real, as much as one's own, so that one feels again poignantly the unfathomableness of ontology, supposing ontology to be at all." (LWJ, I, 224) Not to slight the fishes, in a letter of 1899 to his wife, he says: "four cuttle-fish in the Aquarium. I wish we had one of them for a child--such flexible intensity of life in a form so inaccessible to our sympathy." (quoted from Allen WJ 309) Maybe James would have had more luck I-Thou-ing a cat, as did Buber.

            James wanted to go all the way and I-Thou the entire universe, as nature mystics have traditionally done. Clearly, James is personalizing the universe when he writes: "The Universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here." (WB 31) Taking a religious stance to the world "changes the dead blank it of the world into a living thou, with whom the whole man may have dealings." (WB 101) "Infra-theistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third person, a mere it...[but] theism turns the it into a thou." (WB 106)

            James's I-Thou-ing of nature is within the tradition of cosmic consciousness or nature mysticism. He endorses the following lines in Wordsworth's poem, The Prelude:

To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,

Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning. (quote in TT 139)

Wordsworth's "strange inner joy" resulted from his responsiveness "to the secret life of Nature roundabout him." (TT 140) It is clear that James accepts the panpsychic upshot of this sort of nature mysticism experience. Herein panpsychism enters in, not as it did in the last chapter as an intellectual device for saving the doctrine of Pure Experience against the challenge posed by unperceived events, but as something experientially vouchsafed by I-Thou experiences of nature.[4] In the next chapter it will be seen how this experientially-based panpsychism turns into a form of spiritualism or idealism in his final two books, this time with intellectual considerations working hand and glove with experiential ones.

            Another part of James's account of the I-Thou relation that needs further elaboration is just how unified a person becomes with its Thou, be it another person or nature. There are monistic mystics who take the unification to be one of complete numerical identity, but, James, being squarely ensconced within the Western theistic mystical tradition, takes it to be something less than that, a case of what he liked to call, using Blood's marvelous phrase, "ever not quite." (EP 189) Throughout his career he was a self-proclaimed "pluralistic mystic." Buber was not as unequivocally committed as was James to a dualistic interpretation of the I-Thou experience, for he reports in Between Man and Man that he once had a mystical experience in which it appeared as if he became one and the same as God, but upon subsequent reflection (i.e. he remembered that he is Jewish) came to realize that it stopped short of strict numerical identity, which is reminiscent of Meister Eckhardt's "little point" that God gives men so that they can rotate about it and find their way back to their creaturehood and thereby realize that they are distinct from God, the Creator. In the next chapter, James's other type of mystical experience, the Bergsonian conceptless intuition of the mushing together of spatiotemporal neighbors, will be seen also to fit the format of James's pluralistic mysticism . Furthermore, in both types of mystical experience, the individuals, whether persons or contiguous events, enter into relations with each other in which they lose their distinct identities. These are the "relational processes and states" of Buber. (IT 70) Our concern in this chapter, however, is only with the I-Thou experience, and, in particular, the role it plays in the sort of "religious" mysticism that James winds up embracing in his classic work on The Varieties of Religious Experience. It will be seen to form the basis of this type of mysticism.

II. Religious Mystical Experiences

            The major thesis of this book, and one which I think is successfully maintained to James's everlasting credit, is that the basis of religion, including its institutional structure, theology, and personal religious feelings and beliefs, is rooted in religious experiences of a mystical sort in which the individual has an apparent direct, nonsensory perception of a "More," an "Unseen" supernatural or purely spiritual reality into which she is to some extent absorbed and from which spiritual energy flows into her. These "perceptions" of the "More" can be viewed as a very heightened and intense form of the I-Thou experience. Through these I-Thou experiences of the More the subject gets "an assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relations to others, a preponderance of loving affection." (VRE 383) In the Introduction it was shown that this is this sort of assurance that James's "sick" or "morbid" self needed in order to face the evils of the world, especially the sort that occasioned an experience of existential angst. James's mystical self is the other side of the coin of his healthy-minded promethean self, the one that is itching to engage in a Texas death match with evil without any assurance of who will emerge victorious.

            Surprisingly, James claims not to have had any mystical experiences himself -- "my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand." (VRE 301) If this is so, is not the underlying thesis of this book, that James had a mystical self who clashed with his promethean pragmatic self, especially in regard to the challenge posed by evil, wrong? How can one be a mystic, or even be so sympathetically inclined to mystical experiences as to accept their cognitivty, as James will be seen to have done, without having mystical experiences? I have two replies. 

            My first response is that even if it were true that James did not have any mystical experiences, at least of the more developed type, it could be the case that he had a deep sensitivity to and appreciation of them and what they seemingly reveal, just as someone who lacks the musical genius to compose an Eroica Symphony can esthetically resonate to it. As Walter Stace, a virgin to mystical experience who nevertheless was one of the greatest expositors and defenders of mysticism, was fond of pointing out, people are possessed of varying degrees of mystical sensitivity and talent. James's claim that "we all have at least the germ of mysticism is us" can be seen as making this point. (P 76)

            Second, James is not leveling with his audience. Mystical experiences for him cover a broad spectrum of cases, going from the relatively undeveloped experiences of a heightened sense of reality, an intensification of feeling and insight, such as occurs under the influence of alcohol, drugs, nitrous oxide, art, and even the raptures of nature, to the fully developed monistic experience of an undifferentiated unity in which all distinction are obliterated. James never had an experience of the latter kind, but he did have more than his share of the less developed ones, given his penchant to experiment on himself with nitrous oxide and mescal.[5] He was no stranger to alcohol either and gives glowing descriptions of its effects, along with impassioned sermons on its evils. (VRE 307) Footnote 4 reports on a fairly developed nature mysticism experience that James had in the Adirondaks in 1898 shortly before he caused irreparable damage to his heart, from which he eventually died, by overtaxing himself on a trek. James's reports four mystical experiences he had in 1906 in the 1910 "A Suggestion about Mysticism" in which he apparently became aware of experiences not his own. Whether these experiences should be called  "mystical" will be broached later.

            What was said in Chapter 3 about the reason for James misrepresenting his exceedingly tender-minded view of the will and its freedom in his presidential address to the "breathern of the American Psychological Association" applies here. He was very sensitive to the suspicions that his tough-minded scientific colleagues had of his interests in disreputable types of psychic and mystical experiences and went to considerable pains to appear as tough-minded as they, rather than some sentimental apologist for the wild claims made in behalf of these experiences. His deepest fear was to wind up like his father, an eccentric whose writings everybody safely neglected. This was seen in his patronizing Willy Loman "farewell" letter to his father and the great pain he experienced at the abysmal sales for The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, as evidenced in the quotations given in Chapter 3 from his letters to brother Henry.

            Another example of his misrepresenting himself so as to disarm the suspicions of the tough-minded in his audience is his 1898 lecture, "Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine." He begins by saying that he cannot understand why the Ingersoll Committee chose him to give this lecture, since he is no friend of the doctrine of human immortality and has little personal concern for it, something that was shown in the Introduction not to be the case. He then goes on to neutralize the two major objections to it, mount an inference to the best explanation argument in support of it, about which more will be said, and end with a will to believe justification for believing in it!

            Granted that James had every right to be a sympathetic expositor and defender of mysticism, we can now consider the specifics of his account. The first question concerns whether our apprehension of the supersensible reality is conceptual or via some direct presentation. Throughout The Varieties of Religious Experience James works with a perceptual model of mystical experiences, likening them to ordinary sense perceptions in that both involve a direct acquaintance with an object, although only the latter has a sensory content. "Mystical experiences are...direct perceptions...absolutely sensational...face to face presentation of what seems to exist." (VRE 336) A perception is "direct," I assume, if the existential claims made by the subject on the basis of her experience are noninferential. Another important, and highly controversial, assumption James makes in his likening mystical experiences to sense perceptions is that mystical experiences, like sensory ones, are intentional in the sense that they have an apparent accusative that exists independently of the subject when the experience is veridical. In this respect, they are unlike a feeling of pain, which takes only a cognate or internal accusative, since feeling a pain is nothing but paining or feeling painfully. 

            James tries to take a neutral stance on whether mystical experiences support a monistic or pluralistic view of the More or Unseen reality, in spite of his own strong emotional commitment to the pluralistic version. At one place he seems to come down on the side of the modern-day mystical ecumenicalists, Suzuki, Stace, and Merton, who contend that there is a common phenomenological monistic core to all unitive mystical experiences that then gets interpreted by the mystic so as to accord with the underlying culture of her society, as for example Buber's imposition of a dualistic interpretation on his apparently monistic mystical experience. "In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed." (VRE 332, my italics) Some of James's major contentions in The Varieties of Religious Experience, however, require a dualistic experience of the sort called "theistic" by R. C. Zaehner in his Concordant Discord. For example, James says that prayer is "the very soul and essence of religion," and then describes prayer as involving two-way interaction between two subjects. (For someone who takes such a strong anti-essentialist stance in Lecture II, James managed to say a lot of things about the essence of religion.) James's strong Protestant leanings cause him, for the most part, to give a dualistic interpretation of mystical experiences.

            One of the features of mystical experiences, as well as conversion experiences in general, that James stresses, so much so that it is used as one of the four defining conditions of a mystical experience, is that the subject is passive in respect to them. While persons can take steps, such as following the mystical way, to help induce the experience, its coming is viewed by religious mystics as the free bestowal of a gift upon them by the grace of God. Through the experience the subject feels that her conscious will is held in abeyance as she finds absorption in a higher unity. "The mystic feels as if his own will were grasped and held by a superior power." (VRE 303) In both cases there must be a canceling out of the finite so as to open ourselves to the infinite. This resignation and abandonment of the finite self and its conscious will is found in the mystical and conversion experience of both the once- and twice-born, or healthy- and morbid-minded.[6]

            James, no doubt with his sick soul's experiences of existential angst in mind, stresses how such mystically-based resignation cannot "fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be conscious that, no matter what one's difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one's life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust." (VRE 230) The mystical experiences that such submission of the conscious will helps to foster are "reconciling and unifying states" that "tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest." (VRE 330 and 339) In such mystical union there is a "life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature." (VRE 119) This is just what promethean self's beloved religion of meliorism cannot deliver; it cannot help him make it through the dark nights of his soul, nor face the hideous catatonic epileptic youth described in the Introduction. A theme that runs throughout The Varieties of Religious Experience is the insufficiency of meliorism. It is condemned as being "the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality." (VRE 118-9)

            Herein we see the first of several dramatic clashes between James promethean and mystical selves. First there is the clash between the active self of the promethean moral agent and the passive self of the mystic. The promethean self is the active will, which, James says, is "the substantive thing which we are." (PP 1181) But for the mystic the true self, that "self of all the other selves," no longer is identified with the active aspect of a person, their free conscious will. Quite the contrary, it is that very self, along with its promethean will to believe and the meliorism it favors, that must be surrendered. The true or higher self is that aspect of us, identified by James with the subconscious or transmarginal self, that is able to enter into a complete or partial union with a supersensible reality, which is a "More" of the same kind as it.

            The mystical self displaces the active will by  "a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God." (VRE 46)  "To give up one's conceit of being good, is the only door to the Universe's deeper reaches." (ERM 128) By meeting despair with religious resignation, we uncover "resources in us that naturalism, with its literal virtue, never recks of, possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or Philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, indeed because of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and worry." (ERM 128) The death of strength and responsibility is the death of the promethean moral agent, along with its melioristic religion. "Sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's own right is the only door to the universe's deeper reaches." (PU 138) The overcoming of our active self does not assure that we will achieve some kind of experiential union with God, but it is a necessary first-step along the way to such mystical illumination.

            It would be a mistake to think that the clash between James's prometheanism and mysticism is a clash between the early and the late James. Some commentators, such as Bennett Ramsey and Paul Croce, have depicted James as relinquishing by the end of his career the assertive self in favor of a religious acceptance of forces beyond its control. This can't be right, since James closes his final two books with a reaffirmation of his most promethean of all doctrines -- the will to be believe. Furthermore, there are several earlier publications in which mystical doctrines are espoused, most notably the 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience,  as well as some articles of the late 1890's, even at one place in 1890 The Principles of Psychology. (PP 328) The clashes between James's promethean and mystical selves, therefore, cannot be explained away as a diachronic one, since he was a highly divided self throughout his life. The clashes, rather, are synchronic. At every moment in his career he was of several minds about everything, and that is why his philosophical writings are like a philosophical wheel of fortune. Whatever doctrine it stopped on and temporarily illuminated reaped a rich payoff, since every one of his many philosophies was espoused with incredible brilliance and passion. Whether James would defend pragmatism or mysticism on any given day depended on his mood, whether he was in a healthy- or sick-minded one.    

            James can neutralize the clash between his morally strenuous promethean self and the passivity and quietism of his mystical self by playing Poo-bah and suitably "qua"-clausing the claims made by these selves, thereby allowing them to take turns in being his dominant interest; for example, he could be a promethean moral agent on the weekdays and a mystic on the weekends. This is the promethean "solution," but it has the unattractive upshot of making him into a temporalized schizophrenia. Chapter 11 shall explore ways in which James might get beyond this and become a truly unified self.

            Another significant clash between James's pragmatic and mystical selves is between their respective reality-claims. In the first place, there is an apparent clash in the content of these claims, the promethean pragmatist asserting the existence of a multiplicity of distinct objects changing in space and time and the acosmic mystic denying the reality of this multiplicity. This contentful clash can be neutralized by Poo-bah-izing the respective reality-claims by restricting them to a given person's interests at a certain time. A far more serious clash concerns how the respective reality claims are made rather than what they claim. In the first place, mystical claims, unlike those made by the promethean pragmatist, are not advanced in the spirit of fallibilism, as hypotheses to be tested by future experiences and thus subject to revision or withdrawal. They are, instead, claims to absolute certainty, without which there would not accrue the feeling of peace and safety so needed by James's morbid self. Secondly, and most importantly, they are advanced as noetic claims that are revelatory of an ultimate or absolute reality -- the really real in comparison with which everything is a mere illusion or emanation of some sort. They are nonrelativized reality-claims and therefore are incompatible with prometheanism's doctrine of Ontological Relativism, which played such a key role in enabling us to have it all by requiring that all reality claims be relativized to the interests of a person at a time. The mystic definitely is not saying that, qua the mystical point of view, reality is some kind of a unity or oneness, but rather that it is so simpliciter. To restrict mystical reality-claims to the mystical perspective would, in effect, be awarding an ontological status to the mystic's reality that is on all fours with Ivanhoe and Pegasus, certainly a booby prize. In the next chapter it will be found that James's Bergsonian type mystical claims also are advanced in an absolutistic, nonrelativized manner, as revelations of the true nature or essence of reality, which phrases are anathema to the promethean pragmatist. This clash is far more serious than one of content, since it cannot be met by playing Poo-bah. Instead it is the Ontological Relativism of Poo-bah-ism that is being challenged. This is one of the most serious aporia in all of James's philosophy and must await Chapter 11's attempted resolution.

            It is not surprising that Ontological Relativism is largely subdued in The Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as the final two books in which he promotes his version of Bergsonian mysticism, which I call "Backyard Mysticism." It is interesting to note that Ontological Relativism does make its way into one of the drafts for Lecture II.

What...determines our living attitudes has reality for us in so far forth. In fact, if you open some of the books on psychology, you will find them saying that the way in which the feeling of the thing grasps us and decides our living attitudes is all that we mean by its reality. What thus grasps us is by that very fact believed in, is real. That is all that the world real signifies,--you hear these psychologist insist. (Appendix II of VRE 483-4)

            Why did James omit from his final draft the Poo-bah-istic account of reality of The Principles of Psychology? Probably, it was because he realized that it clashes with the absolutistic reality-claims that he endorsed in the book. Some commentators would like to believe that James gave up his Ontological Relativism, because he realized that it was, in general, fallacious to derive semantic and ontological conclusions from a genetic analysis of how we come to acquire a given concept, something which he has been seen to do with the concepts of good, truth, negation, self identity, and material objects. Owen Flanagan dogmatically claims that it is a mistake to think that "ontology recapitulates ontogeny"[7] and tries to interpret James so that he does not commit this fallacy, in spite of the fact that over and over again James infers what we mean by X, as well as what it is to be X, from a genetic analysis of how we experientially acquire the concept of X. (CP 44-5) It is too harsh to brand this a fallacy. Rather, it is a time honored way of doing philosophy, which ran rampant among James's British empiricist predecessors, that happens not to be favored by Flanagan. There is no evidence that James ever came to doubt this method of doing philosophy. All that his dropping Ontological Relativism from the final draft of The Varieties of Religious Experience is evidence for is that he saw that it is not applicable to mystical claims; however, he continued to apply it to reality-claims made from the promethean perspective of his pragmatic selves, such as the moral agent and the scientist.

            Mysticism also challenges James's pragmatic theory of meaning and truth. The pragmatic theory of meaning, as contrasted with the theory of pragmatic meaning, was interpreted in Chapter 6 as holding that the meaning of X is a set of conditionalized predictions of what experiences we shall have upon performing certain operations, with a belief in the reality of X becoming "true" when these predictions are verified. The reason for the scare-quotation marks  around "true" is that it means "epistemically warranted,” true beliefs being, for James, those that maximize desire-satisfaction for their believers, so he was interpreted by me. But the mystic's conception of the Absolute, the undifferentiated unity, the eternal one, God is not based on how we can ride herd on it, for there is nothing that we do to or with this mystical reality, or ways in which it is expected to behave if we perform certain operations. It doesn't dissolve in aqua regia. It simply is, and is just what it appears to be in the immediate experience of the mystic. A door to door salesman of mystical reality, therefore, would be stymied when asked, "But what does it do?" or "What can I do with it?" Herein the content of the proposition that this reality exists is not reducible to any set of pragmatic conditionalized predictions. The star performer finally gets into the act, unlike the case of the pragmatically favored melioristic religion, which reduced "God exists" to the conditionalized prediction that good will win out over evil in the long run, if we collectively exert our best moral effort. The reason James chose meliorism as his example of a religion in the final lecture of Pragmatism is that it can be shown to employ the same pragmatic theory of meaning and truth as does science, which fits his program of reconciliation through methodological univocalism.

            In order to account for the meaning of mystical reality-claims James will have to resort to content empiricism, which was found in Chapter 6 to be his other species of empiricism to that of pragmatism. Since the meaningful content of the mystic's reality-claim is based on the manner in which she is phenomenologically appeared to in an of-God type experience, the truth of the claim will depend on whether her experience is objective or cognitive. The spiritual and moral benefits that the experience occasions, as will be seen, become relevant, but only as a means of indirect verification, there now being, as there wasn't for meliorism, a distinction between direct and indirect verification, with an assertion's meaning being identified primarily with the former, that being the apparent object, the intentional accusative, of the mystical experience. James seems to recognize this when he says that "the word 'truth' is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life." (VRE 401) Accordingly, James makes the issue of the cognitivity or objectivity of mystical experience a central issue in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Concerning them, he asks about their "metaphysical significance" (308), "cognitivity" (324), "authoritativeness" (335), "objective truth" (304), "value for knowledge" (327), their "truth" (329), and whether they "furnish any warrant for the truth of the...supernaturality and pantheism which they favor" (335), or are "to be taken as evidence...for the actual existence of a higher world with which our world is in relation." (384) James is quite explicit that the answer to the "objectivity" question is independent of the biological and psychological benefits that accrue from mystical experiences.

            James concludes that there is a generic content of the many different type of mystical experiences that "is literally and objectively true." (VRE 405) His arguments for this are not made sufficiently explicit, so much so that it has led some commentators to claim that James gave no arguments at all.[8] With a little sympathetic imagination and anachronistic hindsight, I believe that two arguments can be detected in the text: the argument from analogy with sense experience and the argument from an inference to the best explanation. The former is far more important and will be considered first.

            This argument has been very ably defended in recent years by Wainwright, Swinburne, Gutting, and especially William Alston, whose book, Perceiving God, should become a classic. First, an overview will be given of a generic brand version of their arguments, and then an attempt shall be made to locate it, or at least the germ of it, in James, hopefully without being anachronistic to the point of developing a private history of philosophy. It is an argument from analogy that goes as follows. Mystical and sense experiences are analogous in cognitively relevant respects; and, since the latter are granted to be cognitive, so should the former, in which a cognitive type of experience is one that counts, in virtue of some a priori presumptive inference rule, as evidence or warrant for believing that the apparent object of the experience, its intentional accusative, objectively exists and is as it appears to be in the experience.[9] For sense experience the presumptive inference rule is that if it perceptually appears to be the case that X exists, then probably it is the case that X exists, unless there are defeating conditions. These defeating conditions consist in tests and checks for the veridicality of the experience that get flunked on this occasion. Prominent among these tests are agreement among relevant observers, law-like coherence between the experience's content and the content of earlier and later experiences, and being caused in the right way. The presumptive inference rule is said to be a priori, because it cannot be justified by appeal to sense experience without vicious circularity.

            If mystical experiences are to be subject to an analogous a priori presumptive inference rule, they must be analogous to sense experiences in having defeating conditions -- checks and tests that can get flunked. All of the contemporary defenders of the cognitivity of mystical experiences argue that the great religious mystical traditions employ a fairly elaborate network of tests for veridicality of mystical experiences, usually including that the subject, as well as her community, display favorable moral and/or spiritual development as a result of the experience, that what her experience reveals accords with her religion's holy scriptures and the mystical experiences of past saints and notables, to name some of the more important tests of most of the great religious mystical traditions.

            These tests are admittedly not exactly analogous to those that inform the sense experience doxastic practice[10] in that, most notably, they do not contain any requirements for being caused-in-the-right-way requirement or having nomic connections between the content of the experience and those of earlier and later experiences. An attempt is made to explain away these disanalogies by showing that they can be accounted for in terms of a categoreal difference between the intentional accusatives of the two types of experience, those being material objects for sense experiences and God (the eternal one, etc.) for mystical experiences. Whereas material objects, for the most part, behave according to scientific laws, and thus permit predictions to be made of future experiences and a distinction to be drawn between a right and a wrong way for a sense experience to be caused, God, being an absolutely free supernatural being, precludes our being able to predict how he will behave and, in particular, when and to whom he will choose to directly to reveal himself, as well as our being able to distinguish between a right and a wrong way for an of-God type of experience to occur.[11] Given that God supernaturally causes a mystical experience by his efficacious will, there is no causal chain of events linking God with a mystical experience in the way in which there is such a chain linking a material object with a veridical perception of it.

            With a little imagination we can find most, but not all, of the elements of this analogical argument in The Varieties of Religious Experience; in fact, a good case can be made out that James deserves to be credited with being the founding father of this argument. In the first place, James makes a prominent use of a perceptual model of mystical experience, which is the analogical premise of the contemporary argument for cognitivity. He comes right out and says:

Our own more 'rational' beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality. (VRE 336)

Furthermore, like the contemporary analogical arguers, James goes on to fill out the analogy by showing that there are mystical analogues for some of the tests for the veridicality of sense experience. What is apparently revealed by mystical experiences "must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience just like what comes from the outer world of sense." (VRE 338) Mystical experiences are also likened to "windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world" than is revealed by our senses, and just as we have checks and tests for mediating between rival sensory-based claims there are analogous ones for mediating between rival mystically-based claims. Because of these background defeating conditions, it will be possible for mysticism to have "its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them...We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now." (VRE 339) Further indication of just how close James is to the contemporary analogical arguers is his claim that mystical experiences "establish a presumption" in favor of the thing being as it appears to be in them (VRE 336), which sounds very much like their presumptive inference rule.

            If James did accept such a presumptive inference rule, he would not be committing the howler of inferring that the apparent object of a mystical experience objectively exists from the mere fact that it appears to exist to its subject, as he seems to do in the following: "The theologian's contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region is that they take on objective appearances, and suggest to the Subject an external control." (VRE 403. See also PU 139 for more of the same.) James seemingly drops the intentional operator "take on" and "suggest" as he moves from the "seeming"-premise to the "objectively is" conclusion. Given the presumptive inference rule, the inference becomes valid provided the conclusion is weakened to, "It probably is the case that the apparent object of a mystical experience exists." In other words, a mystical experience, like a sensory one, bestows only a prima facie warrant to believe that the apparent object exists. The belief is defeasible because of the battery of background overriders or defeaters.

            There is one very important respect in which James differs from contemporary analogical arguers that renders his argument less attractive than theirs, namely he completely eschews any attempt to place the relevant background tests, which are the overriders or defeaters, within the shared practices of on-going religious community. In general, James failure to see the importance of religious institutions, with their shared beliefs and communal practices, is a significant limitation in the account that is given of religious experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This is yet another example of James's over glorification of the isolated individual. His mystic is a lone gun mystic, cut off from any doxastic practice of an ongoing religious community. Where his mystic gets her tests from and how they are enforced remains a mystery. Just as James was found in Chapter 6 to be committed to a private language in which the speaker follows rules that only she can determine are being followed correctly, James's mystic, in virtue of being isolated from a community of fellow believers and practitioners, must follow her own private tests.

            Contemporary analogical arguers are intent on justifying the various ongoing mystical doxastic practices as being reliable for the most part. James, on the other hand, works only on the retail level, his concern being exclusively with the justification for an individual mystic taking one of her experiences to be veridical. He fails to see that this justification cannot be cut off from the wholesale justification of the shared social practice of basing objective existential claims on mystical experiences. James fails to realize that by eschewing the wholesale level, he significantly weakens the effectiveness of his will to believe justification for the lone mystic believing that one of her experiences is veridical. This is a very important application of the will to believe, since what she believes in this matter could have the most important consequences for her future moral and spiritual development, that is, for her quest for sanctification. Certainly, she will be aided in her attempt to get herself to believe on will to believe grounds that her mystical experience is veridical if she first believes that the general doxastic practice of basing existential claims on mystical experiences is a reliable one that yields true existential beliefs for the most part. This belief also must be based on will to believe grounds, since the mystical doxastic practice, like the sensory one, does not admit of any noncircular external justification. James's analogical argument, along with his will to believe justification for believing in the veridicality of an individual mystical experience, welcome supplementation by bringing in the doxastic practice in which his tests are embedded.   

            With this in mind, a survey can now be made of the different tests he recognized as relevant to determining the veridicality of a mystical experience. Like the contemporary analogical arguers, James recognizes a mystical analogue to the sensory agreement and prediction tests, though he adds a third one -- the immediate luminosity test. Here, in brief, is how they work.

            James makes a very broad application of the agreement test so that it concerns not only whether there is agreement among the mystics themselves but whether their reports agree with ordinary sensory-based ones. In regard to the former, he first says that there is a consensus among mystics and that "it would be odd...if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong." (VRE 336) However, he immediately counters that "the appeal to numbers has no logical force" and that there is considerable disagreement among the monistic and pluralistic mystics, not to mention their collective disagreement with demoniacal mysticism. Not only doesn't the agreement test support the objectivity of mystical experience when only mystical experiences are considered, it counts against this when the sensory-based experiences are brought in. Mystical experiences "do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connexion with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them." (VRE 22) And, against the claims of monistic mystics, James says that the "eaches" of the pluralists "are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to everyone, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously." (PU 62)

            James, I believe, tries to soften this clash between mysticism and sense experience by giving a very understated conclusion concerning what mystical experiences ultimately proclaim.

As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersenuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, flights to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. (VRE 338)

The same protective strategy seems operative in James's bizarre initial set of four defining characteristics of a mystical experience -- being ineffable, noetic, transitory, and passive (VRE 302-3) -- in which he fails to include being a unitive experience, which is their most important and distinctive feature, but one that seems to clash with the deliverances of ordinary sense experience, which presents us with a multiplicity of distinct objects in space and time. This aptly could be called the "comic book" theory of mystical experiences, since they are supposed to function as do the field of force lines that comic books place around an object that is perceived or thought in a specifically intense manner. This, at best, fits the experiences at the undeveloped end of the mystical spectrum, such as drunkenness, but not those unitive experiences at the developed end, which not only report new facts, James's higher dimensions of reality, but also sometimes seem to contradict our sensory-based beliefs concerning the reality of space, time, and multiplicity. James does not want us to have to serve on a jury and decide whether to believe the testimony of the mystics or that of the vast majority of mankind, but he does not map out any effective strategy for preventing the matter from going to trial. He wants to find some common denominator of all mystical experiences that is sufficiently watered down so as not to conflict with the deliverances of sense experience, but this fails to address the issue of whether the more developed mystical experiences are veridical.

            Whereas the agreement test did not offer any support to the objectivity claim of mystics, quite to the contrary according to James, the prediction test does. Because of the passive and transitory nature of mystical experiences, we are not able to predict their occurrence, and, to this extent, the prediction test counts against their objectivity. But this is more than offset by the fact that so many mystics grow morally and/or spiritually as a result of their experience. In attacking reductivistic causal explanations of mystical experiences he says that we must "inquire into their fruits for life," rather than their causes. (VRE 327) This is an on-going theme in The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially in Lecture I, XIV, and XV. 

            Unfortunately, James does not clearly distinguish between these good consequences being epistemologically confirmatory of the proposition believed and their pragmatically justifying in the will to believe manner our believing it. The following is a typical example of this unclarity. "Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by it observation [of good consequences]." (VRE 103. my italics) Belief is being used here in a way that is ambiguous between the psychological state or act of believing and the what-is-believed, the proposition. This opens James to the standard objection that he ran together the psychological benefits of believing a proposition with the confirmation of the proposition believed. It is here that James is far outstripped by his contemporary analogical arguers, such as Alston, who makes clear in his use of the prediction test that the good consequence for the mystic and her community are confirmatory of the objectivity of the mystical experience in virtue of a conceptual or categoreal link between these consequences and the nature of the apparent object of the experience. Since God is essentially good, it is probable that those who have had an objective experience of him will benefit morally and spiritually. By the same reasoning, one should count the deleterious consequence of a mystical experience as evidence for it having been a veridical perception of a malevolent being like the devil.

            Immediate luminosity, the subject's intense feeling of delight and reality, figures prominently in James's network of confirmatory tests, sometimes being accorded pride of place over good consequence (VRE 23) and at others taking second place to them. (VRE 21-2) An interesting question is why James, unlike his contemporary analogical arguers, used this test. The answer might be that The Principles of Psychology's interest-relative account of existence, although not explicitly endorsed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, still weighs heavily in James's thinking. This might account for James's seeming relativization of being evidence for to persons in his first two conclusions regarding what mystical experiences establish.

(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. (VRE 335)

            This makes it look as if the occurrence of mystical states constitutes evidence for their objectivity for those who have them but not for those who do not, which clearly violates the principle of universalizability of being evidence for among persons, as well as times, as argued in Chapter 6. If E is evidence for proposition p, then E is evidence for any person (or at any time) that p. As emphasized in Chapter 6, being evidence for is an existentially grounded relation and must not be confused with being taken to be evidence for, which is relative to a person's epistemic situation -- what she knows and believes. What mystics know that many nonmystics do not, is that mystical experiences occur and therefore that there exists certain evidence for the existence of God. Nonmystics can have only indirect knowledge through the testimony of mystics that such evidence obtains; and, as a consequence, they have less epistemic warrant for believing that mystical states occur than do the mystics themselves. This completes my rather hasty exposition of James's analogical argument for the cognitivity of mystical experiences and therefore the likelihood that their intentional object exists. It has not been my aim to critically evaluate the analogical argument, which is something I do at length in the publications listed in footnote 10, only to show that James deserves great credit for laying the foundation for the contemporary version of this argument. 

            James's second argument for the cognitivity of mystical experience, based on an inference to the best explanation, is only hinted at in The Varieties of Religious Experience on pages 303, 304, and 381, being more fully developed in other works. Mystical states, like many other psychic or paranormal phenomena, among which James recognized telepathy and alternative or secondary personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, hypnotic and mediumistic trances, all admit of explanation if we follow Frederic Myers and Fechner and posit "a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which individuality builds accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir...Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favor on some such 'panpsychic' view of the universe as this." (EPR 374) In certain exceptional states the ordinary threshold of consciousness is lowered so that we become aware of what is contained or going on in this surrounding mother-sea of consciousness, the super mind or minds, since there might be more than one mother-sea. He employed this mother-sea hypothesis to explain his 1906 mystical experience in which he seemingly became aware of mental states not his own -- free floating states within this surrounding consciousness. He distinguished his experiences from the full-blown mystical states he featured in The Varieties of Religious Experience by pointing out that "in my case certain special directions only, in the field of reality, seemed to get suddenly uncovered, whereas in classical mystical experiences it appears rather as if the whole of reality were uncovered at once."[12] (EP 160)

            There are some outstanding difficulties with this inference to the best explanation for the objectivity of mystical experiences. The subconscious is far too motley a crew of odd-ball states and actions to warrant an inference to the objectivity of any given subconscious state or experience. Some of them are plainly noncognitive, such as hysteria, which James also assigned to the subconscious, while others, such as hypnotism and a secondary self’’s perceptions, are explicable in terms of ordinary sensory ways of gaining, though not processing, information, there being no need to postulate a surrounding mother-sea of consciousness containing free-floating bits of consciousness.

            James favors the pluralistic interpretation of the mother-sea of consciousness hypothesis, so that there is not a single all encompassing surrounding sea of consciousness but more than one, with God merely being the most outstanding of them in terms of power, knowledge, and goodness, but still only finite. In a mystical experience, according to the surrounding mother-seas hypothesis, the subject becomes unified with one of these super consciousnesses in a way that falls short of becoming literally numerically one and the same with it but rather in the weaker sense of becoming cognizant that it is a part of this enveloping consciousness. This inclusion of one consciousnesses self within another raises several problems, the least of which is the one that worried James concerning how one conscious state can be a part of another.

            To begin with, the idea of an individual being a proper part of another individual of the same kind is troublesome. Aristotle argued, successfully in my opinion, that no substance, in his special sense, could be a proper part of another substance of the same natural kind: A human organism, for example, cannot be a proper part of another human organism. Aristotle would not have felt challenged by our doggy door, which is a proper part of another functioning door, because a door is an artifact and therefore not a substance in his sense.

            But what about a self or mind? Is it a substance and thereby subject to Aristotle's stricture? In the last chapter, James was expounded as holding that the self is not a natural kind, because he did not leave it up to science to determine its identity conditions and therefore its nature. Maybe it is possible, after all, for a Jamesian self, understood as a succession of mental states in which the later members remember the earlier ones, to be a proper part of another self. Be that as it may, there remains the question whether it is possible for a person, understood as a morally responsible agent -- one who performs intentional actions for which she is morally praised or blamed -- to be a proper part of another person. That such a person is not a natural kind does not settle the matter in the affirmative.

            James, judging by the following rhetorical question in "The Miller-Bode Objection" notes, favored an affirmative answer: "Why can't I have another being own and use me, just as I am, for its purposes without knowing any of these purposes myself." (MEN 129) This goes along with his remark that "If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelope mine. I am really lecturing for him." (ERE 89) Maybe James had in mind only a case in which one person is another person's lackey or gofer, rather than one that involves actual inclusion within this person, but the text does not favor this weak rendering of his inclusion doctrine.[13]

            I believe that this doctrine is conceptually absurd for the following reason. A person, in virtue of being morally responsible for certain of her actions, must be an autonomous unit, it being the whole person, and only that person, that is held responsible for them. The reason for the "only that person" is that, according to James's Libertarianism, a morally responsible action is done freely and it is done freely only if the agent is the sole cause of it, which rules out there being another person who is responsible for the action. But if one person were a proper part of another person, both persons, pace what the puncher said, would be morally responsible for an intentional action performed by the former one, which is absurd.[14]

            A deeper understanding of this absurdity can be acquired by taking seriously the common occurrence in grade school when one person would punch another and say, "I didn't do it, my hand did." Since the hand that that delivers the punch is to be held morally responsible, it constitutes the entire body of the person who intentionally does the punching and does so even though it is a proper physical part of a human organism. The person whose body is entirely constituted by this human organism is supposed not to be morally responsible for delivering the punch. But if the person whose body is entirely constituted by the hand is a proper part of the person whose body is entirely constituted by the human organism, then both persons are morally responsible for the same act of delivering the punch. And this is the very absurdity in question, assuming that the act is free and we accept James's Libertarianism.

            That one person cannot be part of another person undercuts the major attraction that pluralistic mysticism had over monistic mysticism for James. For it was in order to save the moral agency of the mystic that he felt compelled to reject all forms of monism, whether it be that of absolute idealism or monistic mysticism. But it is just this moral agency that must be sacrificed by his pluralistic mystic. Earlier in the chapter, another reason was seen for James's mystic having to give up being a moral agent, namely that in order to have a mystical experience it is required that one overcome one's active self, which is the moral agent self, and adopt a passive attitude toward the world. Complete or partial absorption in or unification with an enveloping supernatural consciousness is alright, but the price of admission is to cease being a person -- a moral agent. This is a big price for James's promethean self to pay since what is most dear to its heart is its functioning as a morally responsible agent.

            Before concluding this chapter on James's religious mysticism, it should be pointed out that the surrounding mother-sea of consciousness, be it a single sea or a plurality of seas, as the monistic and pluralistic mystic respectively would have it, with which the mystic becomes wholly or partially absorbed is a supernatural entity through and through, as James repeatedly says. It is an unseen order said to be "behind the veil" (ERM 76, 86, 87) to those of us "here below." (ERM 82, 87) It is a "transcendental world" (ERM 93, 96) that makes "influx" into a person's ordinary consciousness when the dam or threshold of receptivity is lowered. (ERM 93) Of most importance is that in calling the surrounding mother-sea(s) of consciousness "supernatural" James means that science cannot describe and explain it. This has the consequence that the doctrine of Pure Experience cannot be applied to it, even if the weakest version of its tenet 3 from the previous chapter is operative, the one that holds that for every individual there are possible sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and physical in others. The reason is that a physical sequence of events is a law-like one, but a supernatural being does not behave in a law-like manner, this being the reason for it not being amenable to scientific explanation. In anticipation of this counter-example to Pure Experience, I restricted the doctrine at the very beginning to sensible individuals, thus ruling out the invisible individuals behind the veil.

            The clash between James active promethean self and his passive mystical self, along with  the clash between the Ontological Relativism favored by his promethean self and the nonrelativized reality-claims made by his mystical self, are the two deepest aporias that arise from James's quest to have it all. Readers will have to wait until Chapter 11, if they can withstand the suspense, for an attempt to resolve these aporias.