A radical empiricism includes all experience. James did not deny that all genuine knowledge must be grounded in experience (empiricism). What he did deny was that experience had to be confined to sensory experience alone. William James developed the idea of “radical empiricism” that considered sensory experience to be only one of several different but equally legitimate types of empiricism. “Empiricism,” in other words, in its generalized essential features meant “experiential,” and included not only data of sense but also data of consciousness (i.e., direct, immediate psychological experience).
He [therefore] expanded research techniques in psychology by not only accepting introspection but also encouraging any technique that promised to yield useful information about people. By studying all aspects of existence – including behavior, cognition, emotions, volition, and even religious experience – James also extended the subject matter of psychology… He encouraged the use of any method that would shed light on the complexities of human existence; he believed that nothing should be omitted. (Hergenhahn, 2001, pp. 305-306)
Subjective aspects of experience honored. It was James’s broadminded approach to the investigation of the subjective aspects of human experience (as grounded in his metaphysics of radical empiricism) and his insistence that the criterion of ultimate truth of an idea can be ascertained by its consequences and usefulness (as grounded in his epistemology of pragmatism) that informed his empirical approach to the study of religious experiences and psychical phenomena and that placed the person and his or her immediate experience, and inner beliefs, values, and attitudes as central to psychology’s scientific concerns.
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Profoundly mistaken distrust of subjectivity. James understood that scientists’ non-feeling objectivity that had come to mirror the standard for ideas and behaviors in scientific psychology was the result of their scientific training to stand apart from experience. The paradox of modern psychology’s profound distrust of subjectivity did not escape James. The very basis of our most intimate experience, the framework behind organized psychology itself, rested upon a reality that was not considered valid by the very discipline that was formed through its auspices. The very subjectivity that gave birth to the concept of “objectivity” and infused it with meaning was suspect and to be viewed with an ironical eye as far as scientific (i.e., laboratory) psychology was concerned.
Religious experiences as reflecting humanity’s dual nature. William James thought otherwise. All subjective religious experience, in James’s view, reflected humanity’s dual conscious-subconscious nature and our connection to regions below the threshold of waking consciousness which are the source of deeply felt religious emotions. “Personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness” (James, 1936, p. 370). James saw mystical states of consciousness essentially as bridge-experiences that connected consciously “known” and subconsciously “unknown” psychic realities with what James referred to as “the higher part of the universe” (James, 1936, p. 507). In his classic 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James’s main thesis centers around the subconscious and its exploration as a doorway to the awakening of mystical religious experience. Religion he defined at the outset as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to the absolute” …If there were indeed higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, “the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them.” (Taylor, 1996b, pp. 85-87)
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Qualities of religious experience. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience “continues to be the most widely used textbook in psychology of religion courses taught throughout the United States” (Taylor, 1996b, p. 84). James’s review of anecdotes, textual studies, and typical examples of mystical experiences led him to identify four qualities that characterized all mystical states of consciousness: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity. In James’s words,
Its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others…They are states of insight into depths of truths unplumbed by the discursive intellect… Mystical states cannot be sustained for long… The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. (James, 1936, pp. 371-372)
Each religious experience revealed a separate spiritual reality. There are as many spiritual realities as there are individuals who experience them, an epistemological position that James referred to as “noetic pluralism” (Taylor, 1996b, p. 134).
James as co-founder of the American Society for Psychical Research. William James also openly espoused the cause of psychical research. He was president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London from 1894-1895 and its vice-president from 1890-1910. The SPR was established in 1882 with the expressed purpose of investigating “without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” James was also a co-founder of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in 1885.
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According to its mission statement, the purpose of the ASPR is
The investigation of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, veridical hallucinations and dreams, psychometry, and other forms of paranormal cognition; of phenomena bearing on the hypothesis of survival of bodily death; of claims of paranormal physical phenomena such as psychokinesis and poltergeists; the study of automatic writing, trance speech, alterations of personality and other subconscious processes insofar as they may be related to paranormal processes; in short, all types of phenomena called parapsychological or paranormal. [www.aspr.com]
The mediumship of Mrs. Piper. As chair of ASPR’s Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena, William James was personally responsible for the extensive investigation of Mrs. Lenore Piper who was perhaps the most thoroughly studied medium (or “channel”) in the history of psychological research. For 18 months William James was totally in charge of all arrangements for Mrs. Piper’s séances. Later William James wrote:
When imposture has been checked off as a far as possible, when chance coincidence has been allowed for, when opportunities for normal knowledge on the part of the subject have been noted, and skill in “fishing” and following clues unwittingly furnished by the voice or face of bystanders have been counted in, those who have the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums there is a residuum of knowledge displayed that can only be called supernormal: the medium taps some source of information not open to ordinary people. (Quoted in McDermott, 1968, p. 793)
James’s distain for uninformed skepticism. William James’s open espousal of the cause of psychical research greatly benefited both the reputation and early experimental forms of this nascent science (Murphy & Ballou, 1960). His distain for modern experimental psychology’s uninformed skepticism of psychic phenomena is evident in a letter he wrote to Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) whose work in the phenomenology of music was to influence founders of the school of Gestalt psychology.
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