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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF
RST 32.2 (2013) 185–208 Religious Studies and eology (print) ISSN 0892-2922
doi:10.1558/rsth.v32i2.185 Religious Studies and eology (online) ISSN 1747-5414
William James on Religious Saints and Verifying the God
Hypothesis
J R. S
State University of New York at Bualo
jshook@pragmatism.org
A
William James proposed a Science of Religions in his Varieties of Religious Expe-
rience in order to fulll his promise that pragmatic empiricism could illuminate
the meaning and truth conditions of religious ideas. Most commentators have
focused either on his “will to believe” defense of faith, or on his analysis of the
power of mystical inspiration. A unifying interpretation is assembled, synthesiz-
ing his kind of pragmatism, his fascination with mysticism, and his application
of Science of Religions to religious saints. Religious saints generate live hypotheses
about society moving towards the ideal moral order. People can participate in that
momentous opportunity for progress with their own moral lives. Although James’s
Science of Religions permits interdisciplinary inquiry into religious experience,
and especially the moral energy of inspired saints, his hopes for verifying hypotheses
about God cannot be fullled.
Keywords
William James, American pragmatism, religion, philosophy, science
Religious hypotheses
William James repeatedly claimed that his pragmatism could methodical-
ly verify hypotheses about God. His books e Will to Believe (1897) and
Pragmatism (1907) resist scientic materialism, strict empiricism, and philo-
sophical rationalism in order to protect the individual faith and moral energy
fostered by the religious life. Yet James surprisingly proposed a Science of
Religions in his e Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) asking three disci-
ples to cooperate for making religion empirically scientic: psychology, his-
tory of religion, and philosophy. Psychology investigates mystical states and
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their eects on religious people. History of religion shows how personal faith
inspires religious revivals and produces ethical reforms. Philosophy selects
convictions about divine matters which may prove to be compatible with
scientic knowledge as well as empowering for social progress.
James’s Science of Religions identies “saintly ventures” trying to improve
society which are best tted for experimental test by “moral saints” trying
to increase humanity’s well-being. Many moral saints do succeed, but what
does their success say about God? On James’s own principles, this Science of
Religions can conrm saintliness as a reasonable mode of social reform, but it
cannot verify what those saints think about God. Philosophers needn’t worry
that their role in Science of Religions amounts to theological apologetics.
More generally, scholars participating in James’s Science of Religions can stay
agnostic about the existence of God. Scholars should not be indierent to
James’s valuable studies into the role of religious saints for the ethical progress
that religion can encourage. Applying pragmatism to religion requires taking
the dynamic aspects of the religious life most seriously.
How can James’s pragmatic method show how religious ideas of God could
become “veried”? James’s search for evidence of God has received much
attention, but it has also been regrettably misinterpreted. James himself tells
us how he conceives of the process of religious verication in the opening
chapter of e Will to Believe :
If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active
faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the ex-
perimental tests by which they are veried, and the only means by which their
truth or falsehood can be wrought out. e truest scientic hypothesis is that
which ‘works’ best; and it can no otherwise with religious hypotheses.
(WB, xii; Works WB, 8)1
Keeping in mind James’s pragmatism, a hypothesis wouldn’t be a static repre-
sentation trying to correspond to xed realities. James sets up no hypothetical
vision of God or propositional denition for God in his writings: only liv-
ing religions make their proposals about what “God” may mean for human-
ity. James sets aside metaphysical statements and theological creeds, seeking
religious hypotheses instead. Pragmatism always seeks the real meaning of
something in potential consequences within people’s lives. What is a religious
hypothesis about the universe, then? It evidently cannot be about the way that
the actual universe is, since religion, according to James, is always discontented
with world and proposes how to change it. A religious hypothesis therefore
concerns the way that the world should become, not the way it already is.
1. Citations to James’s writings are indicated by the standard convention: the original
publication rst, followed by its publication in Harvard edition of e Works of William
James. Citations to e ought and Character of William James use TCWJ.
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How would one go about verifying an idea about what should be? We
cannot understand what a veriable religious hypothesis could possibly look
like until this question is answered. No correspondence test could supply
verication, since nothing yet exists to which the idea could correspond. Also
notable is the way that religion isn’t intent on tracking and transforming the
natural universe. at’s science’s eld of work. Religion is concerned with
the universe insofar as that includes the human world. e realm of persons
and their conduct, not just the motions of material things, is the eld for the
work of religions. James provokes us to ask, How would a religious hypothesis
proposing what should done in the human world manage to receive experi-
mental verication? Also relevant is the way that the moral world does not
have a reality over and above real persons and their conduct, in James’s view.
Avoiding that reication of an abstraction, we are now looking at this specic
Jamesian question: How would a religious proposal about the way persons
should conduct themselves receive experimental conrmation?
Continuing to apply James’s quotation from e Will to Believe, a religious
model of personal conduct is supposed to be experimentally tested by the
active faiths of individuals, “freely expressing themselves in life.” e dynamic
power of faith, as expressed in their lives making a genuine dierence to the
future of the world, is the experimental test of the religious proposal for con-
duct. In James’s pragmatism, a model of conduct plays the role of the hypoth-
esis, while the lived faith in that model is its test. e truth-maker serving
as the basis for a verication of a religious hypothesis is therefore literally a
maker-of-truth: an individual makes a religious hypothesis and makes it real
in their ongoing lives. For James, strictly speaking, a religious hypothesis is
nothing but an individual’s own religiosity, and the verication of that religi-
osity lies in the future changes to the world which that individual’s religiosity
produces. e religious hypothesis is a live hypothesis, in a literal way: the
religious hypothesis is alive. e religious hypothesis is the religious person,
not some idea or theory, and that person’s religiosity proposes to make real in
the human world precisely what is capable of verifying that hypothesis.
Before going further, close notice must be taken of the way that James’s
pragmatic theory of the religious hypothesis reverses the usual order of
things. One would expect that the role of the hypothesis would be played
by faith, while the experimental test would be lived conduct. Simpler say-
ings about religion and faith in James’s popular lectures do sound like that.
Yet James actually reverses that expected sequence for his deeper reections
on religiosity. Faith is the experimental test, not the hypothesis to be tested.
Nearly every commentator on James, hostile or friendly, has mixed things up
from the start. James does not help matters, to be sure. He earnestly wants to
gure out a psychological way to make faith reasonable, and justify the mysti-
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cal experiences behind faith, in the face of sternly skeptical opposition from
rationalism and materialism. It is easy, too easy, to then suppose that James
wants to philosophically validate mystical states and devout faiths, too. After
all, doesn’t he try to make the “will to believe” quite reasonable?
James did strive to defend the power of faithful belief against the corro-
sive skepticism of his rationalistic and scientic age. But, as we shall see, his
defense is designed to protect faith because it is so useful as an experimental
test, a test of something else that is not a faithful conviction. Faithful belief is
a phase of an experimental test of a religious model of conduct, not the other
way around. After all, James repudiates the notion that just any faithful belief
could be easily justied by its production of useful actions. He dispels that
crude caricature of pragmatism:
if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own per-
sonal lives, we should be found to be indulging all kinds of fancies about
this world’s aairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world
hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded.
(Prag 77; Works Prag, 42–43)
James’s pragmatism does insist that reasonable beliefs are those which in the
long run, and on the whole, work best together with all beliefs proving their
worth as well. As we shall explore, what James precisely means by “working
best” requires careful examination of James’s writings on religion.
All this talk of verifying religion with evidence sounds like natural theology,
where matters in the observable world serve as evidence for the reasonable-
ness of arming God’s existence. But we see that James could not be attempt-
ing another natural theology, since he rejects cosmological, teleological, and
other such arguments: “If you have a God already whom you believe in, these
arguments conrm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right” (VRE,
437; Works VRE, 345). If we stubbornly persist in assuming that James is
trying to make intelligible the notion of empirically verifying God, many
dicult questions erupt, starting with this one: How could just one God
get proven “true”? James may not be able to gure out which of four possi-
bilities prove more likely: (1) every god gets pragmatically “veried” for that
god’s believers, so pragmatism can’t get at objective truth but only religious
subjectivism; (2) many gods get pragmatically “veried” by many religions’
believers, so humanity must accept polytheism; (3) one supreme (but vaguely
conceived) deity gets pragmatically “veried” so many religions have to be
about this one god; or (4) the pragmatic standards for “verication” turn out
to be tacitly presumed ideals that conveniently “verify” just one religion’s god,
making all other religions false.
James was sensitive to these potential diculties, and he never intended
to get lost in their mazes. Instead, he proposed a Science of Religions in e
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Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). His Science of Religions culminates
in his proposal to pragmatically study the core of all religions: the saints, the
religiously motivated people strenuously trying to live out their models of
ideal conduct in light of God’s supreme order. In James’s grand vision for an
interdisciplinary Science of Religions, several disciplines are essential: anthro-
pology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, religious biography and autobiog-
raphy, world history, and the history of social reform. is label of “Science
of Religions” can sound wrong to us now, since it has come to mean the
interdisciplinary scientic investigation into religious experience, belief, and
practice. James applauded, and contributed to, this narrower scientic enter-
prise. Yet his program for the Science of Religions is far wider. It includes
philosophically sifting religious hypotheses in light of scientic knowledge,
designing sensible religious hypotheses having real world consequences, and
studying the experimental tests of those hypotheses in the course of cultural
history.
Including investigations of the lives of religious saints in Science of Reli-
gions seems especially misplaced. Biographical explorations of saintly lives is
usually the work of hagiographical religious history, while psychological stud-
ies of religious fanatics today is more about diagnosing the eects of mental
illness or mass hysteria rather than tracking the eects of God on the human
spirit. Saintliness and science hardly sounds like an appropriate or productive
pairing. Nevertheless, James expected saintliness to prove to be the key to
understanding the legitimacy of religious knowledge.
What I then propose to do is, briey stated, to test saintliness by common
sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life
commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself,
then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand ac-
credited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to
anything but human working principles. (VRE, 331; Works VRE, 266)
Saintliness, for James, is the key to religious inquiry and verication. It is
not each moral Saint’s personal idea of God which is the candidate hypothesis
for verication. Instead, the entire life of the moral Saint is what constitutes
the religious hypothesis. e pragmatic test in the eld of religion is not
empirical correspondence with some divine reality in any simplistic sense.
Mystics are not going to veriably discover God with any amount of expe-
riential perception or personal satisfaction. e appropriate test is not con-
vergence in the scientic sense either, because James does not expect saints
to eventually converge on the identical vision of the supreme order, as if they
were scientists converging on the molecular structure of sugar. e saints are
experimenting with their God hypotheses, in a sense. But what exactly is a
hypothesis of God, for James?
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is article argues for a radical interpretation of James’s pragmatist analysis
of religious truth. James often speaks as if his religious pragmatism can verify
beliefs in God’s existence, and hence conrm for reason what faith proposes.
However, his pragmatic method his Science of Religions cannot go that far.
James occasionally speaks as if a hypothesis of God is an idea that God exists,
but his own psychology of inquiry cannot agree with equating the two. An idea
or belief is not a hypothesis, on James’s own pragmatist principles. A hypoth-
esis is much more than an idea, and in the realm of religion, James’s Science
of Religions shows why a religious hypothesis capable of verication must be a
living being capable of making a dierence to the human world. e religious
saints turn out to be the live hypotheses, literally speaking. eir hypotheti-
cal lives can become veried in the process of their proven capacity to evolve
society to better t the ideal unseen order that saints take to be supreme. In so
far as the human world evolves towards that ideal order, the Saint’s lives have
worked, and enjoy verication: saintliness is quite reasonable in proportion to
its positive dierence to the social order. Unfortunately for James’s own per-
sonal hopes, the existence of God cannot be veried along the way.
Religious experience
Because James is so concerned to restrain “medical materialism” and dictate
where science must respect experience, his views on mysticism are taken to
be the essence of his pragmatist view of religion. Most of James’s early com-
mentators on e Varieties of Religious Experience, such as colleagues James
Leuba and Josiah Royce, focused on James’s psychological and philosophical
defenses of mysticism. James does need a psychological account of the origins
of God hypotheses. Is the origin of an idea also the grounds for its justica-
tion? James’s colleagues took James to be an empiricist about mystical experi-
ences. But James himself warned against misinterpretation here. Whether
science can explain mystical experiences in natural terms or not, that has no
bearing on the real religious signicance of those experiences. Regardless of
their ultimate causes, the personal transformations caused by these mystical
experiences are the genuine engines of religion. In e Varieties of Religious
Experience, he wrote: “If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good,
we ought to idealize it and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural
psychology” (VRE, 237; Works VRE, 193).
As Wayne Proudfoot (2004) emphasizes, James’s antagonism against scien-
tic naturalism was quite real, but he did not stake his pragmatic justication
of God’s reality directly on an anti-scientic defense of mystical experience
for its own sake. Again, James was not an empiricist seeking justication
for God’s existence in the experiential origins of convictions about God. He
doesn’t even appeal to his own radical empiricism anywhere in e Varieties
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of Religious Experience, so he isn’t that interested in depicting religious experi-
ence as metaphysically secure. Convictions about God and an unseen moral
order must nd their eventual justication elsewhere in human experience.
T.L.S. Sprigge can’t see any greater role for mystic saints than their experi-
ences of contacts with the divine. James is a “religious realist,” according to
Sprigge (2005), who thinks that God is real because an actual God is the best
explanation for the reality of mystical experiences. But James never argued
that the evidence of God lies in mysticism. Mystics are not automatically the
saints who receives his endorsement. Saints are mystics, but not all mystics
are saints. Saints, as mystics, think that they make contact with a wider realm
of super-consciousness, but that supposed contact only generates hypoth-
eses about God, and do not constitute direct evidence for God, according to
James. As explored in the next sections, James goes out of his way to repeat-
edly deny that mystical events, conversion experiences, or mental states of
faith constitute any sort of objective evidence for God. Science cannot dis-
credit the value of mysticism out of materialistic disdain, but the value of reli-
gious experiences for the religious cannot constitute any sort of empirical evi-
dence proving God, either. Experience is at most suggestive, not conclusive.
Only future experience in the course of inquiry plays the role of conrming
justication. Being in a mental state of faith and devout conviction does not,
by itself, have enough conceptual structure to form a hypothesis for inquiry.
e faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. ... It may
be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling
that great and wondrous things are in the air.
(VRE, 505, Works VRE, 398)
Faith is surely the arousal of moral energy and enthusiasm for reform, but
this energy surge is not the same as the hypothetical plan of action. Under-
going mystical or salvic experiences is never treated by James as a form of
inquiry. If the evidence of mystical experiences and faith states was suppos-
edly crucial evidence of God for James, then why does he insist that the
innite, all-powerful, and all-controlling God of so many mystics doesn’t
deserve priority? Once again, excessive focus on experience for its own sake
is responsible for misunderstanding why James keeps going back to the lives
of the saints. e saints hold their religious convictions because of religious
experiences, but those subjective experiences and faith states cannot also play
the role of verifying evidence for God.
More careful commentators understand the crucial role for religious con-
viction in dynamic action out in the wider world, but they think that only
lone religious believers are in any position to search for, or nd, a God. James’s
“will to believe” argument makes it easy to suppose that James defends what
might be called “personal theism”—just the reasonableness of religious indi-
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viduals in their personal god-belief is what requires philosophical defense.
Many commentators take this line of interpretation; an example is George
Graham (1992). ere is an excuse for supposing that James regarded the
religious life as a personal venture in which one’s own resources are all there
is to ever decide the question, and one can therefore only decide for oneself.
James’s doesn’t seem much interested in justifying God to anyone and every-
one in most of his religious writings. e Will to Believe only urges religious
convictions for those able to regard God as a live option already. James’s other
writings on religion also emphasize the personal and subjective character of
religious experience, religious faith, and the religious life.
Better commentators on James recognize his concern to locate reasonable
grounds for objectively believing in God’s reality, although the experiences of
people are the ultimate origin of all relevant evidence for religion. Excessive
focus on personal religious experience can distort the accounts of otherwise
highly reliable commentators, however. Gerald Myers (1986, 450–470) sees
how James searches for ways to make subjective religious quests for salvation
and immortality more objectively valid through the pragmatic method of
demanding consequences, but saintliness isn’t identied as important. Eugene
Fontinell (2000, 141–142) also rightly says that faith in God, for James, isn’t
limited to beliefs about divine inuences on subjective experience, but can
extend to all of society’s success in advancing the ethical life for everyone. Fon-
tinell falls short by similarly attending to personal immortality and salvation
and failing to give due attention to the crucial role of saintliness for under-
standing the most potent forms of religious experience. John E. Smith, in his
Introduction to e Varieties of Religious Experience, correctly identies the role
of saintliness for all society, rather than exalting saints for their personal faith:
“Actually, James was less interested in assessing the life and character of this or
that saintly gure than he was in determining the degree of inuence exercised
by the saintly form of spirituality on the life of mankind” (Works VRE, xli).
Henry Levinson correctly identied the lives of the saints as the core of
religion’s power and contribution to human well-being. Yet he missed the
way that James expected the greatest inuence of the saints is supposed to
be on entire societies and civilizations as wholes, and not merely on the lives
of religious people. Levinson says, “e saintly methods were habitual ways
of doing things for the sake of salvation or well-being, which was the reli-
gious problem in Western culture as James understood it.” (Levinson 1981,
128) Levinson treats salvation as primarily a personal matter, however; James
regarded religion’s capacity to propel the ethical progress of all humanity as
the great religious problem. For James, there is something about the way that
saints live their lives for the sake of the rest of humanity that connects their
god-belief with objective evidence, evidence objective for all humanity, able to
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support the reasonableness of religion. Ellen Kappy Suckiel (1996) correctly
sees James’s overriding concern for the search for the perfect moral order in
the religious lives of the saints, yet fails to connect this ethical search with the
lives of the saints themselves in a fruitful way. As she well sees, how the saints
successfully feel that they personally come close to moral perfection (in unity
with the divine, or in their own moral conduct) isn’t what James is driving at.
But Suckiel can say little more. G. William Bernard gets no farther; he writes,
“the saints, as embodiments of the fruits of religion, are the exemplars of the
religious life; therefore, if these religious geniuses are successes, then so is reli-
gion” (1997, 312). Failing to take this statement seriously, Bernard returns to
asking how such personally valuable mystical states have any epistemic rel-
evance to the real existence of a genuine God, and so the lives of the saints fade
from view. Of all commentators, Michael Slater (2009) elevates the exemplary
lives of the saints to the most central position in James’s overall philosophy
and science of religion. Slater shows how the pragmatic value of not just the
personal transformations of the saints’ lives, but the wider moral transforma-
tions of the social world eected by the lives of the saints, best ties together
James’s work in “e Will to Believe,” “e Moral Philosopher and the Moral
Life,” and e Varieties of Religious Experience. Sami Pihlström (2013) concurs,
and helpfully claries how James expected that saintly moral ideals aren’t so
much dictated by religions as they are supported by encouraging divinities.
James does try to establish his case that many progressive and prophetic
saints are engines of ethical reform within religion, and by extension, within
entire cultures over time. Even the better commentators think that James was
content to stop his philosophical analysis of religion there. If so, then his Sci-
ence of Religions amounts to this position: saints are pragmatically useful for
religion, religion is pragmatically useful for culture in general, therefore saints
are justied by their fruits, and the convictions about God held by saints are
justied by implication. Yet this pragmatic schema can’t be the whole story. It
omits two crucial issues: Why do these admirably useful saints attempt what
they do and succeed where they do? And how does an actually existing God
connect with the work of the saints, over and above the obvious fact that
saints personally think that God exists? We are still searching for the relevant
sort of “real consequences” in the world which the God hypothesis must have
in order to arouse verication. What precisely is it about these religious saints
that they can supply the means to empirically verify God? Put most sharply,
what exactly is a hypothesis of God?
Hypothesizing God
Let’s return to fundamentals of pragmatism. James openly sets himself this
question: How would a hypothesis involving God be veried?
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in
the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual diculties
may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is
to build it out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all
the other working truths. (Prag, 299; Works Prag, 143)
We may immediately set out some clarications. Elsewhere, James is careful
to say that no unique God hypothesis has pragmatism’s attention. ere is no
such thing as “the hypothesis of God.” ere are as many God hypotheses as
religions and mystics. Further, it is entirely possible, on pragmatic grounds,that
many God hypotheses satisfactorily work in peoples’ experiences. James adds
that a working God hypothesis should “combine satisfactorily” with other God
hypotheses and with well-established natural knowledge. Philosophy is essen-
tial to the work of the Science of Religions. Philosophy can design comprehen-
sive God hypotheses that capture most or all of what works in more specic
God hypotheses. James describes this collaborative philosophical work:
Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from
these denitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove his-
toric incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions
with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines
that are now known to be scientically absurd or incongruous. Sifting out
in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of conceptions
that at least are possible. With these she can deal as hypotheses, testing them in
all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever
tested. ... I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might
not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a
physical science. (VRE, 455–456; Works VRE, 359–360)
Religious hypotheses worthy of inquiry, like scientic hypotheses, are capa-
ble of working across the widest variety of human experience. Because prag-
matism is about proposing and testing hypotheses in terms of their capacity
to guide experience to some expected outcome, James regarded pragmatism
to be well suited for dealing with the claims of religious people about God.
In short, she [pragmatism] widens the eld of search for God. Rationalism
sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses.
Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses,
and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count
mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God
who lives in the very dirt of private fact—if that should seem a likely place
to nd him. Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way
of leading us, what ts every part of life best and combines with the collec-
tivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas
should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how
could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence? She could see no meaning
in treating as “not true” a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What
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other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with con-
crete reality? (Prag, 80; Works Prag, 44).
is passage is typical among James’s condent claims that his pragmatism
will verify God. However, let’s apply his pragmatism carefully. Assembling the
earlier points about what a God hypothesis must be able to do, together with
James’s expectations for practical religious experiences, an idea of God cannot be
a candidate hypothesis for verication unless it satises these minimum criteria:
a. A person must seriously entertain an idea of God—it must be a ‘live
option’.
b. is ‘live option’ about God must not only seem credible, it must also
be motivational towards some kind of activities.
c. is motivating idea of God must help guide action towards some
intended practical consequences in peoples’ experience.
d. is idea of God must supply some sense of the fulllment of that
practical work, some sign that the idea has properly done its work.
In short, we need religiously motivated people with working ideas about
God that result in motivated practical activity producing objectively observ-
able results. Fortunately, humanity provides an endless supply of just these
sorts of religious agents.
Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know cer-
tainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. e various
overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to
bring the evidence in. (Prag, 299–300; Works Prag, 144)
So many over-beliefs, so many faith ventures, to put to trial! Neither philos-
ophy nor religion have to be responsible for generating ideas about the divine.
e discovery of the subconscious in the 1880s permitted James to begin to
see that experiences and ideas operate in more parts of the brain than just
those responsible for conscious self-awareness. Unusual mental states are the
unbidden and uncontrollable source of religious emotions and ideas. How-
ever, the origin of ideas and emotions do not determine their truth. Having
already taken the pragmatic turn away from passive empiricism, James denied
that the manner of origin of ideas mattered much to their validity. Only the
practical consequences of unusual mental states are relevant.
Saintly convictions about God
However, having ideas about God is not enough. Plenty of people have dis-
turbing, abnormal, mystical, and disassociative experiences that they cannot
attribute to the self-conscious will, but these experiences supply no motiva-
tion or guidance. In short, their strange experiences do not result in “faith-
ventures” because they don’t result in any faith.
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Here, religion makes its expected distinction between unusual mental states
generally, and religious experiences that seem to particularly have to do with
a wider and more supreme reality. James more or less follows what he takes to
be religion’s manner of making this distinction. Of those strange experiences
that do result in some sort of faith, James separates out the mystical experi-
ences, with their characteristic features: they are ineable, noetic, transient,
and passive (VRE, 380–381; Works VRE, 302–303). And there are many
varieties of mystical experiences. James is especially wary of monistic mysti-
cisms, as his philosophical inclinations dictate. He cannot deny that monistic
mysticisms may be connecting with that “wider consciousness” of the divine.
However, he does not appreciate monistic religions as pragmatically valuable,
for two primary reasons. First, monism tends to support the idea that God
has but one essential and homogenous character, but this idea is not condu-
cive to generating diverse hypotheses about God’s demands. Second, mon-
ism tends to diminish any motivation to take action, but this quietism is not
conducive to motivating enough moral energy for faith-ventures.
Fortunately, there are other kinds of mystical hypotheses to work with.
James prefers pluralism: there are multiple cosmic forces at work in the world.
Pluralism (sometimes labeled as polytheism) avoids the quietism of inaction
(so unethical for James!). Pluralism supplies some personal comfort that you
can contribute to the destiny of the whole world even if you don’t get saved
or rewarded yourself; pluralism permits a degree of indeterminism and some
free will to pursue real possibilities; and pluralism holds out the opportu-
nity to create salvation of the world gradually, piecemeal, from the valuable
contributions of each person. Pluralism in metaphysics permits meliorism in
action. Meliorism depends on a conviction that one can make a dierence,
on a strong motivation to make a dierence, and on some extraordinary sup-
ply of personal energy for doing extraordinary things.
Religions innately understand the crucial force of moral energy set loose on
the world. Mystical states in particular are identied and shaped by religions
so that they can be put to good use. When a release of energy transforms
a person in both spirit and conduct, religion watches for “conversion” or
“enlightenment.”
James’s close study of mystical conversions across many religious traditions
brings him to a constructed archetype of the saint. Religions have fresh life
because of mystical states, religions have fresh powers because of religious
saints, and religions are transformed over generations by reforming saints. To
test religion fairly is to test saintliness.
What I then propose to do is, briey stated, to test saintliness by common
sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life
commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself,
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then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand ac-
credited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to
anything but human working principles. (VRE, 331; Works VRE, 266)
Saints are religious and ethical pioneers with devotion to high social ideals and
dedication to special personal virtues. What can account for these saints? James
proposes that these saints rely on their felt connection with a divinely supreme
order. He denes the essence of religion in terms of what the saint experiences,
and what any person participating in saintliness can experience:
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most
general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is
an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting
ourselves thereto. is belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in
the soul. (VRE, 53; Works VRE, 51)
Ordinary believers accomplish their harmonization through faithful assent
to creeds and rituals that guide adjustment with that unseen order, while
the saint accomplishes that harmonization directly in extraordinary mystical
experience. at is why religion is capable of releasing far more moral energy
in a saint than in a typical believer.
Aside from the mystical origins and moral energies of sainthood, James is
reticent to declare that all saints are oriented towards the same religion or
God, or that all saints follow the same recipe for success. Pluralism of saintli-
ness is the rule (VRE, 377, Works VRE, 299–300), yet James is still able to
suggest a pragmatic test of saintliness, no matter what specic form it may
take, because saints have much in common, such as their mystical tendencies.
Does their common experience yield any kind of verication of God?
But now I proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to
accept the deliverance of their particular experiences, if we ourselves are out-
siders and feel no private call thereto. ... e fact is that the mystical feeling
of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specic intellectual content
whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material
furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they
can nd a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have
no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special
belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or
in the absolute goodness, of the world. (VRE, 424–426, Works VRE, 336–337)
Having admitted that mysticism cannot help verify any kind of God, James
could have halted at this point (and many commentators stop here as well). If
mystical states have so little specic content in themselves, and the materials
for motivating a God hypothesis for a faith venture are supplied by the envel-
oping religious culture of the mystic, then every religion can easily ‘conrm’
its creeds. e philosopher would have little more to say.
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Saintliness tested
James’s Science of Religions does not stop at this stage, resigned to mysti-
cal subjectivism and religious relativism. ere is still something very special
about saints, over and above their mystical and religious status.
Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical
states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the reli-
gious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. ey tell of the suprem-
acy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. ey oer us hy-
potheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers
we cannot possibly upset. e supernaturalism and optimism to which they
would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the
truest of insights into the meaning of this life. (VRE, 428; Works VRE, 339)
James still earnestly hopes that mystical states, faith states, can be trans-
formed into religious hypotheses, to permit objective empirical verication.
Here, at the transition from the psychological chapter on Mysticism to the
next chapter on Philosophy in Varieties, James throws the burden for carry-
ing his Science of Religions onto the shoulders of philosophy. Philosophy
must take a closer look at the role of saints and the power of their lives. Saints
may sound dierent because they can’t agree on how to describe their faith
experiences, and they dier further since they usually operate within one or
another religious tradition, but philosophy can try to discern an underlying
commonality of purpose inside of Sainthood.
e subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of
divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned rst to mysti-
cism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to
corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to
be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which
claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our
question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the
religious man’s sense of the divine? (VRE, 43; Works VRE, 340)
e chapter on Philosophy explains how genuinely viable and live options
of saintliness can be ltered from the vast mass of mystical states and faithful
religious opinions. After philosophy’s temptations towards metaphysical fancies
and rationalist deductions of God are overcome and renounced, philosophy can
return to the empirically scientic and the observable eects of religious faith.
Philosophy can thereby nd the best candidates for James’s genuine saints: saints
who have both the vision and energy to transform the outer word according to
an ethical plan from their inner world. Philosophy, in short, elevates for consid-
eration momentous and genuine options for melioristic testing. James now can
work with an archetype of the saint on a faith-venture. is saint-venture has
the logical form of a religious hypothesis. Not the mystical states, not the Saint’s
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personal transformation, not the Saint’s particular religion, but the Saint’s life in
its entirety constitutes the religious hypothesis and leads towards the means of its
empirical verication. e saint’s life is the practical God hypothesis.
Here, where we examine the lives of the saints, it turns out that pluralism is
not chaos. Saints tend to live out similar lives pursuing similar general things.
When we survey the whole eld of religion, we nd a great variety in the
thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the
conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and
Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives.
(VRE, 504; Works VRE, 397).
Precisely because saints don’t just have ideas of God, but they experience
what they take to be live connections with God, their religious experiences
are profoundly motivating. Saints are people susceptible to mysticism who
suer deeply from a separation from the Good, and then they are converted
into motivated actors because they suddenly feel part of an ideal unseen order
of supreme good that must be further realized in the human world. is is the
pattern of all of religious life (VRE, 507–508; Works VRE, 400).
Saints aren’t just people who have found personal relief and satisfaction
through religious experience. Many mystics achieve that. Saints aren’t simply
interested in their own salvation; it is the possibility of salvation in general for
the many, and not personal salvation for one, which their religion drives at. And
religion works, if it works, through the lives of the saints. James already clearly
said what he meant about the lives of the faithful serving as the experimental
tests of religion in e Will to Believe. James does not treat a God hypothesis
as an isolated idea believed by a religious person. Only “the active faiths of
individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life” constitute what gets
experimented upon. Faith in itself is no hypothesis, in a fully pragmatic sense.
A saint’s conviction that the whole world is the eld of divine action is what
makes his own life relevant to that widest dramatic scene. James pivots the
objectivity of the God hypothesis on that universal relevance to faith:
Only when this farther step of faith concerning God is taken, and remote ob-
jective consequences are predicted, does religion, as it seems to me, get wholly
free from the rst immediate subjective experience, and bring a real hypothesis
into play. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those
of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not
prolic enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man’s ex-
perience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful order.
He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject’s
absolute condence and peace. (VRE, 517–518; Works VRE, 407)
A real, live hypothesis—a hypothesis capable of making a real dierence to
the long-term objective conditions of the world—is religion’s proper func-
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tion. How does faith in God enter into real relations with the universe? Faith,
as a belief about a divine world, or as a mental state of feeling saved, cannot.
e only thing that we ourselves can control which enters into real relations
with the religious world is our own conduct. e only thing that religion can
place into real relations with the world is the saint. e saint is therefore the
actual religious hypothesis, because only the saint could be religion’s experi-
mental proposal. Religion is not ultimately about individual salvation or sub-
jective faith for its own sake. Religions form saints as their empirical test, and
the empirical test of saint hypotheses is the practical results in society from
their faith. Faith is the experimental test, not the belief which gets tested.
According to James’s overall Science of Religions, the lives of the saints
of any religion all fulll the requirements for being a hypothesis awaiting
potential verication. ey seriously live out their conception of a divine
moral order, it is deeply motivational towards their activities, those activities
guide action towards intended practical consequences in other peoples’ expe-
rience, and their lives are the model for success by bringing about changes in
the human world that align with the divine order.
As explained in the rst section, Science of Religions cannot follow the
expected pattern of “hypothetical faith experimentally justied by observed
results.” Religious hypotheses cannot take the same form as scientic hypoth-
eses. A scientic hypothesis is a conception about how the universe already is
working. A static theory in a scientist’s mind can more or less represent how
nature already is. Religion operates in a profoundly dierent way. Religion
is not about how the world already works, so it doesn’t try to represent what
is already going on. Religions are profoundly dissatised with what is pres-
ently going on. Religions aren’t essentially about what is already real – they
are about what should be real. Furthermore, religions don’t treat their ideal
visions of what should be as hypotheses, since no religious person thinks that
an ideal vision is already real in the world. Religions aren’t “veried” by show-
ing how that ideal vision corresponds to reality. It never does. In science, a
static hypothesis can in turn be used to conduct experiments conrming how
nature does work. In religion, there is no religious hypothesis like that.
Religions do predict how the world can work better, using a model of exem-
plary conduct. What is that model of conduct? It is nothing other than the
life venture of the saint. e saint is the model – the model is not a vision of
a non-existent world order. When James describes the value of saintliness, he
doesn’t talk about the unseen moral order in the next world, but the impact
of saints on this world:
When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or
worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of
prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance,
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when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its ob-
jects. ese saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies; and genuine saints
nd in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an au-
thority and impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where
men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly pru-
dence. is practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is
the saint’s magic gift to mankind. (VRE, 358–359; Works VRE, 286)
It is the faith-venture of the saint which permits the experimental con-
ditions testing religion: does the saint’s life actually help bring about what
should be? e saint’s own exemplary conduct is the religious hypothesis: can
this mode of ideal conduct make the world a better place? e saint does not
arrive on the scene to gure out how the world works, but to make the world
work dierently.
e world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again,
with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expres-
sion, a natural constitution dierent at some point from that which a materi-
alistic world would have. It must be such that dierent events can be expected
in it, dierent conduct must be required. (VRE, 518; Works VRE, 408)
And James frankly announces his theory that the faithful are exactly what
is making a real dierence to the universe through their saintly conduct. He
writes, at the end of his Conclusion to Varieties, “Who knows whether the
faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not
actually help God in turn to be more eectively faithful to his own greater
tasks?” (VRE, 519; Works VRE, 408).
Again, it is not some static idea entertained intellectually by the rational
mind which is the God hypothesis for religion. e religious hypothesis is the
living saint, and the saint’s whole life is the test: does the saint’s conduct guide
society towards fulllment of that ideal supreme order? at is the supreme
question of the validity of meliorism. After James wrote Varieties, the rest of
his years found him proclaiming at every opportunity that we have within
our power the means to improve the human condition. His profound book
Pragmatism continued his quest for an experimental religion for social ethics
that most intimately depends on each and every one of us.
Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a
possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numer-
ous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must
incline towards meliorism. Some conditions of the world’s salvation are actu-
ally extant, and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the
residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality.
(Prag, 286; Works Prag, 137)
e value of a God hypothesis cannot lie in the subjective experience of per-
sonal salvation of the saint. We must look to wider experience, the collective
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experience of humanity as a whole. We can objectively tell whether saintly con-
duct is leading us towards fulllment of a religion’s supreme order of goodness.
We may not personally prioritize the saint’s religion ourselves, and our loyalties
may lie with some other religion, or no religion. All the same, the advancement
of a religion couldn’t be invisible to us, even if we wish that wasn’t happening.
We can even objectively observe how religious saints manage to do their reli-
gious work, and gain some insight into their lives, because we ourselves know
what it is like to ght and sacrice for realizing our own ideals. ere is only
a gradual degree of dierence between a religious saint and moralistic actor
(Prag, 286–287; Works Prag, 137–138). Religion in the traditional sense isn’t
even required to appreciate the power of devout moral energy. Each person
has an opportunity to be a small moral saint, if they feel connected devotion
to some supreme ideal order that makes them sacrice for it. Anyone can help
‘save’ the world, or if the notion of salvation sounds too religious for some, we
can surely take risks and make sacrices to help improve the world.
Here, James asks his most philosophical question: Are you willing to get up
and join the ght? James is, naturally:
I nd myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventur-
ous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘no play’. I am willing to think
that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not
the right and nal attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there
should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I
can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not
the whole. (Prag, 296; Works Prag, 142)
Not surprisingly, James makes sure that every person has an opportunity
to participate in the religious life and the objective verication of religious
commitments. If you don’t help create the evidence that could verify religious
claims, you can’t complain that you didn’t have access to justicatory evi-
dence. Science shows how objective it can be by simply saying to any skeptic,
Come look for yourself, and see what we see. Just as the willfully blind can’t
complain about lacking evidence they refuse to see, the willfully faithless have
no right to complain about lacking religious evidence they refuse to experi-
ence for themselves. On the contrary, everyone has the right to believe, and
the right to verify religion for themselves. How could religion hold itself to
more objective standards than that?
Pragmatic Religion
James wanted his pragmatism to show a real God can be veried through the
fruitful labors of true believers. But when his entire philosophy is applied to this
task, it turns out that no belief in God can be veried, because a belief in God’s
existence cannot be a veriable hypothesis, according to his Science of Religions.
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No features intrinsic to mystical states or essential to faith states will serve
to identify God. e entire history of fanatical believers only displays a
bewildering cacophony of demanding deities. If a simplistic “if it works it’s
true” sort of pragmatism could somehow suce for identifying the God that
humanity could objectively know, then his proposal for a Science of Religions
would be superuous to the task of verifying the correct religion and know-
ing which God really exists. To his credit, James knew better. He tempered
his enthusiastic public lectures about “verifying God” with a sophisticated
multi-disciplinary inquiry into the way religions and religious lives actually
work. His Science of Religions cannot verify the existence of any God, or the
general idea of non-natural realm of cosmic consciousness. It can attempt the
more modest task of showing how personal devout faith needn’t be unreason-
able, and revealing where the religious life may be reasonable.
In a vague sense, people need to get “religious” about morality. Society’s
moral order is hardly something without momentous consequences, and we
cannot be agnostic and indierent about sustaining it. Equally as momentous
and forced are the urgent occasions for ethically reforming society. Every-
one has every right to be empowered to participate in the ethical reform of
their society, so long as a live hypothesis presents itself and some momentous
opportunity for progress is available. e role of the “saint” nds its place
here, whether religious or secular: the saint can precipitate wide commit-
ment to a genuine ethical option for reform that promises deliverance from a
social problem by developing society towards an ideal moral order. e saint’s
lively hypothesis becomes our own, and we can undertake a committed social
inquiry of reform by working together.
Religious saints are the live hypotheses about God, quite literally. eir
lives are shaped into the form and function of a hypothesis. eir hypo-
thetical lives are veried in the process of their capacity to evolve society to
better t the ideal unseen order that saints take to be supreme. In so far as
the world evolves towards that ideal order because of their transformative
power on society, the saint’s lives are veried and their religious convictions
have worked. In James’s Science of Religions, the saints are religion’s ways
of undertaking ethical inquiry, and unless the saints are fully committed to
their moral cause, their ethical reforms couldn’t happen. As far as religion is
concerned, then, the saints are reasonable expressions of religiosity. James
may be on solid ground here, so far as understanding the work of religion in
the world. But what does any of this actually say about the right ethics, or the
true God, if there is one?
James keeps going back to this question: Is there a living god? We see how
James thinks that the experimental test of religion comes down to a test upon
God, trying to verify that “God is real since he produces real eects” (VRE,
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517; Works VRE, 407). James proposes psychological means for accounting
for the capacity of human consciousness to overlap and commune with a
wider cosmic consciousness that he wants to believe is God, or part of God.
Saints can’t help believing. What about the rest of us? Has James established
a widespread right to believe in God through his Science of Religions? Our
answer must be negative.
ere is a logical disconnection between pragmatically committing to
saintly lives and objectively knowing that a God is involved. After all, a com-
mitment to a saint need only amount to a commitment to the saint’s vision
of a better moral order—where that vision of a moral order came from, or
whether the one true God is helping us along the way, need not matter to
the rest of us. After all, the specic origin of an inspirational ethical reform
doesn’t set the terms for its verication. James strenuously denied that the
origin of an idea sets the terms of its validity. Isn’t it quite revealing that
James doesn’t assign to philosophers, so crucial in his Science of Religions,
any responsibility for guring out if mystical states are genuine contacts with
God? He may believe that God’s real eects are evident in mystics’ subjective
transformations. But James knows better than to place so much weight on
that subjective point.
e Science of Religions has to inquire more deeply into the next objective
phase of mysticism, when it develops into the saintly venture. Here, the fact
of the matter one way or the other about God’s real eects drops out of the
pragmatic calculations. e strictly subjective cannot be experimented upon.
Fortunately, even if a saint may be mistaken about an alleged divine origin to
a moral vision, that subjective error can’t destroy the practical value of trying
to make that vision a reality in own social world. If a vision of moral reform
is validated in the course of human events, it remains validated regardless of
inspirational origin. We needn’t declare a saint to be utterly delusional, either
—an individual can be personally reasonable for interpreting their subjective
experience in provably fruitful ways. But philosophy needn’t agree with that
interpretation in any reasonably objective sense.
It may forever remain the case that the nonreligious are reasonable for not
believing in God precisely because they haven’t had those experiences them-
selves. In e Will to Believe James specically exempts atheists from his argu-
ment—religion can’t be a live option for atheists. Is it really all that curious
that James never tries to make the atheist look foolish, or convert the atheist
to belief? He does target the arrogant scientic materialists who say that no
amount of religious conviction could ever be reasonable for anyone. But the
simple nonbeliever isn’t the target of James’s arguments. An atheist can see
how some saintly lives can be valuable instruments for truly valuable reforms,
without having to fully endorse those saints’ religion or believe in God as
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well. Besides, the atheist can also point to nonreligious social reformers act-
ing out of secular devotion to high moral principles. Religious saints remain
optional instruments of reform, as far as philosophy can tell. James’s convic-
tion that religious saints will always be more eective doesn’t prove that they
will always more ethical or benecial to humanity in the long run, and their
saintly powers on earth can’t establish the reality of divine powers.
James provides further grounds for doubting whether a real relation with a
God is what is going on. Look at the way that conceptions of God have had
to change, due to cultural change on earth, not rethinking going on in heaven.
What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown
to need a God of an entirely dierent temperament from that Being interest-
ed exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom their ancestors were
so contented. Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God
indierent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual
favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best profes-
sional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception,
seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying. (VRE, 346; Works VRE, 277)
e ways that ethical progress has occurred across many centuries—as hesi-
tant, partial, and intermittent as it has been—arouses reasonable doubts that
any god is participating. e gods of the past seem so unsatisfying to us now.
Why must we try to dimly perceive a real deity behind so many false idols?
Are the world’s gods really large enough, even today? While James isn’t wrong
to point out how many gods have grown, he also seems to say that the world’s
moral progress is probably changing its gods, not the other way around. As
religious saints propose better and better gods, we may be grateful for the
updates, but philosophy needn’t agree that the “one true god” is actually at
work in all these saints.
Each century’s saints manage to conrm either their own era’s notions of
proper divinity and what this divinity wants, or at most advances the moral-
ity of this God just a bit in the direction of ethical progress. We owe much
of our advanced ethical position today to these incremental eorts from the
past. Yet most saintly gures aren’t incremental at all, exemplifying conserva-
tism instead, and the (few) progressive saints are only incremental, lends con-
dence to an alternative secular explanation, that nothing more than human
inspiration and thinking is doing the real work. Of course religious people
project their highest ethical aspirations and ideals on the divine order—that is
characteristic of religion. Saints convinced that conrmation is arriving from
the divine cannot constitute good evidence for God’s participation and real-
ity. Who is really creating the evidence here? Science of Religions shouldn’t
endorse the religious biases which it studies. Religious saints may actually be
imagining gods to suit their visions of the moral order, so “conrmations” at
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most bear on that visionary moral order, and not on utterly ctional gods.
After all, only imaginative convictions about God, and not any actual divine
power, suces to explain the occasional and incremental improvements to
the human world made by religion under the best of worldly circumstances.
Although James’s Science of Religions is theoretically capacious enough to
consider all religions, old and new, he does blatantly display his own moral-
ist biases. His pluralistic openness to diverse religions in theory isn’t matched
by much ethical pluralism in practice. James warns philosophers away from
formulating some nal ethical system on their own in “e Moral Philosopher
and the Moral Life” in e Will to Believe. Only the future course of human-
ity’s moral trials and experiments in living can confer credibility to surviving
ethical priorities. All the same, James knows well how he is a philosopher
of his own times. ere always is a substantial ethical preference revealed in
his selection of exemplary saints, as he emphasizes saints who are progressive
reformers, reformers who helped push the course of history towards his own
progressive ethical vision. He may be strongly pluralistic about religions in
general, but he is hardly ideologically neutral. James is admirably ecumeni-
cal when he surveys so many fascinating mystics and revivalists across the
world’s religions, but those displaying the most valuable saintliness are on
another level. He especially prefers saints who helped their societies overcome
the enslavement, degradation, and domination of peoples. Commentators
rightly observe how James’s saints lean towards humanism, and often sound
like enlightened Protestants—in short, if they are somehow similar to his own
Boston Brahmin heritage. James evidently applies his own ethical standards of
progress, philosophically tipping the scales as he walks through his Science of
Religions in the chapters of e Varieties of Religious Experience.
Philosophers participating in his Science of Religions won’t necessarily
agree on ethical standards of progress. Should both conservative and progres-
sive philosophers take part, to ensure some measure of ideological neutrality
overall? James’s requirement that the breadth of human experience must carry
great weight cannot help progressive philosophers, interestingly. Conservative
saints do propose religious reforms that t with much of human experience
and knowledge, as it stood during their own lives. In fact, conservative saints
oer religious and moral visions that by denition t better with far more
peoples’ experiences of their social worlds, since that’s exactly what conserva-
tism accomplishes. James’s preferred saints are always in the tiny progressive
minority during their lives, and they typically enjoy approval late in life or
long after they have died. Perhaps that’s how progressivism has to identify its
greatest heroes, after a better world has struggled into birth.
But how could Science of Religions discriminate among would-be saints
today, objectively discerning those with worthy religious hypotheses? It
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doesn’t seem possible, without premising some worldly consensus on secured
ethical values (such as basic moral principles or crucial human rights) to its
philosophical considerations. Disregarding some such ethical consensus, a
retrospective Science of Religions sorting out exemplary saints that led to our
current world devolves into ethical hagiography, unable to be as experimen-
tally helpful as James had hoped. A prospective Science of Religions, again
ignoring some ethical consensus, would promptly shatter and schismatically
divide over which ethical vision for the world is preferable, and devolve into
rival moral theologies. James’s Science of Religions at most can show how to
validate as reasonable the eorts of selected saints by selected ethical stand-
ards, and advance those ethical ideals with further saintly eorts. Where there
is signicant moral progress for humanity, religious saints may be involved,
but ultimately our ethical judgments gure out which saints are the genuine
saints. Science of Religions can only retrospectively identify genuine moral
saints, and it is powerless to verify the existence of any sort of God.
To people who want to live religious lives, the most that Science of Reli-
gions can say is something like this. While saintly gures (and you yourselves
in saintly moments) aren’t unreasonable for taking divine inspiration seri-
ously for morally transforming the world, the world will retain the right to
pass ethical judgments upon your eorts. You may worry about God’s judg-
ment, but as far as the world’s wise judgment can tell, only your psychological
conviction is really involved, and not any sort of objective divinity. Nothing
about any God can receive verication through your eorts to alter the course
of history into future.
Science of Religions ends up as philosophically agnostic as each of the
contributing disciplines were from the outset. We have no way of knowing
whether a religious person is right to believe in God, if even it remains quite
true that each person’s right to believe can move the world. Ultimately, we
remain responsible for the moral world, not science alone, for experimen-
tally deciding which saintly vision proves reasonable. Whatever the destiny of
religion, it would be very much in the spirit of James for him to ultimately
encourage us to fulll this living responsibility.
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