Harvard Professor

“It is a curious thing, this matter of God!” James wrote to philosopher Thomas Davidson in 1882.

Read More
- “I can sympathize with the most rabid hater of him and the idea of him, when I think of the use that has been made of him in history and philosophy as a starting point, or premiss [sic] for grounding deductions. But as an Ideal to attain and make probable, I find myself less and less able to do without him. . . .All I mean is that there must be some subjective unity in the Universe which has purposes commensurable with my own and which is at the same time large enough to be, among all the powers that may be there, the strongest. I simply refuse to accept the notion of there being no purpose in the objective world.”
  
  In his youth, James struggled—and failed, he thought-- to understand his father’s theology; he did not share the unwavering religious faith that sustained his wife or his mother-in-law, to whom he dedicated The Varieties of Religious Experience. Yet he defended the right to believe in his famous “faith-ladder,” an expression of “good-will towards certain forms of result”.
  
  “Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith,” he wrote in “The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life.” With God in the world, he wrote in Pragmatism, humans can believe in an eternal moral order, “one of the deepest needs of our breast. . .
  [S]piritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism’s sun sets in a sea of disappointment.”
  
  The items in this section reflect James’s enduring project, as he wrote to his friend Frances Morse, “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class,’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life. . .and to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, altho all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd. . .yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act.”

In this section

	William James. Notman Studio, photographer. Photograph, undated.	WJ. [Notebook 6] Autograph manuscript, signed; Florence, 20 November 1873.

	WJ. Letter to Alice H. G. James. [Cambridge, 9 October 1876].	WJ. "Philosophy 9, 1898-1899 (Concluding lectures)" [Notebook 13] Autograph manuscript, ca. 1898.

	Josiah Royce, Joseph Le Conte and G.H. Howison and Sidney Edward Mezes. The Conception of God: a philosophical discussion concerning the nature of the divine idea as a demonstrable reality. New York: Macmillan, 1897.	WJ."Memorandums for Gifford Lectures"; drafts for "The varieties of religious experience" [Notebook 15] Autograph manuscript, signed; ca. 1900.

	WJ. [Notes made while preparing second series of Gifford Lectures]. Autograph manuscript, ca. 1901.	WJ. [Answers to J. B. Pratt's questionnaire on religion]. Printed sheet with autograph annotations; [n.p., 1904 ].

	"Faith and Reason", 1906. In: [Obituary notices and reviews of books by William James]. Printed sheets; various dates.