Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion

Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2003, Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 303–326 © 2003 The American Academy of Religion Scholars have understood William James’s unattributed reference to a discovery made in 1886, which he described as “the most important step forward in psychology since [he had] been a student of that science,” as a reference to the British psychical researcher Frederic Myers, rather than, as I argue, the French psychologist Pierre Janet. Correctly understood, this discovery illuminates the experimental (Janet) and theoretical (Myers) underpinnings of The Varieties of Religious Experience, surfaces the comparative method and the experimentally based theory of the divisible self that informed James’s work, and clarifies James’s efforts to explain how persons might subjectively experience a presence that they take to be an external power, when such was not necessarily the case. Approaching the Varieties in this fashion allows us to specify more clearly the kinds of experience that most interested James. This, in turn, circumscribes his explanation of religious experience and, in my view, makes it more compelling.