to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to
recovery and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure’ (VRE 443).
Taken in a wider sense, prayer means ‘every kind of inward communion
or conversation with the power recognized as divine’. This, James main-
tains, is untouched by scientific criticism. Indeed, the whole upshot of his
investigation of religious experience is that ‘religion, wherever it is an active
thing, involves a belief in ideal presences and a belief that in our prayerful
communion with them, work is done, and something real comes to pass’.
But is this belief true, or is it a mere anachronistic survival from a pre-
scientific age? Any science of religion is as likely to be hostile as to be
favourable to the claim that the essence of religion is true.
But science, James thinks, need not necessarily have the last word.
Religion is concerned with the individual and his personal destiny, science
with the impersonal and general. ‘The God whom science recognizes must
be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a
retail business’ (VRE 472). But which is more real, the universal or the
particular? According to James, ‘so long as we deal with the cosmic and the
general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with
private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the
term’(VRE 476). It is absurd for science to claim that the egotistic elements
of experience should be suppressed. ‘Religion, occupying herself with
personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute
realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human
history’ (VRE 480).
James is willing, in conclusion, to call the supreme reality in the universe
‘God’. But his positive account of God is extremely nebulous; it is similar to
Matthew Arnold’s definitions of God as ‘the stream of tendency by which
all things seek to fulfil the law of their being’ or ‘an eternal power, not
ourselves, that makes for righteousness’. James’s woolliness of expression,
however, is only to be expected, since he regarded religion as essentially a
matter of feeling, and feelings as essentially inarticulate. But it disappointed
many of his friends, who regarded him, on other topics, as a model of
candour and precision. ‘His wishes made him turn down the lights’, said his
old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ‘so as to give miracle a chance.’2
2 Letter of 1 Sept. 1910, quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (London: Flamingo,
2001), 436.
GOD
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