by Paul J Croce
concern with “the destiny of the individual” separated from scientific inquiry
into “the constitution of the world.” Showing his own version of C. P. Snow’s
later lament about the sharp separation of these “two cultures,” James added
that the ancients showed that “they are not really so” separate after all,
because they are “both sprouts of one stem.” Despite their common history
and their common display of cosmic curiosity, modern differentiation of sci-
ence and religion often make renewed realization that “one womb bore
them” seem “vain.” 73 Living at a time when science and religion often ap-
peared in conflict, and when many sought to compromise their assumed
178 Young William James Thinking
tension, the mingling of material and immaterial dimensions of life in
ancient times encouraged James’s impulses to see these fields in relation
before even any need to search for compromises. Ancient lessons reinforced
his attitude of deference rather than adoption for religion, but also for sci-
ence; he si mul ta neously respected traditional religion and endorsed mod-
ern science, while also critiquing claims to certainty about either one. For
young James, the ancients were a glowing lure depicting a way to achieve
more harmony during the confusions of earthly existence, including his
own. In his maturity, even when he did not mention Greek art, Roman Sto-
icism, or Vedic religion, he was continually drawn to the circulation of spir-
itual messages within the world.
James’s fascination with ancient thought and culture was part of wide-
spread nineteenth- century attention to history as a way to understand the
identity of con temporary parts of life. This historical imagination mani-
fested itself not only through interest in the origin of diverse species but
also in study of primal forms of human languages, races, and cultures in an-
cient times. By the middle of the century, within the cauldron of tension
about racial difference and antebellum sectional antagonisms, many Ameri-
cans used those insights about identity through origin to develop virulent
theories of racial hierarchy, with Anglo- Saxons as the descendants of supe-
rior ancient Aryan and Germanic people. In asserting this ancient golden
age, these theories provided American whites (not all of whom were even
Anglo- Saxon) with a lineage of superiority. The wistful depictions of ele-
gant Tanagra figures show that ancient Greece was often incorporated into
these hierarchies of historical descent. As James had exhibited in Brazil, by
contrast with his own teacher Louis Agassiz, these hierarchical racial views
held no attraction for him. When friends and colleagues made use of these
ideas to promote racial supremacy, with primitive “Aryans standing highest
in the scale,” he pointedly referred to the “aryan philosophy” in the lower
case, demoting its privileged place, and insisted that the point of his inqui-
ries was not to assert superiority or even differentiation but to find com-
monalities in sources among diff er ent competing “morals[,] politics [and]
religion.”74
James’s awareness of history also served as a basis for still more of his
philosophizing. In the mid-1870s, he observed that, according to conven-
tional wisdom, “the meaning of an idea is that which it has grown from.”
After becoming impatient with the countless claims to certainty that this
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 179
identification with origins encourages, he proposed that “the truth of a
thing or idea is . . . its destiny, that which grow out of it.” But immersion in
the ancients and reading Max Müller’s works and more in the history of
religion brought awareness that “the modern historical method of research”
can reinforce “skepticism,” with belief in “the relativity of all truth of
opinion to its time.” He took this as a philosophical and cultural challenge:
“[U]nless we find a way of conciliating the notion of truth and change, we
must admit that there is no truth anywhere.” By the end of his youth, he was
finding “conciliation” not in the origins of ideas, but in their future orienta-
tion, their “line of development.” Well before his pragmatist declarations
about real ity “in the making” and his pluralist attention to novelty, he was
already identifying truth according to an idea’s “function of continuing
thought in a certain direction.” His recent, hard- won readiness to accept life
“without any guarantee” would support and reinforce this future- oriented
philosophical outlook. 75
James’s historical reflections and encounters with the ancients placed
many of his quandaries about his beliefs and commitments into sharper
focus. What had begun as informal recreation, with personal reading, mu-
seum visits, and theatergoing, became an enthralling drama at the center
of keen vocational and personal choices. The naturalistic science that he
had been studying began to bother him by the middle of the 1860s because
it dealt with nature largely “robbed of divinity,” in the potent phrase of
Schiller, whose essays James read avidly during his scientific education.
Meanwhile, throughout the Western world, he was surrounded by the social
and economic changes of industrialism and the professional overturning
of ecclesiastical privilege; he was aware of these tradition- challenging and
antireligious trends, which supported the narrative of scientific hostility
to religion, but he continued to regard religious belief as a source of human
guidance alongside science— just as each also had its own shortcomings.
Despite these tensions between science and religion in James’s time and
ever since, revisionist scholarship has shown that the conventional wisdom
and the per sis tently popu lar view of conflict between science and religion
is at best a simplification: many scientists have been religious believers,
many religious believers have not been antiscientific, and many religious be-
liefs have influenced science; and even when conflicts have emerged, there
have been vigorous efforts to reconcile the separate spheres. However, a
counterrevisionism emphasizes that even in the midst of these interactions
180 Young William James Thinking
of science and religion, the practice of science, especially since the late nine-
teenth century, has evolved toward naturalistic assumptions, making reli-
gious beliefs irrelevant to the work of science, even if not necessarily an-
tagonistic. In the modern scientific perspective, and even with tacit
endorsement from many religious believers, the natu ral world is simply
material stuff for scientists to study and manage, or for the divine to create
and control directly (for orthodox religious believers) or indirectly (for the
more liberal). Traditional Western religions maintain that the transcen-
dental world is the super natural domain of God and immortality, with kin-
ship to immaterial ideals in general; however, for science, the immaterial
world is vocationally irrelevant, a set of human experiences for material
analy sis, or
just a fantasy, although it may be part of personal beliefs and
even serve to shape scientific ideologies.76 Mainstream science and religion,
so often assumed to be in contrast, generally share the view that nature is
inert: chemical and physical matter to be understood, predicted, and con-
trolled, or mortal finitude that pales before the majesty of transcendent or
ideal realms.
From his young adulthood, and with the support of his thought about the
ancients, James grew impatient with these modern assumptions about sci-
ence and religion. He endorsed the scientists and religious believers who
were ready to dialogue about their respective commitments. In addition,
however, James emphasized that modern materialistic science and tradi-
tional Western religion are not in glaring contrast, with consequent need
for “laboriously attained” reconciliation—to apply his description of pre-
dominant views since ancient times. Instead, he observed what came natu-
rally to the ancients, and he experimented with ways to reduce the prevalent
modern dualistic divide between nature and the transcendent. The ancients
started with nature around them and found immaterial ingredients embod-
ied in it. Like the ancients, James also took up the study of nature in his own
time, namely, scientific inquiry; perhaps circulating within the complexi-
ties of earth, life, and consciousness, he surmised, we can find some deep
meanings to the human experience and, like the Stoics, use our inquiries for
personal direction. Identification of depths of meaning would begin with
his proposition that Western science and religion are kindred cosmic quests.
The widespread dualism, depicting their conflict, separation, or contrast
with need for reconciliation, has reflected the way modern sciences and re-
ligions each pres ents a special case shaped by cultural formations; each has
indeed developed with dramatically diff er ent intellectual affiliations and
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 181
social roles, and each has also evolved into specialized spheres for shedding
light into vari ous parts of natu ral experience. But, in addition, each also of-
fers alternative human attempts to answer the puzzlements of that
experience— each indeed “a syllable in human nature’s total message. ”77
After James found panentheist ideas about spiritual factors circulating
in the natu ral world in the outlooks of the ancients, his ideas about the sub-
liminal “more” would fill out those youthful impulses, as would his views of
the pos si ble finitude of the divine as a participant in the universe rather
than only its distant ruler. James also detected the tacit place of immaterial
ingredients within scientific thinking, observing that positivism and scientific
psy chol ogy, despite their materialist stance, “always pres ent . . . real ity . . .
under two ‘aspects,’ . . . consciousness and . . . matter.” Just as he emphasized
the kinship of science and religion, so he also thought beyond dualist divisions
of mind and body, turning instead to panpsychic ideas of their relationship.
He avoided both defiance and defense of per sis tent contrasts between sci-
ence and religion, or between body and mind. With pragmatist thinking, he
emphasized the respective usefulness of these ardent positions for empha-
sizing material or immaterial dimensions of life as platforms for deeper
learning, clues to the larger mysterious whole. His outlook left him com-
fortable circulating with liberal religious believers, who, as historian Amy
Kittelstrom explains, also offered extensions of Chris tian ity’s theologies of
divine imminence into outlooks for “heeding inner divinity,” with media-
tion of science and religion, and even endorsement of spirituality operating
within humanity and the world. And he anticipated challenges to dualism
in philosophy and psy chol ogy that would emerge more forcefully in the
twentieth century.78
Historian James Kloppenberg observes that James was in the vanguard
of a generation of Eu ro pean and American phi los o phers, coalescing by the
1890s, who “substituted an ac cep tance of contingency for the standard
quest for certainty” through denial of dualism and the grounding of truth in
human experience. Phi los o pher John Dewey, whose reading of James helped
turn him toward pragmatism, admired his se nior colleague’s pioneering
stance: in the 1870s, Dewey observed, James “stood practically alone” cri-
tiquing the confidence of both “materialistic and idealist sides.” In 1925
Dewey would express the nondualist commitment of the mature James’s
radical empiricism with words that sound like phrasing from the young
James’s commentary on modern “laboriously attained simplicity” in con-
trast with Greek harmony: Dewey disparaged dualism for its “assumptions
182 Young William James Thinking
which first make a division where none exists, and then resort to an artifice
to restore the connection which has been willfully destroyed.” James’s
path to the “via media,” as Kloppenberg identifies widespread attempts
at “an unsteady intellectual peace [between] religion and science,” involved
both positivism and humanism, since he used both experimental naturalism
and introspection on the mysteries of depth consciousness. James attended
to these conventionally incongruous combinations at first with ambiva-
lence, and in his youth he gradually developed his more decisive stance; in
his maturity, he developed theories not just in compromise of science and
religion, and of body and mind, but from perceiving their interaction. 79
The panpsychic tendencies in James’s nondualist understanding of the
relation between material and immaterial realms have fostered misunder-
standing and even ridicule. With his focus on social thought, including
pragmatist James’s contributions to deliberative democracy, Kloppenberg
treats panpsychism as a slur by “James’s critics” about the “supposed ability
of minds to commune with other minds.” Despite his own nondualist sym-
pathies, Richard Rorty characterized James’s nondualism as an illegitimate
panpsychic attempt to close the “gap between subject and object.” Rorty
based his own pragmatism on the side of Dewey that was “naturalist with-
out being . . . panpsychist,” and he criticized James for wandering “down
the garden path” from Darwinian observations of continuity of human and
nonhuman animals to impulses presenting experiences of a noncognitive
sort as factors in thinking. James did, indeed, make just this turn, even as
Rorty adapted pragmatism to the linguistic turn, with pragmatism tied to
language rather than to experience; and Rorty set his pragmatism espe-
cially in contrast with James’s radical empiricism, which portrays pure expe-
rience as a seamless blend of objective and subjective ele ments. The garden
path that Rorty found distasteful had its origins in James’s youth— and it
may have begun as a jungle path, in his encounters with the spider monkey
in the Amazon. James found a way to be pragmatist by making use of a
nonmaterialis
t approach to science, a spiritualist hope for religion, and the
nondualism of pure experience; and James’s path pres ents a challenge to
pragmatism and other philosophies to attend to complex and mysterious
parts of natu ral experience. Despite critiques of James, even among prag-
matists, recent intellectual developments have supported nondualist in-
sights, with students of both science and religion showing the abundant re-
lations of these fields, continuities of humanity with other living things,
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 183
and phi los o phers and psychologists pointing to the embedding of mind in
bodily pro cesses. 80
While James’s mature work participated in these trends away from dual-
ism, it also fulfilled his youthful impulse to show deference to traditional
religion even without adoption of these beliefs; this was a major source of
Rorty’s impatience with James’s nondualism since Rorty had almost no in-
terest in religious beliefs and other such human sentiments that often sur-
pass human linguistic expression. James was unusual among liberals and
among intellectuals in general with the depth of his willingness to take
seriously the nonintellectual convictions of passionate religious beliefs
because of the added resources they provide for comprehending life’s myster-
ies. In one of his first philosophical works, James evaluated the disagreements
between religion and science and related ideological and values contrasts; he
called each a distinct “sentiment of rationality,” each “but one of a thousand
human purposes,” each with distinct assumptions, and each setting direction
for par tic u lar philosophical orientations, but by no means all particularly
intellectual. Each position, expressed with unarticulated conviction or with
thorough sophistication, James maintained, begins with a sentiment of
rationality giving primal orientation to the commitment. He was not just
tolerating religious belief but also showing the role for its kind of thinking
within intellectual life in general— just as he had already declared in 1862:
“None succeed in leaving Faith entirely out.” 81 Ironically, James’s science
with its goal for inquiry into the abundance of experience served as a major
factor fostering his sympathy with nonintellectual beliefs, just as it was his