"But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth."

Conversion Experience

Regeneration by the conversion experience, James felt, is what enables the sick-souled individual to escape from the dark nights of his soul. He found this type of experience particularly fascinating but, as usual, treated the grandiloquent claims of "twice-born men" with pragmatic reservations:

"If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it." The then newly proposed theory of subconscious mental processes appealed to James as highly useful for understanding the sudden shifts in character that often attend conversion experiences. Indeed, he lauds the discovery of phenomena outside the "primary consciousness" as "the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science."

A person with a strongly developed, intrusive subliminal region, James argues, will have a proclivity for hallucinations, obsessive ideas, and automatic actions that seem unaccountable by ordinary experience. As a simple illustration, he cites the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. In addition, he refers to the work of Freud, Janet, and Prince on hysteria. Though James explicity credits this research with shedding "a wholly new light upon our natural constitution," he refuses to employ it to "explain away" conversion.

"Just as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material," he writes, "so it is logically conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open."

Mystical States

From personal experimentation with nitrous oxide James received what he emphatically believed to be a form of mystical experience. Trances and other exceptional mental states preoccupied his attention for many years. Throughout his career, in fact, James was unflaggingly open-minded about seances, mind cures, and other academic black sheep. His conclusions regarding the nature of myticism might reasonably be considered an important key to his own religious interests and hope.

The so-called rational consciousness, he felt, is only one special kind of consciousness, "whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different." Though one can live an entire lifetime without knowing about them, James writes, the proper drug or other stimulus will promptly make them accessible.

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded.... They may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.... Looking back on my own experience, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity."

Saintliness

The saint, as James treats him, epitomizes the Jamesian attitude toward religion and the religious life. "Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person.... Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity--these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the completest measure.

"But ... all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating his total function."

Whole Personality

For James the basic concern is always with the whole personality in its functional relationship to its environment. In The Varieties he therefore presents innumerable "case histories" of concrete individuals. Carlyle, Bunyan, Tolstoi, St. Teresa--all receive warm and sensitive treatment.

Nothing bears truer witness to James's compassion than these skillfully rendered descriptions. And nothing provides a better indication of the ultimate aim of his inquiry: transcendence of one's own limitations through familiarity with the entire spectrum of human experience. "Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the self-hood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule."

(This is the fifth in a series of six articles on William James.)