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Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.) was a Roman emperor and renown stoic who wrote a
famous book on how to live. James quotes from Aurelius’s writing to demonstrate
his stoic nature, which agrees to the circumstances of life but not necessarily
with them.
Jonathan Edwards
Theologian and metaphysician Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was born in
Connecticut, the only son of eleven children. He graduated from Yale at the age
of seventeen and became a minister, as his father and grandfather were before
him. James quotes Edwards throughout his lectures but in particular in his
first lecture: ‘‘by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.’’
Man’s roots, James expounds, are inaccessible. Only by the empirical evidence
of the fruit is something known. This is one of James’s basic tenets. Only by
the results of a practice does one know if it is true.
George Fox
Founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers), George Fox (1624–1691) was born in
England and traveled around Europe and the New World promoting his religious
views. James often uses Fox as an example of a person using his or her
pathological features (such as ‘‘nervous instability’’) to help give him or her
‘‘religious authority and influence.’’ James states that no one of any
reputation would state that Fox’s mind was unsound, despite the fact that his
published journal abounds in entries that make Fox sound like a ‘‘psychopath.’’
Fox often had visions that would direct him to do strange things, such as
pulling off his shoes and walking barefoot in winter and crying out that people
he met should repent.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Georg Hegel (1770–1831) was the central
philosophical influence on Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. James refers to
Hegel’s theories in his lecture on philosophy. He mentions two Hegelian school
principles. The first is that ‘‘the fullness of life can be construed to
thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to
itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate
the first one.’’ The second principle states that if a person is conscious of a
negation, that person is ‘‘virtually to be beyond it.’’ In other words, the
concept of the finite, James writes, somehow already acknowledges the
infinite.
Immanuel Kant
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had a strong influence on the
study of metaphysics and ethics, and spent most of his life attempting to
answer the question, ‘‘What do we know?’’ In his lecture ‘‘The Reality of the
Unseen,’’ James calls upon some of Kant’s thoughts about the nature of God and
soul. James paraphrases Kant, who believed that since these concepts ‘‘cover no
distinctive sense-content,’’ theoretically they are ‘‘devoid of any
significance.’’ However, Kant did concede that the concept of God and soul hold
meaning in practice of life and that people have the right to act as if they
held substance. In other words, people can live their lives as if there is a
God.
Martin Luther
James refers to Martin Luther (1483–1546), whose philosophy was to become the
foundation of the Lutheran Church, in his lecture about the sick soul, and in
later lectures, because of Luther’s rather melancholic disposition. The quotes
that James uses display Luther’s sense of almost desperate need for a belief in
a god.
Frederic W. H. Myers
Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. During his lifetime, he published several essays on subliminal consciousness, a concept that James addresses in his lectures on conversion. James writes, ‘‘this discovery of a...
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consciousness existing beyond the field . . . casts light on many phenomena of religious biography.’’ Myers coined the wordautomatism, to which James refers. It is a reference to unaccountable
impulses such as automatic writing, by which an individual writes things of
which he or she claims not to understand the meaning. Later, James quotes from
a letter from Myers in which Myers discusses prayer.
John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, and
James quotes him in his lecture on philosophy that states that theology is ‘‘a
science in the strictest sense of the word.’’ Newman claimed that truths about
God could be (and were) known and could be claimed as fact ‘‘just as we have a
science of the stars and call it astronomy.’’ James uses Newman to point out
the dogmatic nature of institutionalized religion, in which feeling is valid
only for the individual and ‘‘is pitted against reason,’’ which is considered
universally valid.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Born in Prussia, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has greatly influenced the
philosophical world. James refers to Nietzsche’s comments on saintliness, of
which James states, ‘‘The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I
know is Nietzsche.’’ Nietzsche contrasts saintliness to the aggressive nature
of the military type, with emphasis and advantage on the latter. In other
words, according to Nietzsche saintliness was a weakness.
Saint John of the Cross
Cofounder of the Roman Catholic order of Carmelites and doctor of mystic
theology, Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591) provides James in his lecture on
saintliness with an extreme type of ascetic personality. James quotes St. John
at length in a list of all the ways in which St. John finds to humiliate and
humble himself. For example, St. John believed that people should not seek what
is best in life but rather they should seek what is worst ‘‘so that you may
enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution.’’
Edwin Diller Starbuck
Throughout the lecture on conversion, James often refers to the studies of E.
D. Starbuck (1866–1947), a Stanford University professor who along with James
was considered one of the pioneers in the study of the psychology of religion.
In particular, James mentions Starbuck’s statistical research on conversion
among adolescents. Starbuck published several books after James’s death, two of
which are The Psychology of Religion (1911) and Religion in
Transition (1937).
Leo Tolstoy
James uses the story about Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s long bout with
melancholia and his subsequent recovery as an example of a conversion over a
long period of time. Tolstoy (1828–1910) published an account of his depression
and religious experience in his book My Confession (1887). He suffered
from what James calls anhedonia, the ‘‘passive loss of appetite for all life’s
values.’’ During this time, Tolstoy could find no reason to continue with life
since everything he accomplished would end with his death. He could find no
meaning in life, despite the fact that he was happily married, was a success,
and received praise for his work from an international community. He often
contemplated suicide during this period, although he states he never actually
thought he would do it. Over the course of a year, he slowly began to realize
that all humankind was put on this Earth to live for some reason. The concept
of an infinite God broadened his scope and made him stop thinking about his own
finite parameters.
Walt Whitman
James uses American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as his prime example of the
healthyminded individual. James quotes one of Whitman’s students, who states
that Whitman could find supreme happiness just strolling outside and looking at
the grass, the trees, and the sky. According to James, everything in life
pleased Whitman, and he enjoyed a wide readership in his time (a readership
that continues in the twenty-first century) because of his ‘‘systematic
expulsion from his writing of all contractile elements.’’ Whitman wrote in the
first person not as an egotist, James writes, but as Universal Man. His poetry
reassures his readers that everything in life is good. James also quotes
Whitman in his lecture on mysticism, claiming that Whitman’s poetry contains a
‘‘classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience.’’
