William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience Concludes that Experience of the Presence of God is Mediated by Normal Multiple Personality

Published in 1902 and in print ever since, William James’s book is an enduring classic. But very few readers understand what James concluded, because they read his book from religious or philosophical interests, and they do not fully take into account that James was a psychologist of his time and that the subtitle of his book is A Study in Human Nature.

What was going on in the study of human nature in James’s time? In psychiatry, there was Pierre Janet’s report of patients with multiple personality. In psychology, people were excited about dissociative phenomena like automatic writing, which indicated that normal people had co-conscious or subconscious, secondary selves, of which the primary self was unaware.

(This was usually thought of as double, or dual, consciousness, rather than multiple consciousness, because of the popular book published by A. L. Wigan, M.D. in 1844, The Duality of the Mind, which was based on his idea that everyone had, in effect, two brains, the left and right cerebral hemispheres.)

In short, dual consciousness was considered the cutting edge of neuroscience in James’s time. (This insight was later eclipsed for much of the 20^th century by Freud’s mistaken views, but revived in the 1970s as Freud’s influence waned, feminism helped society see childhood trauma, and multiple personality was re-discovered.)

James’s conclusion in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [1901-1902] (New York, The Modern Library, 1994), on pages 555-557, is as follows:

“The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required…At the same time the theologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but…on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling…”

In other words, our subjective experience (and its religious interpretation) of our unrecognized second self is that it is not-me; it is something external to me; and it is of a higher nature, from a higher realm; i.e., a Higher Power, Supreme Being, God.

I hasten to add that William James, himself, was a religious believer. Therefore, he further reasoned that his psychological explanation of religious experience does not prove that God doesn’t exist. God may simply be using the human mind as a medium through which to communicate with humans.

The purpose of this post is to give one reason why I don’t believe that normal multiple personality is limited to novelists. It is a widespread, normal, psychological phenomenon, which I would guess is present in at least 30% of the general population. But I think that novelists are a good example. And, incidentally, as you probably know, William James was novelist Henry James’s older brother.