The Religious Experience and Reality in William James

Abstract

In his Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, William James accounted for and developed his own theory of truth. For James, truth is the agreement of an idea with reality and this agreement has to be verified in our actual experience. From this point of view, reality means sensible experience. These notions about truth, reality and experience are not so difficult to understand as long as we deal with ordinary or scientific matters.

However, are these concepts true of religious matters? Religious phenomena transcend our sensible experience, so people tend to think there is an essential difference between two kinds of experiences. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James tries to reveal the nature of religious experience. James doesn’t think that these two experiences are completely different. He qualifies religious experience and reality as ‘quasi-sensible’, and this attitude isn’t incompatible with that of Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth in which experience is considered to be sensible.

The purpose of this paper is, by reading carefully The Varieties, to elucidate what the religious experience and reality are, focusing on what is meant by the adjective ‘quasi-sensible.’ For James, in religious experience, people are affected through their sensible experience by religious reality called ‘subliminal’ or ‘the more’, and so an individual consciousness turns out to be surrounded by the vast superhuman consciousness.