The Varieties of Religious Experience

One man left us a dynamic portrait of the great school project prematurely completed in miniature: William James, an insider’s insider, foremost (and first) psychologist of America, brother of novelist Henry James. James’ prestige as a most formidable Boston brahmin launched American psychology. Without him it’s touch and go whether it would have happened at all. His Varieties of Religious Experience is unique in the American literary canon; no wonder John Dewey dropped Hegel and Herbart after a brief flirtation with the Germans and attached himself to James and his philosophy of pragmatism (which is the Old Norse religion brought up to date). But James was too deep a thinker to believe his own screed fully. In a little book called Talks to Teachers, which remains in print today, over a hundred years after it was written, James disclosed his ambivalence about the ultimate dream of schooling in America.