William James's Narrative of Habit

Style, Spring, 1999 by Renee Tursi

our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain - that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.(7) (50)

One explanation he offered for the experience of psychics was that while the medium feels that spirits exhibit a "tendency to personate," the more likely scenario is that, if there be spirits at all, they are unwitting "passive beings" whose stray bits of memory are at the hands of the medium's "will to personate" (Essays in Psychical Research 368).

By opening the door to psychological (or, one might argue, psychoanalytic) aspects without totally abandoning the metaphysical ones, James is able to open his language and widen the terrain by removing its restrictive definitional fences in a way that once again, through the force of habit, recasts the uncanny in home-like ways. Indeed, James re-emphasizes that with this essay he goes on record for "the presence, in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal knowledge" (372). He wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, in good part, to give evidence of what he meant by such a statement. As he explained in 1904 in answer to a colleague's questionnaire on religious feeling, "the whole line of testimony" on the point of having felt God's presence, for example, leads him to conclude that such real effects cannot be refuted (Letters 2: 214). "No doubt there is a germ in me of something similar that makes response," he acknowledges, for even though James was personally incapable of spiritual belief in the conventional sense ("I can't possibly pray," he wrote, "I feel foolish and artificial"), he felt that his "need" for some sort of cosmic divinity, pragmatically speaking, proved his belief in the idea of such a force or in a "universe of spiritual relations surrounding the earthly practical ones" (214, 213). He used the term "religion" in the supernaturalist sense to mean that it is in our relation to "an unseen world" that the "true" significance of our human life lies (Will 48). "Religious experience," per se, he defines as "any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more 'home' to one" (Letters 2: 215). So he holds that other sorts of preternatural phenomena might likewise find equally valid response; "'normal' or 'sane' consciousness," he maintains, "is so small a part of actual experience" (213).

Steeped in the language of habit, James's early model of consciousness bears its own consistency with this point of view. Developed from the scientific approach to psychical phenomena taken by the German philosopher, psychologist, and physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, James's rendering presents a threshold process along the lines of Fechner's wave theory.(8) According to James, our level of consciousness can rise and fall; "normal" consciousness, finding itself in a lowered state, might then very well experience an overflow of the supernormal or unconscious into its own "stream of thought." This notion, by assigning consciousness a purely filtering, sieve-like function rather than a generative one, not only allowed for paranormal occurrences, but also provided the initial steps toward satisfying his desire to do away with the Cartesian model of a mind that produces its contents.(9) But even with the gate of consciousness lowered, so to speak, just how, without the "humbug" help of a self-styled spiritualist, might unexplained forms of knowledge actually go about getting themselves rationalized by us?