Dear spirited, thank you so very much for this quote from William James! I do believe it may be your only direct quote of him — though it seems the context by which it might be understood is missing. Everything else you cited about James and his work was about what other people have said about him. Including such notorious people as Bertrand "Banned-in-Boston" Russell. Somehow Laplace and Haeckel show up, not to mention the American Realists.... I'm still working through it all....
Sigh. I still do not believe that William James was a gnostic thinker, let alone an unconscious Luciferian. I think he was adapting the techniques of science to the study of psyche, of human consciousness. I haven't read anything by him (yet) that would suggest he saw consciousness as being ultimately "material". Though possibly he might have toyed with the idea that it would be convenient if consciousness could be reduced to such terms, his own empirical evidence, the voluminous "subjective" experience collected in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," does not seem to bear out this presupposition.
It wouldn't be the first time the idea of "science" was applied to a domain of human inquiry that had always been regarded as properly belonging to "philosophy." Plato and Aristotle did this, with episteme politike —political science.
Anyhoot, William James, and his brother Henry — arguably a very great American literary artist — were Massachusetts men; Boston Brahmins; the fruit of Harvard University at the height of its glory. We Bostonians tend to hold them in high regard. Yet this Bostonian humbly recognizes that, although the United States of America has produced magnificent achievements in economics and science, historically it has not ranked high in accomplishments in the arts or philosophy as compared with other countries....
I gather you conclude that James had reduced all mental processes to "atomic units," following Democritus, the original atomic theorist. And this proves he is a monist.
But what do you suppose motivated Democritus in his (primitive) search for the ultimate nature of Reality? That he started out wanting to prove the godlessness of the Cosmos? Jeepers, I just think that would be a stretch. Maybe the guy was just trying to understand the world all around him, in which he understood himself to be personally embroiled, in the best way he could possibly conceive of. His original insights are still enormously valuable within certain domains of inquiry, and continue to inform modern science to this day.
Of course, it is modern science itself which is now trying to tell us that "atomism" and "mechanism" are inadequate as explanations of the Universe. Both of the great scientific revolutions of the Twentieth Century — Einstein's Relativity, and the Quantum Theory of both the Copenhagen and the Schrödinger Interpretations — occurred after William James' death, in 1910. What would James have known of the state of science proper around the turn of the Twentieth Century?
He might possibly have heard about Max Planck's quantum; he might possibly have heard about Einstein's photon. As a "scientist," James was probably alert to such new developments.
But those "developments" are still not fully digested today — scientifically, epistemologically, ontologically, or socioculturally.
The above excerpt from James brings to mind a dispute between Einstein and Niels Bohr, regarding the epistemological fallout of the quantum theory. On the basis of the criticality of the observer in quantum theory, Einstein twitted his great friend that he, Bohr, would deny the very existence of the moon, unless he could see it with his own eyes. Bohr retorted that the moon would still be there; but he could not claim any direct knowledge of this fact if he didn't see it for himself, and so would be unable to say anything at all about it.
Anyhoot, there are no atoms as such either in relativity or quantum theory. And I strongly doubt there are "atoms" in William James' analysis of psyche.
Dear sister in Christ, I regard the above as open questions. We must always stay open to the Lord. For we humans are not the measure of Him, nor of His Creation, let alone His Judgment.
Thank you ever so much for your engaging correspondence, dear spirited!
“But what do you suppose motivated Democritus in his (primitive) search for the ultimate nature of Reality? That he started out wanting to prove the godlessness of the Cosmos? Jeepers, I just think that would be a stretch.”
Spirited: Roman and Greek nature philosophers received their notions regarding the structure of the universe from Egypt. Egypt in turn received its’ own ideas from ancient Sumeria (Babylonia). The Enuma Elish, Babylonia’s evolutionary cosmogony bespeaking a one-substance consisting of primordial waters (matter) out of which the gods created themselves is the seed-bed from which grew all such cosmogonies-—even India’s Brahman originated in the Enuma Elish....as did Darwin’s conception.
Church Father Athanasius relates that the worship of matter/energy began with pre-flood people. And now in our own time it has displaced God.
Spirited: Guenon does not describe James as a Luciferian but as an unconscious Satanist. This is an important distinction. The first position speaks of knowing submission to Lucifer while the second speaks of the unwitting submission by those who like James, no longer believe in the Christian view of total-reality, thus are blind to the unseen powers under whose influence they’ve fallen.
Guenon’s own view of reality is based in perennial philosophy and rather than explain his meaning from within that worldview I’ll explain it from within our own total view of reality.
Both evolutionary materialism (i.e.,Secular Humanism/ Atomism) and evolutionary Eastern pantheism (and occult New Age) posit a one-sided view of reality rather than Christianity’s total view of reality encompassing both physical matter and spirit.
Atomism’s one-sided view holds that void and physical matter in motion (the ‘sensory’ or empirical dimension) encompasses all of reality while Eastern pantheism’s one-sided view holds that void (psychic energy/ the unseen) is spirit (mind) and since this is reality then the physical world is Maya, or illusion.
These two one-dimensional cosmogonies have a materialist philosophy that Christians share. The principal doctrine of Christianity is that the living, personal One God in three Persons became flesh (i.e., physical matter) in Jesus Christ God incarnate. Jesus Christ is a Person and the ultimate aim of Christianity is not just the salvation of immortal souls (the unseen) but the resurrection of the material body (the seen) in incorruptibility.
Christian reality consists of two interconnected, interfacing halves, hence this earth (the seen/empirical/material dimension) is really a theater and men live out their lives on its stage being observed by other men (the seen) and by the living, personal God and Angels (the unseen).
Men cannot see God and very rarely do they see Angels but they can see and hear us. God tests our hearts, knows our secrets, motives, and thoughts (Psa. 17:3; 44:21; 139: 1-4) and both righteous Angels and malevolent fallen Angels and demons are all around us, watching, listening, helping if righteous, if not then leading men astray, inflating and enflaming passions, blinding and corrupting minds, teaching one-dimensional views of reality and other persuasive thoughts into the minds of men.
With this in mind we can understand why Guenon described James as an unconscious Satanist: James radical empiricism posits a one-sided view of reality that blinds him to the actual though unseen presence and influence of hostile beings.
It is also with this in mind that we can understand why God holds all 'teachers'---be they priests, ideologues, philosophers, prophets, scientists such as Dawkins and Sagan, etc.---to higher levels of accountability.