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dissect, like a sure-handed surgeon, the philosophical wisdom of his age. In his twenty lectures, James rejected the reigning theory of his colleagues, who diagnosed spiritual experience as evidence of a disordered brain and believed that mystics and religious believers were better suited for the asylum than pulpit or pew.Why, he asked, could scientists not envision the world as consisting of “many interpenetrating spheres of reality,” 5 which can have both scientific and spiritual explanations—just as, to day, depression can be explained by both psychotherapy and altered brain chemistry?
    “The first thing to bear in mind,” he warned the august crowd, “is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.” 6
    Then James set out to do what scientists do so well. He categorized. First he analyzed the more common (and less intense) spiritual experience: religious conversion. Drawing from the rich personal stories of Saint Augustine, Leo Tolstoy, John Bunyan, and less famous converts, he concluded that people who had undergone religious conversions had achieved something that most of his intellectual colleagues had not. They had pushed through the angst of a “divided self,” with its disappointments and doubts about the world. They had utterly surrendered themselves, only to find that their divided self had somehow been sewn back together.
    For psychologists, James said, those forces are subconscious; but for the converted, they are supernatural. James himself yearned for, but never found, the transforming spirituality about which he spoke. But, he told his colleagues, he had become persuaded that “twice born” people—those who had been touched and converted by spiritual experience—were the healthiest, not the sickest, among us.
    James then turned his gaze to the spiritual virtuosos: the mystics, who know firsthand “the reality of the unseen.” All mystical experiences share certain common elements, he contended—and his descriptions presaged the words of Sophy Burnham. First, they are ineffable: they cannot be described adequately with words. Second, they have a noetic quality—a truth or deep insight that is truer to the person than the material world itself. The insights may differ from person to person, but there are certain shared threads: the unity of all things, the love of a conscious “other” or God, and the confidence that all is as it should be—as Julian of Norwich voiced it,“all manner of things will be well.” Third, James observed, mystical experiences quickly ebb, usually within a few minutes. Last, these experiences pounce on the mystic: some power outside of the person takes control, pushing the mystic into the passenger’s seat. As James put it,“The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” 7
    After placing mystics under his searching and sometimes critical gaze—for example, he looked dimly at Saint Teresa’s erotic flirtation with God as so much exhibitionism—the Harvard scientist came to an extraordinary conclusion.
    “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different,” he said.
    He went on to write, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” 8
    For many believers then and now, William James had endorsed “God.”At the very least, he had vouched for the mental