Brown, Hunter.  _William James on Radical Empiricism and 
Religion_.  (Toronto:  U. of Toronto Press, 2000). 185pp. Hardback.
  Reviewed by Steve Marsden, sjm4175@unix.tamu.edu, Texas A&M 
University.

         William James is perhaps best known to scholars of comparative 
mysticism as the author of the seminal work in the field, _On the Varieties 
of Religious Experience_.  One of the traits that made James's study of the 
experiential element of religion possible in the age of dogmatic and 
reflexive skepticism in which he lived was an attitude that emerged from 
his Radical Empiricism: a demand that any philosophical truth worthy of the 
name had to account for experience in all its thickness, including the 
often neglected volitional and "subjective" elements.  James's realization 
that feeling and thought are inextricably of one piece, and that logic is 
but a portion of (and not an overwhelmingly large portion of) the complex 
business of forming our beliefs, has led, from his own time to this, to 
pervasive distortions of his position.  The primary element of this 
distortion is to characterize James as recommending the prudential adoption 
of theistic beliefs on the strength of their subjective benefits alone: in 
Morton White's words, James has gained a reputation as a sort of "patron 
saint of wishful thinking." Hunter Brown, in this small volume, sets about 
to offer a much-needed corrective.
         Brown's attack on this position begins with an overview of James's 
philosophy of religion in its complexity and a history of its reception, 
then focuses around two important, somewhat obscure, and often-neglected 
aspects of James's religious thought: the question of the "liveness" of a 
belief and the idea of the "strenuous mood."  The first section, "The 
Woodpecker and the Grub," serves as a solid introduction to the 
complexities of James's thought on religion.  Brown lucidly explains 
James's unique conception of a finite God, an uncertain universe, and of 
the spiritual importance of attending to the concrete facts of the world we 
live in. He focuses on how, for James, real religion was not a prudential 
adoption for the purpose of safety, but rather a, "religion that squares 
with the facts of the world and is 'willing to take the universe to be 
really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 
"no play"' (22).
         The second section of Brown's examination, named after James' 1896 
lecture/essay series _The Will to Believe_, continues to uncover the 
complexities of James's thought via a close examination of James's view of 
'liveness,' and what it is for a belief to be a 'live option.'  Brown 
fairly deftly finds his way among the misleading phrasing,  changes of 
position, and general waffling in the face of questioning that James did on 
the subject of the so-called "will to believe."  His thrust is generally 
that, contrary to the opinion of many of those who hold a prudential 
interpretation of James, "liveness" is only present in those religious 
options in which one has a pre-existing propensity to believe, and thus, 
the "will to believe" is more of a "right to believe" what one believes 
already. James developed his position in the face of those of his 
contemporaries, like William Clifford, who held that a person ought to 
abandon beliefs for which he or she lacked sufficient evidence.
         The third chapter, "Subjectivity and Belief" continues Brown's 
argument, noting that the debate over the "subjectivity" of James's 
position has often failed to recognize that James declined to 
compartmentalize the flow of existence into neat categories of "subjective" 
and "objective," and that in James's schema the elements that we might call 
"subjective" are constrained by the nature of their relationship with and 
responsibility to other elements the flow of experience.  The subjective in 
James is never mere caprice, and doesn't exist either in a vacuum or in an 
exclusive opposition to objectivity.
         Brown concludes with an examination of James's idea of the 
"strenuous mood": the peculiar impetus by which a believer may be driven to 
difficult or dangerous actions in pursuit of their intuitions, in 
connection with their religious beliefs. Brown's argument centers once 
again around disputing a prudential viewshowing that the "strenuous mood" 
is not a desirable state, separable from the beliefs with which it's 
involved, capable of being pursued for its benefits  (as some have implied).
         _William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion_ is concerned 
with a portion of James's philosophy of religion not explicitly connected 
with his treatment of mysticism.  However, I find that the book to be a 
very solid and lucid treatment of James's thought on the problems 
surrounding the adoption or retention of religious belief, and I recommend 
it strongly to any student of religious philosophy who wishes to broaden 
his or her understanding of this most original and complex of  American 
philosophers in all his originality and complexity.