Letter from Friedrich von Hugel to William James

Abstract

A substantial letter from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to William James has recently come to light in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. This letter of May 10, 1909, was initially sent to James along with an inscribed copy of the Baron's two-volume work, The Mystical Element of Religion (1908). In the letter von Hügel acknowledges gratefully his indebtedness to James, especially for the latter's conception of reflex action. An examination of The Mystical Element reveals that von Hügel adapted James's voluntaristic, psychological framework of the reflex arc—sensory intake, reflection, and discharge in action—making the triad a paradigm for a theory of three-stage development in the religious life of the individual, and also for a classification of types of religion and of world religions. Von Hügel expresses in detail appreciation also for certain ideas and insights in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and then proceeds to offer a critique, objecting to James's isolation or “separation of religious experience from its institutional-historical occasions and environment and from analytic and speculative activity of the mind.” He objects also to the subjectivist ramifications of Pragmatism, and laments James's inordinate concern for psychic phenomena and research as offering little of “spiritual or moral value.” James's exclusive concern for “the personal and private” in religion, von Hügel asserts, leads him to abandon his inductive, concrete a posteriori method and to exhibit a reductive a priori conception that neglects corporate religious experience with its institutional influences, disciplines, and responsibilities. Von Hügel shows himself to be closer in all of this to Ernst Troeltsch and Reinhold Niebuhr than to James by reason of the latter's failing actually to deal with the varieties of religious experience, instead presenting it as privatized religion, the consequence in part of the one-eyed approach of pietism and psychology, and in part of a narrow conception of psychotherapy.