Distinctly recall a Quentin Blake illustration for this one, too!

Seconded, I adored my Milligan anthology as a kid - definitely remember this from that.

I think scholars like

• Josephson-Storm (looking unflinchingly at the esoteric/religious/etc historical roots of the secular humanities), or

• Kripal (poking at the limits of what the humanities are permitted to think about)

speak to the same tensions found by those working in “theology-and-X”

Fabulous! I’m thinking a bit about ethics and epistemic “limits” in Woolf’s essays at the moment, as well as (separately, for now) the eternal question of how to understand “moments of being” - so this look like it’ll be an interesting read!

No conclusion here other than: if you read enough of his essays, you eventually fall in love with William James.

When you get that intimacy with his work, even his comparatively dry - and occasionally catty! - writing like the Psychology harbours flashes of that depth of spirit which animates him.

James’ critique here is the flipside of his famous argument in The Will to Believe - unfounded beliefs are defensible because we can only pursue the truth via “living hypotheses”.

Ideas that try to *contain* contraction & paradox, relegating them to the edges, halt that pursuit.

The same impulse that rejects ideas which act as rhetorical stopgaps leads James to be profound generous towards risky intellectual or spiritual enterprises.

James here valorises a certain restlessness to thought. He’s deeply suspicious of any satisfying answers reached by logic alone, yet likewise wary of an unreflective empiricism that refuses to think deeply and openly.

James comes at it slightly differently. Spencer’s whole project aims to rationally explain the symmetry between knowable realities disclosed by science & unknowable realities intuited by religion.

For James, this amounts to *explaining them away*: assuming both human mastery & ineffable mystery.

This points to Spencer’s role as an ambivalent cypher for different strains of British thought.

Religious critics attacked his agnosticism - i.e. mechanical metaphysics with “the Unknowable” at its core - as coded materialism, while secular critics read it as coded “mysticism”.

Another interesting aspect is James’ characterisation of Spencerian “awe” at the Unknowable.

Despite James’ reputation for intellectual charity to the point of credulity - and Spencer’s for the dullest, driest sort of materialism - James attacks Spencer as *too sentimental*, for a failure of nerve.

(Spencer’s contemporary neglect is warranted insofar as he’s a piss-poor philosopher, yet it’s difficult to overstate his influence and fame in the late 19th/early 20th century.)

There’s some interesting points about James (unstated) invocation of Spencer.

Today mostly read as a niche historical curiosity or a source of scientific racism, Spencer (though James can’t stand him) here represents a major tendency in contemporary thought, with the stature of an English Hegel.

(James would later formalise this critique of what he calls “intellectualism” in A Pluralistic Universe. There, he explicitly argues that materialism is merely another form of Idealism.)

Both Hegel’s idealist vision of synthesis towards “the Absolute”, and Spencer’s mechanistic reduction down to “the Unknowable” are, for James, the same intellectual vice:

faced with scientific or metaphysical aporia, they invent solutions to satisfy intellectual discomfort.

I’d never thought of that actually… 🤔

Sounds like a fabulous paper!

But if you did want to dive into that thread about perplexity at source, introduces in Being and the Between, and goes into it more in Perplexity and Ultimacy.