William James saw the human psyche as being awesomely complex. To start off with, he divided it into two selves:
The phenomenal self (the experienced self, the 'me' self, the self as known)

The self-thought (the I-self, the self as knower).

There is the 'ME' which is the objective, detached term that we use -- that we see -- the empirical self. And then there is the 'I' the constant flow of subjective thought that the person has about the self and which makes the person perceive the self, moment per moment, in a certain way:

'Personality implies the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time. Hereafter let us use the words ME and I for the empirical person and the judging Thought.' (James (1890), op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 371.)

The ME self is further divided into three different interrelated aspects….

illiam James was a prominent psychologist and philosopher in the early 20th century. Presently, James' work is outdated, but only in the sense that Galileo's or Darwin's work is outdated. Both Darwin and Galileo were originators in their respective fields. Their work served as a basis for many incredible discoveries and innovations in the modern world. The work of James, too, serves as a foundation for modern science. He is one of the founders of what we currently call psychology and philosophy today ("Significance and Influence," 2002).
James was the originator of "pragmatism," and this new school of philosophical thought was so useful, that it even resonated in the works of such prominent early physicists as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. These men depended upon, "a world of events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating in chance, perpetuated by habits... And transformed….

illiam James, Clifford, And Belief
illiam James' "The ill to Believe" was written in response to an essay on religious belief by illiam Kingdon Clifford. It is worth noting that James himself was a distinguished scholar, and sometime experimenter, on spiritual beliefs, and the author of a capacious and open-minded study of the subject entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience. Clifford provoked a response from James clearly because Clifford's approach is primarily an ethical one: as Clifford states, "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." (James 8). Clifford believes that it is a moral obligation to refuse any belief that lacks sufficient evidence, because in his account belief may behave almost like a virus: Clifford argues that it is a "duty…to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest….

William James offers us a philosophy called Pragmatism which seems designed to steer between previous philosophical positions on what constitutes the truth. For James, a thing is true insofar as it is useful. James would refer, in what seems to be a self-consciously American way of speaking (not unlike Mark Twain), to the "cash value" of an idea -- or as James expounds it "Pragmatism asks its usual question, 'Grant an idea or belief to be true...what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life?"
This is where the applicability of William James' philosophy becomes particularly apparent -- not only is Pragmatism concerned with uses, but it is also concerned with how to maintain a kind of "tough-minded" (in James' words) philosophical stance within "pluralism" or "the pluralistic universe" as James called it. This entails negotiating between multiple truth claims and selecting them on the basis of….

William James' idea of man's religious experience is that man feels God or a spiritual presence in him and that this intuition alone - real as it feels -- is the basis of evidence that a mystical something exists. Congruent to the utilitarianism of James' philosophy, he asserts the cash-value of such belief in that it helps the individual attain a more meaningful life and gives him certain direction and bliss. In this way, interaction with the Divine (or mystical feelings) whether 'real or not that such presence exists -- and it doesn't matter - are important and authentic since they contain instrumental value.
Scientists of the time perceived people who had religious 'experiences' as being, at best, in delirium; at worst, as delusional and insane. James argued that these instances were metaphysical, namely above and beyond physical experience, and could, consequently, not be measured by scientific criteria.

Drawing a distinction….

William James, complete religious experience is far more than simply a theoretical, or abstract living-in -- the moment feeling. For him, religion has to be lived and experienced in a wholesome, holistic manner. It has to be conscious and permeate man's entire being.
James described this in the following way:

If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another. (489)

For James, this "effective occupation" requires experience that is a "full fact":

A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude….

William James' Understanding of the Sick Soul; from the book The Varieties of Religious Experience. The writer of this paper takes the reader to explore the book and then determine how James depicts the process of healing and several other questions. There was one source used to complete this paper.
Conversion Questions

Throughout history, we have studied religious faiths and asked for answers to the most basic of questions. Is there good and evil? Is there an afterlife? How should we be living now to prepare for it? These and other questions are the center of religious debates worldwide some that can get quite heated. William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experiences, addresses this very issue in his works. He explains to the reader what conversion is about in the world of faith and whether or not he believes it to be real or supernatural. Along the way he….

James believed that belief in God could be contemplated in terms of "live and dead hypotheses" (James 2010). He argues that when one is trying to find an argument for God existing or God not existing, we must consider three things: 1) Living or dead 2) Forced or unavoidable; and, 3) Momentous or trivial. He says, "and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind" (2010). For James, a living option is when there are two hypotheses that are "live ones" (2010). He says that if he were to say that someone should become a theosophist or a Mohammedan, the option is probably dead since for that person both hypotheses seem dead. Though if he were to tell a person to be agnostic or be Christian, the person is trained in some way to a follow a….

Free ill and Determinism
hat is free will, according to philosophic interpretations? hat is determinism -- and how is it different from free will? hat do philosophers say about free will and determinism? These questions will be answered in this paper, along with issues that dovetail and provide additional clarification and understanding.

Trinity University's C. Mackenzie Brown, professor of religion, explains one definition: an action is "free" if and only if it's cause is internal to the agent, not external. But, Brown argues, a sneeze has an internal cause, but it's not a free action. So perhaps an action is free only it if is caused by the agent's beliefs and desires" (Brown, 2001). As for determinism: "everything has a sufficient cause," he succinctly states; and a "sufficient cause" is one which is sufficient to ensure that the event in question will indeed take place.

Jean Paul Sartre believed that there is "an….

The elevation of traditionally oppressed minorities also alleviates some of the historical burden placed on American society for their past abuse, in some ways this provides a sort of retrospective reparations for abused minorities. In general Affirmative action has changed the social landscape by allowing the entrance of formerly oppressed minorities to gain entrance into American mainstream society.
If on the other hand Affirmative Action did not exist, an entirely different set of circumstances would be true. Since traditionally oppressed minorities are by and large the worst off economically within our society, they will never have the resources to transform their chain of social oppression. This means that an entrenched cycle of poverty would continue to arise within American society, where the poorest sector would also ethnically reflect African-Americans in particular. Without resources to help themselves escape poverty, the minority population would become poorer and poorer, while the majority would….

William James finds that religious experience is useful on the whole, even amongst the most vital mankind's biological operations, but he also says that this does not make it true. Nevertheless, James presents his own belief, which he does not claim to prove, that religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world. The further limits of our being plunge into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world:"Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whatever it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best" (488).
James states that the conclusions of human nature can be reached through spiritual judgements only. He says that the "visible world is part of a….

In addition, a brief look at his family history is required, because the political fortunes of James Otis' father directly influenced the trajectory of his own career.
James Otis was part of the fifth generation in a family that first arrived in the colonies looking for economic opportunity, and James Otis' grandfather, John Otis III, was the first in the family who went beyond business into politics (aters 1968 & Halko 1969, p. 609-10). In 1760 James Otis was appointed advocate general of the Admiralty Court, which was the court responsible for dealing with smuggled goods seized in the colonies (Hickman 1932, p. 89.) hen the protest launched by the Society for Promoting Trade and Commerce within the Province made its way to court, James Otis would have been responsible for defending the legality of writs of assistance, but instead he resigned his post and took up the cause of….

William Carey -- Father of Modern Missions
William Carey

Britain

Moravians

India

Modern Missions

William Carey, a Baptist preacher, is considered to be the Father of Modern Mission. Carey believed absolutely that the Word of God was to be taken to all nations, devoted his own life to this endeavor, and challenged other believers to engage in this sacred work. In terms of sheer numbers of converts, Carey's accomplishments would be considered small, particularly when measured against the standards in place today. William Carey demonstrated that one man's vision be the catalyst for a movement that will serve God and others in s manner that adheres to the great commission. When Carey first made his ideas about carrying the Word to people around the world, he was told by his ministering peers to sit down and give up the unrealistic and non-mandated idea. But Carey's vision stood fast on the foundation of his spiritual beliefs and….

According to Mctiernan (1997), "James Fenimore Cooper's the Spy is interesting precisely because no genre had yet hardened around spying when he wrote it. Cooper relies instead on the conventions of other genres -- primarily, the domestic romance and the historical adventure, which, unlike spy fiction, did not evolve in part to justify the dishonesty and covert manipulation central to espionage" (3).
As noted above, Cooper was also able to draw on the inspiration of an unspoiled American wilderness that few people today can imagine without his help. It is this aspect of Cooper's early works, perhaps, that continue to make them popular today just as they did in his own time. As Ringe (1962) advises, though, this is unfortunate because Cooper matured as a writer over the years and some of his best work was during the last part of his career. "Ironically, Cooper is best known for what….

In 1682, the Quakers purchased East New Jersey. Penn then sought to extend the Quaker region. The King granted Penn a land charter, the area that is currently known as Pennsylvania, and that charter made Penn a sovereign ruler and the world's largest private landowner. Penn named the region Sylvania, but Charles II changed that to Pennsylvania, to honor Penn's father. (See Jacobson, pp. 43-55).
Pennsylvania was a very interesting colony. First, it guaranteed absolute religious freedom to its inhabitants. Second, it guaranteed the traditional rights of Englishmen. It guaranteed free elections, trial by jury, and freedom from unjust imprisonment. All of these guarantees were contained in Pennsylvania's first constitution, which was written by Penn. Penn also set about establishing a government much like the modern American government, which divided the legislature into two houses, and limited the power of the sovereign. Penn also introduced the idea of constitutional amendments,….