Embodiment, Divinity, and New Theological Directions in William James and Ralph Barton Perry

Abstract

In his innovative and creative attempt to reconcile empiricism and religion, William James made the case for finite theism and a pluralistic conception of the cosmos involving overlapping minds of several scales. In doing so, James also cautioned against abandoning functional psychology in favor of what he called entitative points of view. In his work, Ralph Barton Perry critiqued James for understating the role of embodiment in cognition. In Perry’s view, the central role the body plays in cognition suggests that so-called social or composite minds lack integration and are thus cognitively inferior to embodied minds. However, Perry also believed that the emergent character of embodied cognition provides grounds for an alternative, humanistic spirituality. In this article, I compare James and Perry on theology, and I argue that Perry’s concerns about the importance of embodiment in cognitive integration help illuminate a tripartite distinction between what I call impersonal, subpersonal, and personal theologies that scholars looking for more embodied approaches to theology would do well to consider.

1. Introduction

For several decades now, cognitive science and philosophy of mind have witnessed a resurgence of interest in embodiment, with practitioners advocating for theses of various strengths. According to many theorists, cognition is radically embodied (e.g., Varela et al. 1992). Of course, philosophical or metaphysical materialists have long maintained that cognition is embodied. What embodied theorists add is the view that cognition is not neurophysiologically bounded (e.g., Clark 2008). In this view, cognition does not occur exclusively within the brain or even the broader nervous system (e.g., Noë 2009). To be sure, philosophical or metaphysical dualists have long championed the view that cognition is not neurophysiologically bounded, and something similar might be said for the world’s monistic traditions. For example, the yogic view of Self in Hindu tradition has also denied that cognition is neurophysiologically bounded, but this view has maintained that conscious states are ultimately attributable only to God and thus lie beyond both body and mind (e.g., Larson 2013). Radical embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind maintains that cognition is not neurophysiologically bounded, but that it is physiologically grounded in a broader, more expansive sense. The popularity and promise of radical embodied approaches raise several questions about religion, particularly insofar as many religious traditions have often emphasized the transcendent and otherworldly.

My view is that as religious studies scholars and theologians come to grapple with burgeoning paradigms in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, they would do well to consult those historical philosophical traditions that have already grappled with the problem of religion and embodiment. As I will demonstrate, American philosophy, particularly philosophers operating in or near American pragmatism, have long been concerned with embodiment and the challenges embodiment presents to religion. Chief among these philosophers is the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, who has long been considered one of the founding figures in functional psychology and who was at least occasionally taken to have advocated a view near to behaviorism, although James and his students clearly advocated a less reductionist view compared to Watson and Skinner (e.g., Perry 1921, pp. 100–2). As I will explain, James was predominantly concerned with how to reconcile science and religion, and as a trained physiologist, James was especially attentive to the ramifications of embodiment for religious belief. For James, this tension was ultimately navigated by the adoption of a distinctive methodology and a process ontology supporting it. In James’ view, this ontology was worked up in a pluralistic universe in which minds of various scales could interact and compound. However, James’ reconciliation was not without its critics. One often overlooked criticism came from one of James’ own students, Ralph Barton Perry, who in many ways took up James’ philosophical project. Perry argued that James’ view of consciousness ultimately overlooked the important integrating role of the body and the nervous system. According to Perry, cognitive integration in embodiment also made it unlikely that the cosmos could be given a description in terms of compounded forms of consciousness of ever higher scales as James suggested. Nevertheless, Perry was adamant that the emergent character of embodiment might provide some hope for a conception of immortality and a broader, progressive view of theology in general.

In what follows, I examine these positions and this debate and ask what contemporary scholars might learn from James and Perry. I start with an outline of James’ empirical approach to psychology, how this approach informed his empirical account of theology and religion, and how James came to the view of the cosmos as enveloping minds of various scales. I argue that James’ pluralistic universe is the outcome of his effort to reconcile science and religion and that it is particularly attuned to issues of embodiment. I then examine Perry’s criticism of James’ view of consciousness, how this criticism leads to a critique of James’ theology, and the humanistic alternative Perry put in its place. I then examine what lesson contemporary scholars might take from James and Perry. I argue that Perry’s critique of James helps illuminate a tripartite distinction between what I call impersonal, subpersonal, and personal theologies. I contend that the notion of a subpersonal theology is often overlooked and that it can be understood as accounts of the divine that do not posit the primary importance of psychological states. I contend that such a theology can recognize Perry’s concern about embodiment and the manner in which embodiment points to the importance of antecedent conditions that enable the emergence of psychological states, including in the divine. I close with some questions about the justification of this approach and what further ramifications such an approach might have for theology.

2. James’ Pluralistic Reconciliation of Physiological Psychology and Theology

In the opening pages of his magisterial work The Principles of Psychology, James ([1890] 1983) notes that the earliest efforts to understand mental life attributed psychological phenomena to “a simple entity, the personal Soul.” This view, which James describes as a scholastic view, is rivaled by associationism, which posits “discrete ‘ideas’” and “their cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succession” (p. 15). The scholastic view is explanatorily impoverished because it merely posits a faculty for every mental operation and does not explain the concrete facts. For instance, James asks of memory, “why should this absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those of an hour ago?” (p. 16). Similarly, James thinks that associationism fails to explain how ideas “get their fantastic laws of clinging” (p. 17). For James, the solution is to recognize the essential role of the body, and in particular, the brain, which James describes as “the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations.” However, to this, James adds that “[m]ental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a parte post” (p. 18). In fact, James says that the “boundary line of the mental is certainly vague.” In his view, “minds inhabit environments which act on them on and on which they in turn react” (p. 19). Thus, James says that “mental life seems to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world” (pp. 19–20). Of course, mental life is not merely reactive. If so, mental life would be indistinguishable from inorganic events. Rather James says that “pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are…the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon” (p. 21).

In his philosophical work, James refers to this view of cognition as a view patterned after reflex action. In “Reflex Action and Theism,” James ([1897] 1979b) says that this is the view that “the acts we perform are always the result of outward discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges are themselves the result of impressions from the external world, carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves” (p. 91). However, James is also clear that this applies to all action, “even the most deliberately weighed and calculated” (pp. 91–92). Thus, James says that “[t]here is no one of those complicated performances in the convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond, which is not a mere middle term.” In fact, James says that “the nervous system is in fact a triad” (p. 92). For this reason, James speaks of three departments of mind. The first department is sensory and thus takes stock of what James calls “the facts of nature.” The second department is the middle term of thought and involves what James calls “the theoretic elaboration.” The third department concerns action or what James describes as “volitional nature” (p. 101).

For James, this view has a fideistic upshot. In James’ view, the advanced second department in human cognition is owed to “incidental complications to our cerebral structure,” and its products are thus “secondary and brain-born kind” (p. 143). In this way, James’ physiological psychology is deeply informed by evolutionary biology. In all cognitive creatures, cognition follows the reflex pattern and thus follows the pattern of what James calls “a loop” (p. 92). Cognition involves the selection of actions that facilitate the successful completion of the end of action. However, in less complex forms, cognitive selection hews closer to sensation and actions whereas in more advanced forms, cognitive selection is less immediately coupled to its sensory triggers and action potentials. For example, a dog trying to retrieve a treat from inside a toy is more constrained by its immediate perception and the actions that more closely align with the success of its governing tendency. Thus, the dog paws, chews, and nudges at the toy in hopes of freeing the treat. By contrast, the human being can think to retrieve a tool such as a knife to free the treat even though the use of the knife itself is not an immediate trigger of mastication and the retrieval of the tool might even mean walking away from the object of concern. For James, the importance of this conception of cognition is that it means that thinking is loosely tethered to its sensory trigger and to the actions that make verification possible. As James says, in complex thought, we break out the objects of sense impression and connect them “with others far away” (p. 95). In doing so, we venture beyond our initial evidence and thus in theoretical cognition, the “whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in” (p. 98).

In this way, James thinks that a biologically and physiologically informed conception of cognition points away from what we could call strict proportional evidentialism, the view that all rational beliefs are strictly proportioned to the available evidence. In his earlier work, James was quite voluntarist, as he claimed that there are “passional tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief” (p. 20). However, in his later work, James ([1909] 1977) claimed that “[o]ne’s general vision of the probable” informs faith ventures (p. 148). In fact, as James ([1911] 1979a) described what he called the “faith ladder” in his later work, he outlined a process in which one moves from clear evidential constraints represented by such thoughts as “It may be true” to more abductive considerations such as “it is fit to be true” (p. 113). In one description, James ([1909] 1977) even says “something persuasive in you whispers” as a decisive moment in the adoption of a belief (p. 148). This latter description suggests that James moved away from a more austere form of voluntarism to a relaxed form of evidentialism, in which faith venturing is nonetheless permissible.

Such an interpretation is supported by James’ concern with religious experience. In Pragmatism, James ([1907] 1975) says “I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences” (p. 56). This search for an evidential basis of religious belief makes sense if the mind is patterned after a reflex arc in which thought is a middle term both propelled by incoming sensory evidence and pulled by volition. In fact, as we look closer at James’ treatment of the evidential value of religious experience, James treats religious belief as both evidentially grounded and faith-venturing. For example, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James ([1902] 1985) says that religious experiences support the belief that there is a “‘MORE of the same quality’ with which our own higher self appears…to come into harmonious working relation,” but he also adds that when it comes to answer questions about “what form should we conceive of that ‘union’…the various theologies perform their theoretic work” (p. 401). This description of theology as theoretic work is telling because, as we have seen, James thinks that theorizing is the place in which cognition plays looser with its evidential base. In this way, James came to adopt the view that there is an evidential basis for theism and that the conceptual elaboration of this basis is a faith-venture.

Of course, given James’ view that appropriate faith-venturing is evidentially constrained, the question thus became how to reconcile theism with the scientific worldview of the turn of the 20th century. James was adamant in his belief that contemporary science made perfect being theism and traditional religious faiths such as Christianity improbable. He recognized that many perfect being theists remained and that many maintained evolution was simply the creative means God chose, but James ([1907] 1975) dismissed such a position as the product of “one stage of concession after another” (p. 16). James also saw the phenomenology of religious experience as suggesting a relation between human beings and the divine that traditional theism with its conception of a purely spiritual and transcendent being fit poorly with. As James ([1909] 1977) says, “to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it” (p. 16). Instead, James entertained the speculative view of the cosmos as consisting of overlapping forms of consciousness. However, even here James ([1912] 1976) insisted that one “distinguish the functional from the entitative point of view, and…not treat the minor consciousness under discussion as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones consist” (p. 67).

3. Perry’s Realistic Humanism

A student of William James, Ralph Barton Perry was a constant advocate of James’ philosophy. In fact, Perry won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of James (Williams 1958–1959). However, Perry was also a powerful thinker in his own right and while his advocacy for James is undeniable, there are also signs of contrast between the two. One place where there is both considerable overlap and disagreement concerns their respective metaphysics of mind. Perry shared James’ emphasis on empiricism and the empirical study of cognition. Perry was critical of what he called introspective theories of consciousness. In fact, Perry (1909) believed that the view that one’s mind is “accessible only to itself…to be the greatest present obstacle to the clear and conclusive definition of mind” (p. 29). In Perry’s view, minds are “intersecting rather than exclusive systems” (p. 31). In many cases, such as two persons dealing with a shared object, the content of one’s mind is readily perceptible (p. 32). In other cases, the contents of one mind may be hidden from another mind, but Perry says that this is simply because the cognitive event does not occur on the periphery of one’s body (p. 34). However, in general, Perry thinks that even thought of displaced events, such as memories, are facilitated by the nervous system, that the nervous systems’ operations are reproduced in various instances, and that observation of this process is possible in principle. Such observations might be complicated to perform, but Perry says that “all things are difficult to observe under certain circumstances.” In his view, all one’s access to one’s own cognition amounts to is an inductive privilege: “certain data can be collected more conveniently” by one mind itself than by another mind (p. 35). However, this does not mean that one mind’s access to itself is metaphysically privileged or that introspection is the only means of mental observation. Introspection can be convenient, but Perry ([1912] 1929) contends that “while introspection is the best method of collecting cases of mental content, it is the poorest method of denning their nature” (pp. 276–77). The introspective method can provide a stock list of mental items, such as feelings, desires, and ideas, but it does not tell us what these things are.

In Perry’s ([1926] 1967) view, the superior methodological alternative to introspection is “Behaviorism” which he says is “simply a return to the original Aristotelian view that mind and body are related as activity and organ” and that “the activities of mind…are observable and describable functions of the physical organism” (p. 142). Perry observes that behaviorism is often objected to on the grounds that it leaves out consciousness, but he insists that the behaviorist recognizes consciousness “as a group of facts, as something that exists and happens” (p. 143). It is here that Perry is critical of James. James’ reconciliation of religious experience and contemporary science led him to the view that the cosmos could be described in terms of higher and more enveloping forms of consciousness. To account for this possibility in a broadly functional perspective, James ([1912] 1976) developed what he called “a philosophy of pure experience” (p. 42). According to this view, pure experience is the “one primal stuff or material in the world” (p. 4). How precisely James conceived of the nature of this pure experience “stuff” is somewhat murky. Perry (1948) contended that James had meant to abandon idealism altogether with the notion and to advocate something closer to neutral monism than panpsychism (pp. 278–79). However, many contemporary scholars, such as Cooper (2002), interpret James as a panprotophenomenalist (p. 67). As Perry ([1912] 1929) notes in this view, “mental action [is defined] in terms of the feeling of bodily activities” (p. 285). Perry’s problem with this view is that it does not explain the nature of consciousness and thus cannot claim to have “greatly improved upon idealism” (p. 279). Thus, Perry prefers to identify consciousness with “the bodily action itself” (p. 285).

At the same time, Perry clearly means to embrace the functionalism James first outlined in his psychology. Perry ([1926] 1967) recognizes the evolutionary conception of adaptation, which he defines as “the possession by the organism of a complementary fitness to its environment which enables the organism to survive” (p. 164). However, Perry thinks that this conception does not illuminate the nature of cognition, and that it suggests that consciousness and life are more coextensive than Perry assumes it to be. For Perry, the crucial factor that is “the contribution of mind, is control by anticipation” (p. 176). Cognition consists not just in “organization and adaptation, but re-organization, and re-adaptation” (p. 177). Intelligence or cognition involves “a capacity for prospiciently determined action,” or what H.S. Jennings calls “reaction to representative stimuli” (p. 178). For example, Perry says the “dog who anticipates a beating is not merely behaving in a way that averts a beating, but is in some measure presently enacting the behavior appropriate to the possible future beating which the whip represents to him” (p. 179). It is here that Perry thinks psychology emerges from biology. In Perry’s view, emergence is a phenomenon in which “synthetic properties are predictable neither from the constituents severally, nor from any prior and more general principle of synthesis” (pp. 151–52). An emergent phenomenon is “consistent with preceding principles, although independent of them in the sense of not being implied by, or deducible from them” (p. 152). In this way, Perry thinks that the teleological bent of cognition is consistent with mechanistic integration: a suitably arranged system of components parts can give a rise to a novel property such as goal-directedness. However, for Perry, the term “mechanism” simply refers to a system’s “composition and structure” (p. 152). Thus, Perry should not be taken to be advocating an overly reductive, deterministic, or purposeless view of cognition. In fact, when the New Realist movement of which Perry was a part outlined their view, they included an essay from Edward Spaulding, in which Spaulding claimed that the realist view is that the organism is “not-pure mechanism” (Holt et al. 1912, p. 247).

In Perry’s view, the governing principles of emergent psychological phenomena are behavioristic, but given the negative connotations that attach to this movement today, it is probably better to emphasize Perry’s use of the term “motor affective.” In fact, Perry was quite critical of what today is most readily recognized as behaviorism. For example, Perry says that appeals to “pleasureableness and painfulness” in many accounts commit “the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius, since feeling still remains the most unsettled province of psychology,” and he is also critical of Watson’s “excessively simplified” view that explains cognition “in terms of habit-formation” (p. 187). In their place, Perry posits a “motor-affective” view of cognition guided by what he calls “a governing propensity, or determining tendency” (p. 183). According to this view, an organism is motivated by a particular end and selects various actions insofar as they lead to or agree with this end. As an example, Perry cites Thorndike’s experiment in which a hungry kitten is placed in a box it must escape from by maneuvering a latch to retrieve a bit of fish. The kitten selects a series of actions in its attempt to escape until over several trials it immediately begins to maneuver the latch. In this case, the kitten has a determining tendency or “higher or selective propensity” to satisfy hunger and it selects a “subordinate act” until it achieves the end of that propensity (p. 185). For Perry (1921), this view coheres with James’ original empirical view that “selection, interest or purpose is the essential and distinguishing feature of mind” (p. 100).

As Perry ([1926] 1967) sees it, this view closes “the gap between man and nature…created by man’s pride in himself and widened by the misguided indulgence of metaphysics and religion” (p. 183). However, this is not to say that Perry was altogether dismissive of religious interest. In his earlier work, Perry ([1912] 1929) rejected naturalism on the grounds that success in physics presupposed mathematical realism, and that ethics and logic suggest that “science is not all of truth, nor physical nature all of being” (p. 108). In his later work, Perry (1954) argued instead that nature “embraces ideal ends or purposes” and that the “natural interest has its ideal object as truly as—together with other natural existents—it has its logical and mathematical form” (p. 454). Nevertheless, Perry argued that the essential feature of cognition or interest “projects itself into the future” and explains the human longing for God and immortality by reference to its commitment to the continuation and maintenance of its objects (p. 482). For Perry, the possibility of immortality receives “[s]ome empirical support…from the abandonment of the older materialistic conception of the body.” Given that personal identity consists in “identity of content selected and organized by interest,” Perry says, “a particular body is expendable” and that it is “conceivable that another body could do its work” (p. 483). What precisely Perry means by this is difficult to say. Perhaps here Perry is referencing the emergent character of cognition, and he means to suggest that interest can detach itself from its physical base and assume another base, but in that case, Perry would be advocating a view that reads a lot like emergent dualism. In his earlier work, Perry ([1912] 1929) emphasizes what he calls “moral causality” (p. 341). He says that “interests operate, that things take place because of the good they promote” (p. 342). He says that consciousness “does actually make things good” (p. 346). Perhaps what Perry means is that the emergent interest in a future bodily existence might actually make it the case that there is such a body. However, in his later work, Perry (1954) says that “the realization of the object of his interest with his own consummatory act…is not necessary” (p. 482). Perry also says that “God can…be identified with man’s moral and spiritual history,” that “[t]his ideal is an actual force,” and that “the name ‘god’” can be given to “the good will and aspiration to perfection which here and there, now and then, fugitively and precariously, have emerged from the flux of existence” (p. 481).

For this reason, I think it is probably more accurate to describe Perry’s personal view as far more humanistic than James’, although it seems equally correct to say that Perry wants to leave open the possibility of a more modest theism and subjective immortality. In any case, it seems clear to me that Perry is moving away from James’ brand of theology. One reason to think that this is the case comes from Perry’s critical treatment of the social mind hypothesis, a treatment that predates and is arguably more sophisticated than (Gale 1999, pp. 270–71). Perry (1922a) says that there are five possible characters that might be applied to collections or groups: (1) class, (2) whole, (3) individual, (4) system, and (5) compound (p. 567). Perry ([1926] 1967) defines a class as “an aggregate of individuals, of which the same thing is true” (p. 418). He says that just as a human being has a mind, one can truly say that a society is “a class of minds” (p. 419). Perry also says that a society is clearly a whole, which he defines as “an aggregation of individuals such that something is true of the aggregation which is not true of the individuals” (p. 420). However, while we may speak of “certain works of civilization” as the product of “combined aspirations and efforts,” this does not mean that the whole is composed of such things (p. 421). Perry also admits that we can talk about a society as a system spotlighting “the connecting relations rather than…the members so related” (p. 423). Two examples Perry gives are an army which is “a mechanism of inter-changeable parts” and an institution, which is “an abstract system of relations” (p. 424). However, Perry (1922a) notes that when people speak of a social mind, they often mean something like a compound, where the whole has a property that is also attributed to each part (p. 572). Thus, the social mind hypothesis is that a social mind is cognitive or a person just as each individual mind that composes it is cognitive or personal.

Throughout his career, Perry developed two cases against a robust social mind hypothesis, both of which concerned the lack of mechanistic integration in any possible social mind: one focused on unification more generally, the other focused on personality. In the first argument, Perry (1922b) says that every whole has a principle of unity and that this principle can represent lesser or greater functionality (pp. 723–24). In some cases, such as a plant or animal, the whole organism has greater functionality than its members. This is due to the specialization of the parts and their relations. Perry gives the example of the Hydrurus foetidus, an aquatic plant made up of a colony of unicellular algae that “have lost their independence and assumed specialized functions relative to the life of the plant as a whole” (p. 725). Perry contrasts this example with the case of the ant colony, which he says resembles “a gigantic foraminiferous Rhizopod” and which he suggests is closer to a protozoa “than an ant” (pp. 726–27). In Perry’s view, higher functionality is “more unified and more versatile,” by which Perry presumably has in mind the kind of adaptability characteristic of cognition (p. 730). In this way, Perry implies that social groups lack the kind of integration that facilitates such unification and versatility. In his view, quite characteristic of American philosophers, a society is “a plurality rather than…a unity” (p. 732). Even in the case of a group, “you cannot divide a syllogism between three men having the first think the major premise, the second the minor premise, and the third the conclusion” (p. 733). Thus, even if there is some sense in which a social group is a whole, it is “of a type inferior to the best that is typical of [its] human members” (p. 734).

In Perry’s second case against the social mind hypothesis, he returns to the issue of integration but focuses more specifically on personality. In this case, Perry ([1926] 1967) says “society is an integration of mind…but it is not that specific mode of integration or unity which constitutes a person” (p. 433). With this concession, Perry admits that society is an organization of distinct units operating indirectly on the same object, but he suggests that this is cognitively rudimentary as exemplified in the simple case of the shared attention of workers on an assembly line. Perry admits that the concept of a person does not admit of “easy or even of definitive solution” (p. 431). However, Perry thinks that the concept of a personality can be operationalized and that one can develop a cogent case for thinking that society lacks a personality in this sense. He notes a distinction between what he calls “intra-organic” and “inter-organic integration,” and observes that an “organism does not acquire habits as a result of the actions of another” (p. 433). He says that this is also true “of interest or purpose.” One organism cannot act because of the expectations of another, unless it makes that expectation its own. The same is also true of “intermediation of interests.” In order to subordinate one interest to another, both interests must belong to the same organism (p. 434). A society can have intersecting objects of interest. For example, two persons can take an interest in the same object. However, Perry says that this is different from the case in which “acts of interest directly mediate one another.” In Perry’s view, it is this kind of mediation that is characteristic of personality, which he says belong to “one concentric and integumented organism,” which he describes as “a peculiar autonomous system, or field of control…conditioned by one continuous nervous tract having a continuous history” (p. 435).

In developing the former case, Perry (1922b) explicitly contends that the argument casts doubt on Absolute Idealism (p. 727). However, in the development of his second case, Perry extends the target of his criticism to include James. Perry ([1926] 1967) explicitly says that James’ view that “an individual mind is only a sort of trickle from a wider ‘sea’ of consciousness…fails to provide for the unity of personality” (p. 432). Of course, it should be noted that James never staked out any specific position on the nature of the larger consciousness that might populate a pluralistic cosmos. It is also true that James cautioned against treating higher forms of consciousness as somehow constituted materially rather than functionally by lower forms. What James meant with this distinction is admittedly obscure, but presumably James has the contrast between substantialist and process ontologies in mind. Nevertheless, Perry’s arguments cast aspersions on James’ cosmic vision of compounding consciousness. From Perry’s point of view, a universal or earth consciousness possesses less mechanical integration than a human body, as Hume long ago observed in his critique of the teleological argument. Even if such a large-scale unity could be identified and interact non-locally, as perhaps an ant colony does, its non-localization implies a lack of functional subordination, which suggests that larger forms of consciousness are not necessarily higher forms. Thus, while Perry’s critique of the social mind hypothesis might leave open the possibility that there are functional minds of various scales, it suggests that more expansive minds are functionally impoverished compared to more spatiotemporally localized minds. In this sense, Perry offers a more humanistic spirituality than James, and the position he describes as realism implies that James’ reconciliation of science and religion needs to be reconsidered.

4. Impersonal, Subpersonal, and Personal Theologies

Perry’s criticism of James’ theology depends on his contention that the body is the supervenient base of the mind. While Perry does not fully explicate the supervenience relation, it is clear that Perry thinks of the relation in non-reductive terms. However, Perry’s emphasis is also not so much on synchronic composition as it is on diachronic process. For Perry ([1926] 1967), the emergent character of life is captured in its tendency to self-preservation (p. 157). The emergent character of cognition is captured by the elaboration of this tendency into selective adaptability (p. 179). The point I have stressed in the preceding section is the theological upshot of this view. For Perry, the emergent, diachronic character of cognition presupposes an elaborate, continuous process with a mechanically integrated base of sufficiently specialized subcomponents operating through a cascade of local effects. Such a view implies that any large-scale cosmic minds that might exist are functionally impoverished compared to human cognition.

To resist this conclusion, one might reject the contention on which Perry’s case turns. As Perry (1938) himself was well aware, James defended the possibility of human immortality on the grounds that the mind-brain relation was not productive, but transmissive (p. 204). In effect, James was denying the view that the body is the supervenient base of the mind. However, this is not to say that James would outright reject the idea that a body is essential to cognition. James ([1909] 1977) explicitly rejected dualism on the grounds that “the word ‘soul’ is but a theoretic stop-gap—it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy” (p. 95). At the same time, James maintained that consciousness was capable of compounding. On the other hand, as we have seen, James also warned against treating the compounding of consciousness in an entitative rather than functional manner. I suspect that Perry would worry about the internal coherency of these moves. However, I also suspect that what James has in mind here is something close to what Perry describes as mechanistic interaction. The difference is that where Perry locates cognition above the neurophysiological line, James’ view of immortality implies that cognition occurs below the neurophysiological line among the primal, pure experiential stuff. At the same time, James might insist that such stuff is not quite outside of the body or disembodied. The entire point of James’s ([1912] 1976) philosophy of pure experience is that what we think of when we think of the body as a material constitution and what we think of when we think of the mind as a functional set of operations are two different ways of taking the same thing but varying it in “the context in which we find it opportune to consider them” (p. 77). However, if this is the case, one wonders how subjective immortality is possible in this view. James’ empirical psychology combined with his watery metaphors of returning to a mother sea would suggest that either the mortal body is in fact doubled during life or that a spiritual body is inherited upon death.

Whether James’ view is viable is hard to say. It is certainly far more speculative than Perry’s. Of course, a more speculative view can still be true, but one might argue that it is less justified. This was Perry’s position. Perry (1954) agreed that the “difference between mind and body is a difference in the organization” of the two (p. 444). However, Perry pressed this view further into neutral monism than James. As we have seen, Perry ([1912] 1929) worried that James’ view made no advance over idealism (p. 279). While James was arguably unclear about the nature of pure experience, James ([1912] 1976) did also describe his view as “a more comminuted Identitätsphilosophie” (p. 66). Perhaps James would aver, as many contemporary philosophers do, that the experiential character of consciousness is difficult to explicate in terms of organization (Chalmers 1995). The neutral monist response to the so-called hard problem of consciousness is that a physical organization cannot give rise to a mental organization because the two are distinct forms of organization, and that the problem is a by-product of an impoverished categorical scheme (e.g., Silberstein and Chemero 2011).

Whatever the answers to this debate, the theological point that I want to emphasize is that Perry and James are both advocating views in which any consciousness, including divine consciousness, is only possible given various antecedent conditions in a situation of considerable complexity. For James ([1909] 1977), the existence of a divine consciousness is made probable by religious experience (p. 140). Perry (1954) says that the empirical case James has established on the grounds of religious experience is “not to be rejected in advance.” He notes that some contend such experiences can be explained “in terms of abnormal and social psychology,” but he also suggests “a further possibility, which is to substitute the idea of an immanent, for the idea of a transcendent, god; and for the idea of a supernatural and other worldly god, the idea of a natural and worldly god.” Of course, it is here that Perry hedges and says “God can then be identified with man’s moral and spiritual history (p. 481). However, it is important to note that the modest theism Perry entertains is not much different than the theism James seems to affirm. In his empirical study of religious experience, James ([1902] 1985) says that such experiences establish “the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come” (p. 405). As we have seen, in his later work, James ([1907] 1975) says that such experience is evidence for God (p. 56). However, James is clear that the God he believes in is not the traditional conception of the monotheistic traditions, the conception contemporary philosophers of religion recognize as perfect being theism. James ([1909] 1977) says that “there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or knowledge, or in both at once” (p. 141). For James, the central stress was to distinguish this conception from pantheism. James believed that “the older monarchical theism is obsolete or obsolescent,” but then he saw his task of prying apart the more “intimate species” of theism into “one…more monistic, the other more pluralistic in form” (pp. 18–19). Such a view might be worked up in different ways—perhaps into a form of panentheism or a form of neo-Platonism, in which a spatiotemporally finite being is just one primordial force among many. In either case, both James and Perry are entertaining conceptions of a complex divinity, embodied, and satisfying several elaborate (perhaps merely logically) antecedent conditions to possess a consciousness at all.

In my view, the comparison between James and Perry also points toward an underappreciated distinction one might make between various forms of theology. Comparativists have long observed a distinction between personal and impersonal conceptions of the divine. Of course, this distinction has been complicated by the live and ongoing debate between theistic personalists and classical theists (Gasparov 2024). Some classical theists even argue that religious traditions that have long been identified as affirming an impersonal conception of the divine exhibit consider similarity compared to the views of theologians who have operated in traditions that are often identified as personalistic (McNabb and Baldwin 2022). Whatever one thinks of these comparisons, classical theists nonetheless affirm a purely spiritual conception of God. In fact, it is this classical conception that James ([1909] 1977) often describes as dualistic (p. 16). Classical theists have historically affirmed the view that God is both transcendent and immanent, but God’s immanence is construed agentially, not constitutively or functionally (Gasser 2019). Thus, while apophatic theologians might protest or otherwise hedge the description, theistic personalists and classical theists both predominantly explicate divinity agentially or intentionally. Impersonal conceptions of the divine traditionally deny that agency can be attributed to divinity. As Neville (2022) observes, in the impersonal religious traditions of South Asia, agency is considered problematic (p. 23). In any case, my point is that the preceding discussion of the importance of process and embodiment to cognition suggests a middle approach, or what one might describe as a subpersonal conception of divinity, in which intentionality and agency is attributed to the divine, but not pre-eminently. According to such a view, divine cognition and consciousness may emerge as the result of an ideal tendency that precedes divine intentionality and is at least partly responsible for the antecedent organization of the cosmos. Such a view would resemble what Diller (2013) calls end of being theism in some ways but posit a more robust conception of divinity than a mere final cause of the universe (p. 473). Subpersonal theology would also track well with process theology, but it would emphasize the possibility that God is becoming a personal agent in a way that process theology in general does not.

Of course, many questions remain. One such set of questions concerns the motivation for the view. One of the great ironies that emerges from a contemporary retrospective on Jamesian pragmatism and Perry-style realism is the recognition that contemporary philosophy of religion is far more theologically conservative than it was at the turn of the 20th century. James ([1909] 1977) believed that developments in 19th century science had changed the social imaginary and made perfect being theism and traditional religion obsolete (p. 18). When Perry (1914) penned “Contemporary Philosophies of Religion,” he considered only what he called disillusionism, symbolism, idealism, and meliorism. Today, many philosophers take fine-tuning arguments and contemporary cosmology to be a scientific boon for what James and Perry would have regarded as old-fashioned theism. In response, one might contend that a broader, empirically informed abductive case responding to contemporary work on embodiment in cognitive science in conjunction with contemporary cosmology points in the direction of an alternative theism such as panentheism. I also wonder whether Perry’s thoughts about the emergence of life and cognition, together with a subpersonal conception of divinity, might point toward an alternative cosmology between spiritualistic cosmic fine-tuning and brute multiverse selection. Perhaps divine purposiveness and consciousness come apart, and the latter is an effect of the evolution of the former in conjunction with a cosmos whose existence the former helps explain.

Of course, such possibilities raise questions about the larger ramifications for theology. Critics might wonder whether James and Perry are even offering models of God. Diller (2019) has argued that perfect being theism is inessential to theism in general. If so, alternative theism may not be so inhospitable to extant systematic theologies. James might actually be a good example to invoke here. While James ([1907] 1975) took a clearly alternative stance on the nature of God, he also maintained that “we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run” (p. 144). Perry (1954) believed that transcendental religion was morally dangerous because it encouraged an impoverished conception of the good (p. 470). So, there is also reason not to understate the revisionary potential of more embodied conceptions of divinity or the divine, and perhaps there is even reason to prefer that term to the term “God” altogether. On the other hand, I suspect many traditionalists will simply balk at the idea that radical embodied conceptions of cognition call for an abandonment of traditional metaphysical positions, such as substance dualism. After all, some contemporary philosophers believe that emergence in general is friendly to substance dualism (e.g., Hasker 2018). Perhaps a broadening of the supervenient base is less important than some suggest, but I suspect many others will believe that James and Perry are right to suggest that any form of dualism is explanatorily toothless.

5. Conclusions

In this article, I have examined the role embodied, evolutionary accounts of cognition and consciousness played in the work of two American philosophers, William James and Ralph Barton Perry, and how these accounts informed their respective theologies. I have demonstrated the extent to which James and Perry revised theology. As contemporary scholars wrestle with the religious and theological implications of radical embodied cognitive science, my hope is that they will profit from the work of the thinkers who investigated these ramifications before. The consultation of these figures is not just important for the exercising of due diligence in this interdisciplinary area, but a source of fresh perspectives, overlooked possibilities, and puzzles that contemporary scholarship must work through if we are to meet the spiritual and evidential demands of our age.