It’s a wonderful lecture, quite a bit better than I remembered.
I’ll just note a few points here, and then see what develops.
A little bit of context. By 1896 James had been teaching psychology at Harvard for twenty years; The Principles of Psychology was published six years before this lecture. Even more than twenty years earlier was the year of the Metaphysical Club, and the volume of essays in which this appears is dedicated to Peirce “to whose philosophic comradeship in old times [some 23 years prior] and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.” He had become professor of philosophy as well some fifteen years before this lecture. The Varieties of Religious Experience was five years away, and the various well-known books on pragmatism more than ten.
In my edition, the lecture is about 30 pages, and the first 20, sections I through VII, he calls introduction. There are then two more sections and he only comes to religion proper in the very last section, the last five pages of the lecture, more or less. If you make it to “If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no further,” you’ve already heard 80% of the lecture.
There is a lot of material, but I believe the key passage comes in about the middle, the end of section VI:
Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought. For us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.
There are things throughout somewhat like arguments, maybe some of them are arguments, but fundamentally I think it is an invitation to a certain way of comporting yourself toward the world, an orientation, what he calls “empiricism” but we would call “pragmatism”.
I’ll add here a longish quote from the preface to the collection of essays in which this appeared, as a summary:
I admit, then, that were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men.
I largely share his view of the world, so I think he gets a lot right in the lecture. Science is an extraordinary achievement, and there’s no question for us, as there was not for James, of rejecting science. But is it the One True Way of forming beliefs? No. There are other ways, and we can look at them, try to understand how they work, and in gaining such understanding take a step toward coming to some kind of an arrangement with science that respects it without mistakenly generalizing it as a model for all legitimate cognition.