ABSTRACT
The cultural and scientific influence of William James has many pathways. Sharp zigzag angles seem to be in tension with another geometric figure to which James was drawn: the spiral. He gives a technical discussion of the spiral in the second volume of The Principles of Psychology , but its shape also poetically evokes an organic pattern, an “ascending circle” that rises from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous evocation of the transparent eyeball in his 1836 essay “Nature” into the many perceptual directions of Emerson’s 1841 essay “Circles”. Daniel Dennett is one of the most prominent and provocative living American thinkers. Dennett is a demystifier in his challenge to certain religious groups that he calls “protectors of mysteries”, whereas James’s concept of radical empiricism allows for a broader plenum of experience than is permitted within a strictly empirical realm, even though his father warned him of the spiritual dangers of such as pursuit.
