ABSTRACT
William James was born in New York on January 11 1842, the first son of Mary and Henry James. His grandfather, also called William, had amassed a large fortune after emigrating from Ireland in the eighteenth century, and a portion of this wealth passed to Henry. After a rather unsettled youth and a period of training in theology Henry James devoted himself to writing on philosophical and theological topics. He became a disciple of Swedenborg and produced articles and pamphlets on the subject. His conversion to Swedenborgianism seems to have been triggered by a vivid hallucinatory experience, later diagnosed in Swedenborgian terms as a ‘vastation’. This dramatic episode, and a subsequent period of serious depression, were later mirrored in some similar, equally dramatic, experiences of William James himself.1 Although they did not result in William’s conversion to Swedenborgian doctrines they nevertheless had a profound effect on his later life and thought. In a more indirect way this was true as well of Henry’s influence on his son. William retained a deep and lifelong commitment to religious belief2 which was manifested most publicly in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. In that work there are clear echoes of Swedenborgian doctrine, and in William’s later edition of a collection of his father’s writings there is a recognition of his father’s influence.
