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As best I can tell, James defends an individualist view of religion in Varieties in at least four distinct senses. , are typically based upon the immediate or direct religious experiences of their founders and live at second-hand upon them (VRE, 33). , on the basis of direct personal religious experiences (VRE, 59). (7) Religious doctrines or “formulas” (as well as such enterprises as philosophical theology and the development of religious philosophies) depend upon religious feeling, insofar as there would be no motive for developing such doctrines or formulas in the absence of such feelings (VRE, 341–42).

28 Reconsidering James’s account of religion to and independent of human thought and action. That order consists of the social and cultural world that is a product of history” (p. 85). ’ The moral order consists of what men and women have put there, of Geist, and the proper way to study it is through the humanities and social sciences, especially history” (p. 92). It is not entirely clear to me, however, how one might make an argument in support of the claim that an unseen order does not exist that does not already presuppose that claim, and it is perhaps telling that when he makes such assertions Proudfoot does not argue for them.

Rejection of essentialist and sui generis conceptions 21 knowledge, no definition of religion satisfies or is agreed upon by all scholars of religion – it constitutes yet one more piece of evidence that his account of religion is not merely concerned with “feeling” or personal religious experience. In light of these considerations, then, what considered view should we take of James’s religious individualism? In order to answer this question, we first need to specify in what sense or senses James was a religious individualist.