NP article on William James

[Doug Millison]

[...] In his Edinburgh lectures the son wanted to pay tribute to his
father's blazing conviction that religion was real, while maintaining at the
same time his own modern psychological and philosophical thinking. There was
a Jamesian moment, as it were, because he was undogmatic, not a church
member, not a promoter of any sect. He had impressive scientific credentials
as the author of The Principles of Psychology, the first important American
work in that field; and yet he was extraordinarily willing to pay close and
respectful attention to those who had had religious experiences, however
bizarre they might seem to nonbelievers. [...] In his lectures on religious
experience, James drew on a democratically wide spectrum of material from
saints, philosophers, artists, and ordinary people. The scope of his
believers included Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Christian
Scientists, Transcendentalists, Quakers, Mormons, Mohammedans, Melanesian
cannibals, drug-takers, atheists, and neurotics, including himself concealed
in the guise of an anonymous Frenchman to whom (James later confessed) he
had attributed his own experience of panic fear in the asylum. [...] He
himself had no sense of living commerce with God, and his ultimate belief in
the supernatural came down to his psychologist's confidence that in faith
and in prayer there is some "actual inflow of energy." [...] 
http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/archive/2001/3/strout.html