Volume 1, Page 64: "The highest centers do probably contain nothing but arrangements for representing impressions and movements, and other arrangements for coupling the activities of these arrangements, which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge occurs."
Page 29: "Can we tell precisely in what the feelings of the central active self consists? When I forsake general principles and grapple with particular it is difficult for me to detect any pure spiritual elements at all."
Page 107: "The currents, once in, must find their way out. In getting out they leave their track. The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or make new ones, and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words, when we call the brain an organ in which currents passing in from the sense organs make paths which do not easily disappear."
The reader will here observe that James refers to motor discharges and brain paths as though he actually believed, or that there was evidence, that such things existed.
All through his works he quotes freely from agnostic and atheistic authors who have been attacking religion for about three hundred years, from which I will copy samples:
Spinoza: "Extension is invisible thought, thought is invisible extension. Man is not free-willed—God neither thinks nor creates."
John Locke: "Whatever any man may know, or reasonably believe in, or even conceive, is dependent on human experience."
David Hume: "Ideas are but weakened copies of impressions."
Herbert Spencer: "No idea or feeling arises save as the result of some physical force expended in producing it."
The teachings of this school of instructors are peculiar, inasmuch as no such ambiguity concerning reason or will power has heretofore been taught at large or sanctioned by any class of instructors in the history of our world. The attempt to shelter under the wing of the ancient Greeks is plainly a misconstruction, for the wise Greek bowed in wonder before unknown cause.