Ignorance Clad In Authority: William James, The Cult of Scientism, and the Will to Believe

“A lot of what you're seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci in the summer of 2021. In a more recent interview with the BBC (December 2023), Fauci explained that practicing Catholicism was something he “doesn’t really need to [do],” as his “own personal ethics on life are [...] enough to keep [him] going on the right path.”

This divide between religion and science has a long history, but by 1874, the once-happy marriage was finalizing its divorce. The English-American scientist, John W. Draper, noted at the time, “There is a great and rapidly increasing departure from the public religious faith [...] The time is rapidly approaching when it will give rise to serious political results.”

As William James, the father of American Psychology, noted: “Religion and science, each verified in its own way, from hour to hour, and from life to life, would be co-eternal,” if they could be harmonized. “After all,” thought James, “may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality?”

In 1874, James had just returned to Cambridge (Massachusetts) after living in Europe for a year. He arrived just before the 223rd Commencement at Harvard, where he was to begin his first year of teaching. The ceremony was notable, as Harvard Divinity School relaxed its proscription on James’s godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and invited him to speak on the campus after three decades.

“Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance,” Emerson “blasphemously” stated in his Divinity School Address (1838.) “Divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.” The newspapers during the commencement season of 1874 stated that all of America’s colleges were sectarian but noted this had “little influence” on the young men, and “for all practical purposes, the instruction they afford [was] purely secular.”

Nevertheless, a new “sacerdotal” monopoly was on the rise, and an alarming trend among scientists to occupy a role more akin to a dogmatic cleric than an objective pedagogue. These scientific men “obey[ed] the current, cut loose from the old traditions of taking things piecemeal, and contentedly ignor[ed] much,” committing themselves to “vast theories which, whether true or false, [stood] at least as much unverified [...] as any of the theosophies of the past.”

What separated the religion of the open-air preachers in Boston Common and the science of the professors in their classroom often was little more than sanctioned authority. These priests of scientism propounded their beliefs like street preachers as though they were established truths, and like street preachers, they represented but one of several “equally unverified conceptions.” The leaders of the scientific fields rallied “the faithful around them” by ringing their slogans and checked all opposition and criticism in advance by labelling it “Ecclesiasticism” (the dreaded word.) “It behoves every clear-headed guide of public opinion,” thought James, “to insist as loudly as he can upon the truth that in these perilously recondite regions, no man’s authority is worth a jot.”

By the late 1880s, American medical doctors began appealing to state legislatures for restrictive licensure laws that would effectively end the legal practice of traditional medicine, and “mental healing” or “faith healing.” More than a few people were wary of such legislation of authority. James voiced his own concerns in a speech delivered at Yale in 1896.

“The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived,” said James. “Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique; her so-called method of verification, and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all.”

James would have another opportunity to state his case two years later when the Massachusetts State Board of Registration in Medicine drafted a proposed bill that “sought to put an end to medical frauds and to require an examination of all those claiming to practice medicine.”

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest against this bill,” said Professor William James before the committee in Boston’s new State House. It was March 2, 1898, and the lofty corridors were perfumed with the chill of New England winter. “I come to represent no body of persons with special interests but simply as a private citizen interested in good laws and in the growth of medical knowledge. The medical profession are urging the bill in the interests, as they believe, of true science. Those who oppose it, they think, can do so only in the interests of ignorance and quackery. I hold a medical degree from Harvard University. I belonged for many years to the most scientific of our medical societies. I have taught Anatomy and Physiology and now teach Mental Pathology, in Harvard College. The presumption is that I am also interested in science. I am indeed, and it is, in fact, because I see in this bill a movement in favour of ignorance that I am here to oppose it.”

A spiritually-inclined scientist, and scientifically-inclined “spiritualist,” James was concerned that America was quickly reaching a point when no student of science or letters would be considered “respectable” unless they had some kind of “badge” or “diploma” stamped upon them. It was time for Harvard and similar institutions to seriously examine this “grotesque tendency before it was too late.”

“It will inevitably trammel the growth of medical experience and knowledge,” James continued. “Were medicine at present a finished science, with all practitioners in agreement about methods of treatment, such a bill as this, to make it penal to treat a patient without having passed an examination, would be unobjectionable. But it would also be unnecessary. No one would attempt to cure people without the instruction required. But the present condition of medical knowledge is widely different from such a state. Both as to principle and as to practice, our knowledge is deplorably imperfect. The whole face of medicine changes unexpectedly from one generation to another, in consequence of widening experience; and as we look back, with a mixture of amusement and horror, at the practice of our grandfathers, so we cannot be sure how large a portion of our present practice will awaken similar feelings in our posterity.

“Each generation adds something, it is to be hoped, to the treatment that will not pass away. Some of these therapeutic methods arose inside the regular profession, others outside of it. It stands firm in its belief that such experience is worthless and that the whole history is one of quackery and delusion. In spite of the rival schools appealing to experience, their conflict is much more like that of two philosophers or two theologies. Your experience, says one side to the other, simply isn't fit to count.

“So we have great schools of medical practice, each with its well-satisfied adherents, living on in absolute ignorance of each other and of each other's experience. How many of the graduates, recent or early, of the Harvard Medical School have spent twenty-four hours of their lives in experimentally testing homoeopathic remedies, or seeing them tested? A large number of our citizens, persons as intelligent and well-educated as you or I, persons whose number seems daily to increase, are convinced that they do achieve them and are persuaded that a valuable new department of medical experience is by them being opened up."

“One would suppose that any set of sane persons interested in the growth of medical truth would rejoice if other persons were found willing to push out their experiences in the mental-healing direction, and provide a mass of material out of which the conditions and limits of such therapeutic methods may at last become clear. One would suppose that our orthodox medical brethren might so rejoice; but instead of rejoicing, they adopt the fiercely partisan attitude of a powerful trades union demanding legislation against the competition of the ‘scabs.’ They summon the state to disregard absolutely all the peculiar conditions under which the mental healing operations flourish today, and to say to the mind curers, ‘Pass our State examinations, or go to our State’s prison.’ Abstractly it sounds magnificent to say that our State protects its citizens against the ignorance of practitioners,” James continued. “In the living concreteness of the matter, however, not only is such a claim an utter farce.”

Who could claim the right to legislate belief? While James was giving his testimony, for example, a teacher in Georgia named Virginia Moore was forced to resign because, being a follower of (Mary Baker Eddy’s) Christian Science, refused the compulsory vaccination ordinance.

“A people that love quacks will have them laws or no laws. Instead of crying out for legal protection, the medical profession ought to educate the people better. They must remember that the aversion which they find in the public, and from which they suffer, has historic roots. The history of medicine is a really hideous history, comparable only with that of priestcraft. Ignorance clad in authority, and riding over men’s bodies and souls. Let modern medicine dispel all those inherited prejudices by living the historic memories down. It may well be questioned whether a regime of license and monopoly will hasten that even as much as one of freedom and conciliation.”