In December 1899 when James wrote to Frances Morse of the pair of “bully volumes” he intended for his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, he indicated that the second course was to be his own last will and testament, “setting forth the philosophy best adapted to normal religious needs.” When he died in August 1910, having just returned from a trip to Europe, it was not obvious that James had delivered the metaphysical text promised to his colleagues and friends for so many years. Although one might reasonably debate which of the achieved texts from the first decade of the 1900s is closest to fitting the bill, I hope that I have allayed doubts that by 1910 James had sought to fulfill at least the spirit, if not the letter, of his pledge to produce a metaphysical philosophy adapted to human religiousness as he understood it. Philosophically comprehending that “piecemeal supernaturalism” so tantalizingly beckoned to in the postscript to Varieties has in many respects been both the catalyst and the impetus for this book.

Up to this point I have pursued two different but interrelated methodological programs, one historical and the other systematic. By attending anew to the historical development of James's thought through the last two decades of his life, it has been possible to see with greater clarity not only what his various views were, but also what many of his concerns were in coming to hold them. In chapter 2, his interest in metaphysics as he understood it as well as the specific formulations he embraced in radical empiricism were seen to arise significantly out of his dissatisfaction with the philosophical implications of his own psychological formulations.