speaking of

"I have no authority whatsoever to talk to you about religion and experience [...] It is from this very impossibility of speaking to my friends and to my own kin about a religion that matters to me, that I want to start tonight: I want to begin this essay by this hesitation, this weakness, this stuttering, by this speech impairment. Religion, in my tradition, in my corner of the world, has become impossible to enunciate."

Bruno Latour, "Thou Shall Not Freeze Frame"

Note Latour's explicit debt to James's sense of deferral, his self-consciousness about speaking at the beginning of Varieties and in the letters, his invocation of Whitman's "To You"; also c.f. William Connolly, "often, though, the differences between liberalism and secularism are those of inflection"; Stanley Cavell, "in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference."

the creative mind

"According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed of great spiritual currents. If many of us resist others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses--a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author's thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is no doubt the origin, the inspiring idea of the 'pragmatism' of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought."

Henri Bergson, "The Pragmatism of William James," An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)