PRATT, JAMES B.

PRATT, JAMES B. (1875–1944) was an American philosopher and psychologist of religion. Born James Bissett Pratt in Elmira, New York, and raised in the Presbyterian tradition, Pratt graduated from Williams College in 1898. He returned to the school in 1905 to teach, a post he held until 1943. From 1899 to 1905 Pratt studied philosophy at Harvard, primarily with William James (1842–1910) and Josiah Royce (1855–1916). From 1902 to 1903 Pratt studied in Berlin, valuing especially his work with the philosopher of religion Otto Pfleiderer. Pratt also visited eastern Europe and the Middle East, establishing a habit of travel that informed his comparative religion work. In 1911 Pratt married the Italian-born Catherine Mariotti. That devoted relationship was fundamental in expanding Pratt's Protestant sensibility to a sympathetic approach to Catholicism. Pratt's significance lies in three areas: the psychology of religion, comparative religion, and the philosophy of religion.

Philosophically Pratt was a firm critic of James's pragmatism as in What Is Pragmatism? (1909). Nevertheless he was a follower of James's psychology of religion, as can be seen by his doctoral thesis, The Psychology of Religious Belief (1907). This is an important reminder that the psychology of religion was not dependent on pragmatism for its foundation. Pratt's most significant work, The Religious Consciousness (1920), is second only to James's Varieties of Religious Experience as the hallmark of that movement. Both attempt to take religious experiences seriously and sympathetically. There are also interesting differences in their approaches. Pratt draws on a much wider range of religious phenomena and represents generally what James would have called the position of the "healthy minded." He speaks from a rich and deep but not anguished religious faith. This leads him to put less emphasis on the drama of involuntary conversion experiences than James did and to critique the evangelical theology that privileges this type. The more frequent type of conversion for Pratt was the product of the deliberate acts taken by individuals who knew their goals, were not satisfied with "any sort of merely emotional state," and were rewarded with "a new sense of calm and satisfaction" (Pratt, 1920, p. 140).

As Pratt moved from privileging extreme forms of conversion, he also distinguished mild and extreme forms of mysticism, insisting that the more mild type had been overlooked and that the extreme forms of mysticism, many of which had pathological features, had received too much attention. Pratt's work also showed a much greater sensitivity to the role of cult and worship in religious life than James and a developing sense of the religious developments through the life cycle. The Religious Consciousness remains the most balanced synthetic statement of the issues and approaches of the American-born movement of psychology of religion. In its attempt to hold together the social and the psychological and to take religious consciousness as an irreducible phenomenon, it did not survive the onslaught of the European trends of Durkheimian sociology and Freudian psychology. Pratt was familiar with both of these currents but could not fully embrace either.

Pratt's wide acquaintance with comparative religion was evident in his psychology works but also in two landmark titles, India and Its Faiths: A Traveler's Record (1915) and The Pilgrimage of Buddhism and a Buddhist Pilgrimage (1928). Both works are sensitive mixtures of textual study, done in translation, and rich impressions from travel. They seek to give the reader a sense for how it feels to be a Hindu or a Buddhist. Although informed by the questions of the psychologist of religion, they focus more on the worldviews and histories of the traditions under examination and therefore stand independent of Pratt's psychology of religion work.

The remainder of Pratt's writing falls into two types. First, he articulated his realist philosophical stance, which affirmed the reality of both material world and mind in such works as Matter and Spirit (1922), Personal Realism (1937), and Naturalism (1939). Second, his work in the philosophy of religion, Adventures in Philosophy and Religion (1931), Can We Keep the Faith? (1941), Eternal Values in Religion (1950), and his unpublished God and the War, articulated a defense of liberal religion against any overemphasis on supernaturalism. In these writings Pratt called for a return to the centrality of symbol and ritual for the nourishment of the religious imagination and for the restored vitality of religion in the modern world.

See Also

Comparative Religion; James, William; Philosophy, article on Philosophy of Religion; Psychology, article on Psychology of Religion.

Bibliography

The memorial volume Gerald E. Meyers, ed., Self, Religion, and Metaphysics: Essays in Memory of James Bissett Pratt (New York, 1961), deals mainly with philosophy. The fullest assessment of Pratt's psychology of religion is in David W. Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (New York, 1997), pp. 507–523. Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2d ed. (La Salle, Ill., 1986), pp. 114–117, gives brief attention to the comparative-religion aspects of Pratt's work.

William R. Darrow (2005)