Is William James Freud Proof?

After we finish with Freud(a pitiful two weeks that could be two semesters) we move on to William James, a contemporary of Freud but an American, and see if his answers address the questions Freud raises.

Here are a couple of teaser quotations from James to get started:

First of all, there is much that Freud and James would agree upon. Here is James in a passage that Freud would have approved.

The Will to Believe, p.7

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees howit was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference....then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!

Varieties of Religious Experience, p.162.

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help! (I think Freud would agree with that.)

But James wants to do battle with the "medical materialists."

The Will to Believe, p.131

Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us that, amid the wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands upright, --that his name is Scientific Truth...

These most conscientious gentlemen think they have...emancipated themselves from the shackles of their subjective propensities...they are deluded....they have construct(ed)...the leanest, lowest, aridist result--namely, the bare molecular world--and they have sacrificed all the rest.

Varieties, p. 122 The universe is a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for....if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science...we have to confess that the part of it which rationalism can give an account for is relatively superficial.

Varieties, p.503 Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping them in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.

Varieties, p.519 The total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperment--more intimately built than physical science allows.

And here is James when he really gets going...

Varieties, p. 519 We and God have business with each other.Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

To this last, Peter Gay claims Freud would have seen them as unintelligible.(A Godless Jew, p. 24)