William James

The American philosopher and psychologist surfaces across three of Kyle’s books in distinct registers. In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley invokes James’s essay “Great Men and Their Environment” to defend the outstanding individual against Herbert Spencer’s (and later B.F. Skinner’s) determinism — Huxley notes that Bertrand Russell sides with James in holding that individuals, not just impersonal social forces, drive historical change, and that Skinner’s behaviorism ignores the “physiological forces” James insisted on.

In the two LDS-faith books he is cited for his philosophy of religion. An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins invokes James via The Varieties of Religious Experience on the nature of religious experience. The Crucible of Doubt quotes James’s famous rejoinder on the “will to believe” — that the person who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely betrays “his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe,” and that “worse things than being duped may happen to a man.” James’s image of the over-cautious general who keeps his soldiers out of battle forever to avoid a single wound becomes, in that book, an argument for a “certain lightness of heart” over excessive intellectual caution about belief.

Context: William James (1842–1910) was a founding figure of American psychology and pragmatist philosophy, best known for The Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); his essay “The Will to Believe” (1896) defended the rationality of religious faith under conditions of uncertainty.

Where this appears

• Brave New World Revisited — Huxley uses James’s “Great Men and Their Environment” to argue (with Russell) against Spencer/Skinner determinism and for the causal weight of individuals.
• An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins — cited via The Varieties of Religious Experience on religious experience.
• The Crucible of Doubt — quoted on the “horror of being duped” and the will to believe.