The Psychology of Conversion
James draws on the statistical work of Edwin Starbuck to show that conversion follows a regular psychological pattern: a period of moral struggle and self-dissatisfaction, followed by a crisis of surrender, followed by a sudden breakthrough into new certainty and peace. The pattern is not confined to explicitly religious contexts — it appears whenever a person's centre of habitual energy shifts from one set of concerns to another.
If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a "transformation."
The Subliminal Region
James's account centres on the concept of the subliminal self — the fringe of consciousness below the threshold of ordinary awareness, where thoughts, memories, and new attitudes incubate before breaking through into full consciousness. Conversion is not the result of conscious effort alone but of a ripening process in this deeper region. When the new centre of energy breaks through, it feels like an irruption from outside — hence the religious experience of grace, of God acting on the soul.
The Wider Self and "Something More"
The subliminal self is James's candidate for the psychological correlate of what religion calls the divine. When the religious person feels themselves in contact with "something more," they may indeed be in contact with something real — not necessarily the God of any particular theology, but at least the wider reaches of their own psychological life. This is James's way of vindicating religious experience empirically without endorsing any specific metaphysical framework.
Conversion is the subject of Lectures IX and X of The Varieties (1902). James's concept of the subliminal self draws on F.W.H. Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), which was being prepared simultaneously.
Related Concepts
