Mind, Nature, and Religious Experience in William James and Carl Gustav Jung.

This article analyzes the fundamentally different philosophical frameworks developed by William James (1842–1910) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) for understanding consciousness, nature, and religious experience. James’s approach, grounded in radical empiricism and neutral monism, evolved into a form of religious naturalism that pragmatically evaluates religious experiences by their transformative effects and openness to reality’s deeper dimensions. In contrast, Jung constructed a psycho-epistemological framework emphasizing archetypal structures within the collective unconscious, interpreting religious phenomena symbolically as expressions of psychological individuation while maintaining methodological boundaries between psychological and metaphysical claims. The study highlights how these divergent ontological commitments shaped their methodologies and continue to influence contemporary consciousness studies, psychology of religion, and related interdisciplinary research.