The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

The Varieties of Religious Experience

                         A Study in Human Nature

 Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in
                                1901‐1902

                                    By

                              William James

                         Longmans, Green, And Co,

              New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

                                   1917





CONTENTS


Preface.
Lecture I. Religion And Neurology.
Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.
Lecture III. The Reality Of The Unseen.
Lectures IV and V. The Religion Of Healthy‐Mindedness.
Lectures VI And VII. The Sick Soul.
Lecture VIII. The Divided Self, And The Process Of Its Unification.
Lecture IX. Conversion.
Lecture X. Conversion—Concluded.
Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness.
Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness.
Lectures XVI And XVII. Mysticism.
Lecture XVIII. Philosophy.
Lecture XIX. Other Characteristics.
Lecture XX. Conclusions.
Postscript.
Index.
Footnotes






                               [Title Page]





To

C. P. G.

IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE





PREFACE.


This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an
appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of
Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten
lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that
the first course might well be a descriptive one on “Man’s Religious
Appetites,” and the second a metaphysical one on “Their Satisfaction
through Philosophy.” But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter
as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being
postponed entirely, and the description of man’s religious constitution
now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than
stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires
immediately to know them should turn to pages 511‐519, and to the
“Postscript” of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express
them in more explicit form.

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us
wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have
loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among
the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I
may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to
offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will
say, are not sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the
end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I
there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense
which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual
reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.

My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck,
of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of
manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend
unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore
Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague
Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to
my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late
of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations
with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at
Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well
express.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
March, 1902.





LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.


It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this
desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of
receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of
European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not
a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from
Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or
literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to
cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were
visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the
Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans
listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure
it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.
Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American
imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of
this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood.
Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the
first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe‐
struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s
class‐room therein contained.