Nonfiction · 1902
The Varieties of Religious Experience
A Study in Human Nature
William James surveys firsthand accounts of religious conversion, mysticism, saintliness and despair — drawn from autobiographies, letters and case histories rather than theology — to ask what religious experience actually does for the people who have it, independent of which creed, if any, they belong to.
James delivered the book as his 1901-02 Gifford Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh, publishing the lectures as a book in 1902.
Bibliomancer restores the 1902 text exactly as James wrote it.
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
- Appendix
- 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
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1842–1910 · Victorian
William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City, the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He trained first as a painter and then as a physician, and taught at Harvard for thirty-five years — physiology, then psychology, then philosophy. The Principles of Psychology (1890) established the discipline in America; The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragmatism (1907) followed. He took the word pragmatism from Charles Sanders Peirce and made it public. He died at his summer house in New Hampshire.
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