The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~200,000 words · 952 passages
Cite this work
- APAWilliam James. (n.d.). The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-varieties-of-religious-experience-a-study-in-human-nature
- MLAWilliam James. The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-varieties-of-religious-experience-a-study-in-human-nature.
- ChicagoWilliam James. The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-varieties-of-religious-experience-a-study-in-human-nature.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
James's Gifford Lectures of 1901-02: a study of conversion, saintliness, mysticism and the sick soul, built from first-hand testimony.
Context and history
The principle of selection is what makes the book. James decides to look only at personal experience — what happens to someone alone — and to set aside institutions, creeds and churches; he admits himself that this leaves a great deal out. He also chooses extreme cases rather than ordinary ones, on the ground that the extreme shows the phenomenon more clearly. He says so plainly, which is why the book can be argued with while knowing exactly what was included and what was not.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self‐conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interesting as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become religious classics. The _documents humains_ which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition—they lie along the beaten highway; and this circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits admirably also your lecturer’s lack of special theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more out‐of‐the‐way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand. The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance?…