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In lectures given in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, William James studied religion not through doctrines or churches but through the experiences of individuals…
In lectures given in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, William James studied religion not through doctrines or churches but through the experiences of individuals: conversion, the sense of a divine presence, the 'healthy-minded' who see only good in the world and the 'sick soul' haunted by evil, the divided self, saintliness and mysticism, whose marks he defines as ineffable, full of knowledge, brief and passive. Drawing on letters, diaries and autobiographies, he judges these experiences by their fruits in people's lives rather than by their origins.
Context and significance
James draws on Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim sources, and in his lecture on mysticism he quotes at length from the spiritual autobiography of al-Ghazali, which the library has as The Confessions of Al Ghazzali. The book remains a classic of the psychology of religion. James's earlier work is The Principles of Psychology.
About the author
William James (1842–1910), the older brother of the novelist Henry James, studied painting and then medicine, and after years of depression became a professor at Harvard, where he taught the first course in psychology in America and set up one of the first psychology laboratories.
His Principles of Psychology made the new science readable, his Varieties of Religious Experience studied faith with sympathy, and his philosophy of pragmatism asked what difference an idea makes in practice. He wrote with a warmth and clarity rare among philosophers.