Work · Pragmatism & US Philosophy
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Religion understood by its fruits.
Introduction
The book collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on natural religion that James gave in Edinburgh in 1901–02; its subtitle is “A Study in Human Nature”. Instead of churches and doctrines, James examines personal religious experience, drawing on diaries, autobiographies and letters. He contrasts the “healthy-minded” religion of the once-born with that of the “sick soul”, who must be born twice, and discusses conversion, saintliness and mysticism, whose marks he identifies as ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity. His test is the fruits of such experience in a life, not its origin. The book is a founding text of the psychology of religion and is widely read outside philosophy.
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- 1907Pragmatism
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