on the varieties of religious experience

He believed that religious experiences were simply human experiences: “Religious happiness is happiness. Theology and the organizational aspects of religion were of secondary interest. James was most interested in direct religious experiences. Religion is a man’s total reaction upon life.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. There are many overlapping ideas in Varieties and his 1907 book, Pragmatism. James later developed his philosophy of pragmatism. Soon after its publication, Varieties entered the Western canon of psychology and philosophy and has remained in print for over a century. The lectures concerned the nature of religion and the neglect of science in the academic study of religion. Varieties comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 19. James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. He was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the “Father of American psychology”. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James (1842 – 1910).

On the varieties of religious experience