The Varieties Of Religious Experience

by William James

Overview

This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of
Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a descriptive one on "Man's Religious Appetites," and the second a metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy." But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to pages 511-519, and to the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781514115640
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/1900
Pages:	788
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.57(d)

About the Author

William James (1842-1910), the brother of the novelist Henry James, was the founder of experimental psychology in America, and of the philosophy of pragmatism. The Varieties of Religious Experience is his best-known work.
Eugene Taylor of the Harvard Medical School is an internationally recognised expert on the life and work of William James, and is the author of William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin (Princeton, 1996) and William James on Exceptional Mental States (Scribner's, 1982).
Jeremy Carrette lectures on the psychology of religion at the University of Stirling, and is the author of Foucault and Religion (Routledge, 2000)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Lecture 1 - Religion and Neurology

Lecture 2 - Circumscription of the Topic

Lecture 3 - The Reality of the Unseen

Lecture 4-5 - The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Lecture 6-7 - The Sick Soul

Lecture 8 - The Divided Self, and the Process of its Unification

Lecture 9 - Conversion

Lecture 10 - Conversion-concluded

Lecture 11-13 - Saintliness

Lecture 14-15 - The Value of Saintliness

Lecture 16-17 - Mysticism

Lecture 18 - Philosophy

Lecture 19 - Other Characteristics

Lecture 20 - Conclusion

Postscript