The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Free edition · The Varieties of Religious Experience · 1902

The Varieties of Religious Experience

By William James — London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902 — (Published 1902) · All William James books

Word Count ~154,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 8.6 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #621

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #621

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The opening of Chapter 1

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s classroom therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.

But since I have received the honor of this appointment I have felt that it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. Let me say only this, that now that the current, here and at Aberdeen, has begun to run from west to east, I hope it may continue to do so. As the years go by, I hope that many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States; I hope that our people may become in all these higher matters even as one people; and that the peculiar philosophic temperament, as well as the peculiar political temperament, that goes with our English speech may more and more pervade and influence the world.

As regards the manner in which I shall have to administer this lectureship, I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, that, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities.

The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which James admits his fear at lecturing in Edinburgh, recalls the awe he felt as a boy before the names on its lecture rooms, and explains why a psychologist is not a theologian.

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Further Reading

Read next: Walden, The Souls of Black Folk and Meditations

Free edition

Walden

By Henry David Thoreau · The American experiment in deliberate living that James read as a religious document

Free edition

The Souls of Black Folk

By W. E. B. Du Bois · The 1903 book that treats the spirituals as evidence of an inner life

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: Summary, Characters & Themes

The Varieties of Religious Experience is William James’s study of religion as it is lived by individuals, published in 1902 and based on the twenty Gifford Lectures he gave at Edinburgh. This page gives a summary and analysis of the whole book, grouped by its lectures, with the cases James cites, the types he builds out of them and the conclusions he draws in the last lecture and the postscript. James came to the subject as a psychologist: he had taught at Harvard since the 1870s, published the Principles of Psychology in 1890, and spent the following decade arguing about belief, will and evidence. His life and work explain the book’s method, which is descriptive, anecdotal and deliberately unsystematic.

This edition has fourteen chapters, which correspond to the twenty lectures and a postscript: the lectures were printed in pairs and triples and James kept the spoken form, addressing his audience directly and apologising for his material. He quotes at length, from Augustine, Bunyan, Tolstoy, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi and George Fox’s Journal, and above all from the collection of autobiographical statements gathered by Edwin D. Starbuck and sent to him before publication. The method is empirical in a strict sense: he will not decide whether an experience is true until he has described it. Readers who know Walden will recognise the same question about what a deliberate life costs, though Thoreau’s experiment is a report and James’s is a survey. His footnotes point to the books he used, and they remain the best guide to what he had read.

The central contrast is between two temperaments. The healthy-minded take evil as an obstacle to be removed and are, in Francis Newman’s phrase, once-born; the sick souls find the world radically wrong and are twice-born, converted out of a divided self into a unified one. James gives both sides their evidence, from Whitman’s exultation to the panic fear of a correspondent who looked at an epileptic patient and felt that that shape was himself. He refuses to explain either away, and his attack on what he calls medical materialism, the reduction of Saint Paul’s vision to a lesion and Teresa’s ecstasies to hysteria, is the book’s most quoted passage. The full text is at Project Gutenberg.

From the types James moves to their fruits. Conversion he treats as a fact of adolescent psychology, commoner in the teens than later, usually gradual but sometimes instantaneous, and always a shift in the centre of personal energy. Saintliness he defines by its practical marks, asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity, and then asks the uncomfortable question whether the saints are good for anything, letting Nietzsche put the case against them. Mysticism he describes by four marks, ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity, and treats it as a doorway into the subconscious rather than a proof of anything. The four marks are his, and later writers have gone on using them long after the rest of his argument was forgotten. The chapters on the sorrow songs in The Souls of Black Folk make a neighbouring claim, that a religious life can be known from its songs.

The last lecture states the common nucleus of all the religions James has described: a sense that something is wrong with us as we naturally stand, and a sense of being saved by connection with a larger power. He calls that power God, admits that the name is an over-belief, and refuses to claim more than the facts allow; immortality, he says, is a secondary point on which his evidence is silent. The postscript adds that he is a supernaturalist of the piecemeal kind, one who thinks the ideal can make a difference in particular facts. The text here follows Standard Ebooks, and the same question, how to meet a world that will not be arranged to suit us, runs through Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

Historical Context

The Gifford Lectures were endowed by Adam Gifford, a Scottish judge, who left money for lectures on natural theology at the Scottish universities. The lecturer was to treat religion as a subject of inquiry rather than to preach it, and the post was open to sceptics as well as believers; James was invited to Edinburgh in the late 1890s and gave his first course in 1901. He had planned two courses of ten lectures, the first describing what he called man’s religious appetites, the second asking how philosophy satisfies them. Only the first was finished. The preface says plainly that the metaphysical course was postponed altogether and that the descriptive matter was stretched to fill twenty lectures, and the gap between the two plans is visible in the finished text.

The 1890s were the decade in which the psychology of religion became a subject with questionnaires. Edwin D. Starbuck, of Stanford, circulated a printed circular asking people to describe their conversions, and sent the manuscript answers to James, who used them throughout the book and thanked him first in the preface. Theodore Flournoy in Geneva, James’s friend and correspondent, was studying automatic writing; Frederic Myers in London had proposed the subliminal self. James drew on all of them, and he had already carried the argument over the will to believe into the public arena in 1897, which is why the lectures treat belief as a power rather than a conclusion.

The book appeared in London in 1902 from Longmans, Green, and was reprinted for the rest of James’s life. Its importance for later readers is that it founded a way of writing about religion without either defending or debunking it: the lectures describe conversion, saintliness and mysticism as events with causes and effects, and leave the question of their truth to the last two chapters. That division of labour was not new in 1902, but nobody had carried it through so much evidence. The second course of lectures, the one that would have argued the metaphysics, was never written, and the postscript says the position was sketched rather than stated.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• William James: The lecturer and narrator, a Harvard psychologist who tells his Edinburgh audience at the outset that he is neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist, and that psychology is the only branch in which he is versed. He tests his own material as he goes, quoting a friend’s hallucination of a presence, his own experiments with nitrous oxide, and the cases sent to him by correspondents, and he writes as a man still uncertain of the conclusions he is drawing.
• George Fox: The founder of the Quakers, whom James uses to prove that a disordered nervous system does not settle the value of a religious life. Fox was acknowledged from Cromwell down to his jailers, and his Journal records the command to walk barefoot through Lichfield crying woe to the bloody city. James calls him a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye, and then argues that the same temperament supplied the emotional force of his religion.
• Walt Whitman: The great example of the once-born, the man James calls the restorer of the eternal natural religion. Quoting Dr Bucke, he describes Whitman sauntering among the fields and liking everything he met, and contrasts him with Achilles and Lycaon to show how much less pagan the modern optimist is. Whitman’s cheer, James says, is too voluntary and defiant; it will not survive a look at the hospital and the prison.
• Leo Tolstoy: The novelist whose My Confession supplies the book’s fullest case of the sick soul. At about fifty he found that something had broken within him on which his life had always rested, hid the rope in his room and stopped going out with a gun. James quotes the fable of the traveller in the well, gnawed at by white and black mice, licking the drops of honey, and follows him to the recovery he found in the faith of the peasants.
• The panic-fear correspondent: A French patient whose letter James translates at length. In an asylum he saw an epileptic idiot and was struck by the thought that that shape was himself, and afterwards lived in dread of the dark and of the pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. Bible texts kept him sane. James uses the case to show that dread of the universe, not sin, is the deepest form of melancholy.
• Edwin D. Starbuck: The Stanford psychologist whose manuscript collection of religious autobiographies underlies much of the book. His circular asked correspondents to date their conversions and describe what happened, and his statistics let James argue that conversion is an adolescent phenomenon, commonest in the teens, and that sudden conversions are the exception rather than the rule. James thanks him first in the preface, and quotes him in almost every lecture.

Core Literary Themes

• The divided self and the twice-born: James divides religious temperaments by the number of storeys in their world. The once-born inhabit a one-storied universe and see no need to be saved; the twice-born inhabit a double-storied one and cannot enter the second floor until the first has been lost. The divided self is not a metaphor but a described condition: Augustine’s will that all but did a thing and did not do it, Bunyan hearing a voice urging him to sell Christ, the man who wants one thing and does another until conversion shifts the centre of his energy. The theme gives the book its structure.
• The reality of the unseen: Religion, for James, begins with the sense that there is an unseen order and that our good lies in adjusting ourselves to it. He takes that sense seriously as a fact of experience and refuses to call it an inference: ideas act on us like sensible presences, and the felt nearness of something holy is reported by people who are otherwise sober. His cases run from hallucinated presences to mountain-top ecstasies, and he borrows Kant’s point that God, freedom and immortality are not objects of knowledge and yet have meaning in practice, like a bar of iron we cannot see but can feel. His conclusion is psychological rather than metaphysical, that the ontological imagination is one of the powers of the mind and that instinct leads while intelligence follows.
• The sick soul and the problem of evil: The book’s boldest claim is that the cheerful religions are the shallow ones. James collects melancholy, anhedonia, dread and despair, from Goethe’s confession that he never had four weeks of genuine well-being to the patient who wrote that fear pressed him down, and he argues that the completest religions are those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Healthy-mindedness, whether liberal Christianity or mind-cure, treats evil as dirt, matter out of place; the sick soul finds it woven into the constitution of things, and James thinks that view ranges over the wider scale of experience.
• Saintliness and its fruits: James defines saintliness by its psychological marks rather than its doctrines: a wider life, a sense of friendly continuity with a larger power, elation and freedom, and a shift of the affections toward love. Its practical fruits are asceticism, strength of soul, purity, charity, obedience and poverty, and the book is full of people who carried them to uncomfortable lengths, from Fox refusing to doff his hat to Suso’s iron cross. The question he then asks is whether saintliness is good, and he answers by its fruits while conceding that excess makes fanatics as well as saints.
• Mysticism, the subconscious and the more: Mystical states are ineffable, noetic, transient and passive, and James treats them as evidence about the mind rather than about God. They are authoritative for the person who has them and carry no weight for anyone else, which is why they break the monopoly of the rationalistic consciousness without settling any argument. He connects them to the subconscious, to Myers’s subliminal self, and to what he calls the more, the larger power we feel ourselves in touch with, and he leaves the question of its nature open, as an over-belief each of us must supply.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience?

The Varieties has never been out of print, but most digital copies are transcriptions that flatten the lectures into long unbroken chapters. This edition follows the Standard Ebooks text, prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1902 Longmans printing, and keeps the fourteen chapter divisions and the postscript exactly as that edition sets them, so a reader can move from a summary here to the same passage in the file without hunting.

The summaries are arranged by lecture rather than by theme, which is how James arranged his argument. Each one names the cases he actually quotes, from Fox in Lichfield and Tolstoy at fifty to the French patient who feared the dark, because the book’s force lies in those documents rather than in its definitions. The grouping into eleven movements is ours; the order is his.

If you want to check a passage, the complete text is also at Project Gutenberg, where it can be read online or downloaded as plain text. Set a lecture beside the files here and you can see how little the Standard Ebooks compositors changed; the lectures, the preface and the postscript are the same.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1902 Longmans edition; the lecture divisions and the postscript follow that edition.
• Lecture by lecture, with the cases kept Eleven groups cover all twenty lectures and the postscript, and the summaries name the converts, patients and saints James actually quotes instead of dissolving them into types.
• History kept apart from the argument The context section covers the Gifford foundation and the psychology of religion without attributing to James claims he never makes, and the summary never turns one of his over-beliefs into a conclusion.
• Clean text for e-readers The EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files are built from the Standard Ebooks edition, with working contents links, proper notes and no page scans, so the lectures read the same on a phone, a tablet or a dedicated reader.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · Early 20th century