The Varieties Of Religious Experience A Study In Human Nature

The Story

In 'The Varieties of Religious Experience,' William James approached the study of religious phenomena in a new way-as a pragmatist and as an experimental psychologist. REjecting the rationalist philosophical systems that dominated Continental Europe of his day, James sought a more empirical means of making sense of the world, and found, in the deeper levels of subconscious experience, manifestations of man's link with the divine. Explaining the book's intentions in a letter to a friend, he stated: 'The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend ... 'experience' against 'philosophy' as being the real backbone of the world's religious life ... and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mannkind's most important function.' To substantiate his beliefs, JAmes cites evidence from his won experience, and from that of such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Whitman, Emerson, Luther, Tolstoi, John Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards, and subjects to analysis examples of religious thought and life from the widest variety of theological and religious viewpoints.