The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature — John Shaqi
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D. Starbuck,
of Stanford University, who made over to me his large collection of
manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East Northfield, a friend
unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious information; to Theodore
Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller, of Oxford, and to my colleague
Benjamin Rand, for documents; to my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to
my friends, Thomas Wren Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late
of Cracow, for important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations
with the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at
Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can well
express.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
March, 1902.
LECTURE I. RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY.
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 awe‐
struck feeling I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton’s
class‐room 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.
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