Loading…

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is unavailable, but you can change that!

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James offers a psychological account of personal religious experiences across the major world religions. Defining personal religion as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in relationship to the divine, James develops a taxonomy of various experiences. He makes comparisons, noting similarities and differences between particular religious...

matter what may be their author’s neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint
Page 18