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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
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IN FILIAL GRATITUDE AND LOVE
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
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PREFACE
T
HIS 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.
In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often
makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however
deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I
have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious
temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before
they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the
subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If,
however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe
that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there combine
the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which
serve as correctives of exaggerations, and allow the individual reader
to draw as moderate conclusions as he will.
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
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
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 Lutoslwski, 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.
H
ARVARD
U
NIVERSITY
,
March, 1902.
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PREFACE
RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
LECTURE I
RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
I
T 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 class-room
therein contained. Hamilton’s own lectures were the first philo-
sophic 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
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
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. Pyschology 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 con-
stitution. 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.
If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but
rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject,
and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective
phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully
self-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography. Interest-
ing as the origins and early stages of a subject always are, yet when
one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to
its more completely evolved and perfect forms. It follows from this
that the documents that will most concern us will be those of the
men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able
to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These
men, of course, are either comparatively modern writers, or else
such earlier ones as have become religions classics. The documents
humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be
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