The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James · 1902
5.0 · 6 ratings
About the book
America's greatest psychologist spends twenty lectures on what actually happens to people — conversions, mystical states, saintliness, the sick soul — and refuses to explain any of it away. Still the fairest book ever written about belief, by a man who wanted to believe and couldn't quite.
Try the short course
Part 1 · A belief's origin doesn't settle it. The first six slides, free.
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Someone you know has turned religious, and someone else at the table explains it away: she is just lonely, he is just anxious, it is her age. You have probably done it yourself. James opens the book with this move and lists its everyday forms. Alfred believes in immortality because his temperament is emotional. William's melancholy about the universe is a torpid liver.
The trick always rests on the same two words. The belief is nothing but its cause, and once the cause is named, the belief is supposed to be finished.
James notices something else. We use the move freely on people whose states of mind we find overstrained. When it is turned on our own highest moments, we feel outraged, because we know those moments meant something, whatever our organism happened to be doing.
Inside the course
20 parts- Religion and neurology: dismissing the dismissersFree above
- Circumscribing the topic — religion as feeling, not creed
- The reality of the unseen
- Healthy-mindedness: the religion of once-born souls
Questions
Is The Varieties of Religious Experience free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Varieties of Religious Experience is waiting in the app’s library.
