Religion Studied Through Personal Testimony

The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered by the American philosopher and psychologist William James as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 and published as a book the same year, approaches religion not through doctrine, institutions or theology but through the first person accounts of individuals describing their own religious experiences, drawn from published autobiography, private testimony and case material James gathered from a wide range of traditions and individual temperaments.

James distinguishes early in the book between what he calls healthy minded religion, an orientation toward life's goodness with comparatively little attention to sin or evil, and the religion of the sick soul, arising from and addressing a deep sense of inner division or wrongness, and he traces how these different starting points shape the very different kinds of religious experience, including dramatic conversion experiences, that individuals across his source material describe undergoing. Mysticism receives sustained separate treatment, with James proposing a set of characteristic marks, including ineffability and a noetic quality of felt insight, that he argues recur across mystical testimony regardless of the specific religious tradition it comes from.