The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 3

sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration,
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
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.

THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
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 awestruck feeling I received from
the account of Sir William Hamilton's classroom 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.
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. Psychology 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 constitution.
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. Interesting 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