Human Nature and the Fruits of Faith
Forget dogma—living a richer, fuller life is the true goal of religion.
'Varieties of Religious Experience' (1902) by William James Yao Xiao
To write a masterly book on the contentious subject of religion without taking a partisan position is a remarkable achievement. William James, the philosopher, scientist, psychologist, brought it off with a lambent lucidity in 1901-02, when he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion in Edinburgh and later published them under the title "Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature" (1902).
William James was, of course, the 15-months-older brother of the novelist Henry James, and the eldest of the five children—four sons and a daughter—of Henry James Sr. and his wife, Alice. The Brontes produced three sisters who all wrote remarkable novels, but no family that I know of, other than that of William and Henry James, produced two brothers who were geniuses in their own right yet vastly different from one another in the nature and style of their thinking. Which of the two brothers one admires more may tell a great deal about the cast of one's own mind.
In delivering the Gifford Lectures, William James was wary of offending. Lord Gifford, the founder of the lecture series, was himself a seriously religious man. James's own religion was unknown. What position, the question must have been, would he take? Attacking religion? Endorsing it wholeheartedly? Surely it could not be possible to write a book on religion from an entirely neutral standpoint.
In his Gifford Lectures, James decided to exclude religious institutions or religion in its institutional settings. He chose not to argue, or even discuss, theology. He set aside the question of immortality, which he wrote about elsewhere in an essay called "Human Immortality" (1897), where he concluded that it would be "blindness" to rule it out as a possibility. He concentrated instead on the effect of religion on the individual, of its stirrings in the human heart.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/william-james-varieties-of-religious-experience-unique-message-1411767878
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/wjames/varieties-rel-exp.pdf
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