James on Radical Empiricism and the Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) originated as the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, which James delivered at the University of Edinburgh across two series in 1901 and 1902. Rather than arguing for or against the metaphysical truth of any religious doctrine, James treats religious experience as psychological data, compiling and analyzing a wide range of firsthand testimonies of conversion, mystical states, and religious feeling — drawing, among other sources, on the spiritual autobiography of Leo Tolstoy and the writings of the eighteenth-century American theologian Jonathan Edwards. From this material James draws his influential distinction between "healthy-minded" or "once-born" religion, which minimizes the reality of evil and finds an easy, optimistic harmony with the universe, and the "sick soul" or "twice-born" temperament, for which religious peace can be reached only through a wrenching experience of crisis and conversion, a structure James associates especially with the theology of self-surrender found in evangelical Protestantism.