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The Varieties Of Religious Experience, By William James
Preface
THIS
book would never have been written had I not been honored with an
appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of
Edinburgh. In casting about
me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus
became responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be a
descriptive one on "Man's Religious Appetites," and the second a
metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy."
But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter
as I came to write it out has resulted in the second subject being
postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious constitution
now fills the twenty lectures. In
Lecture XX I have suggested rather than stated my own philosophic
conclusions, and the reader who desires immediately to know them should
turn to pages 501-509, and to
the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be able at some later
day to express them in more explicit form.
In
my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser
than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the
lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the
extremer expressions of the religious temperament.
To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the
middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject.
Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane.
If, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I
believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there
combine the religious impulses with other principles of common 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.
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