Lecture 1 from The Varieties of Religious Experience

Beginning his studies as a medical student, William James (1842–1910) would rapidly cement his place as one of the leading philosophers and psychologists in the English-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth century. The work excerpted here, his Gifford Lectures (delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902), is reflective of James’s stature and ambitions – it blends philosophical forays into epistemology (what is it justified to believe?) with psychological approaches to first-person religious experience. His psychological credentials were already burnished – his textbook, Principles of Psychology , deftly fused the empirical research of authors like Helmholtz with evolutionary biology and medical research. For James, the defining feature of consciousness – and here he differs from the tradition of Helmholtz, Mach, and Spencer – is that it is a kind of unified, coherent whole, even if we are able to later extract certain parts or elements from that whole. This put him in direct contrast with the earlier approaches we have seen, which emphasized the construction of conscious experience out of smaller-scale (often perceptual) elements. 1 For James, in contrast, consciousness is like a stream – while we can perhaps note certain structural features (an eddy here or there), we cannot divide the stream into a collection of discrete parts.

Aesthetics · Consciousness · Contrast (vision) · Epistemology · Perception · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Evolution and Science Education · Philosophy · Psychology · Study and Philosophy of Religion