The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Centenary Edition » (1st Edition)

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

The Varieties of Religious Experience is certainly the most notable of all books in the field of the psychology of religion and probably destined to be the most influential [one] written on religion in the twentieth century' said Walter Houston Clark in Psychology Today. The book was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902.

Jaroslav Pelikan

The old cliche that Henry James wrote novels as though they were philosophical treatises whereas William James wrote philosophic treatises as thogh they were novels, while unfair to Henry, describes...the William James of The Varieties of Religious Experience very well. Believers and unbelievers (and semibelievers) will continue to find it both a resource and a challenge.

Introduction

Lecture 1 - Religion and Neurology

Lecture 2 - Circumscription of the Topic

Lecture 3 - The Reality of the Unseen

Lecture 4-5 - The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Lecture 6-7 - The Sick Soul

Lecture 8 - The Divided Self, and the Process of its Unification

Lecture 9 - Conversion

Lecture 10 - Conversion-concluded

Lecture 11-13 - Saintliness

Lecture 14-15 - The Value of Saintliness

Lecture 16-17 - Mysticism

Lecture 18 - Philosophy

Lecture 19 - Other Characteristics

Lecture 20 - Conclusion

Postscript