William James' Varieties of Religious Experience

For William James, much of the interest in the varieties of religious experience lies in their effects on human beings, and their ability to cause the human being to respond and change. In his own life, James dealt with emotional problems which were not assuaged until his own conversion experience, although that was not a conversion to conventional Christianity or anything like it. In this study, James explored religious experience in order to understand its origins and its effects. He seems to have correctly concluded that the sense of divine presence, or a larger power friendly to human beings, is an accurate one for others and for himself. The intention in the following pages is to examine some of James' discussion of this issue.

In his postscript, James indicated that he would have to place himself among those crasser, or piecemeal, supernaturalists because he found it unacceptable that the transcendental principles could exist without having any consequences or effects. Instead, he concluded that in at least some instance there is an incursion through the subconscious which is at least partly not ourselves and that this produces an effect. He indicated that his observation of this relatively frequent experience convinced him to adopt the hypothesis that:

At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our expe

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the transformed person, the saint who is motivated deeply by love and strength of character, all of these are datum that provide evidence that there was a cause, and that the cause was the ideal power, or God to whom the individual with the religious experience attributed the motivation. In other words, the transformed individual generally attributed that conversion to the love and presence of some sort of god, or spiritual presence. While James took that as a form of evidence in itself, an even more persuasive form of evidence was in the results of the encounter between the individual and this ideal power or principles. This seems quite persuasive. Obviously something happened to all of these individuals, and to many individuals in contemporary life, which leads them to change directions, sometimes drastically. These conversion experiences generally cause people to cease behaviors like drinking or violence, that the society views as immoral and replace them with behaviors like service of others, which the society considers to be desirable, moral, and good. In our studies of psychology and the nature of human beings, there is little to indicate that there are psychological processes which, on their own, lead to this kind of co

Category: Philosophy - W