tion (29-30).
Whether or not there is any special value to psychopathic states in the realm of religious experience, James felt that all aspects of the religious experience--e.g., religious happiness or religious trance--would be better understood if they were viewed in comparison with other types of happiness or trance. His purpose, he explains, is not to degrade religious experience or deny it particular value by equating it with every other type of experience. Thus he makes the important logical distinction between asking what the religious propensities are and what their value may be. By identifying their occurrences, their characteristics, and their origins James is attempting to answer "an existential judgment or proposition," which is very different, and separate from, a "proposition of value," which is answered in terms of the "importance, meaning, or significance" of the object under discussion (6). Thus James is not attempting to deny that religious experience has value, merely that in order to determine the nature of the experience its value must be the second question that is asked.
In looking at religious experience in an existential context James extends his reach across many types of organized religion. This pluralism recognizes that there is an essential core of experiences that, no matter what the institutional nature of the religion to which a particular person's experiences may be attached, personal religious experience is paramount for understanding the phenomena. Thus in trying to define religion as he deals with it in this work, James avoids the definition that puts personal experience to one side as the "unorganized rudiment" of "the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution . . . the Church, in short" which is held by some to be the true definition of religion (35).
Merely by arguing from the question of which is more fundamental, however, James shows that personal religion (as...