The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature - Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (The Modern Library of the World's Best Books ML 70)

xviii, 526 pp. Note on the author precedes text, index follows text. When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century.