The Varieties of Religious Experience

Here is a philosopher who refused to laugh at the convert weeping on the chapel floor, or the mystic who swears the universe spoke to him. William James climbed to the Edinburgh lectern with a stranger plan: gather the raw testimonies of the saved, the broken, the rapturous, and treat each one as evidence worth keeping, without first asking whether its God was real. He had earned the right. In his twenties a terror seized him, the conviction that he might at any moment dissolve into nothing, and that sick soul sits hidden inside every page, a man who knew the abyss writing tenderly of those who clawed their way out. His test for a religious experience was almost shockingly practical: does it leave you changed, more alive? Read it and the old quarrel over whether faith is true quietly loosens its grip. Something stranger takes its place, the experience itself, in all its varieties, asking only to be witnessed.