The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
WILLIAM JAMES
(Penguin classics, 576 pp, £10.99)

The copy I found in the second-hand department of Thin’s bookshop in Edinburgh in 1958 was the thirty-sixth impression of the original bestseller of 1902. And an unlikely bestseller it had been. I mean, how many Gifford Lecturers attract excited crowds of ordinary people to listen to them?

William James called his lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Wasn’t the subtitle a giveaway? Religion understood as an aspect of human nature, discussed by a man with no discernible faith himself. And yet ... There was no doubt of his sympathy for the subject and the extraordinary experiences he described. But there must have been something unsettling for his listeners in his approach. Did they shiver with apprehension when he stood up to tell them, in his resonant Boston accent, that his first address would explore to what extent religion was a neurological disorder?