Among his more illustrious students was the novelist Gertrude Stein. In 1876 he began to teach in the relatively new field of psychology and in that same year James established the first psychological laboratory in America. But ultimately James chose medicine after receiving his medical degree in 1872, he accepted a post in physiology at Harvard University the following year. He was drawn to careers both in art and in medicine, first studying art in Paris and later in Providence, Rhode Island, under the direction of William Morris Hunt. Under his father's guidance, William was educated by tutors and at private schools in the United States and in Europe. About the Author: WILLIAM JAMES, son of the theologian Henry James (1811-1882) and brother of the famed novelist Henry James (1843-1916), was born in New York City on Jan-uary 11,1842. James concludes that religious experience is real insofar as it produces real effects on peoples' lives and characters, and therefore it can and should be the subject of serious scientific inquiry. science's impersonal abstract approach and the overall value of religion to human well-being. He also discusses the distinctions between religious experience and philosophy psychological theories concerning the origin and nature of religious belief religion's personal, individualistic approach to reality vs.
Taking the approach that extreme manifestations of the religious temperament give us more insight into the subject than the routine features of worship and ritual, he discusses many intriguing accounts of remarkable religious experiences, grouping these experiences into broad types: healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, the divided self and the process of its unification, conversion, saintliness, and mysticism.
His gift for distilling the essential ingredients of the religious experience from the great mass of details is evident in every chapter. It is this very daunting aspect of the subject that makes James's achievement in these lectures so impressive. Perhaps no other aspect of culture is so amorphous and difficult to grasp in its totality as religion. As such James's study is relevant to any religious context, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, New Age, or any other. Emphasizing subjective religious experience in its many guises, as opposed to the distinctions among specific creeds or theologies, this trenchant exploration of the religious imagination is still unsurpassed as an overview of the human belief in a transcendent reality, whether personalized as God or viewed impersonally as some higher spiritual reality. James's masterful treatise on the psychology of individual religious experience was originally composed for the prestigious Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh University in 1901-1902.
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