THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

LECTURE I

RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

IT is with a significant amount of nervousness that I take my place behind this desk and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries—scholars we have either persuaded to cross the ocean to address us, or captured during their travels. It seems the natural thing for us to listen while the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking while the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and it makes the person who first attempts it feel that an apology is due for such a presumptuous act. This is especially true on soil as sacred to the American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophy chair at this university were deeply impressed on my mind as a boy. Professor Fraser’s Essays in Philosophy, which had just been published, was the first philosophy book I ever looked into, and I well remember the awe-struck feeling I experienced from his account of Sir Wil-