William James Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

If the inquiry is psychological, the subject must be religious feelings and impulses, not religious institutions. I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature by articulate and fully self-conscious men, found in works of piety and autobiography. While the origins and early stages of a subject are always interesting, one must look to its more fully evolved and perfect forms when seeking its full significance. Consequently, the documents that will most concern us are those written by men who were most accomplished in the religious life and best able to give an intelligible account of their ideas and motives. These men are, of course, either relatively modern writers or those earlier ones who have become religious classics. The documents humains original: "human documents"—personal accounts of the human experience that we will find most instructive need not be sought in the haunts of special scholarship; they lie along the beaten path. This fact, which follows naturally from the character of our problem, also suits my own lack of special theological learning perfectly. I may take my citations—my sentences and paragraphs of personal confession—from books that most of you will have already held in your hands, yet this will not detract from the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in the future, may unearth from library shelves documents that will make for more delightful and curious entertainment than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will necessarily get much closer to the essence of the matter by controlling so much obscure material.