Cliff Notes: Circumscription of the Topic

With the second lecture, James narrows the scope of his inquiry still farther in The Varities of Religious Experience. Now having honed in on the type of individuals he will analyze, he defines the actual experiences one might call religious. For him, religion famously means "the acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine."

So, again, he will set aside the most common experiences of religion and the most common defintions of religious experience as ritual or collective rite. He notes that the personal experiences of religious founders must predate the traditions they establish; the only exception to this would be the fetishism and magic worship of our remote (pagan) ancestors, about whom so little is known as to be almost entirely useless.

So these will be purely individual encounters between man and divine- but what of the divine? James denotes this as any object that is godlike, whether a deity or not. This allows for a broader sweep of spectrum than most definitions: it would include Transcendentalism as well as Christianity, Deism as well as Judaism.

Yet it would not include the ethical, however robust the moral code or just feeling. James notes the difference between the stoic acceptance of truth that seems to be the most that the irreligious can posit. He contrasts this with the glad and joyous acceptance of one's state present in most Christian religious genius.

As James himself says, "Here religion comes to our rescue. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God."