One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.
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