ABSTRACT
In his celebrated Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1 William James titled his first lecture “Religion and Neurology” and expressed disdain for attempts to absorb religious experience into the framework of what he called “medical materialism.” He wrote,
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor’s body at the time. (p. 16)
