| | 1 | Author: | James, William | Add | | | Title: | The Varieties of Religious Experience  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | IT is with no small amount of trepidation 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 whom we have either induced to cross the ocean
to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting
our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst
the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst
the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him
who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of
apology being due for so presumptuous an act. Particularly
must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the American
imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the philosophic
chair of this university were deeply impressed on my
imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy,
then just published, was the first philosophic book I
ever looked into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling
I received from the account of Sir William Hamilton's classroom
therein contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the
first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and
after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas
Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown;
and I confess that to find my humble self promoted
from my native wilderness to bc actually for the time an official
here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious
names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as
much as of reality. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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