All the talk about Richard Dawkins' book made me want to read William James' The Varieties of Religious Experiences again.

Varieties - which I got into in the first place by using my principle that any book Jorge Luis Borges admired is worth a go - was first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02 Being the work of a psychologist who strayed into philosophy and religions studies, the book feels more like a work of literature than a scientific treatise by modern standards; which for me is a large part of its charm. Obviously one can't expect all scientists to have a prose style almost as beautiful as that of their young novelist brothers, but one can still dream.

I'm just starting to read The God Delusion and am curious to see if Dawkins mentions James; I suspect James' approach would drive Dawkins up the wall, or even further up the wall than he already seems to have been driven by the end of the second chapter. James considers that all the old scholastic arguments for the existence of God have been demolished by the modern science of his day, particularly evolutionary biology, and he is no more convinced by the attempts of 19th century transcendentalist idealism to provide a justification for religion.

So far, I'm sure that Dawkins would approve, but James, as an old-fashioned psychologist, is primarily concerned with the subjective experience of religion by its adherents. It's his patience with the effusions of the revival-tent Methodist, the Mind-Cure movement and various mystics which I think would drive Dawkins to distraction. It tries my patience, and James is continually apologising for the imposition on his auditors of yet another excerpt from a tract or pamphlet; but the source documents are fascinating, and often hilarious.

James' personal metaphysics, which he saves till the last chapter, seems to be a strange kind of home-brewed theism: there is no miraculous intervention in the natural world other than the Divine contacting the minds of humans via the experiences of prayer and mystical visions. As James seems not to have had any such experiences himself, there's something wistful and touching about this.

Some idea of the flavour of James' work can be gathered from this essay, where he explains how huffing nitrous oxide enabled him to understand Hegel for the first time.