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Hello, one day in the 19th century in America, a man locked himself in a rural and refused food and water. He fell to the floor in a faint.

When he came to, he found himself on his knees, praying, infused with a deep sense of peace. He'd been converted to said to God.

It was accounts like these of an intensely personal moment of conversion that inspired American psychologist William James to attempt a daring project.

In 1901, he spoke of his examination of the psychology of religion as a means to explore not the doctrines of belief but the nature of the individual experience itself.

In 1901, William James, the brother of the novelist Henry James, made the boys from America to deliver a series of public lectures on his findings to the people of Edinburgh.

When the lectures were published as the varieties and religious experience, they were unexpected and influential success.

In the century, since there had been reprinted 36 times and had a wide and deep influence inspiring figures from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung to the novelist eldest Huxley.

With me to discuss William James and the varieties of religious experience are John Holden, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews,

Glenn Griffiths-Dixon, Emeritus Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, and Jonathan Ray, a freelance philosopher.

Jonathan, can you give us some sense of William James' background, his intellectual context?

First of all, I think William James is one of the greatest philosophers ever, and he's untypical of 20th century philosophers I think fall into two groups.

They're either nitpicking petty-fogging bureaucrats or else they're egomaniacs with delusions of genius.

He wasn't like that. He was honest, witty, modest, flexible, generous, very creative, open-minded thinker, and he produced prose, which looks as though it was a spontaneous flow of very colloquial thoughts, but is actually incredibly carefully crafted.

And he was a great phrase maker too. I mean, he came up with phrases like the divided self, the very phrase mental states, the sixth soul, the will to believe subliminal consciousness, the stream of consciousness.

It was obviously very important for his brother, the novelist, Henry, and indeed religious experience itself is one of his great phrases.

He was an American. He was a New Yorker originally born in 1842, so he was just coming up to 60 when he came to Edinburgh to give the Gifford lectures, and he'd been teaching in Harvard for 30 years by then.

But before that, he'd had an incredibly broad education. His father had taken him around him and Henry, round Europe, so they became steeped in the languages, the philosophy, the art of Europe.

He was a fantastic education. After that, he'd become a naturalist, he'd gone to South America, become a field naturalist, a Darwinian, and then he'd gone to Harvard, started teaching biology, got interested in psychology, and his first great work was a book called The Principles of Psychology, published in two volumes in 1890.

So he was primarily a Darwinian scientist who then turned to philosophy later in his life.

And he was invited to Edinburgh to give what were called the Gifford lectures. Can you just briefly say why they were the Gifford lectures and why he accepted?

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