Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Religion is real because its effects are real — judged not by origins but by fruits, the "more" disclosed in religious experience deserves respect
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | The Varieties of Religious Experience |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Immediate |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Experience |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
The Varieties of Religious Experience
James's framework is broadly realist about temporal succession. The lived time of religious experience — the moment of conversion (Lectures IX–X), the gradual cultivation of saintliness (XI–XV), the timeless mystic moment (XVI–XVII) — is treated empirically, with full attention to its phenomenological structure.
Space
The Varieties of Religious Experience
The lived space of religious experience — solitude, the natural sublime, the architecture of worship — receives the same empirical attention. Standard substantival realism in the working framework.
Matter
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Standard background. James does not engage matter as a philosophical category in the Varieties; the work's focus is on the phenomenology of religious experience in embodied human subjects.
Observer
The Varieties of Religious Experience
The Jamesian observer is the embodied, plural, individually distinctive human subject — "healthy-minded" or "sick-souled" by temperament, the unit of religious experience. Knowledge is immediate and experientially given; agency is active in the religious life. Moral authority is experience: the test of any religious claim is what it produces in the life it shapes. The metaphysical agency is personal-and-pluralist — James leaves the door open for a finite, personal divine reality.
Energy
The Varieties of Religious Experience
James's late metaphysics (in A Pluralistic Universe and elsewhere) treats the universe as composed of experiential streams in real causal interaction. Energy is substantival, conserved, locally dissipative.
Information
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Religious experience genuinely discloses something — "a sense that there is something there." James is unwilling to specify what, but committed to the reality of the disclosure. Personal information is conserved across death — James's late work treats immortality as a serious philosophical option, not merely a comforting hope.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
James's pluralism — that the universe is multiform, religious experiences genuinely various, and no single religious tradition has a monopoly on the truth — sits in tension with the implicit theological framework many readers find embedded in his case studies. The Varieties has been read variously as a sympathetic naturalisation of religion, as an empirical apologetic for religion, and as a covert proto-perennialism. James himself finally declines to specify, treating the question as practical rather than theoretical.