The philosopher James is often credited with legitimizing questions of mental healing and causative qualities of the mind in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); but this much shorter work, which he delivered as an address before the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, asserts the need for a practical spirituality and philosophy of living - the effects of which can be measured in human conduct (which James saw as the one true worth of an idea). James's impact was equal to Emerson's in summoning modern thinkers to a pragmatic approach to religion.
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