We are happy to offer the public a free, carefully annotated, PDF e-book edition of William James' classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience.  This web edition of the book was prepared by LeRoy L. Miller for a course given at Brooks Divinity School, Denver, Colorado, in June, 1999.  We would like to express our deep appreciation to Mr. Miller for his extensive work in making this text available to new generations of spiritual seekers.  

If you are already familiar with downloading PDF files, you can download the book by clicking here.  Otherwise, please follow the download guide on the rest of this page.

Downloading and reading the PDF file

The Varieties of Religious Experience is downloadable to any computer that can run the Adobe Acrobat reader (which is available free from Adobe Systems). If you do not yet have the Acrobat Reader on your computer, please go to Step 1, below, download the software and install it.  If you already have Adobe Acrobat on your system, please go to Step 2, below.

STEP 1:  Install the Adobe Acrobat Viewer

A.  Begin by bookmarking this page, because the Acrobat
installation process will require you to restart your
computer.   If you are not familiar with bookmarks and/or
favorites, write down the address of this page so that you
can return to it to complete STEP 2.  The address is
http://www.worldu.edu/library/william_james_var.htm

B.  Click here to download Acrobat Reader (5MB)
(select the appropriate Windows or Mac version on the
Adobe download page. This will take from 5 to 20 min.
Write down the directory or folder in which you saved
the downloaded program file)

C.  Install. The Acrobat software package will require a
simple installation process:  Log off the internet and close
all applications.  Find the downloaded program file and
double-click on it.  At the end of the installation process
you may need to reboot your computer.  After rebooting,
go online again, come back to this page and continue with
STEP 2, below.

STEP 2: To download The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF file
click on the link below:

Download book in Acrobat PDF format (1.5MB)
(This will take from 2 to 8 minutes to download.)
Your browser should launch Acrobat, which will allow
you to view, print and SAVE(very important) the 
book in PDF document format.  Be sure to use the
Acrobat Reader's SAVE button to save a copy of the
book on your hard drive.  If your browser does
not launch Acrobat, it should launch a dialog box
that will allow you to save the  PDF document on
your hard drive for later viewing with the Acrobat Viewer.
 

Process complete.  Many Blessings!

Copyright 2001, World University in Ojai