At the outset of his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James advises readers that he comes to his subject matter not as theologian nor as historian of religion nor as anthropologist but as a psychologist. James is alluding to his earlier labors, of which The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Psychology: Briefer Course (1892) are the notable monuments. Whatever varied fortunes these publications met with in James's own times, they have acquired the stature of landmarks, certainly in the history of American psychology but also - less conspicuously perhaps - in the modern history of ideas. Gordon W. Allport, for example, attests to the former fact in his preface to a 1961 reissue of Briefer Course: William James's “depiction of mental life is faithful, vital, subtle. In verve he has no equal.” The “expanding horizon of James,” he adds, contrasts markedly with the “constricting horizon of much contemporary psychology”; and Allport suggests that readers of the book apply the pragmatic test for themselves by asking whether they find their own horizons enlarged, whether they feel the “pulse of human nature.”