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Quotation from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
James's description of John Bunyan; 'psychopathic' here means nervously unstable, in the vocabulary of 1900.
Citation: "He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory" — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul. (id the-varieties-of-religious-experience-q6)
Portrait: William James by Alice M. Boughton, c. 1907, platinum print, from the National Portrait Gallery - NPG-NPG 87 37James-000001 (cropped), Alice Boughton, Public domain.
