Abstract

This paper reconstructs the concept of the «feeling» elaborated by William James in the text The Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in human nature as a mean towards a moral education. The analysis of the feeling expecially the religious one is structurally connected, in this writing of James, not only with thebiographical problem of the conscience and the knowledge of the self, but also with the strategically wider issue, of «a study of the human nature». The analysis of the experience conducted from the pragmatist perspective allows us to specify the pedagogical function of the «spiritual feeling» in the path of consciousness of the subject: the faith, in fact, seen in its operative dynamic, increases the experimental conviction that the world can improve and it prepares in such way to raise and to invigorate the relationship with the life. In such perspective it is underlined the «therapeutic» function of moral emotions for the existence in general, and their specific impact on the process of formation and behavior of the human being.