I can't say I particularly enjoyed having to read James' _Varieties_ - I had to cram it in a week in a fairly intensive course back at Reed. Your assessment of it is dead-on. It's not a great read (not a bad one either, though) but its influence is truly overwhelming. People who have no interest in or knowledge of James aside from his more famous brother - like my parents - use his precise language all the time to talk about their religious experiences. (The common American assumption of experience as the center of religion is, itself, a Jamesian echo, although he here, as with so much else, is tramslating German Romanticism into American idioms) James is usually brought up today by scholars to be criticized, but in the way that we criticize a true father to the field.

I can't quite remember his definition either, but it's a tettaropartite typology with two addendum clarifications. Ineffability, inconstancy are two. Third is that it's noetic (you have something to say about it afterwards). The others I can't recall...

Little did he know that a century later no reader would be able to think of a "Starbucks Survey" without lusting for an overpriced latte.

His perfect slam on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as "wheezing sewer rats" will forever stay with me and provide a little distance from the allure classical pessimism.