Synthesized answer
The purpose of "concrete examples" in James's lectures is to demonstrate that a large acquaintance with particulars often leads to greater wisdom than possessing abstract formulas [5]. He has intentionally included these examples, particularly those from the more extreme expressions of the religious temperament, to illustrate the "enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit" [3, 5].
James uses these concrete examples to help the audience understand the psychological peculiarities of religious attitudes and the belief in unseen orders [4]. He believes that by presenting these varied experiences, including those that might initially seem like "convulsions of piety," the lectures will allow individuals to draw moderate conclusions by the end, as he intends to later combine these impulses with principles of common sense as correctives [5].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
agnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being. It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the…
ng with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever. My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence…
may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy‐minded type, we must take it where we find it in most…
egin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts. LECTURE III. THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN. Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object which…
1‐519, and to the “Postscript” of the book. I hope to be able at some later day to express them in more explicit form. In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not sane. If, however, they…