 It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.A broad range of western and eastern movements have incorporated and influenced the emergence of the modern notion of "mystical experience", such as the Perennial philosophy, Transcendentalism, Universalism, the Theosophical Society, New Thought, Neo-Vedanta and Buddhist modernism.William James popularized the use of the term "religious experience" in his "The Varieties of Religious Experience".