The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure.

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.... Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. --William James

In the pragmatic movement Charles Peirce is associated with science, John Dewey with education and morals, and William James with religion. The designation, philosopher of religion, should not be taken as a testimonial to conviction, however, for James personally shunned all sects, dogmas, and revelatory creeds. "He did not really believe," remarked Santayana a trifle unfairly; "he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you believed."

Even as a phenomenon for study, institutionalized religion did not attract James. Religious experience, he felt, should be first-hand, vital, and the remedy for otherwise incurable maladies of the soul. "At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?" Assuredly the moralist assents to the reigning order, but he may endure it with "the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke." The religious man, on the other hand, in his strongest and most fully developed form, never feels the demands of life as an odious burden. "Dull submission," according to James, "is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place."

When James received his appointment to the Gifford Lectureship at Edinburgh University, he viewed it, firstly, as an opportunity for an act of filial devotion. Immediately after his father's death in 1882 he had written his wife: "you must not leave me till I understand a little more of the value and meaning of religion, in Father's sense, in the mental life and destiny of man. It is not the one thing needful, as he said. But it is needful with the rest. My friends leave it altogether out. I as his son (if for no other reason) must help it to its rights in their eyes." Twenty years later he orally fulfilled the pledge and subsequently published the lectures as The Varieties of Religious Experience.

By way of introduction James admits in The Varieties that the incidence of abnormal psychical conditions among religious leaders has been exceedingly high. He even grants that the "pathological" aspects of their personalities have contributed greatly to their prestige and authority. Nonetheless, James insists that the prevalence of such traits and tendencies does not constitute a refutation of their teachings.

Ultimately, he declares, good religious beliefs must be determined by the empiricist criterion. "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots." "Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true."

Another Dichotomy

Just as James divides thinkers into the tough-minded and the tender-minded, he categorizes religious believers as healthy-minded or sick-souled. It is with the religion of healthy-mindedness--ranging from the creeds of professional mind healers to the poetry of Whitman--that he deals first. "It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of a sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden."

Healthy-minded individuals, James notes, possess temperaments "organically weighted on the side of cheer." For some people healthy-mindedness consists simply of involuntarily feeling happy about things--it occurs as an immediate, spontaneous response.

Voluntary Form

In its more voluntary form healthy-mindedness becomes an abstract way of conceiving things as good. It deliberately rejects evil from its perceptual field, holding the good as the essential aspect of being. James maintains that the emotional state of happiness carries with it blindness and insensibility to opposing facts as an instinctive device of self-protection. Yet he recognizes that healthy-mindedness can be employed as a conscious religious policy, and he takes pains to give it a fair hearing.

"Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern."

Beyond Health

Cheery and salubrious though it be, healthy-mindedness for James could never qualify as an ultimately satisfactory credo. "It seems to me," he writes, "that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution.