38 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 863 



those problems of evolutionary thought 

 and of psychology to which I just directed 

 your attention. I am sure that James him- 

 self was very little conscious that he was 

 indeed an especially representative Ameri- 

 can philosopher. He certainly had no 

 ambition to vaunt himself as such. He 

 worked with a beautiful and hearty sin- 

 cerity upon the problems that as a fact 

 interested him. He knew that he loved 

 these problems because of their intense hu- 

 man interest. He knew, then, that he was 

 indeed laboring in the service of mankind. 

 But he so loved what he called the con- 

 crete, the particular, the individual, that 

 he naturally made little attempt to define 

 his office in terms of any social organism, 

 or of any such object as our national life, 

 viewed as an entity. And he especially 

 disliked to talk of causes in the abstract, 

 or of social movements as I am here char- 

 acterizing them. His world seemed to him 

 to be made up of individuals — ^men, events, 

 experiences and deeds. And he always 

 very little knew how important he him- 

 self was, or what vast inarticulate social 

 forces were finding in him their voice. 

 But we are now viewing James from with- 

 out, in a way that is of course as imper- 

 fect as it is inevitable. We therefore have 

 a right at this point to attribute to him an 

 office that, as I believe, he never attributed 

 to himself. 



And here we have to speak first of 

 James 's treatment of religious problems, 

 and then of his attitude towards ethics. 



Our nation since the civil war has largely 

 lost touch with the older forms of its own 

 religious life. It has been seeking for new 

 embodiments of the religious consciousness, 

 for creeds that shall not be in conflict with 

 the modern man's view of life. It was 

 James's office, as psychologist, and as phi- 

 losopher, to give a novel expression to this 

 our own national variety of the spirit of 



religious unrest. And his volume "The 

 Varieties of Religious Experience," is one 

 that, indeed, with all its wealth of illustra- 

 tion, and in its courageous enterprise, has 

 a certain classic beauty. Some men preach 

 new ways of salvation. James simply por- 

 trayed the meaning that the old ways of 

 salvation had possessed, or still do possess, 

 in the inner and personal experience of 

 those individuals whom he has called the 

 religious geniuses. And then he undertook 

 to suggest an hypothesis as to what the 

 whole religious process might mean. The 

 hypothesis is on the one hand in touch 

 with certain tendencies of recent psychol- 

 ogy. And in so far it seems in harmony 

 with the modern consciousness. On the 

 other hand it expresses, in a way, James's 

 whole philosophy of life. And in this re- 

 spect it comes into touch with all the cen- 

 tral problems of humanity. 



The result of this portrayal was indeed 

 magical. The psychologists were aided 

 towards a new tolerance in their study of 

 religion. The evolution of religion ap- 

 peared in a new light. And meanwhile 

 many of the faithful, who had long been 

 disheartened by the later forms of evolu- 

 tionary naturalism, took heart anew when 

 they read James's vigorous appeal to the 

 religious experience of the individual as to 

 the most authoritative evidence for re- 

 ligion. "The most modern of thinkers, 

 the evolutionist, the psychologist," they 

 said, "the heir of all the ages, has thus 

 vindicated anew the witness of the spirit 

 in the heart — the very source of inspira- 

 tion in which we ourselves have always 

 believed." And such readers went away 

 rejoicing, and some of them even began to 

 write christologies based upon the doctrine 

 of James as they understood it. The new 

 gospel, the glad tidings of the subcon- 

 scious, began to be preached in many 



