July 14, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



41 



to sloth. And sloth on every level of our 

 development remains one of the most 

 treacherous and mortal enemies of the 

 moral will. Secondly, they teach us to 

 avoid the dangers to which the souls of 

 Hamlet's type fall a prey. That is, they 

 discourage the spirit that reflectively 

 divides the inner self, and that leaves it 

 divided. They warn us that the divided 

 self is indeed, unless it can heal its 

 deadly wound, by fitting action, a lost 

 soul. And thirdly, they emphasize cour- 

 age. And courage — not, to be sure, so 

 much the courage that faces one's rivals 

 in the market place, or one's foes on the 

 battlefield as the courage that fits us to 

 meet our true spiritual enemies — the cour- 

 age that arises anew from despair and that 

 undertakes, despite all tribulations, to 

 overcome the world — such courage is one 

 of the central treasures of the moral life. 

 Because of these three features, the 

 maxims to which I refer are in all their 

 vagueness, vehicles of wisdom. But they 

 express themselves in their most popular 

 forms with a wilfulness that is often 

 more or less comic, and that is sometimes 

 tragic. For what they do not emphasize 

 is the significance of self-possession, of 

 lifting up our eyes to the hills whence 

 cometh our help, of testing the life that 

 now is by the vision of the largest life that 

 we can in ideal appreciate. These popu- 

 lar maxims also emphasize results rather 

 than ideals, strength rather than cultiva- 

 tion, temporary success rather than whole- 

 ness of life, the greatness of "Him that 

 taketh a city," rather than of "Him that 

 ruleth his spirit." They are the maxims 

 of unrest, of impatience and of a certain 

 humane and generous unscrupulousness, 

 as fascinating as it is dangerous. They 

 characterize a people that is indeed 

 earnestly determined to find itself, but 

 that so far has not found itself. 



Now one of the most momentous prob- 

 lems regarding the influence of James is 

 presented by the question: How did he 

 stand related to these recent ethical tend- 

 encies of our nation? I may say at once 

 that, in my opinion, he has just here 

 proved himself to be most of all and in the 

 best sense our national philosopher. For 

 the philosopher must not be an echo. He 

 must interpret. He must know us better 

 than we know ourselves, and this is what 

 indeed James has done for our American 

 moral consciousness. For, first, while he 

 indeed made very little of the formal office 

 of an ethical teacher and seldom wrote 

 upon technical ethical controversies, he 

 was, as a fact, profoundly ethical in his 

 whole influence. And next, he fully un- 

 derstood, yes shared in a rich measure, the 

 motives to which the ethical maxims just 

 summarized have given expression. Was 

 not he himself restlessly active in his whole 

 temperament ? Did he not love individual 

 enterprise and its free expression ? Did he 

 not loathe what seemed to him abstrac- 

 tions ? Did he not insist that the moralist 

 must be in close touch with concrete life? 

 As psychologist did he not emphasize the 

 fact that the very essence of conscious life 

 lies in its active, yes, in its creative rela- 

 tion to experience? Did he not counsel the 

 strenuous attitude towards our tasks? 

 And are not all these features in harmony 

 with the spirit from which the athletic 

 type of morality just sketched seems to 

 have sprung? 



Not only is all this true of James, but, 

 in the popular opinion of the moment, the 

 doctrine called pragmatism, as he ex- 

 pounded it in his Lowell lectures, seems, 

 to many of his foreign critics, and to some 

 of those who think themselves his best fol- 

 lowers here at home, a doctrine primarily 

 ethical in its force, while, to some minds, 

 pragmatism seems also to be a sort of phi- 



