he sympathized deeply with the more importunate and helpless cravings of the religious spirit. But for himself, he was "willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play.”1 "The essence of good is simply to satisfy demand." But the tragic fact is, that demands conflict, and exceed the supply. Though God be there as "one of the claimants," lending perspective and hopefulness to life, the victory is not yet won. If we have the courage to accept this doubtful and perilous situation as it is, "there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.'

2

IV. CONCLUSION

These, I believe, are the bare essentials of James's philosophy, and the thread of reasoning by which they are connected. A summary such as this must altogether miss the pictorial and dramatic quality of his thought. That which is most characteristic of him cannot be restated; for his own style was its inevitable and only adequate expression. But I offer this rude sketch in the hope that it may help those who seek to apprehend this philosophy as a whole. James's field of study, the panoramic view within which all of his special problems fell, was the lot of mankind. On the one hand stands the environment, an unbidden presence, tolerating only what will conform to it, threatening and hampering every interest, and yielding only reluctantly and gradually to moral endeavor. On the other hand stands man who, once he gets on good terms with this environment, finds it an inexhausible mine of possibilities. "By slowly cumulative strokes of choice," he has extricated out of this, like a sculptor, the world he lives in. James never confused the world with man's world, but he made man's world, thus progressively achieved, the principal object of his study. Man conquers his world first by knowing it, and thus presenting it for action; second, by acting on it, and thus remoulding it to suit his purposes. But these operations are the inseparable

1 Pragmatism, p. 296.

"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in Will to Believe, pp. 201, 212, 209, and passim.

parts of one activity through which a humanized and moralized world is developed out of the aboriginal potentialities. So philosophy becomes the study of man as he works out his salvation. What is his endowment and capacity? How does his knowing take place, and what are the marks of its success? What forms does reality assume as it passes through the medium of the human mind? What are the goods which man seeks? What are the grounds, and what is the justification, of his belief in ultimate success?

The characteristics of James's mind were intimately connected with his conception of the mission of philosophy. He was distinguished by his extraordinary sense for reality. He had a courageous desire to know the worst, to banish illusions, to take life at its word, and accept its challenge. He had an unparalleled capacity for apprehending things in their human aspect, as they fill the mind, and are assimilated to life. So indefatigable was his patience in observing these conjunctions and transitions in their rich detail, that few of his critics have had patience enough even to follow his lead. True to his empirical ideals, he abandoned the easier and more high-handed philosophy of abstractions for the more difficult and less conclusive philosophy of concrete particulars. And finally, he had a sure instinct for humanly interesting and humanly important problems. He sought to answer for men the questions the exigencies of life led them to ask. And where no certain answer was to be had, since men must needs live notwithstanding, he offered the prop of faith. Making no pretence of certainty where he found the evidence inconclusive, he felt the common human need of forging ahead even though the light be dim. Thus his philosophy was his way of bringing men to the wisest belief which in their half-darkness they can achieve. He was the frank partizan of mankind, undeceiving them when necessary, but giving them the benefit of every doubt!

To attribute James's power to his genius is as much as to say that it escapes analysis. He was felt in his time as an original intellectual and spiritual force, that can no more be divided and inventoried than his philosophy can be distributed among the hackneyed classifications of the schools. It is easy to say that he owed much to his style; but it is plain that his style owed everything to him. He was, it is true, a lover of form, endowed

with the finest sensibilities, and stirred by the creative impulse; but his style was always his instrument. He found it above all a means of communication; for nothing was more notable about him than the social quality of his thought. He wrote for his readers, his vivid imagination of their presence guiding him infallibly to the centre of their minds. And his style was also the means of faithfully representing his experience. It was figurative and pictorial, because the world he saw was a procession of concrete happenings, abounding in novelty and uniqueness. For his originality lay, not in his invention, but in the extraordinary freshness of his perception, and in an imagination which was freed from convention only to yield itself utterly to the primeval and native quality of the world as he found it. His thought was always of the actual world spread before him, of what he called "the particular facts of life." He relied little on dialectic, but brought his powers of observation into play where the traditional philosophy had abstracted the problem and carried it off into the closet. And to this first-hand acquaintance with particulars he added a keen zest for metaphysical speculation, He was curious, as the natural man is curious, loving the adventure of exploration, and preferring the larger riddles of existence to the purely technical problems of the schools.

His resources were by no means limited to the results of his own observation. He probably read more widely than any philosopher of his day. He did not, however, value erudition for its own sake, but only as a means of getting light. His reading was always selective and assimilative; he converted it at once into intellectual tissue, so that it gave him strength and buoyancy and never merely a burden to carry. And he learned from men as well as from books. Always governed by his likings rather than his aversions, generous and open-hearted, men who shrank from others gave their unsuspected best to him. In short, his mind was instinctively discriminating. He not only knew the good from the evil, but he was guided by a remarkably independent judgment of proportion. He was never led to accept a thing as important simply because it had acquired a certain professional or academic prominence; and he was rarely imposed on by the respectable humbug, though he opened his mind to whatever was humanly significant, even though it might be socially disreputable.

It is impossible to divorce his intellectual gifts from his character. His openmindedness, which has become proverbial, was only one of many signs of his fundamental truthfulness. Having no pride of opinion, and setting little store by his personal prestige, his mind remained flexible and hospitable to the end. His very modesty and guilelessness were sources of power. For his modesty was not a form of self-consciousness, but a preoccupation with things or persons other than himself. And his guilelessness was not a childlike naïveté, but a sincerity and openness of motive. He was possessed of a certain shrewdness and directness-an ability to come to the heart of affairs at a stroke that made him the wisest of counselors. But he had no ambitions which he attempted to conceal, and no prerogatives of which he was jealous; so that he met his students and his friends with a natural simplicity and an entirely uncalculating indifference to distinctions of social eminence. He proved the possibility of possessing taste and personal distinction without pride or aloofness. And his democracy was a matter of conviction, as well as of impulse. He believed heartily in the institutions of his country, and shared those hopes of freedom, peace, and happiness, which unite men and nerve them to take part in the work of civilization.

James did not found a school. He was incapable of that patient brooding upon the academic nest that is necessary for the hatching of disciples. The number of those who borrowed his ideas is small and insignificant beside the number of those that through him were brought to have ideas of their own. His greatness as a teacher lay in his implanting and fostering of intellectual independence. He prized his own university for its individualism and tolerance, and for the freedom which it gave him to subordinate the scholastic office and the scholastic method to a larger human service. So the circle of his influence widened to the bounds of European civilization; while his versatility, his liberal sympathies, the coincidence of his ruling passions with the deeper interests of mankind at large, and above all the profound goodness of his heart, so diversified and humanized this influence that there were few indeed too orthodox or too odd to respond to it.

INDEX