Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life. So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts,- gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond our control. How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery.
The prophet of healthy-mindedness pulls herself up by her bootstraps, while the sick soul sees that she needs an unearned gift -- from above (what I think Christians call grace) or from below, from her own fickle neurochemistry.
Would you say that like James's sick soul you'd find the idea that "natural evil [is] no such stumbling-block and terror" because in the end it doesn't really count, and is "swallowed up in supernatural good," a good basis for religious experience? Versus the healthy-minded view in which evil could be avoided, or reinterpreted out of existence, by acts of will, and the supernatural is limited to the power of "mind-cure"?
Then there are the pagan options, which I think it's interesting that James doesn't think much of: Stoic indifference to the natural world, and the disciplined bet-hedging of Epicureanism, "which can only by great courtesy be called a religion."
For James there still remains one other religious alternative, which, very interestingly, he doesn't work into the Varieities (but discusses at length in A Pluralistic Universe): accepting that some evil is real, final, and never made good, and valuing the struggle against such evil more than your own personal fate. Near the end of "Pragmatism and Religion," he writes:
Is NO price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all ’yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn’t the fact of ’no’ stand at the very core of life? Doesn’t the very ’seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?
I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to [this view]. [...] I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ’no play.’ [...] I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.
As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one’s self:
“A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, Weathered the gale.”
Those puritans who answered ’yes’ to the question: Are you willing to be damned for God’s glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting it ’aufgehoben,’ or preserved in the whole as an element essential but ’overcome.’ It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name.
It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the element of ’seriousness’ is not to be expelled. Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames.
|