In this week's Varieties lectures, James explores a topic of great personal interest to himself: the relationship between religion and depression (or other kinds of chronic psycholgocical distress). The religion of healthy-mindedness asks the believer "to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart," but there are people "who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence." These "sick souls" require a different relationship with the universe, based on "their own peculiar form of consciousness."As Lecture I would suggest, James does not object to giving a physiological explanation for the religious life of the sick soul. He notes that people randomly vary regarding various psychological "thresholds": some people feel unpleasantly cold sooner than others, some feel worried sooner than others, and so on. There is no particular rhyme or reason to where our thresholds fall. Some unfortunate people "seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over," or even beyond the pain-threshold, destined for near-constant misery.Such people are sensitive to wrongnesses that don't trouble the healthy-minded. In particular, they are unable to ignore the "great spectre of universal death." "If life be good," James reasons, "the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it." The robustly healthy, living high above the pain-threshold, feel no need to dwell on this conclusion, but James warns that in time "a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians." The lower our pain-threshold becomes, the more we will feel a "sadness" that a "merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy" cannot address.James offers an elegant (but debatable) proof of the inevitable sadness of a merely naturalistic worldview. In light of "recent cosmological speculations" about the inevitable heat death of the universe, he observes, "mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation." One might argue that it isn't worth caring very much about an extinction that is still so far in the future, but, James argues, "the lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with"; if mere naturalism puts an outer limit on these possibilities, there is then an outer limit to our present happiness, a limit which the sick soul will feel as painful.QUESTION: Do you accept this proof?The sick soul can only be at peace if all the evils of the universe, including the evil of its ultimate ending, are negated by being absorbed into a universal goodness. Since nature taken by itself is shot through with at least a tincture of evil, the good that negates that evil must for them be supernatural, above and distinct from nature. As long as there are sick souls, James predicts, "the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much."James calls the religion of the sick soul "coarse," yet in the next breath he argues that it is superior to the cultivated optimism of the religion of healthy-mindedness, because it takes in a wider view:
In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we to say of this quarrel? It seems to me 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. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.This apparent contradiciton, that the religion of the sick soul is both better and worse than the religion of healthy-mindedness, is only fully resolved in James's later book, A Pluralistic Universe. This week's supplementary essays, "Pragmatism and Religion" and "The Absolute and the Strenuous Life," give some glimpses into his solution. But this thinksheet is already long enough -- maybe anyone who wants to talk about the essays could introduce them themself?
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