For James, the religion of healthy-mindedness does have to be "sought out," and in fact the seeking is an essential part of what it's all about. To willfully feel no evil is its defining act. For the healthy-minded,

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

But the religion of the sick soul reflects something more fundamental about feelings, that in the end you can't really choose them (whether you look at them in a biological ("organic") or spiritual light):

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.

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 10:41 PM, Eric Purdy epurdy@uchicago.edu wrote:

I think that I am a pretty good specimen of the "morbid-minded" type. I am, yes, sometimes saddened by the impending heat death of the universe. More often I am saddened by the inevitability of emotional violence in interpersonal relationships, and by the various oppressions that I see in the world. And I identify strongly with the Tolstoyan inability to really feel the goodness of things pretty often.

Being this way doesn't really feel like a choice? I don't know how I would go about seeking out the religion of healthy mindedness. I also don't think I would choose it even if I could - it would feel like a betrayal of my nature, or something.

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Jesse Raber jesse.raber@gmail.comwrote:

...

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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