unsuccessful rivals that were condemned, and sank into 'unreality' by their rejection. It should be added that it continues to hold its status as reality in virtue of its superiority over all other claimants. Seeing, then, that all truth and all reality have to be adopted by a selection, and by a rejection of error and illusion, it is clear that 'true' and 'real' must mean for us truer and more real, i.e. superior in value to any alternatives that have been, or may be, suggested.

This implication of personality in values and of values in every object of human interest (whether theoretical' or 'practical') is the insuperable obstacle to all the academic attempts at dehumanising philosophy. It reinstates in principle the romantic attitude towards the world we live in. But James advocates it not by a revulsion of feeling, as a rebel against science, but in the sacred name of science itself. It is a sober and irrefutable fact that life is a personal venture, and that nothing venture nothing have.' There are no means of avoiding personal responsibility for whatever we do or think. Whether we believe or disbelieve, or doubt and suspend belief, we are judged by our beliefs, that is our acts. There are no absolute guarantees, and no predestined dooms. All our beliefs, our methods, our results, are provisional and subject to revision; they are conditional upon their working, and moulded by the lessons that intelligence draws from experience. For they are made by man for man that man may live. They are not, therefore, fit objects for idolatry or uncomprehending worship; but no pains can be too great to render them as good as possible, for the best are barely good enough.

It was because he realised this so intensely that James never hesitated to champion a number of ideas that were in academic disrepute. He disputed the metaphysical truth of Determinism, which is just a form of the scientific postulate that the incalculable individuality of things shall not be allowed to disturb scientific calculations, and of Monism, which adds to Determinism the pretension to lay down the law to the real à priori, by imposing on it our conception of a 'universe.' He vindicated the right to believe against a rationalism that conceived faith as a purely intellectual

process, and failed to see that it always involved an act. He was a life-long psychical researcher, who neither gave up hope nor lapsed into credulity; thus showing (like Henry Sidgwick) that it is possible to live in close proximity to pitch and not be defiled, and that interest in the abnormal need not degenerate into morbidity. His attitude here was an illustration of what his friends always recognised, viz. that beneath all James's enthusiasm and his chivalrous defence of the under dog there dwelt a calmly critical judgment that was incorruptible and not easy to deceive or to stampede by the emotions. The special attraction psychical research had for him was that it concerned itself with a precious affirmation of the romantic, personal view of reality he was exploring. As he puts it in the essay on psychical research included in the Will to Believe' (pp. 324-5):

'Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological, emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their personal significance, is an abomination. . . .' But the personal and romantic view of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and perversity of heart. It is perennially fed by facts of experience, whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be.'

And so the scientific view cannot ignore it, so long as it professes to account for facts and to account for all of them.

The issue, then, between William James and the traditional philosophy is not about technical trifles like the disputes of the schools; it is one of the deepest human interest. One would give much to know how, and out of what, James developed his convictions, what was the source of his originality and courage in breaking with tradition. Unfortunately, as in all such cases, our curiosity cannot be completely satisfied. In part because the origin of a personality is never wholly explicable in

terms of ancestry, history, and upbringing; as is signally illustrated in the James family itself by the divergent development of William and Henry, though both were brought up together by the same father, rather unkindly described by Prof. Santayana as

'one of those somewhat obscure sages whom early America produced: mystics of independent mind, hermits in the desert of business, and heretics in the churches. They were intense individualists, full of veneration for the free souls of their children, and convinced that every one should paddle his own canoe, especially on the high seas.'

But has not James himself taught us that genius is never deducible from its environment? It springs from so incalculable a confluence of qualities that no one can predict it or take the credit for it; it has to be accepted as a gift of the gods.† James, moreover, has left no history of his spiritual struggles and of the development of his opinions, having, as he says in one of his remarkable and revealing letters to T. W. Ward, soon learnt to consume his own smoke (Letters,' I, p. 77). These letters are the more important because, during what were probably his most formative years (1869-73), when James was wrestling with a bad spell of physical and mental depression and 'having it out' with the universe, he was living at home in the circle of his Cambridge intimates, and so had little occasion to put his soul on paper.

Nevertheless there remain a few precious traces of the spiritual struggle by which he reached the bracing, moralising atmosphere of his later Weltanschauung. James was clearly not one of the happy, healthy-minded, simple souls, 'once-born,' impervious to doubt, insensitive to the lacrima rerum, who go on from strength to strength, to finish up flatly in the undrained swamp of spiritual stagnation. He had been a 'sick soul' in his day; as his friend Flournoy revealed, and these 'Letters confirm (1, p. 145); he had portrayed himself, camouflaged as a French correspondent,' in the vivid descrip

'Character and Opinion in the United States,' p. 64. James's own beautiful letter to his father, on receiving the news of his last illness, should be compared (1, p. 218).

Principles of Psychology,' II, ch. 28; Will to Believe,' p. 216 f.

tion of The Varieties' (p. 160). Of his wanderings in the City of Dreadful Night there is no further record; but their fruits preserved James's thought from the insipidities of a callous optimism. We recognise them in the tonic bite' of passages like these:

'The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilisation is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.'

or when he tells Benjamin Paul Blood, the 'pluralistic mystic,' to whom he devoted the last article he wrote: I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide,'† and confesses to T. W. Ward that all last winter, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment.' ‡

James's spiritual troubles were not merely due to bad health and doubts about his professional career. He was simultaneously going through an acute religious crisis and considering, not which philosophic theory formulated best the absolute truth about reality, but whether he could think the world such that life in it was endurable. The nature of his crisis, and the means by which he emerged from it, come out best from the following documents-the letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junr. (Letters,' I, p. 82), his contemporary memorandum (1870) proclaiming, after reading Renouvier, that his first act of free will shall be to believe in free will' (ibid. 1, 147), his father's letter to his brother Henry (ibid. 1, 169) (1873), the criticism of Herbert Spencer's definition of mind (Essays and Reviews,' p. 43 f.) published in 1878, and lastly chapters 5, 21, and 28 of 'The Principles of Psychology' (1890).

A comparison of these documents shows, I think, that the essential trouble with James, as with so many of his generation, was the withering of the spiritual values, of God, freedom, and immortality, under the devastating onset of Naturalism. Nowadays some have learnt,

* In the Hibbert Journal' for July, 1910.

Letters,' II, p. 39.

Ibid. 1, p. 129.

from James as much as from any one, that the situation is by no means desperate, while many, it is to be feared, have grown used to their spiritual losses, and no longer view them tragically. But at that time Naturalism seemed to bear down all opposition with the irresistible might of science, and to leave nothing standing but the meaningless evolutions of matter determined by a mindless mechanism. This view of the world had received an imposing systematic form in the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, whose vogue was even greater in America than in England. Against it James's soul revolted. But instead of defying it by a mere refusal to believe himself an automaton,' or evading it by an equivocal idealism,' which saved the phraseology of spirituality while secretly betraying its cause, James set himself to fight it on its own ground. He began by dividing his enemies, and boldly appealed to Darwin to confute Spencer. He had the acuteness to perceive that Spencerism was essentially 'pre-Darwinian,' and had not really assimilated the method of biology and the implications it had for the theory of the mind's place in nature. Now biological method has no use for the fictions of an inactive, inefficacious mind that merely 'contemplates' the mechanical routine of happenings without power to intervene or to direct its course. Mr H. V. Knox has excellently shown,* James had seen (as Spencer had not) that biological method implies that mind must have survival-value. It cannot, therefore, be the impotent superfluity to which intellectualistic contemplation' reduces it. It must have efficacy, and make a real difference in the course of events. An intelligent and living being is not merely an automatic victim of natural selection.

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As

But what is the difference it makes? Simply this, that it is not merely selected, but itself selects. It is active and reacts upon external stimulation, in order to live. That is, it reacts selectively and teleologically, and its ends are determined by the goods it aims at. That it should have a mind at all, and that its mind should function as it does, become intelligible only when we recognise that mind is selective and purposive, through