CUSHING STROUT
435
Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Transcendentalists,
Quakers, Mormons, Mohammedans, Melanesian cannibals, drug-tak–
ers, atheists, and neurotics, including himself concealed in the guise of
an anonymous Frenchman to whom (James later confessed) he had
attributed his own experience of panic fear
in
the asylum.
Nothing could have been further from the inventory in his lectures of
disturbing religious experiences than the Anglican religion, which he
characterized
in
a letter to his friend Pauline Goldmark as "obese and
round and comfortable and decent with this world's decencies, without
an
acute
note
in
its whole life or history,
in
spite of the shrill Jewish
words on which its ears are fed, and the nitro-glycerine of the Gospels
and Epistles which has been injected into its veins."
In
the end his con–
ceptualizing of religion came down to the centrality of one type of expe–
rience very familiar to Americans, the conversion of the "twice-born
sick soul" through a crisis into a new consciousness
in
which "surren–
der and sacrifice are positively espoused."
He also outlined by contrast another familiar form of American reli–
gion, "the religion of healthy mindedness," which cultivates the "sky–
blue" optimistic gospel of the "once-born," whose development is
"straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or cri–
sis." Yet on his own evidence the religion of healthy mindedness,
preached
in
his day by Christian Scientists and other "mind-curers,"
attracted the nervous and the sick, not the robust and the healthy; and
in a footnote james acknowledged that in his case histories of the mind–
cure form of healthy mindedness, there were "abundant examples of
regenerative process." His concepts tended to conflate psychological
genesis with doctrinal perspective.
What stands out in
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
neverthe–
less, is his sympathy for the point of view held by the classic examples
of "twice-born" sick souls, those for whom the "evil facts" which the
"healthy-minded" refuse to recognize are actually "a genuine portion of
reality," james insists; "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."
In
a remarkable passage james observes that
the norma] process of life contains moments as bad as any of those
which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical
evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn ....Here on our very
hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting
mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws.
