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So the completest religions, he concludes, "are those in which the pes–
simistic elements are best developed."
It
was here that he most parted company with Emerson, who had
said we should admire a soul "whose acts are regal, graceful, and pleas–
ant as roses" and not turn against such an angel and say "Crump is a
better man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." James
replied in a wonderful footnote: "True enough. Yet Crump may be the
better Crump for his inner discords and second birth," while the regal
character may "fall far short of what he individually might be had he
only some Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiar
diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these
may be." Sorrow and suffering are for James the soul's "heroic
resources," and he appealed to "the common instinct for reality" that
holds the world "to be essentially a theater for heroism."
James's father complained that Emerson lacked "a conviction of sin,"
as Calvinists called it, and William shared with his father a Puritan
strain that connected them to Jonathan Edwards. William specifically
cited Edwards's
Treatise on Religious Affections
for its argument that
"no appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is
the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Chris–
tians." As a philosopher of pragmatism James was thoroughly at home
with this emphasis on practice because for him beliefs are rules for
action, so that "to develop a thought'S meaning we need therefore only
determine what conduct it is fitted to produce." James was resolutely
humanistic, however, as Edwards was not, and evaluated theologies by
"the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all
gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be
advancing." From this point of view "the gods we stand by are the gods
we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements
of our demands on ourselves and on one another."
He himself had no sense of living commerce with God, and his ulti–
mate belief in the supernatural came down to his psychologist's confi–
der1Ce that in faith and in prayer there is some "actual inflow of energy."
Having spent so much time in his Edinburgh lectures on making this
point credible, he found that he had too little time left to develop his
philosophical views about it. All that he could suggest was that he had
an "over-belief" that such states are connected to a larger realm of per–
sonality, a universe not defined by "the sectarian scientist's attitude" in
which "the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be
all." But he was typically heretical in thinking that God need not be sin–
gle or infinite, and as a pluralist he rejected the tendency to "consider
