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self-reliance); and he tended to identify religion with the "sick-minded"
and moralism with the "healthy-minded." Of course, he conceded, as
individuals we could sometimes be "healthy minds on one day and sick
souls on the next"; but philosophers needed to be more consistent.
James's feeling for the central role of heroism made him confess that his
own pragmatism recoiled from religious optimism about a world
already saved in favor instead of a more chancy, dangerous, and unfin–
ished world: "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?"
This eloquent tough-mindedness in
Pragmatism
is often overlooked
in James because at other moments he can express some limited sympa–
thy in some contexts for utopian reformers and even for "the healthy
minded once-born," sentiments which may seem more American to
many of his commentators. Yet he had advertised Pragmatism in the
beginning of his lectures as a mediator between "the tender-minded"
and "the tough-minded," and so in the end he returned to the idea that
"higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines
similar to our own." We might be in the universe as dogs and cats are
in our libraries, being "merely tangent to curves of history the begin–
nings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken."
It
was a characteristically Jamesian compromise expressed with his char–
acteristic flair for the homely metaphor.
James's writing is so expressive of the man that it might seem as if it
would be too idiosyncratic to have an influence, but in fact Pragmatism
was a movement in philosophy that had its passionate proponents in
England and Europe, so that James, as Ralph Barton Perry put it, was
"the Ambassador of American Thought to Western Europe." He was,
like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a cosmopolitan Ameri–
can patriot who could speak to the world, and he has been credited by
the historian H. Stuart Hughes with being "the revivifying force in
European thought in the decade and a half preceding the outbreak of
the First World War."
But the recent revival of Pragmatism, chiefly led by the philosopher
Richard Rorty, has invoked John Dewey rather than James. Dewey
linked himself to James in their common belief that the "chief business
of philosophy" is to show how "desire and ideas, purpose and knowl–
edge, emotion and science, can cooperate fruitfully in behalf of human
good." Both men were Darwinian, but Dewey always set out from the
context of the organism and its environment, truth and value being
