The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation ... and ... kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevances however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me to be a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster.

William James's ambivalence about Emerson reflected his ambivalence about "optimism" in general and his failure to distinguish between optimism and hope. An awareness of evil did not necessarily lead to spiritual "sickness," as his own account of the religious experience of the "twice‐ born" should have made amply clear. Yet James could not rid himself of the suspicion that submission to a higher will—the central feature of that experience—contained something a little unmanly and "tender-minded," especially if it implied a "monistic" view of the universe in which evil was seen merely as the product of human perversity and pride, not as an active principle in its own right. James took the distinction between the once-born and the twice-born from John Henry Newman, but his formulation of the issue between them often seemed to owe more to Nietzsche. Nietzsche's violent antipathy to Christianity as a religion of the "sick" and "morbid" was "itself sickly enough," James wrote in Varieties, "but we all know what he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals." The strong man glorified by Nietzsche could "see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self-severity." The debate between the two ideals—and the debate was "serious," James insisted—came down to the choice between "aggressiveness" and "non-resistance." Which provided the better "means of adaptation" to a world in which human projects and expectations so often came to nothing?

James's passionate engagement with these issues marked him as a worthy successor to Edwards and Emerson—a thinker, indeed, whose ideas are easily misunderstood if this earlier background is allowed to fade out of sight. But the background of early American Protestantism had already become slightly indistinct even for James himself, who missed Emerson's call for heroism and read him, in effect, as an advocate of "non-resistance." Nietzsche, who read Emerson and Carlyle more accurately in this respect and valued them precisely because they too admired

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