heroism, criticized them for trying to reconcile it with religious submission. Though James did not subscribe to Nietzsche's view of Emerson, he accepted his formulation of the general issue—his equation of submission with weakness and "morbidity." His own preoccupation with "optimism" and "pessimism," together with his identification of these qualities with "health" and "sickness," suggests a certain deterioration in the intellectual atmosphere of the times, from the effects of which even those who set themselves against the times could not altogether escape—a coarsening of thought, which would eventually reduce all spiritual questions to questions of "mental health."

At first sight, James's work appears not merely to foreshadow this therapeutic view of religion, the dominant view in our own time, but to present it in a fully developed form. James conducts his investigation of religion, after all, in the psychological mode. In his Principles of Psychology, a work that anticipated Freud, he exposed the importance of unconscious mental associations in the "stream of consciousness." His next major work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, applied his psychological method to the analysis of religious "symptoms"—the psychology of conversion. Here he endorses the religious insight that only forces outside a person's conscious control can bring about real changes in character and outlook; but he takes the position that these forces enter the self not from above but from below, from the subterranean depths of the mind. He bids a "definitive good-by to dogmatic theology" and to a personal conception of God, which is "incredible," he says, "to our modern imagination." He judges religious ideas, or at least appears to judge them, solely by their effect on mental health, waving aside the question of their truth. Thus he argues that Christian Science and other mind-cure movements should be taken seriously because they sometimes produce a "change of character for the better," whereas liberal Christianity "does absolutely nothing" for the believer.

When we add to such statements James's frequent references to the "cash value" of religion, we seem to be justified in regarding him as the

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