"secular theologian" of the "new therapeutic society," in Clarence Karier's words, someone who valued religion only for its therapeutic properties and took the position that "any therapeutic belief is acceptable as long as it works." But things are not so simple. James expressly repudiates the "re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality," along with the "medical materialism" that can so easily be used as a means of "discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy." He dissociates himself from attempts to write the "story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever." A purely scientific view, he says, falls short of "absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts." Scientific rationalism gives a "shallow" and "superficial" account of man's spiritual life. It cannot explain religious belief even when it tries to argue in support of religion instead of arguing against it. A rationalistic God is no more convincing than a universe with no God at all. If God exists, he now has to be conceived as an altogether "more cosmic and tragic personage," whose presence reveals itself in the depths of emotion evoked by religious belief.

The "subconscious incubation" of religious feeling, James argues, does not rule out the possibility that something lies on the "farther side" of consciousness as well as on its subterranean or "hither side." The psychological realism of Luther, Edwards, and other Protestant theologians— whose analysis of conversion, James thinks, can hardly be surpassed by a modern psychologist—does not mean that religion should be replaced by psychology. It means only that psychological understanding has been part of the appeal of religion all along. The "admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind" indicates that Luther and Edwards knew what they were talking about and should be listened to respectfully. As for the "cash value" of religion, James takes no credit for the originality of this idea. He sees it simply as a restatement of Edwards's doctrine that religion should be judged by its fruits—its capacity to bring about an underlying disposition of acceptance and affirmation or, in James's words, a "new zest," a profound "love of life," and above all an appreciation of its "heroic" and "solemn" character. James's analysis of religious experience, as he conceives it, carries on Edwards's investigation of "religious affections" and rests on the same assumption, that "religion, in the vital sense, ... must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur."

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