Even if we had no biographical information about James, even if we knew nothing about the emotional crisis he went through in his twenties—about his early fear that a scientific career would foreclose the "privilege of trusting blindly [as he wrote in his diary in 1873], which every simple man owns as a right"—or about his lifelong attempt "to unite empiricism with spiritualism," as he put it in his notes for a course on metaphysics in 1905, the evidence of his books alone, together with the general pattern of his intellectual career, would still force us to reject the view that his interest in religion was purely therapeutic. The Varieties of Religious Experience occupied a pivotal position in James's intellectual development. It was the hinge between his early work as a psychologist and his later work as the philosopher of pragmatism; and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the pragmatic test of truth first suggested itself to James in the form of the familiar religious principle that the quality of belief makes itself known in its effects on the conduct of life.

The age-old wisdom that "the uses of religion ... to the individual who has it ... are the best arguments that truth is in it" led James to the more general principle, formally stated for the first time at the end of Varieties, that "the true is what works well." He did not mean, in the case of religion, that it makes us feel pleased with ourselves, confirms our opinion of our own rectitude, or gives us a comforting illusion of intellectual certainty. He meant that it provides the spiritual vitality that comes with insight into the human condition. An understanding of the religious context in which pragmatism first presented itself to James helps to forestall the vulgar misunderstanding of pragmatism as the philosophical glorification of success. Benjamin Paul Blood was much closer to the truth when he called it the philosophy of wonder—"the only method of philosophizing" that was possible for those who had attained the understanding that "wonder and not smirking reason is the final word for all creatures and creators alike."

When James took the position that the truth or falsity of religion had to be judged by its practical results, he was not thinking of its capacity to

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