encourage good behavior, any more than he was thinking of mental health. True to the Protestant tradition, he regarded the conduct of life as an emotional and not primarily as a moral issue. The question to which religion was the answer was not so much how life should be lived, strictly speaking, as whether it was worth living at all (as he put it in the title of one of his essays). The sense of gratitude associated with religious conversion was experienced as a gift for which "no exertion of volition" was required, and it was this gratitude that distinguished "enthusiastic assent" to life from stoical resignation. The "difference of emotional atmosphere" was what counted, James argued, not morality.

The conduct of life was not an abstract issue for James but a very immediate and personal one; nor was it a question of an individual's obligations to his neighbors. It was a question of an individual's obligation to life itself, and it first presented itself to James, as it does to so many others, in the choice of a calling. As a young man, he found himself torn between science and art. He knew that by choosing science, he would forfeit the possibility of "blind trust"; but he had equally important reservations about the aesthetic attitude toward experience. What he longed for, as he wrote in the depths of his youthful crisis of indecision and "neurasthenic" malaise, was the "health, brightness and freshness" he found in the ancient Greeks after reading the Odyssey. He contrasted the "bloody old heathens," with "their indifference to evil in the abstract, their want of what we call sympathy, the essentially definite character of their joys, or at any rate of their sorrows (for their joy was perhaps coextensive with life itself)," with the "over-cultivated and vaguely sick complainers" of his own day, himself included. "The Homeric Greeks 'accepted the universe,' their only notion of evil was its perishability.... To them existence was its own justification, and the imperturbable tone of delight and admiration with which Homer speaks of every fact, is not in the least abated when the fact becomes to our eyes perfectly atrocious in character."

The naive trust of the Greeks could not be recaptured in the nineteenth century, at least not by the educated; but the educated classes had all the art of the ages at their disposal, and perhaps they could find a sort of sanctuary there—in the worship of poets like Homer, if not in the worship of the world Homer worshiped. It is significant that the aesthetic approach to life presented itself to James as the answer to questions that

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