remained essentially religious. When he said in 1897, "Religion is the great interest of my life," he meant what he said. In 1884, he gave a remarkably penetrating account of the aesthetic solution to the "dilemma of determinism." The doctrine of free will, James argued, exaggerated the degree to which man was his own master, but determinism (in both its religious and its scientific forms) held that things could not be otherwise than they were and thus forced us either to condemn everything or to approve everything indiscriminately—to adopt Schopenhauer's cosmic pessimism or the foolish optimism of Dr. Pangloss. A "dramatic" view of the universe, however, might offer a way out of the difficulty. What if the "final purpose of our creation" was the "greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of characters"? In that case, evil could be said to be necessary because without it, we would know nothing of good. Without the play of contrasts, the world would be as suffocatingly one-dimensional as the "white-robed harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools" or the "ladylike tea-table elysium" envisioned by Herbert Spencer and other social Darwinists as the "final consummation of progress." Human nature demanded the "shifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom," a "Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro." It would always find "pictures of light upon light" disappointingly "vacuous and expressionless." ^*

James presented this "dramatic," "gnostic," "subjectivist," and "romantic" view of the world so attractively that a careless reader might have mistaken it for his own. He went on to argue, however, that an aesthetic orientation to experience led to "ethical indifference." It transformed life "from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity pleases to carry it out." It gave rise to the cult of "sensibility" exemplifed by "contemporary Parisian literature," the cynical complacency that saw the world as an experimental novel. It was therefore with a sense of relief that one

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*

These words provide a reasonably accurate characterization of the theology of the "fortunate fall," to which the elder Henry James, among others, subscribed. Man's attempt to know and do good would not amount to much, according to this theory, without his knowledge of evil. Close acquaintance with such views probably helped James to give such a sympathetic account of them.

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