awoke from the "feverish dream" of sensibility into a renewed appreciation of the "unsophisticated moral sense," which wanted the world to be better than it was and resolved to act, instead of merely drinking in the spectacle, so as to reduce the sum of evil in the world.

Having rejected the religion of art, James did not propose to adopt the religion of science by default. He adopted the scientist's calling, but he did not forget its limitations. He was one of the first to see, even while the Victorian faith in science was still running high, that science would never be able to offer a worldview to replace discredited religions. In another early essay, misleadingly entitled "The Will to Believe," James explored the shortcomings of science with the same insight he had brought to the shortcomings of art. ^* The scientific worldview, he argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. The longing for deliverance from doubt, enshrined in the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy as the distinction between certitude and mere "opinion," had to be regarded not as the beginning of wisdom but as the product of a "weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can." Science, at least as it was construed by the Cartesian tradition of philosophy, had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. It betrayed an "excessive nervousness" in the face of possible error. Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. "Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer's exact position." It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life. The "agnostic rules for truthseeking" laid down by "scientific absolutists" betrayed a timorous state of mind, an unwillingness to act, a suspension of judgment that ignored the whole field of religious experience and its testimony to the power of faith.

When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, ... then this command that we shall put a stop-

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*	The title is misleading because belief is the one thing, according to his own account, that cannot be willed.

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