per on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true—till doomsday, or until such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.

Only when he had disposed of the competing ideologies of art and science did James turn to his psychological and philosophical studies of religion, in the hope of resolving the continuing debate in his own mind between health and morbidity, optimism and pessimism, religious "pluralism" and "monism."

The Varieties of Religious Experience turns on the famous distinction between the once-born and the twice-born. It not only offers a sympathetic analysis of each type; it also, characteristically, tries to evaluate them—to decide what difference it makes to hold one view of the universe or another and which view shows a deeper grasp of things. Most of the time, James seems to come down on the side of the twice-born. His envy of the healthy might lead us to expect a preference for the "healthy-minded" type. Having no awareness of evil, however, the once-born type of religious experience cannot stand up to adversity. It offers sustenance only so long as it does not encounter "poisonous humiliations." "A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians." When that happens, we need a more rugged form of faith, one that recognizes that "life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together" and that "all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction." If nothing else, the shadow of death hangs over our pleasures and triumphs, calling them into question. "Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness."

Stoicism, the "highest flight" of the purely natural man (the man with

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