calls them. It overcomes laziness, timidity, the craving for comfort, the exaggerated respect for social conventions, the fear of ridicule, and all the other doubts and misgivings that paralyze the capacity for action. It annuls the desire for "guarantee and surety." A conviction of the "importance of man and the omnipotence of God" has the curious effect of releasing energies formerly subdued. It brings with it an "astringent relish" for life. The "abandonment of self-responsibility" makes it possible to "live with energy." It transforms doubters and cowards into men and women capable of exemplary courage and resolution. The "chief wonder" of religious heroism, James finds, "is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but simply by relaxing and throwing the burden down."

If the debate between "two types of religion," as James put it in Pragmatism, raised the "deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame," we might imagine that the transformation of the "sick soul" into a strenuous lover of life, as described so vividly in The Varieties of Religious Experience, should have settled the matter. But James equated submission to a higher will with a "morbid" confession of weakness. As we noted earlier, he accepted Nietzsche's formulation of the choice between defiance and servile submission, even when his own evidence should have led him to question it. Thus in "Pragmatism and Religion," the last chapter of his next important work, Pragmatism, James sided with "healthy‐ minded buoyancy." "There are morbid minds in every human collection," he wrote, and all of us experience "moments of discouragement ... when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving." But James now appeared to repudiate the "attitude of the prodigal son" as an expression of the desire for complete security in an uncertain world. In moods of discouragement, "we want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea." But self-surrender was the mark of the tender-minded, who sought safety in the illusion of an omnipotent deity instead of meeting life as a "real adventure, with real danger."

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