James developed this line of thought most fully in his Hibbert Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1908-9 and published in 1909 as A Pluralistic Universe. Like Pragmatism itself, this work should be understood as an attempt to provide the philosophical sequel originally intended to follow the psychological investigation of religion in the Gifford Lectures of I90I-2 (The Varieties of Religious Experience). In A Pluralistic Universe, the distinction between healthy-minded and morbid religion was overlaid by the philosophical or theological distinction between pluralism and monism. When stated in this way, the issue began to look quite different from the way it looked before. The question that divided the healthy and the sick, it appeared, was whether the world would inevitably be redeemed or whether redemption should be seen as merely one among several possibilities. To put it another way, the question was whether evil was merely the absence of good or an active force that might well overpower goodness in the last analysis. The "sick souls" praised for their saintly heroism in Varieties lined up on the wrong side of these issues, as James now saw it. They needed the emotional security of the absolute, whereas the toughand healthy-minded, with whom James now identified himself, took their chances in a "pluralistic" world the final form of which had not yet been decided.

Still rejecting the "naturalistic self-sufficiency" according to which the "individual, if virtuous enough, could meet all possible requirements," James once again commended the religious view of a "world wider" than naturalism could imagine, in which "all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, indeed because of certain forms of death—death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and worry, competency and desert, death of everything that paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to." Yet the feeling that "all is well" could not be pushed to monistic conclusions, James argued, without sacrificing the essential insight that all is not well, at least in the short run, and that even the long-range outcome remains in doubt. James left his audience with the impression that the absolute sovereignty of God, the monistic fallacy, was a doctrine originating in "dialectical abstraction" and altogether incomprehensible in the "terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God." The "monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally" could not be gleaned from the "thicker method" of empirical description, with its

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