absorption in the "confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography." Those perfections represented the "cooler addition of remote professorial minds" occupied with "conceptual substitutes" for God in place of direct experience.

The commonsensical postulate of a finite God and a pluralistic universe, James decided, offered the only "escape from the paradoxes and perplexities" of theology. He advocated this solution at once as the tough‐ minded alternative and as the "line of least resistance." The best available evidence, the evidence of religious experience, suggested the existence of a "superhuman consciousness" that was nevertheless "not all-embracing." Experience indicated, "in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once." Such was James's last word on the subject.

His uncertainty about the moral value of submission and self-surrender illustrates the difficulty of carrying on an essentially theological controversy without its theological context. Even more than Emerson and Carlyle, James believed that this context could now be dispensed with. In its absence, however, Emerson's affirmation of the goodness of being would tend to be construed either as fatuous optimism or as the product of an emotional need for absolute security and reassurance, while heroism, on the other hand—notwithstanding James's warning that "mere excitement is an unworthy ideal"—would degenerate into Nietzsche's "will to power."

In our own time, the heroic ideal is so closely associated with the cult of power (and thereby discredited) that it is important to remember what made it seem so attractive to James and his predecessors. When the British liberal L. T. Hobhouse objected that pragmatism—with its confusion of truth and "cash value," its cavalier indifference to principles, and its preference for action over thought, as Hobhouse saw it—could easily encourage collective irrationality and mob rule, James tried to correct this "travesty" of pragmatism ("by believing a thing we make it true," as Hobhouse put it) and then added, in effect, that the quarrel between Hobhouse and himself arose out of differing assessments of the modern predicament. For Hobhouse, the victory of the Enlightenment was precarious and the danger of a relapse into barbarism always imminent. For James, on the other hand, the victory of the Enlightenment was so complete that it had almost eradicated the capacity for ardor, devotion, and

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