William James was not alone in his fear of "desiccation." By the end of the nineteenth century, the decline of heroism had become a common lament. Cut loose from its religious moorings, however, the defense of the strenuous life degenerated into a cult of sheer strength. The call to live "on a higher plane," as Emerson had put it, became a summons to war and imperial conquest, often accompanied by attacks on modern softness and effeminacy, on various forms of "race suicide," and on governments' ill-advised attempts, said to reward mediocrity and weakness, to interfere with the laws of "natural selection." Critics of modern decadence and "over-civilization" conscripted the heroic ideal into the service of militarism, jingoism, imperialism, and racial purification. Under these circumstances, it

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