ose who as yet
had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of
the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic
God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will
answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct
conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring
being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon
a personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How
disconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?
And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!
I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more
probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All
three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which
probabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to
the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not
which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all
expressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith
and imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's
new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has
broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new
direction, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than
the old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly
be true--who shall know that?--but that it has entered the heart of a
leading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition
cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which
it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been
challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been
discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No
one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is seale