by adopting the point of view of the outer
world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns
everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a
curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with
other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the
genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With
William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European
sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but
the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal
spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,
similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so
to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the
dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.
His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of
thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in
a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the
genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its
opposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is
not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of
experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through
the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible
transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at
last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of
expanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when
it fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist
like William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its
neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them
separately, according to his personal predilections.

For one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all
that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in
religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to
sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and
impostors--for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing
to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any
of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the
blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the
certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least
they we