ion. The fruits of the
spirit are the empirical tests of a religious doctrine; and, apart
from those uprushes of faith from the subconscious whereof we have
spoken in previous lectures, there are for James no other tests of the
truth of religious convictions than these. The truth of religion
consists in its successful "workings."

Hence, however, religion depends upon an {144} ever-renewed testing of
its opinions through a carrying of them out in life. Insight would be
barren were it not quickened and applied through our will. To James,
as we already know, reason, as such, seems to be of little use in
religion. But action, resolute living, testing of your faith through
your works and through its own workings, this is religion--an
endlessly restless and dramatic process, never an union with any
absolute attainment of the goal.

V

Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive
and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists?
My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism,
depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our
discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation
between reason and action, and between the real world and the human
will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of
religious insight. No truth is a saving truth--yes, no truth is a
truth at all unless it guides and directs life. Therein I heartily
agree with current pragmatism and with James himself. On the other
hand, the will is a collection of restless caprices unless it is
unified by a rational ideal. And no truth can have any workings at
all, without even thereby showing itself to be, just in so far as it
actually works, an eternal {145} truth. And, furthermore, what I have
asserted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from
being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational
consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to
the consideration of absolute truth and to the assertion of an
all-inclusive insight. Only, when we view this all-inclusive insight
from the point of view which the pragmatists now emphasise (and which
I myself have emphasised from a period long antedating the recent
pragmatist movement), such a fair estimate of the insight of reason
transforms our first and superficial opinion of its nature and of its
meaning. It becomes the insight of a