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 WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 249 is the faith if a thing is really true, it must be true for you as well as for me. And that is just the truth which Prof. James categorically denies. I am not of course questioning the value or the partial and relative truth of many conflicting creeds, but they have their value just on one condition that those who profess them really do believe them to be objectively true. They need not of course be- lieve that they are infallible. We make mistakes in arithmetic, but we believe that */ my answer to a problem in arithmetic be true, yours which differs from it cannot be true also. " To believe " means to think that a thing is objectively true. This is just the faith which Prof. James does his best to dethrone by inviting every one to believe just what caprice dictates. " The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another" (p. 331). All the Philosophies or Religions which believe in objective truth, no matter what their disagree- ments in other matters, have more in common with each other than they have with Prof. James's revived Pyrrhonism. Prof. James's position can only be described as a deliberate abandonment of the search for truth and a handing over of Religion and Morality (and why not Science ?) to the sway of wilful caprice. To me at least to believe that my Religion or Philosophy was only true for me would be exactly the same thing as not believing it at all. Of course Prof. James is not consistent no sceptic ever is. "In our Father's house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation " (p. 377). Beautifully put, but then this implies that there is an objective canon which makes one mission and vocation " truer " than another ; it may be different in detail but the ideal by which its value is measured must be one and the same. I gladly recognise that my creed and the discrepant creed of my neighbour may both of them really be but approximations to or partial aspects of the truth, but to believe that both may be equally true is equivalent to not believing either to be true at all. Prof. James's book is eminently one which "gives to think". As such it has a high value, intellectual and practical, and par- ticular suggestions and ideas of it 'for instance, its emphasis on the importance of the " subconscious self," to whose working the author attributes many of the religious phenomena which he studies may contribute to the building up of a sober and rational philosophy of religion in the future. The candour and breezy optimism of his tone are attractive and stimulating. But to those who do not agree with it, its philosophy will seem (as a whole) flimsy and superficial. To such minds Prof. James's profound disbelief in Reason will suggest something more than a doubt whether in its real tendency "the book is as edifying and religious as it evidently is in the inten- tion of its author. Prof. James insists much upon the fact that for the fortunate