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.
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