ABSTRACT
Extract from ‘Is Life Worth Living?’, International Journal of Ethics (October 1895). Reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1912), pp. 33–5.
William James (1842–1910) was once described by the philosopher Horace M. Kallen as ‘leader of the movement known as pragmatism and most renowned and representative of the thinkers of America’. He was the brother of the novelist Henry James, but unlike his brother whose taste for Whitman appears to have been a matter of slow growth, his own was more spontaneous and immediate. He has discussed Whitman’s mysticism in Varieties of Religious Experience. Here, his main stress is upon Whitman’s optimism and lack of a sense of evil in the universe, which is his connecting link with Rousseau. Henry James senior, it is said, ‘found something of the consolation and security he was seeking’ in the works of Swedenborg. His son found it possible, therefore, to appreciate more vividly than many others the importance to individuals which writers off the beaten intellectual track might acquire.
