That is the famous position taken in "The Will to Believe." As James has once pointed out, its real title should have been "The Right to Believe." No doctrine in James's thinking has been more persistently misunderstood. Yet it rests on the simplest of insights: that atheism and theism are both dogmas, for there is scientific evidence for neither; that to withhold judgment is really to make a judgment, and act as if God didn't exist; that until the evidence is complete men have a right to believe what they most need.
James has acted upon that right. He has made a picture compounded of the insights of feeling, the elaborations of reason, and the daily requirements of men. It is a huge guess, if you like, to be verified only at the end of the world. But it has made many men at home in the universe. And this democrat understood the need of feeling at home in the world, and he understood also that the aristocrats are not at home here. (Perhaps that's why they are aristocrats.) "The luxurious classes," he says, "are blind to man's real relation to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently hard and solid foundations of his higher life." And he prescribed for them—for their culture, I mean—this treatment: "To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."
This, and thoughts like this, and kindnesses like this, put James not alone among the democrats of this uncertain world, but among the poets also; among the poetic philosophers who, like Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Whitman, have a sense of the pace of things. Sunlight and storm-cloud, the subdued busyness of outdoors, the rumble of cities, the mud of life's beginning and the heaven of its hopes, stain his pages with the glad, sweaty sense of life itself.
It is an encouraging thought that America should have produced perhaps the most tolerant man of our generation. It is a stimulating thought that he was a man whose tolerance never meant the kind of timidity which refuses to take a stand "because there is so much to be said on both sides." As every one knows, he fought hard for his ideas, because he believed in them, and because he wanted others to believe in them. The propagandist was strong in William James. He wished to give as well as receive. And he listened for truth from anybody, and from anywhere, and in any form. He listened for it from Emma Goldman, the pope, or a sophomore; preached from a pulpit, a throne, or a soap-box; in the language of science, in slang, in fine rhetoric, or in the talk of a ward boss.
And he told his conclusions. He told them, too, without the expert's arrogance toward the man in the street, and without the dainty and finicky horror of being popular and journalistic. He would quote Mr. Dooley on God to make himself understood among men. He would have heard God gladly in the overalls of a carpenter, even though He came to preach that the soul of man is immortal. So open-minded was he; so very much of a democrat.