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James, William, 1842-1910

"Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature"


Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it,
casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the
monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, as
Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as
an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and
consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system
of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the
sort.[69] Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to
be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of
truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality,
a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very
memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal,
so far from being co-extensive with the whole actual, is a mere
EXTRACT from the actual, marked by its deliverance from all
contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff.
[69] I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many
mind-cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent
with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not
to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a
higher Presence with which they connect themselves.


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