[MD] The Virtue of Unpopularity

[John Carl]

Inevitably, however, the pragmatic doctrine, that both the meaning and the
truth of ideas shall be tested by the empirical consequences of these ideas
and by the practical results of acting them out in life, has seemed both to
many of James's original hearers, and to some of the foreign critics just
mentioned, a doctrine that is simply a characteristic Americanism in
philosophy-- a tendency to judge all ideals by their practical efficiency,
by their visible results, by their so-called "cash values".

James, as I have said, earnestly protested against the cruder interpretation
of his teaching.  The author of the Varieties of Religious Experience" and
of the Pluralistic Universe" was indeed an empiricist, a lover of the
concrete, and a man who looked forward to the future rather than backward to
the past, but despite  his own use, in his "pragmatism " of the famous
metaphor of the "cash values " of ideas, he was certainly not a thinker who
set his affections upon things below rather than upon things above.  And the
"consequences" upon which he laid stress when he talked of the pragmatic
test for ideas were certainly not the merely worldly consequences of such
ideas in the usual sense of the word "worldly".  He appealed always to
experience; but then for him experience might be, and sometimes was,
religious experience.  Experience of the unseen and of the superhuman.

And so James was right in his protest against these critics of his later
doctrine.  His form of pragmatism was indeed a form of Americanism in
philosophy.  And he too had his fondness for what he regarded as efficiency,
and for those who "play the game," whenever the game was one that he
honored.

But he also loved too much those who are weak in the eyes of this present
world-religious geniuses, the unpopular enquirers, the noble outcasts.  He
loved them too much, I say, to be the dupe of the cruder forms of our now
popular efficiency doctrine.  In order to win James's most enthusiastic
support, ideas and men needed to express an intense inner experience along
with a certain unpopularity which showed that they deserved sympathy.  Too
much worldly success, on the part of men or of ideas, easily alienated him.
 Unworldliness was one of the surest marks, in his eyes, of spiritual
power....