Word: soul
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...works teem with provocative insights--too many, perhaps, ever to be fully systematized. But, most of all, James radiates moral greatness. His openness of mind and eagerness to defend underdogs, his freedom from vanity and from paltry ambitions, all betoken what his father would have called "largeness of soul...
...Although most teaching fellows are the soul of honor," Palmer said, "there is a sizeable minority which is not conscientious." In one spectacular case, Palmer reported that 100 over-due Widener books were found in an office of a teaching fellow three months after he left Cambridge...
Even as a phenomenon for study, institutionalized religion did not attract James. Religious experience, he felt, should be first-hand, vital, and the remedy for otherwise incurable maladies of the soul. "At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?" Assuredly the moralist assents to the reigning order, but he may endure it with "the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke." The religious man, on the other hand...
Just as James divides thinkers into the tough-minded and the tender-minded, he categorizes religious believers as healthy-minded or sick-souled. It is with the religion of healthy-mindedness--ranging from the creeds of professional mind healers to the poetry of Whitman--that he deals first. "It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of a sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think...
Regeneration by the conversion experience, James felt, is what enables the sick-souled individual to escape from the dark nights of his soul. He found this type of experience particularly fascinating but, as usual, treated the grandiloquent claims of "twice-born men" with pragmatic reservations...