Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism leaves us with the main body of our common-sense beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing], such as the belief in “freedom”--as a “promise and a relief,” he adds; and the belief in the religious outlook upon life, in so far as it “works.” This is the attitude and the tenor of the well-known books on The _Will to Believe_ and _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.[8] “Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value?” And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James elsewhere finds himself unable to believe “that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” It is the emergence of many such incoherences in his writings that gives to his pragmatist philosophy of religion a subjective and temperamental character, and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective basis. “If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form--that is, reliance on possibilities that are not necessities--will not seem to offer you security enough.”[9] He “inclines,” on the whole, to “Meliorism,” treating satisfaction as neither necessary nor impossible; the pragmatist lives in “the world of possibilities.” These words show clearly how difficult it is to pin down Professor James to any single intelligible philosophy of belief, if belief be interpreted as in any sense a “commerce” of the soul with objective realities, as something more than a merely generous faith in the gradual perfection or betterment of human society. “Religious experience,” as he puts it in his _Pluralistic Universe_, “peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy.” In this same book, it is declared, however, on the one hand, that “we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy, the God of our popular Christianity being simply one member of a pluralistic system”; and yet, on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that “we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious with one another in a supernatural intelligence.”[10]