an insurance company.  How disconcerting!  Is not this new theology a little like superstition?  And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!  I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy.  All three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which probabilities are irrelevant.  If one man says the moon is sister to the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all expressive.  The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith and imagination have prejudged the issue.  The force of William James’s new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this:  that it has broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new direction, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than the old.  The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly be true—­who shall know that?—­but that it has entered the heart of a leading American to conceive and to cherish it.  The genteel tradition cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved.  But it has been challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been discovered.  No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it.  No one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.  We need not be afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere.  The intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent.  That is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.  Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring things as they are.  The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family, by the genius of the race.  Henceforth there can hardly be the same peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties.  Hegel will be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.  Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been abandoned.  An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.