In inviting the attention of readers to certain of William James' opinions about war, I am conscious of raising is· sues which are subordinate and peripheral to the main field of current ethical controversy over war and peace. The point of view James asks us to adopt is one which, in contrast with those momentous moral ques· tions that have been raised with unprecedented clarity and Can the moral exigency urgency by adherents and op· fulfilled by war ponents of pacifism in our be also found time, may seem too trivial or in a " moral equivalent too obsolescent to merit our of war"? interest or even our patience. Let me begin then by conceding that James' observations + about war are secondary considerations. Whether or not they are also irrelevant and JAMES GAFFNEY, S.J. negligible considerations is however another question and the one that has seemed to me + worth raising. James' characteristic reflections on the subject and. problem of war were products of the last decade of his life, the first of the present century. They were expounded somewhat as a digression in the celebrated chapter on the value of saintliness in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, taken up again for his Remarks at the Peace
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