‘What Does Not Work’—Thomas Hardy

Abstract This is a counter-chapter, offering challenges and objections to William James’s brave and exhilarating view, partly through the story of his student W. E. B. Du Bois, who became a great African-American activist, and partly through the problems of belief, hope, and feeling embodied in the work and person of Thomas Hardy. Hardy copied from a magazine article these words: ‘“Truth is what will work” said Wm. James’; but for Hardy, it needed to be put the other way: Truth is precisely what does not work. Here the author now asks: what if William James does not work? That after all was not a fear or doubt that James himself was ever secure from. His life’s work, suggested John Jay Chapman, was to have what he called ‘a purgatorial influence’, to get whomsoever he connected with out of hell on earth. In this chapter, Hardy represents something of that hell on earth—the challenge that the poet Robert Frost, student of James, admirer of Hardy, acknowledges. And in what James calls ‘the zone of insecurity’, Du Bois represents the threat of earthly failure in a great social cause. The question is whether the story of a life is judged by its apparent end and outcome. Or whether, without a heaven or a political utopia, pragmatic and agnostic William James can still offer those haunted by failure some real sense of purpose and future.