of evil in the world. Although James presents this as a value-neutral distinction between different kinds of religious attitude, he in fact regarded the sick souled religious experience as preferable, and his anonymous source of melancholy experience in lectures VI and VII is in fact autobiographical. James considered healthy mindedness to be America's main contribution to religion, which he saw running from the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. At the extreme, the "healthy minded" see sickness and evil as an illusion. James considered belief in the "mind cure" to be reasonable when compared to medicine as practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century. James devotes two lectures to mysticism and in the lectures outlines four markers of mystical experience. These are: Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood. Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned. Transient: the experience is of limited duration. Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience. He believed that religious experiences can have "morbid origins" in brain pathology and can be irrational but nevertheless are largely positive. Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of a high fever, after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually remain and are often valued for the rest of the person's life. James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experiences. Further, despite James' examples being almost exclusively drawn from Christianity, he did not mean to limit his ideas to any single religion. Religious experiences are something that people sometimes have under certain conditions. In James' description, these conditions are likely to be psychological or pharmaceutical rather than cultural. Pragmatism Although James did not fully articulate his pragmatic philosophy until the publication of Pragmatism in 1907, the approach to religious belief in the Varieties is influenced by pragmatic philosophy. In his Philosophy and Conclusions lectures, James concludes that religion is overall beneficial to humankind, although acknowledges that this does not establish its truth. While James intended to approach the topic of religious experience from this pragmatist angle, Richard Rorty argues that he ultimately deviated from this methodology in the Varieties. In his lectures on saintliness, the intention is to discover whether the saintly