There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

William James makes this remark in the context of his Gifford Lectures on natural religion, later published as *The Varieties of Religious Experience* (1902). In the lectures James contrasts “healthy-mindedness” (optimistic, harmony-seeking religion that minimizes sin, suffering, and tragedy) with the “sick soul,” whose religious consciousness is shaped by melancholy, guilt, and the felt reality of evil. Arguing as a psychologist and pragmatist rather than a theologian, James insists that any adequate philosophy of religion must take seriously the full range of experience—including despair and moral evil—because these darker facts often drive the most profound religious insights and conversions.

James is criticizing a one-sided optimism that treats evil as mere illusion, error, or something to be ignored. For him, a philosophy that cannot “account for” suffering and moral darkness is incomplete because it excludes part of what human beings actually encounter. More strongly, he suggests that confronting evil may be epistemically and spiritually productive: pain, failure, and guilt can disclose depths of character, dependence, and meaning that comfort alone may never reveal. The quote encapsulates James’s pragmatic pluralism—truth must be tested against lived experience—and his conviction that the “negative” experiences of life can function as catalysts for insight rather than mere obstacles to be explained away.