 James’s essay is intended as a “defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced” (1–2). Some critics have worried that the argument leads down a slippery slope to irrationalism. John Hick has claimed that James’s conclusion “constitutes an unrestricted license for wishful thinking… If our aim is to believe what is true, and not necessarily what we like, James’s universal permissiveness will not help us” (60). However, this seems unfair. James insists that in defending the “lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith” he is not thereby opening the door to what he calls “patent superstition” (2, 29). Faith, on James’s account, is not a matter of believing against the evidence; the “will to believe” is justified only when the option is genuine and the evidence is inconclusive. “In concreto,” James writes, “the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider” (29).