September 03, 2026

Judge By The Fruits

By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots, is the rule by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we should judge things.

William James delivered these words in his 1902 Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, defending mystics and religious visionaries against critics who dismissed their insights as mere symptoms of nervous disorder. He argued that a belief's value cannot be settled by tracing its origin, whether in disease, temperament, or upbringing, but only by watching what it produces in a life. This was James at his most pragmatic: truth and worth are proven in the living, not in the pedigree. The same test applies to habits and judgments today, ask not where a thing came from but what it actually grows into.