his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain

I’ve been reading a fair bit of William James of late, and greatly enjoying it—partly due to the topics under discussion, but also in no small part due to the period style. (Those among you who have noticed a turn for the somewhat Victorian in my diction may therefore wish to clap yourselves on the back; that’s a sharp eye you have there.) As for the topics, it’s amusing—and, to some extent, a source of something close to relief—to observe how many of the debates of the present moment were very much present in the discourse of the very beginnings of the C20th. This passage from Pragmatism, for example, is incredibly contemporary in its content, if not in its form: “… one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth…