Sentence:  Writing to his colleague George Herbert Palmer - `` Glorious old Palmer '' , as he addresses him - James says that if only the students at Harvard could really understand Royce , Santayana , Palmer , and himself and see that their varying systems <WSD>are</WSD> `` so many religions , ways of fronting life , and worth fighting for '' , then Harvard would have a genuine philosophic universe . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)