Young William James Thinking Page 3
France, he admitted often “posing” himself as a “model of calm cheerfulness
and heroism.” From that posture he often felt better when giving “moral ad-
vice” to her than when trying to act boldly himself. Now he admitted that he
did not even know “how to talk to a ‘jeune fille’ [young lady] after being intro-
duced.” Not sure of his next steps with her, he called his own words “a quantity
of non- sense.” 1 Such ambivalence was a burden not only on his romantic prospects but throughout the young adulthood of William James.
James had traveled to Eu rope, on leave from Harvard Medical School, to
improve his understanding of the latest investigations in physiology and anat-
omy relating to psy chol ogy, especially the research at German universities and
laboratories. He spent most of his time since arriving in April of the previous
year shuttling between Berlin, where he attended physiology lectures, and a
water- cure establishment in Teplitz, Bohemia, for his health. He was eager to
gain mastery of the German language with its “truly monstrous sentences”
and ready to learn from both the materialist science of Emil du Bois- Reymond
4 Young William James Thinking
and the alternative sectarian health practice of hydropathy, with its use of
water in many forms to boost the living strength of patients. In between his
scientific and sectarian visits, James stayed in Dresden in Saxony, then in de-
pen dent, but soon part of a united Germany. He steadily improved his knowl-
edge of German by reading science texts and “Kant’s Kritik” and by “looking
up the subject” of hydropathy that he was using at the Teplitz water cure. He
was also eager to read the work of the En glish scientific synthesizer, “Herbert
Spencer’s biology;” the Bible; “a little book by . . . one Ch. Renouvier,” a French
phi los o pher who advocated for the potency of free will; and, following his
father’s spiritual enthusiasms, “one of [Emanuel] Swedenborg’s treatises. ” 2 As his eclectic reading suggests, he was ready to learn contrasting views, which
further added to his ambivalence.
While visiting the Établissement hydrothérapique in Divonne, with a “bold
desire & intention to get well at any effort,” despite the slowness of this reme-
dy’s impact on his constitutional strength, and with steady work “hovering
and dipping about the portals of Psy chol ogy,” he also took a broad philosophi-
cal view of the jostling material and immaterial dimensions of his life. He was
eager to talk “about scientific matters” with his physiologist friend Henry
Bowditch, also studying science in Eu rope, as they both hoped “to make dis-
coveries” with impacts on medicine and beyond. And yet, he also declared that
“fragments of man (thoughts, smiles) . . . [are] worth more in the world than . . .
chemical reactions that could replace them.” Perhaps it was during one of
those reflective moments when James stepped back from his eagerness to im-
prove his health and his science to draw a picture. The sketch depicting his
time in Divonne harked back to his year of artistic training eight years earlier
and made more reference to his hopes than to his actual surroundings. He had
not forgotten Havens, and he felt “entranced” by another young lady at the
water cure, but “she has never yet shot one beam from her eye in my direction.”
James the artist, however, depicted himself confidently and vigorously talking
with not one “jeune fille” but seven. Even the little dog he drew seemed to hang
on his every word. In the shaded bowers of the water cure, some of the ladies
looked sickly, but all were in rapt attention to the young science student. And
yet James presented himself with his back to the viewer, with full identity still
cloaked. He tacitly acknowledged the distance of his artful imagination from
his real- life situation by writing a joking caption to his work. Although staying
in France and fluent in French, he used his newly acquired German; he wrote
“Die Kalt Wasser Cur zu Divonne” (the cold- water cure at Divonne), and he
Almost a Phi los o pher 5
added that his imagined scene would be “vortrefflich gegen Melancholie”
(splendid against, or to counter, melancholy). 3
Q
During his stay in Divonne, James exhibited many traits of his youthful
development: his attraction to science and to sectarian medicine, his confi-
dence and social awkwardness, his art and academic learning, eager strug-
gle and ac cep tance of limits, recognition of material and immaterial parts
of life, and a self- deprecating sense of humor. During the 1860s and early
1870s, these commitments would animate his development but also inten-
sify his ambivalent attitudes until his mid- thirties when he discovered ways
to turn his burdens into opportunities. This book pres ents William James be-
fore the best- known James. Well before becoming the popu lar face of prag-
matism and pluralism, before composing the essays on consciousness starting
in 1904 showing the relation of things and thoughts that would grow into
Essays in Radical Empiricism, before directing psychological attention to
the spiritual core within abundant Va ri e ties of Religious Experience (1902),
before presenting his popu lar psy chol ogy and philosophy including Talks to
Teachers (1899) and The Will to Believe (1897) on these topics and more to
wide audiences from the 1890s, before his twelve years researching and
composing his thorough and erudite Princi ples of Psy chol ogy (1890), before
his appointment as a professor of philosophy in 1880, and even before he
began to write his first major publications two years earlier starting at age
thirty- six, James was already drawn to philosophical speculation during
his early adulthood. From his late teens to his mid- thirties, he was as yet
untouched by expectations for any philosophical achievements, and his
speculations were guided by insights from his own experiences.
Experience was a keynote of James’s thinking, first as source pulling
him toward philosophizing and then as subject for theorizing. Ever since
his youth, he associated experience with the natu ral, in contrast with the
artificial. He detected artificiality in both scientific interpretations of expe-
rience in material terms and religious interpretations of experience in im-
material terms. But he also maintained that each also points to impor tant
ingredients of the sheer abundance of experience in its simultaneous physi-
cal and mental dimensions. These impulses would provide the ingredients
for his later integration of objectivity and subjectivity as diff er ent expressions
of what he would formally label, in 1896, “pure experience,” with “two diver-
gent kinds of context . . . woven . . . into . . . the general course of experience.”
6 Young William James Thinking
Every moment and every encounter include an uncountable riot of somatic
and subjective experiences. In The Princi ples (1890), he gave the example
of someone who hears “thunder crash”; it is not “thunder pure, but
thunder- breaking- upon- silence- and- contrasting- with-it.” That description
finds complexity in a simple moment, but that unpacking of one split second
touches only on the “objective thunder” and the “feeling of the silence just
gone,” without attending to the other parts of experience occurring at the
same time, including the season of the year, the time of day, the personal
concerns of the listener, that person’s wakefulness, and more parts of expe-
rience than could be listed— and more than would be useful for most pur-
poses, but all fully real. We select diff er ent portions of experience, James
maintained, on the basis of diff er ent interests and intentions, untrue to the
robust real ity of experience, but useful for concrete practical purposes. 4
Early on, however, before he achieved those elaborations, James was simply
open to natu ral experiences of all kinds, but already impatient with intel-
lectual translations into abstractions. Natu ral experiences, he maintained,
could not be reduced to their material components, any more than they
could be understood only in immaterial terms. He honed this combination
of naturalism without materialism from his own experiences in early adult-
hood. By the end of his young adulthood, when James became a phi los o-
pher, experience remained central to his thinking; he gravitated toward
theories that would provide tangible orienting direction and toward ideas
about practical consequences. And he regarded the mind’s thoughts, feel-
ings, spiritual states, and willful choices as forms of experience, still subject
to all the buffeting contexts of material forces intertwining with products
of mind.
James began his career by studying art and science, fields focused on
natu ral facts; then he took up medicine as a way to gain physiological un-
derstanding of physical factors in the mind’s operation just as the field of
psy chol ogy was taking shape. James’s best- known works continue those
student inquiries with philosophy providing direction through the thicket
of experiences, but as with his first work in science, he kept assessing natu-
ral experience. These inquiries began with thinking and writing for his
own personal direction. Then, even with fame and sophistication, he re-
tained his initial impulse about philosophy: theories may be useful, but they
remain “monstrous abridgement[s] of things” that “cast . . . out real matter”
of life as lived. 5 That was not a reason to stop theorizing. Theories guide
Almost a Phi los o pher 7
understanding, even as humility guided his theorizing, with that sense of
limitation prompted by the sheer abundance of experience.
To comprehend the young James, this book looks forward from the out-
look of his own early years, within his own contexts and experiences, to an
uncharted future. The young James looking back uses expressions more
simple and direct than in later compositions, but they reward attention by
displaying the interrelations and thematic directions he would continue to
choose for steering through his diverse interests. His early notes, letters,
and short publications display the depth of his ongoing commitment to the
power of experience, which so often displayed contrasts that stoked his am-
bivalence. Each intellectually contentious interpretation suggested an arti-
ficially selected abstraction, while experience displayed natu ral facts in
their comprehensive abundance, which gradually would become his setting
for mediation. In par tic u lar, his education in science and religion, learned
both in relation to and with an eye for their applications, would train his
mind toward the interaction of material and immaterial factors. He carried
these insights for the rest of his life: he would not blink at the full plenum of
experience, its uncountable facts and relations, its rich layers of complexity,
its pockets of mystery, its invitation to appreciate contrasting points of view
based on diverse interests. James’s early thinking would set his philosophy
in formation.
William James in Formation
My previous book, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse
of Certainty, 1820–1880, focuses on his family, his teachers, and his peers,
circles of influence on his youth and on his whole career. This book on Young
William James Thinking goes to the center of those circles, with James him-
self applying his education in science and religion, especially as their as-
sumptions, ideas, and practices provided orienting shape to surrounding
fields. This is a companion to the earlier book, with stories and evaluations
of the young adult James on his way toward his mature life and thought,
and with display of his youthful concerns persisting throughout his career.
The earlier book of contexts tells tales of declining certainty especially
through the rise of probabilistic thinking in the sciences and through secu-
lar challenges to religion, while this book reveals how he responded to these
settings in his first work of young adulthood. The current book is therefore
explic itly about James himself between childhood and fame, during almost
8 Young William James Thinking
two de cades before his theories earned his first flush of broad prominence
in 1878.
Up until the age of nineteen when James began his formal study of sci-
ence in 1861, he had already received significant educational enrichment.
He was the eldest of five children of parents who had in some ways reversed
conventional gender roles: the reliable and stable Mary Walsh James man-
aged the house hold affairs, while the impulsive elder Henry James shaped
the family’s religious orientation and directed the children’s education.
A sizable inheritance from his own father, the Irish immigrant and first
American William James who had amassed a fortune in real estate sur-
rounding the Erie Canal and with numerous business operations in upstate
New York, enabled the father to pursue his spiritual commitments. Henry
James, Se nior (to distinguish him from his second son, Henry James, Ju-
nior, the novelist), was a writer and lecturer inspired by Emanuel Sweden-
borg; he shared with the Swedish empirical mystic an ardent belief that the
material world, though a mere shadow, embodied a crucial set of correspon-
dences revealing deeper spiritual truth. With his spiritual beliefs and com-
pelling personal energy, the “Unrev[eren]d James” readily circulated with
leading Transcendentalists and reformers in the middle of the nineteenth
century. These spiritual convictions also drove his devotion to the educa-
tion of his children; their unstructured curriculum included frequent
changes of schools in pursuit of the father’s ideals, attendance at diff er ent
churches, discouragement of specialization, and transatlantic travel to ex-
pose the children to “strange lingoes.” The father’s nurturing approach to
childrearing anticipated trends that would grow after the end of his life in
1882, with the increasing importance of elective interests and of global ori-
entations within liberal education. He insisted on fostering spontaneity and
natu ral impulses untainted by worldly affiliat
ion for as long as pos si ble in
order to maintain the “admirable Divine mould or anchorage” manifest in
childhood innocence and won der. With the mingling of nature and spiritu-
ality in his philosophy, he thoroughly supported scientific investigation in
order to uncover the spiritual messages embedded within empirical facts.
He ardently believed his philosophic ideals and was convinced of their pal-
pably philanthropic value: Science as “God’s great minister” would bring
spiritual transformation away from rigid rules and raw self- interest, toward
a just society guided by humanity’s au then tic spiritual core.6
Attention to the natu ral spontaneity of childhood would be a first step
toward this ideal future. And so, as a child, William was encouraged to fol-
Almost a Phi los o pher 9
low his own intellectual appetites, at first with confusion, since his father
insisted that what the children were to do was “just to be something,” in his
brother Henry’s puzzled memory, “something unconnected with specific
doing, something free and uncommitted.” William’s early education, along
with the family’s wealth, even as it was dissipating across the generations,
emboldened him to stray across bound aries of discipline and convention
since he had early on felt sanction to “have a say about the deepest reasons of
the universe.” In his fifties, when well established as “a supposed professor,”
as he joshed about his academic status, he would still say “it is better to be
than to define your being.” That would leave him restless with “philosophic
lit er a ture” for the rest of his life. Yet he was constantly compelled to have his
say, with a vow to turn his frustrations into spurs to “do it better.” 7
In the 1850s and 1860s, even the irreverent elder Henry James detected
the growing power of science and hoped to ground his son’s reflective tem-
per in empirical studies. The father had been eagerly trying to connect his
own philosophy to the work of some leading scientific figures: for example,
physicist Joseph Henry had been his teacher in Albany, and they remained
close friends, with years of substantial correspondence; and the family met
physiologist William Carpenter during a visit to England, and William
James would use his texts in science school and in some of his first publica-