Young William James Thinking Page 7
ris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, and his father, Henry James, Se nior, was
28 Young William James Thinking
the most decisive force in his life. The spiritual and social commentator who
circulated with Transcendentalists and reformers was an exuberant influence
on William, in the whole James family, and in public discussion about the pur-
pose of the war.
The war began as a po liti cal contest over union, and the elder James wanted
no part of fighting over po liti cal lines on a map. He spoke out publicly, includ-
ing on the Fourth of July 1861, no less, against a government that remained “in
danger of bringing back slavery again under our banner: than which consum-
mation I would rather see chaos itself come again.” He joined the small but
growing Northern chorus who believed that slavery was a “poison” that cor-
roded the American “struggling nascent . . . hope” for a more egalitarian soci-
ety, even as he also agreed with a majority of Northerners with racial prejudice
in assuming that the “sensuous imagination predominates” in African Ameri-
cans. With the government setting war aims that carefully avoided even hints
of challenging chattel slavery, Henry James declared that this government
and this conflict are simply not “worth an honest human life.” In this stance, he
also spoke for the outrage that many Northerners felt in reaction to U.S. gov-
ernment moves toward conscription with the Militia Act in July 1862 and the
Enrollment Act in March 1863, which, against avid re sis tance, took the first
steps away from the American tradition of voluntary militia ser vice toward an
involuntary draft. Henry James added a religious dimension to that wide-
spread position with his insistence on the “inalienable sanctity and freedom of
the subject as against the nation.” At the beginning of the war, even when his
children got caught up in enthusiasm for enlistment, the elder Henry James
took his stand against the war, declaring “I won’t let them go. ” 2
The elder James stood by his princi ples in declaring that this war could be
justified only if its purpose would include the ending of slavery. Other wise, he
proclaimed with characteristic fervor, the nation would “decline into all infer-
nality and uncleanness,” from the “slimy purulent ooze” of slavery continuing
and spreading. 3 He could not know how much his lurid abstractions would come close to describing the gruesome battlefields and field hospitals as the
conflict grew in scale and fervor on both sides. By the second year of war, the
enormous carnage, combined with the limited success of the Union armies,
drove enlistments down. This prodded the government not only to turn toward
conscription but also to contemplate taking a stand against slavery.
A declaration against chattel bondage would not only infuse the war with
higher purpose but would also turn the conflict into a total war directed against
a centerpiece of the Southern society and economy. This was an urgent po liti-
First Embrace of Science 29
cal issue that impacted military goals; Union general George B. McClellan did
not support abolition of slavery, and that coincided with his less aggressive
tactics in war. During the Seven Days Battles, while President Abraham Lin-
coln urged aggressive attack, McClellan showed per sis tent caution. When
Northern troops came close to capturing the Southern capital, Richmond, Wil-
liam James joined the supporters of Lincoln; “Geo B hardly gave an order,”
and, he added with worry, this could “have ruined us.” Escalating the destruc-
tion of the South would make the war still more intense, with white Southern-
ers moved to stiffen their righ teous and defensive reaction to Northern aggres-
sion. President Lincoln resolved to take this fateful step in the summer of 1862
but deci ded to wait for some battlefield success with hopes to pres ent his pro-
nouncement as part of momentum toward victory. The brutal battle of Antietam
on September 17, when Union troops halted the Confederate army’s invasion
north, provided the occasion. Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclama-
tion on September 22. During this season when the war aims were shifting,
William’s younger brother Wilkinson James enlisted in the Union army; his
father appreciated that he was joining a state militia, not getting drafted in
the federal army. With sentiments against the “vile sin of Negro slavery” even
stronger than his father’s, Wilkie James volunteered in an African American
regiment no less, as did the youn gest James brother Robertson. Although the
U.S. military still showed the prevalent patronizing assumption that African
Americans needed to be “properly led,” the ser vice of white officers called for an
extra mea sure of courage because the Confederate Congress considered these
Union leaders to be “inciting servile insurrection” and therefore declared that “if
captured, [they shall] be put to death.” Undaunted, Lieutenant Wilkinson James
defiantly declared that “ every Negro ought to be armed”; he served proudly with
his troops who “fought as well as we did” in the Mas sa chu setts 54th Regiment,
commanded by Col o nel Robert Gould Shaw. On July 18, 1863, they approached
Charleston, near Fort Sumter, where the war had begun, and stormed Fort Wag-
ner, the “bastion of this rebel hell.” 4 Wilkie James suffered near fatal wounds to his side and his foot, while so many of his comrades died around him.
Back at the James family home, family and friends surrounded Wilkie with
admiring love and support; Louisa May Alcott knitted him an afghan and
wrote him a poem, which concluded with the words “For he who dares has
earned his rest.” William drew an admiring sketch of the warrior at rest. In six
months, even though he still walked with a limp, he had recovered enough to
rejoin his regiment. In 1865, when Wilkie revisited the site of the fateful battle,
some newspaper reporters wrote sentimentalized stories about the wounded
First Embrace of Science 31
hero. Wilkie arrived right after “our flag was hoisted at Fort Sumter,” and he
“gazed at the ruins with satisfaction and plea sure, not unmixed with melan-
choly.” William James spoofed his brother in a sketch in which he echoed his
father’s sentiments about patriotism and war. Henry James, Se nior, supported
a war now directed against slavery, but he still decried “that unscrupulous
rubbish . . . spread- eagleism,” with its ready ac cep tance of destruction crushing
the great “demo cratic spirit” of the United States. But the unhealthy products
of total war were more popu lar than high- toned po liti cal ideals. Wil iam drew a
“theatrical” picture of his brother earnestly holding up a bloody foot, with
a spread ea gle in the background and the caption, “Fort Sumter in Union
hands!!! Let the ea gle scream!!!!” In this same season, William elaborated on
his views, in raising concern privately that the way the war was being fought,
with shrill patriotism drowning out higher purpose, the founding princi ples of
this “model Republic” would become endangered. Wilkie trea sured the sketch,
placing it next to
cutouts of newspaper accounts, as two expressions of the
“cause . . . for the defense of the country’s life.” The indecisive young James
can be blamed for making light of his brother’s bravery or for not taking more
bold actions during the war with his fledgling convictions, but those ambiva-
lent sentiments would grow into his mature statements on war. At a tribute to
Screaming Ea gle Patriotism and Abolitionist Ideals.
“Garth Wilkinson James’s return to Charleston Harbor,” William James papers,
bMS Am 1092.2 (63). Courtesy of Bay James and the Houghton Library, Harvard
University.
William James agreed with his brother’s abolitionist sentiments and admired his
bravery in battle. Captain Wilkie James was second in command to Col o nel Robert
Gould Shaw of the “Negro Regiment,” the Mas sa chu setts Fifty- Fourth, which fought
courageously at Fort Wagner, SC, at the southern approach to Charleston Harbor,
July 1863. Even with the bravery of these white officers (if captured by the Confeder-
ates, they would be put immediately to death for violating the South’s racial code), the
Northerners would not countenance African Americans as commanders, even of their
fellow troops. Through this po liti cal and military drama, William grew impatient
with brutal “screaming ea gle” patriotism that the war ignited and that some
newspaper reporters tapped in focusing on the hoisting of the flag without reference
to the moral transformation in race relation. William exaggerated on his mixed
feeling with a theatrical display of Wilkie’s return to the captured territory in 1865.
Wilkie trea sured his brother’s spoofing sketch and kept it with the original news
clippings.
32 Young William James Thinking
Col o nel Shaw himself in 1897, he was invited to give a speech in which he re-
flected on “the very soul and secret of those awful years.” If the war spirit
bloomed unchecked, he declared, drowning out the need for “civic courage” to
temper shrill patriotism and channel the human impulse for aggression into
more constructive directions, this nation and any nation would repeatedly sow
the “fatal seeds of future war. ” 5 The seeds of his own convictions, first sprout-ing during the Civil War, but hampered by ambivalence, would take shape
while he made commitments far from the battlefields.
William James felt the influence of his father not only in his fledgling con-
victions about war but also in his next vocational steps. In the fall of 1861,
he took up the study of science with a keen hope for vocation spurred by his
father’s eagerness to find scientific ways to improve human society— including
perhaps helping to prevent such future disasters. Henry James, Se nior, had
already raised expectations that study of science would add persuasive au-
thority to the spiritual messages he so fervently believed. And a centerpiece of
his spiritual commitment was his belief that scientific inquiry would bring a
better ordering of society, with po liti cal leaders stepping aside to “leave the
coast clear to scientific men,” as he said right on the eve of the war and just
before Wil iam began studying science at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School.
The elder James’s hope soared with ardent convictions that science could be a
way to rid society of its prob lems. He called the American founding a “ great
providential stride in human affairs,” and its promise would be fulfilled by
careful application of science— especially as guided by his spiritual convic-
tions. Although he would remain skeptical that brutal war could achieve such
ideals, once the war began he identified the potential for po liti cal attack on
slavery as “the scientific promise of our polity. ” 6 These philanthropic hopes and fervent beliefs about the social and spiritual significance of science were
the first pictures of the systematic study of nature that William took with him
as he started his formal education in science in the fall of 1861, even though at
the Lawrence School he would encounter new ways of thinking about science
and religion that would challenge his family faith.
Q
In the 1860s William James took his first major step away from his father’s
faith, propelled, ironically, by his father’s own hopes for a “scientific career
for Willy.” He turned from the drums of war not only because of his doubts
that these brutal means could achieve higher goals that could reach beyond
shrill blood lust but also because of his eagerness to study science. He
craved a vocation with purpose and effectiveness. His father’s vigorous
First Embrace of Science 33
declarations for science stoked his commitment, which in turn increased
his ambivalence about his painting talents. What he would soon say about
philosophy, he was already earnestly feeling about science; in 1875 he de-
clared that “phi los o phers had best . . . stak[e] their persons . . . on the truth
of their position.” Possessing a version of his father’s idealism with “feelings
of philanthropy” about science, young James took up its study as his imme-
diate and passionate vocation, and the simultaneous real ity of war around
him lent his work in science a still more amplified sense of purpose. With
science, he aimed to “do as much good” as he could. “How much that is, God
only knows. I pray . . . I may do something.” Perhaps science, with its prom-
ise of great knowledge, practical solutions, and even— according to his
father— spiritual insight could provide paths out of conflict. Young William
James felt indecision about the choices around him, including about the ap-
plication of any ideals to a working vocation in a world so torn and in dis-
tress.7 In 1861 the war began, and Abraham Lincoln called for troops. William
James, religiously imbued, philosophically curious, vocationally uncertain,
personally ambivalent, but morally driven to do some good, enlisted in the
cause of science.
Science and Religion: Va ri e ties of Cosmic Orientations
When William James started on his career path in the 1860s, he was also
witnessing a cultural and intellectual shift in the whole Western world
toward more uncertainty in the methods and assumptions of science and
religion. Biblical criticism challenged long- accepted certainties in religion,
and Darwinism further spurred this evolution toward intellectual uncer-
tainties with its probabilistic methods, conceptions of im mense and elusive
stretches of time, and portraits of nature in constant change. The biological
theory of species development was one of several scientific theories from the
late nineteenth century that turned away from widespread earlier deter-
ministic thinking, pointing to uncertainties at the heart of science. Despite
these intellectual uncertainties, science maintained a sturdy public confi-
dence among its prac ti tion ers and supporters as it gained social authority
from institutions and ideas that endorsed its growth and power. 8 The very
decline of conceptual certainty within science actually contributed to so-
cial confidence in its certainties, with the methods of science presented as
ways to cope and
find direction in an uncertain world.
In James’s time, science was widely associated with empiricism, the phi-
losophy that our knowledge grows from what enters our mind through the
34 Young William James Thinking
senses; science and empiricism were both authoritative and contested, with
alternative medical prac ti tion ers, popularly called “mere empirics,” making
claims to experiential facts supporting their therapies, until the increas-
ingly specialized work of mainstream laboratory science became widely as-
sociated with exclusive claim to authoritative empiricism and science. The
increasing confidence and success of science reinforced the philosophical
tradition of naturalism, which in the ancient world had been primarily an
orientation with reference to the All, the eternal and mysterious character
of the world as a whole, while with some ancients, and more thoroughly in
recent centuries, naturalism became sharply associated with a secular view
of natu ral facts explaining things in nature without reference to anything
beyond the natu ral world. Especially since the nineteenth century, scien-
tific naturalism has exhibited trust in science, use of empiricism, and lean-
ings toward materialism, in degrees; methodological materialists describe
the scientific work done only on material things, whereas metaphysical
materialists make philosophical claims that material ingredients alone can
explain the world, with all other experiences reduced to these material
facts. These trends in science further undercut the authority of Western re-
ligion. As naturalistic explanations gained more influence, the authority of
super natural realms looked weak by comparison. In par tic u lar, religion ex-
perienced challenges to its traditional verities about the structure and
moral direction of the cosmos, humanity’s place in nature, and the authen-
ticity of the deity and of sacred texts. And yet, such secular challenges did
not beat religion into submission (despite the inaccurate predictions of
some enthusiasts for science) in the United States and much of the world,
where church attendance and belief have endured strongly since the nine-
teenth century with a wide array of beliefs.
James’s own teacher Louis Agassiz helped to set the tone for advocates of