by Paul J Croce
religious certainty, in his own time and ever since. Agassiz was a great sci-
entific investigator and teacher, but he could not abide the Darwinian turn;
the same was true for most advocates of natu ral theology, who looked to
science for empirical evidence supporting religious belief. For all their
differences, the idealistic Agassiz and the followers of natu ral theology
maintained an earlier type of science with fewer hypotheses, fewer proba-
bilities, much shorter spans of earth history, and therefore much more cer-
tainty—in understanding of science and in support of religious belief. While
many nineteenth- century Evangelical Protestant Christians accommo-
dated to Darwinism, still more developed increasing antagonism for main-
First Embrace of Science 35
stream science and kindred secularities that defied biblical certainties, and
the most stringent of these believers consolidated into early twentieth-
century fundamentalism. Despite the irony of their antimodernism emerg-
ing in modern times, the very extremity of their position has contributed to
the attention they attract. Current theories of creation science and intelli-
gent design have drawn upon similar expectations for scientific and empiri-
cal sanctions for belief to support the case for biblical authority holding the
line against less deterministic modern scientific theories and methods. Other
traditional Western religions have perceived less challenge from modern sci-
ence: Roman Catholicism has for the most part integrated scientific innova-
tion into its understanding of unfolding revelation comprehended by human
reason within history, and Judaism has generally embraced theistic evolu-
tionism, with science as a way to learn about divine creation. 9
Advocates of scientific certainty, from the scientific naturalists of James’s
time to current enthusiasts for secular science such as Richard Dawkins, hold
similarly ardent views about the contrast between science and religion,
even in their utter disagreement with advocates of religious certainty. Some
supporters of science, however, have seen no need to leave religion aside, as
long as the contrasts between science and religion can serve as lessons in
themselves for keeping their ideas and beliefs strictly separate. In James’s
circle, Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a committed Presbyterian Christian who
avidly promoted Darwinism, was part of a sturdy tradition of keeping the
realms in splendid isolation, for personal belief and social purposes. Reli-
gious belief would then remain as certain as the individual desired or as the
church demanded because belief would stay segregated from science, with
each blessedly untouched by the other. But curiosities would intrude, along
with practical questions about bound aries in practices, policies, and per-
sonal orientations. 10
Since the time of Darwin’s and James’s youth, abundant integrations of
science and religion have also emerged with a readiness to form compro-
mises by enlisting meta phorical readings of sacred texts, recognition of
similarities in methods, hope for lessons to be learned across the bound-
aries, and other forms of mediation generally based on either adaptation of
religion to make it relevant to modern knowledge or adoption of scientific
knowledge for religious visions of the cosmos. Even these compromises, with
religion bending to science or science to religion, would assume a significant
gulf between science and religion, while encouraging mediation despite
those differences. These efforts for renewed harmony of science and religion
36 Young William James Thinking
would continue despite their growing separation in practice and the eclipse
of their intellectual certainties, and despite the accelerating fragmentation
of specialized knowledge in all fields. The hope for unity of knowledge ran
deep. Tapping abundant human resources, science and religion since the
nineteenth century have each thrived, with relations harmonious or in con-
flict, integrated or separated.11 While young James witnessed these pre-
dominant forms of interaction between science and religion, and gravitated
toward forms of integration, he gradually realized that even this position
assumed their stark contrast. To understand their relations, he probed
deeper.
The dynamic bound aries between science and religion have suggested
large questions about the relation of material and immaterial ingredients of
life. The most significant claims of religious believers remain generally be-
yond empirical facts, with abundant references to immaterial realms, in-
cluding divinity and afterlife beyond this world, grace- filled or idealistic
expectations, mystical experiences beyond scientific explanation, and nu-
minous realms at sacred spaces within this world. In addition, as James
readily noticed in his work and avocational interests, intellectual, ethical,
artistic, and psychological experiences also seem to operate without explicit
reference to material parts of life. Nature viewed comprehensively includes
evidence for both material and immaterial ingredients in apparent interac-
tion; however, par tic u lar advocates have per sis tently supported the signifi-
cance of one side or the other and have often used one side to explain the
other. Spiritual philosophies, as with that of the elder Henry James, reduce
material to immaterial. By contrast, materialists propose that anything
claimed to be beyond matter can be explained by its material components;
mechanistic philosophies extend this impulse in portrayal of the material
world operating like a machine. These theories assert eliminative authority
in opposite directions, an eliminative spiritualism and an eliminative mate-
rialism, respectively. While much commonsense thinking turns to dualism
with each realm in steady interaction, other dualists claim separation of
material and immaterial ele ments without interaction. As with science and
religion, there has been a whole spectrum of views on the relation of mate-
rial and immaterial parts of the world. Just as James grew impatient with
the conflict or separation of science and religion, he also rejected the reduction
of material or immaterial ingredients to each other or their stark separation.
Starting with the experiences of his youth, he perceived the simultaneous
coexistence of material and immaterial ingredients, and he identified explic itly
First Embrace of Science 37
or tacitly with the integration of philosophy and spirituality within his sci-
ence: panpsychism, depicting mind within nature; hylozoism, as the belief
that all worldly things are alive; pantheism, in portrayal of the divine con-
flated with the world; and its more interactive variation, panentheism, with
the divine circulating in the world— that is, with immanence, the theologi-
cal term.12
James was exposed to this range of perspectives on science and religion
and related dualisms, and he was particularly concerned with scientific in-
tellectuals, especially William Clifford, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spen-
cer, who showed limited re spect
for nonmaterial parts of life, using scientific
theories to comprehend humanity’s intangible experiences by using natural-
istic explanations. Positivism, with confidence that science would provide
the only positive knowledge, emerged before its twentieth- century association
with logical positivism and analytic philosophy. Auguste Comte developed the
positive philosophy with naturalistic assumptions and very schematic but
compelling stages of history; especially once pop u lar ized by John Stuart Mill,
positivism became a general worldview and a cultural reference for science
claiming intellectual and social authority, in contrast with the less rigorous
thinking in philosophy or religion, fields relying on immaterial dimensions.
The philosophy of evolution, or evolutionism, also pop u lar ized in these same
years after the advent of Darwinism, was associated with Herbert Spencer,
and with John Fiske within the Metaphysical Club itself; its metaphysical
naturalism involved the broad application of the biological theory of species
development to almost every field. Like positivism, the philosophy of evolu-
tion was based on confidence in science, with nonscientific factors reduced to
scientific terms. These orientations offered scientific naturalism both for the
work of science and for a public ethos regarding science as the ultimate
authority for what could be known about the natu ral world and, through
technology, what can be done with nature. James took issue with scientific
naturalism from his first known use of the term positivism in 1868 and in his
classroom criticisms of philosophies based on evolutionism culminating in
his 1878 critique “Spencer’s Definition of Mind.” As James started to work in
science, he was particularly worried that its growing professional expertise
would make it “quite inaccessible” to nonexperts, yet “possessed of unlim-
ited control of natu ral forces,” with power to “keep the world in order by
mere terror. ”13 His fellow scientists did not yet possess these capacities, but
they already harbored the rudiments of these powers, with ambitions for
more, which James viewed warily.
38 Young William James Thinking
Even with his concerns about science, James admired it and kept working
at it, attracted by the commitment to material facts and empirical methods
but also lured by its relationship to immaterial factors, even in the thinking
of scientific naturalists. Scientific pro gress implied uncertainties not yet
known, which were greeted either with faith in science for eventually solv-
ing those riddles or with recognition that some parts of the world would
remain elusive. Clifford readily referred to the “insights still in the course of
development,” which would displace humanity’s “confused and uncertain im-
pressions” with the “certain and immediate . . . intellectual senses” of sci-
ence. And even though Spencer maintained strong confidence in science,
he himself identified “The Unknowable,” which despite the “established
truths” of science and its methods of “rigorous criticism [by] successive
generations,” remains “utterly inscrutable.” Whether with faith in its future
or with recognition of the per sis tently elusive, scientific naturalism implied
a dualism without interaction: scientific work would focus on material ingre-
dients of the world, while immaterial factors would simply accompany the in-
vestigations, remaining mostly ignored. James met this noninteractive dualism
in the psychophysical parallelism of scientific psy chol ogy, whose prac ti tion ers
largely bracketed mysterious questions of mind or spirit while diligently ac-
cumulating knowledge on the empirical side of the proposed duality. Such
scientific work itself also actually contributed, however, to interactionist
perspectives, with scientific or religious emphases: many scientific psychol-
ogists harbored the hope that with enough knowledge, naturalistic inquiry
would convert immaterial mysteries into investigative prob lems to be solved
in materialist terms; and even scientific trends that challenged traditional
religion supported less institutional, more spiritual perspectives with forms
of panpsychism and panentheism, portraying mental or spiritual ele ments
operating within the world. 14
James readily worked within the dualities of scientific practice, just as
he acknowledged the power of religious convictions. He would describe
these practices and worldviews with a range of terms: positivism, material-
ism, scientific naturalism, or even scientificism, in contrast with tran-
scendentalism, religious belief, apriorism, intuitionism, or rationalism. He
sometimes even substituted one term for another, highlighting the shared
dimensions of the terms on each side. Despite their differences, these orien-
tations all refer to philosophical commitments relying, respectively, on
material or on immaterial ingredients, which would manifest in diff er ent
dimensions of life, including during his early experiences. When James
First Embrace of Science 39
started his schooling, material and immaterial factors appeared within his
inquiries into science and religion and in related fields; while learning the
particulars of each field and the character of their commitments, he also
sought to understand their relations. The extent of his task contributed to
the extended length of his years in educational preparation, with both a lot
to learn and still more to evaluate for choice of direction.15
Weighing Dif er ent Scientific Disciplines
Broad contexts for understanding the relation of science and religion,
including a range of choices for thinking about material and immaterial
factors in those fields and more, stirred James’s imagination during his
years of scientific education starting in 1861. This array of choices, and his
own scientific training made the particulars of his father’s beliefs seem in-
creasingly less plausible, even as he retained a vocational passion that the
elder James could appreciate. Yet he still considered ways to reconcile the
subjects of his study with religion, including some ideas with ironically dis-
tinct similarities to those of his father. He discovered that the most ardent
enthusiasts for the authority of naturalistic science held similarly idealistic
hopes for the promise of science to understand nature’s deepest meanings
based on hope rather than immediate empirical evidence, albeit with more
secular ideals in mind. The young James would maintain a similar cultural
hope for science over the next few de cades, starting with his work at Har-
vard’s Lawrence Scientific School and Medical School.
Despite James’s eagerness for scientific study, deciding on which field
and what approach to adopt would take more than a de cade. He spent his
twenties moving among many sciences in search of a field for his own work.
While his schooling was the major taproot of his education, his simultane-
ous abundant private learning broadened and deepened his education. With
these private inquiries, he reflected on his own personal direction about the
meaning and implications of his scientific education, and although he could
not know it yet, he also set his mature philosophy in formation. In the caul-
dron of his private writings, while testing out his personal and intellectual
directions, he drafted out preliminary versions of his later published work.
By contrast, earlier diary writers, ranging from the worldly William Byrd to
the saintly David Brainerd in the eigh teenth century, wrote private compo-
sitions that remained completely private. By James’s time, the emergence of
a more robust public sphere and increasing outlets for publication along
with increased readership created greater opportunities for private thoughts
40 Young William James Thinking
to become public. In the second third of the nineteenth century, novelist
Louisa May Alcott would “simmer novels” in her journals as a first step toward
putting her mind “in order” on the way toward writing for publication; and
Ralph Waldo Emerson called his journal writing his “Savings Bank,” where
he would deposit insights for cultivation into published form. After collect-
ing folk stories of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, Zora Neale
Hurston used whole phrases from her anthropology field notes within her
novels.16 James’s diaries, notebooks, and letters were at once private sim-
merings and steadily growing deposits, which he would also often use di-
rectly in published work.
Comments in letters to his family that he wrote during his first semester
at Harvard indicate that he was working hard at his first study of chemistry,
even if it was difficult and perhaps not so suited to him as he and his father
had hoped. And his comments also reveal his steady interests beyond sci-
ence. A letter from September 1861 includes some Celtic vernacular slang
from British writer James Stephen, whose words he would also quote years
later to support his image of the leap of faith at the conclusion of “The Will
to Believe.” Now he was tapping his own will and strength for a less dra-
matic task: “This chemical analy sis is so bewildering at first that I am en-
tirely ‘muddled and bet [beat]’ and have to employ most all my time reading
up.” In his essay, Stephen reminded the apprentice scientist of the august