by Paul J Croce
power, for good or ill, of science, which was becoming “a sort of god— a
blind, arbitrary, capricious deity.” With such prospects still only on the ho-
rizon, James settled into the routine work of the semester, and in its last
weeks he had most of the term’s work still to do, including evaluation of the
most basic chemical ele ments and compounds: “Chemistry comes on toler-
ably, but not as fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, hav-
ing done but twelve since Thanksgiving and having thirty- eight more to do
before the end of the term.” Still uncertain about his abilities, much less
about the future of science, he motivated himself with a simple and deliber-
ate maxim: “Nothing can be done without work.” 17
In the fall of his first semester, James also wrote a long letter to a cousin,
hastily ending it because he had to get back to work: “This writing in the
middle of the week is an unheard-of license, for I must work, work, work.
Relentless Chemistry claims its hapless victim.” But there were obstacles;
he found the claims of science and scientists increasingly implausible because
they conveyed a disturbing tone of arrogant finality. His chemistry teacher,
Charles Eliot, contributed to this impression. For example, early in his second
First Embrace of Science 41
year, when James was suffering from a boil on his elbow, “Eliot with voice
of absolute certainty told me to keep painting it with iodine.” James was
skeptical, but remained respectful in this scientific setting, so “how could I
help hopefully painting away.” The treatment did nothing to heal the boil
but soon made matters worse: “[A]bout three days ago, . . . my arm began to
swell voluminously.” He allowed that “the iodine seems to prevent the
formation of a crater” but concluded with light mockery, “[W]hat else it
does, heaven and Eliot alone know.” 18 While Eliot and the rest of the Har-
vard faculty were comfortable with the scientific authority supporting such
regular medical practices, James in his family had used a range of alterna-
tive therapies, which contributed to his skepticism about Eliot’s confident
suggestions.
During his second year, James attended the lectures of Joseph Lovering,
professor of physics. In September 1862, he recorded the professor’s overview
of the course: “We shall treat of Acoustics, Electricity, Magnetism, Electro-
Mag[netic] Optics & heat from a mechanical point of view and shall treat them
together as they are all bound by the mechanical notion of undulation. ”19 This
class exposed him to some basics of the scientific method, along with the as-
sumption of materialist and even mechanical explanations for the action of
physical phenomena, and the argument that diverse phenomena can be ex-
plained by unified forces; these theories offer ironic parallels to those of his
father, who would also unify forces but with spiritual explanations.
Lovering was a beloved teacher but not an innovative researcher. Al-
though he was permanent secretary of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science from 1854 to 1873, his own investigations were
largely observations and correlations of information. He graduated from
Harvard in 1833, and he spent his whole career there. When James knew
him, he was serving as regent of the college, a position like a modern regis-
trar. Eliot praised him for his “capacity for assiduous routine labor.” He
brought those virtues into the classroom as well, where he stated scientific
facts and laws with great clarity, illustrated them successfully with routine
experiments, offered occasional oratorical drama, and frequently recited
exact passages from textbooks. His brief studies at the Divinity School and
his idealistic Unitarian faith added to his appeal as a lecturer on campus
and on the popu lar lecture cir cuit, including many pre sen ta tions at the Low-
ell Institute. Through Lovering, James’s exposure to theories of the mecha-
nistic uniformity of nature were laced with idealism about the divine architect
behind the laws of classical physics.20
42 Young William James Thinking
James did not rec ord many direct responses to these mainstream scien-
tific ideas that he was learning from Eliot and Lovering during his first
years of formal study, but when he did, he raised doubts about strictly mech-
anistic approaches. For example, at the beginning of his second year, he con-
sidered the possibility that “our modern ‘forces’ light, magnetism &c. [are]
no more physical entities than we now consider Bacon’s ‘forms’ are.” Baconi-
anism was the paragon of strict empiricism associated with scientific work,
but Francis Bacon himself combined his attention to evidence from the senses
with theories about hidden forms that could explain the secret workings of
material facts. James suggested that forces associated with science may
also have, like Bacon’s forms, nonempirical qualities: magnetism, for exam-
ple, instead of being a physical entity, was much like “malleability or any
other property of matter.” This implies that forces are not things but func-
tions of matter— that is, forces are the ways in which matter behaves. This
focus on the functional properties of matter rather than its tangible empiri-
cal qualities suggests his later turn away from traditional empiricism, with
his proposition that consciousness exists not as an entity but rather as a
function. In 1863, well before formulating radical empiricism, his words
about the functional properties of matter emerged as part of his early re sis-
tance to materialist views of nature. He would gain support for doubts
about some of the assumptions of his formal education from some scientists
themselves, including his reading of Michael Faraday, who was both a co-
discoverer, with Henry James’s friend Joseph Henry, of electromagnetic
induction in 1831, and an ardent Sandemanian. This religious sect empha-
sized the simplicity of early Christian life and the direct action of the divine
in the world. The elder James was also a follower of Sandemanianism in the
1830s on his path toward Swedenborgianism. In these contexts, even while
studying mainstream materialistic science, William James was immedi-
ately drawn to asking philosophical questions about the natu ral facts of his
scientific investigations. 21
Despite William James’s dedication to science, his formal studies made
him restless. A science education would be more impor tant to him for how
he assimilated the material rather than for what he was taught. He was
more interested in the relations between science and other fields and in the
broad implications of his new learning. During his months as a chemistry
student, his teacher Charles Eliot reported that “James was a very in ter est-
ing and agreeable pupil,” readily “mastering the pro cesses” and passing the
exams. He also observed patiently that James was “tolerably punctual at
First Embrace of Science 43
recitations,” but he “was not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry.”
Moreover, “his mind was e
xcursive,” a trait he showed even more outside
the classroom. James spiced up chatting letters to friends with deeper
thoughts, even signing them with mock gravity, identifying himself as “Your
guide / Phi los o pher / & Friend.” He applied those speculative interests to
the exploration of “other sciences and realms of thought” beyond his chem-
istry assignments, and when he was in the laboratory, he liked to try his
hand at “novel experimenting.” 22
In the next few years, James experimented with a few diff er ent sciences,
while grazing in a wide range of other, nonscientific fields. After just three
semesters of full- time study of chemistry, he took a leave from the Law-
rence Scientific School for the spring of 1863. As early as November 1861, he
had already planned to “spend one term at home.” His reading suggests that
his time away from school was a season of shift in scientific interests toward
psy chol ogy, in both its philosophical and physiological aspects. Eliot later sus-
pected medical prob lems, but he did not offer specifics in diagnosis or timing
beyond saying that James in his youth suffered some “ill health, or rather
something which I imagined to be a delicacy of ner vous constitution,” a
veiled reference to neurasthenia. His teacher also said James possessed a
“remarkable spirituality.” During his first years of schooling, James did not
say anything about his own health, but he did continue to study science on
his own, even as he read widely in other fields as well. While continuing his
avocational reading, he re entered the Lawrence Scientific School in the fall
of 1863, now as a student of Jeffries Wyman in the Department of Compara-
tive Anatomy and Physiology. He revealed support for his new teacher’s
Darwinian leanings when he admiringly incorporated one of the careful
anatomist’s experiments into his notebook reflections on the naturalistic
explanation of “organic phenomena. ”23
James had already shown interest in physiology when he had been a stu-
dent of chemistry; noticing this, Eliot gave him a laboratory assignment in
the fall of 1862 to determine “the effects on the kidneys of eating bread made
with Liebig- Horsford baking powder, whose chief constituent was acid phos-
phate.” Since acid phosphate is already pres ent in the human body, the
physiological response to the consumption of additional acid phosphate in
the form of the baking powder would have been minimal. With the physio-
logical presence of the phosphate not yet known, however, this was a reason-
able if not daring experiment; for the student in lab, however, it was tedious.
His teacher said James kept an “accurate” rec ord of his findings, but he added
44 Young William James Thinking
delicately, the results were “unpromising.” Young James found the whole
experiment “tiresome,” especially since he was administering the distaste-
ful bread to himself, and he asked to be given another assignment. Eliot ob-
served that James’s reaction was part of a trend that would dominate his
scientific study for almost a de cade: although he would return intermit-
tently to the laboratory, his first scientific education was “in large propor-
tion observational.” James keenly wanted to do more lab work, he re-
spected it deeply as the foundation of scientific comprehension for its
attention to tangible facts, and he would do extensive and innovative ex-
perimental work once he started his teaching career, but he did not do
much experimental work during his original education in science. Within
the next few years, when he took up reviewing books and other writing, he
reported that part of his attraction to this work of evaluating the scientific
experimentation of others was “the simple cleansing of the persona, as it
were, from the laboratory dirt.” 24 These steps away from the practice of
science were also steps toward reflections on its methods and toward
philosophizing.
Philosophical Reflections within Scientific Study
In his 1862 notebook, James’s entries on physics trailed off as he filled the
pages with a range of speculative ideas and personal reflections. Eliot could
see this trend coming when the young chemistry student grew distracted
from his “systematic . . . education” in favor of “unsystematic excursions . . .
[in]to philosophical studies.” For example, he recorded a basic epistemolog-
ical prob lem about the nature of perception and conception: “Can I without
consciousness distinguish between two objects—my chair and my wash stand”?
Here is an early and simple example of a question that would become a
centerpiece of his psy chol ogy and philosophy, and that he would answer: No,
the selective attention of consciousness is fundamental to our perception and
understanding of our world. Without it, the world is a uniform and undistin-
guished mass of data, but with it, and its selective attention, we make in-
formed distinctions to or ga nize and deal with the world around us. With his
notebooks serving as psychological complements to his physics lessons, young
James was already taking steps away from a spectator view of knowledge and
toward the “dynamic relationship” of mind and world, which would become
crucial parts of his mature philosophy.25 Lovering taught him the mechanical
relation of physical bodies in space, and James questioned the mechanical
perception of clear and distinct objects in perception.
First Embrace of Science 45
As he worked in science, James offered some very basic reflections on
the relation of the One and the Many: “Realists say, our idea of man has a
diff[erent] source (reflection) from our idea of men (sense).” This suggests
his doubts about the merits of separating an abstraction from its concrete
manifestations in particulars. The pragmatic philosophy of the mature James
would expand this leaning into a wholesale critique of abstraction: because
a thing is “known as” its effects, then the only significance of an abstract
idea is in its relation to concreteness or its “cash value” in experience. He
took another decisive step toward pragmatism when he first met Charles
Peirce late in 1861 as a fellow student at the Scientific School, and during
talks over the next few years, including discussion in their informal Meta-
physical Club, where they and their colleagues worked their way toward
pragmatic insights. Even this entry on the abstractions of philosophical re-
alists likely grew from an exchange with Peirce, who was himself a realist,
but one who posited that our knowledge of the real truth would not emerge
from reflection on essences but from experience and inquiry over the long
run. 26 This orientation toward the future would have a decisive influence
on James’s prospective emphasis on ideas in the making; meanwhile, he
continued to learn from sense experiences but began to doubt the increas-
ingly brash claims of some scientific empiricists.
James’s interest in large cosmic questions attracted him to the brilliant,
irascible son of Professor Benjamin Peirce. James was still misspelling his
name, but already quoting “C. S. Pierce” in his 1862 notebook. Over the next
few years, as their friendship grew and their discussions deepened, they
exchanged questions about the role of philosophy and religion in the midst
of the growing authority of science, which they witnessed in school. James’s
entry referring to “Pierce” is a strict logical lesson based on the limits of our
knowledge. In response to “the reductio ad absurdum,” a logical weapon of
philosophical abstraction that infers the truth of a position from the absurdity
of its denial, he wrote that it “can never be used in metaphysical discussion
& rarely in scientific because it assumes that we know the sum of possibili-
ties.” Both Peirce and James endorsed the elusiveness behind even the most
proud and confident claims. In addition, unlike the emerging enthusiasts
for science, they did not hesitate to compare metaphysics with science because
each contained uncertainty. This quotation, the earliest known evidence of
James’s intellectual contact with Peirce, significantly points to the probabi-
listic thinking that James and Peirce would both use to equate the distinct
fields of science and religion for their common human quests to understand
46 Young William James Thinking
the world— and for their mutual limitations. These mainstays of the Meta-
physical Club would famously search for compromise of science and reli-
gion, but what is less often understood is their emphasis on the fields’
shared uncertainties before even the need for compromise. 27
James continued to assess the plausibility of scientific and religious claims
in his per sis tent reading of “the ‘Phi los o pher of Königsberg.’ ” His next note-
book entry is a short philosophical note on the relation of knowledge and
faith, with a clear summary of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical goals: “Kant
works critically until he finds it unsatisfactory— and then stops, at morality,
freedom, God.” And then James claims, “[David] Hume do[es the same],”
despite the Enlightenment phi los o pher’s bold reputation for antireligious
sentiments and for disproof of arguments for the existence of the divine
based on natu ral design. James observes the parallel in Hume for also employ-
ing philosophical reasoning critically but stopping at a diff er ent endpoint: in