by Paul J Croce
place of Kant’s ultimates, “Hume . . . stops at cause. ”28 James assessed Kant
and Hume working on the same cosmological terrain, but where they “stop”
displays their respective selective attention supporting religious or scien-
tific orientations.
These philosophical observations would filter into the half- defiant name
for the discussion group, the Metaphysical Club, which formed in the late
1860s. James in 1862 was already emphasizing, even in the midst of scientific
inquiries, that “[n]one succeed in leaving Faith entirely out.” To develop this
insight, James did not wait to read Charles Renouvier, who undercut cer-
tainty in all human thought, although reading the French phi los o pher first
in 1868 surely confirmed his thinking. The insights of Peirce and James about
the limits and consequences of knowledge and about the presence of faith
in all forms of thinking would become a starting point for their discussions
of ways to use science for philosophical and religious insight on their path
to the development of pragmatism. James reiterated this 1862 notebook idea
in one of his first influential essays, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879): “We
cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous
with working hypothesis.” Seeing the operation of faith in many areas, he de-
picts the constructed quality of knowledge: in religious beliefs, philosophical
assumptions, scientific hypotheses, and worldviews in general. Both Peirce
and James acknowledge that each of these practices involves a sort of faith,
and therefore, none of them is immune from uncertainty, even as each has
its uses.29
First Embrace of Science 47
In another reference to Peirce in the same notebook, James uses a reli-
gious term to identify relations between scientific thinking and ideas that
most scientists find to be irrelevant to their work: “The thou idea, as Pierce
[ sic] calls it, dominates an entire realm of mental phenomena, embracing
poetry, all direct intuition of nature, scientific instincts, relations of man to
man, morality &c.” Con temporary readers of these words will surely be re-
minded of Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923), which drew on centuries- old
religious impulses to challenge or complement religious monism in favor of
a more mystical relation of the divine with the faithful person. Despite their
own scientific schooling, both Peirce and James proposed that aspects of sci-
ence could be placed in this rarified com pany, each one mode of inquiry
among others, with no privileged place. Significantly, they refer to the “in-
stincts” of science, suggesting a focus on the assumptions and methods that
guide inquiry. These orienting directions, like intuitions and religious be-
lief, especially mysticism, involve thinking in relation, with subject and ob-
ject connected to each other in experience, as he explains: “All analy sis must
be into a triad; me & it require the complement thou.” The emphasis on rela-
tions would be central to James’s radical empiricism, and this triad anticipates
Peirce’s evaluation of three factors in reasoning: subjective, objective, and “ab-
ductive,” his intermediate term for inferences based on explanatory hypoth-
eses; Peirce applied his triad to a host of interacting networks, including
ideals, facts, hypotheses; idea, signified, sign; art, practicality, science; and
more. After the 1850s, scientists rarely grouped their work with intuition,
poetry, morality, religion, or any “thou” idea, even among those who main-
tained personal humanistic and religious commitments. In applying this
notion so broadly, Peirce and James transcended their training, which was
tacitly based on the dualism of the “me” and “it”— the objective investigator
and the natu ral world. Instead, they acknowledged that even scientific in-
vestigation has ele ments of inspiration and subjective relations, and there-
fore science includes the participatory power of the “thou idea.” 30 This line
of thinking about science would lead Peirce and James to consider hy-
potheses to be at least as impor tant as facts in the formation of scientific
theories.
Even while tracking the inescapability of faith and the disagreements that
come with differences of belief, James added, some ideas develop reputa-
tions for certainty. Repeated perceptions make them appear more sure, and so
“one thinks necessary that wh. he has never seen violated.” Even “scientific
48 Young William James Thinking
ideas, [such] as the laws of motion &c., the unity of nature, seem (almost?)
necessary to the adept.” The authority they command derives from their
continued use and utility, since they were “slowly & laboriously evolved by
successive generations.” In time, James predicted “the law of inertia” will
“petrify into an idea so familiar” that it will seem an idea “as necessary as
that of cause”; this attention to the halting evolution of ideas suggests the
scaffolding beneath the confidence in scientific theories—or any other no-
tion presented with equivalent certainty. These notebook reflections resem-
ble his later descriptions of pragmatism in relation to common sense, which
he also identified as the product of historical development, with par tic u lar
ideas “able to preserve themselves through . . . experience” to become “fun-
damental ways of thinking.” Despite a growing reputation for the ability of
science to provide the most certain knowledge available, James suggested
that to “the adept” in science (a professional class he was aspiring to join),
scientific ideas “seem . . . necessary”— but he qualified that functional confi-
dence with the qualifying word “almost.” He associated scientific theories
not with timeless truth but with the habits that form when the ideas are not
violated in experience. That was not a reason to dismiss them. In fact, he
showed pride in his new profession by implying that scientists had been cul-
tural leaders in drawing the rest of the population toward their insights. By
writing about the “historical growth of necessary truths,” as James says
with a fertile paradox, he shows that he is neither awestruck by the author-
ity of science nor dismissive of it; instead he is presenting an insider’s gene-
alogy about the construction of its pedigree. 31
James strayed further away from both his scientific work and his father’s
assumptions toward the end of his 1862 notebook. The elder James held a
traditional view of the mental traits and social roles of men and women.
Although some traces of these views would appear in William, especially in
his marriage, his own early observation about a gender distinction in moral
thinking was closer to progressive and modern feminist arguments with
their critique of static abstractions: “ Women act in detail & judge of each
case for itself & by their own feeling.” While his father would say such things
only in patronizing critique, William showed admiration, as he compared
female traits with the traditional (male- oriented) view of ethics based on the
&
nbsp; proposition that “all moral rules are a generalization.” By contrast, “ women
do not generalize much, they rather seize on particulars.” Just as he learned
from the “feminine- mystical mind” in contrast with the “scientific- academic
mind,” James’s portrayal of women framing their morality with less reli-
First Embrace of Science 49
ance on rules was actually high praise, especially given his growing phil-
osophical doubts about fixed certainties. 32 He emphasized thinking about
particulars rather than settling on abstract generalizations about them, views
that show his questioning of the absolutist— and prejudicial— dimensions of
his father.
Medicine, Psychiatry, and Their Patients
While James was struggling with intellectual questions, he felt more im-
mediate urgency about his career choices, so he sketched out “a resumé of
[my] future history for the next few years” shortly after starting his scien-
tific studies in 1861: “1 year Study Chemistry, then spend one term at home,
then 1 year with Wyman, then a medical education, then five or six years
with Agassiz.” This plan would put him on a path to becoming a field natu-
ralist. While the first steps of his plan were a remarkably accurate projection
of his next few years of study, he added with typical self- deprecation that
after this much study, “then prob ably death, death, death with inflation
and plethora of knowledge.” That facetious flourish hinted at the reflective
aspects of James’s mind that would indeed contribute to his delays. Having
studied three semesters with Eliot, James had lost his “first flush of . . .
chemical enthusiasm.” After half a year of private study, he returned to
school in the fall of 1863, explaining his revised plan to his cousin Katherine
(Kitty) James Prince: “A year and a half of hard work at it here . . . some-
what dulled my ardor.” Still committed to science, he renewed his enthusi-
asm by shifting fields: “I am back here again, studying this time Comparative
Anatomy.” 33 Still at the Lawrence Scientific School, he now worked closely
with Jeffries Wyman, who was a noncontroversial careful experimenter
and dedicated teacher.
With his return to school in September 1863, James set himself a dead-
line for deciding his vocation. In the same letter to Prince, he wrote: “I am
obliged before the 15th of January to make fi nally and irrevocably ‘the
choice of a profession.’ ” Not yet deci ded, he continued by making light of
his serious choice: “I have four alternatives: Natu ral History, Medicine,
Printing, Beggary.” Despite his attraction to scientific study, he was wor-
ried that it might be financially impractical, so he added flippantly, “Much
may be said in favor of each. I have named them in the ascending order of
their pecuniary invitingness.” Despite the family’s inheritance, the elder
James’s lack of steady conventional work and the family’s size and frequent
travel had taken their toll on the family’s wealth. William was aware of the
50 Young William James Thinking
financial concerns that lay immediately beneath the vocational question,
and he expressed them with a playful reference to his father’s spiritualism:
“ After all[,] the great prob lem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul
together.” He then concluded with a more serious reference to finances,
saying “I have to consider lucre.” The choice was particularly acute for
William James because his soul and body led him in diff er ent directions.
Despite its naturalistic associations, science actually expressed his “soul”
because of his attraction to its great philanthropic potential, but practical
considerations forced him to reconsider. The mention of printing was a hint
toward the popu lar writing he would indeed take up, starting with book
reviews only two years later and continuing with his public intellectual
work; and he considered that “[m]edicine would pay, and I should still be
dealing with subjects which interest me.” James’s reasoning was repeated
countless times by scientists in the nineteenth century, including Harvard’s
own Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray, but James was more vehement about the
mere expediency of the medical path: “[H]ow much drudgery and of what
an unpleasant kind is there! ”34 But medicine would be a way to study physi-
ology, as a basis for understanding psy chol ogy.
During the same month that James wrote this letter to his cousin, he
wrote to his mother on the same subject. Although only twenty- one, he felt
“very much the importance of making soon a final choice of my business in
life. I stand now at the place where the road forks”: he hoped for a career in
natu ral history for its “ mental dignity & in de pen dence,” but feared it would
bring “physical penury”; given his commitment to science, other paths
smacked of “selling . . . one’s soul.” In his first known declaration of interest
in women or a future life of marriage— subjects that would contribute to his
bleak moods for years— James continued with a forlorn romantic tone: “If I
myself were the only one concerned I should not hesitate an instant in my
choice. But it seems hard on Mrs. W. J., ‘that not impossible she,’ to ask her
to share an empty purse and a cold hearth.” The same poem by seventeenth-
century En glish Catholic poet Richard Crashaw that he was quoting from
also includes descriptions of a future mate still “in shady leaves of Destiny”
and refers to sadness about love being “long [in] chusing a Dart.” These
whimsical poetic asides amplified his serious concerns about the vocational
forks in the road before him: “On one side is science, upon the other business
(the honorable, honored and productive business of printing seems the most
attractive), with medecine [ sic], which partakes of advantages of both, between
them, but which has drawbacks of its own.” Throughout these practical
First Embrace of Science 51
deliberations, his avocational education continued, with wide reading— and
some wistful musings about his future love. 35
Wyman’s joint teaching in the medical school and James’s own sense of
the practicality of this profession drew him toward medicine. In Septem-
ber, he wrote to Prince, whose husband William Henry Prince was a doctor
in an asylum and who herself had been a patient. In par tic u lar, “of all
departments of Medicine, that to wh. Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I shd.
think, the most in ter est ing.” And he added, that he would “like to see him
and his patients,” to explore the vocation for himself. The professional in-
terest in insanity intersected with his curiosity about whether his own
mental hesitancy and uncertainties indicated that he was prone to it him-
self. Since he had not seen his cousins in two years, he doubted if he ought
to visit or even write to them, saying of himself “nature makes us so awk-
ward.” Moreover, the tensions from ambivalence and vocational choice made
him blurt out that they might want to “chain me up in your asylum,” a flip-
pant
aside displaying an earnest worry. Although he showed no overt signs
of insanity, he remained vigilant and worried about his mental state, espe-
cially since he knew of the range of cases of mental illness in his extended
family, including Katherine Prince herself and two other cousins. 36
James’s tendency toward indecision was already in full force, as he an-
nounced with understatement about his vocational indecision, “I confess I
hesitate.” In the fall of 1863, he worried that this trait was itself a sign of his
brittle mental state. He would remain in this posture of hesitation for an-
other de cade; in fact, not only in this period but for the rest of his life he
would repeat this pattern of decision making, which left him puzzled in his
youth, but which strengthened his ability to welcome contrasts and even
integrate them forcefully. He summoned up a sampling of the strength that
would allow him to find decisiveness even within his ambivalence: by the
end of the fall semester, he felt confident about his choice for medicine and
was now ready to “shoot forth into life like an arrow.” But on writing to
Kitty Prince again, he doubted his abilities to work with “live lunatics”
since he feared, “I shd catch their contagion & go as mad as any of them in a
week.” Upon reading one of his course books, “Dr. Winslow on Obscure
Diseases of the Mind, . . . my reason almost fled,” since he was “so rudely
shaken by the familiar symptoms the Doctor gave of insanity.” Forbes Win-
slow urged checking for the “precursory symptoms of cerebro- psychical
disease” in youth when the “incipient stages” of insanity manifest subtly;
the “disorders of the mind” included “acute morbid sensibility, physical and
52 Young William James Thinking
mental, accompanied by a difficulty of fixing the attention, . . . fits of apathy
[and] . . . a state of moody abstraction.” Winslow even warned that “indul-
gence in a state of morbid reverie, or disposition to ‘build castles in the air,’
is fraught with serious mischief to the mind” because it is “precursory of
softening of the brain.” These clinical symptoms often did indeed line up
with James’s own temperamental traits. The multiplication of choices in