by Paul J Croce
modern times also multiplied his worries, because “every one must more or
less act with insufficient knowledge— ‘go it blind,’ as they say. Few can af-
ford the time to try what suits them.” He did not yet know how much time
he would actually take, but at this point he was already feeling “the awful
responsibility of such a choice.” The mature James would be known for his
advocacy of bold risk- taking, but not before he learned to cope with his own
hesitancy by believing and acting despite the kinds of ambiguities that sur-
rounded him in his youth— vivid personal versions of the leap of faith he
would advocate in “The Will to Believe.” 37
James enjoyed his work in anatomy and physiology with Wyman, but his
previous choices still held some attraction. In September 1863, James told
his mother that “I shall confer with Wyman about the prospects of a natu-
ralist and fi nally decide.” He chose medicine. In February of the next year,
he wrote to a friend, “I embraced the medical profession a couple of months
ago.” His “first impressions” were that “ there is much humbug therein”; in
par tic u lar, he was keenly aware of the therapeutic limits of mainstream
medicine, except for “surgery, in wh. s’ thing positive is sometimes accom-
plished.” In the spirit of clinical trust in nature with limited use of reme-
dies, as advocated by many at Harvard Medical School, including his own
teacher Oliver Wendell Holmes, Se nior, and in keeping with his family’s use
of alternative therapies, he added that “a doctor does more by the moral ef-
fect of his presence” than with any prescribed remedy— and he added sharply,
“He also extracts money from them. ”38 Despite his lukewarm attitude about
the field, he was eager to continue working with Wyman, whose modera-
tion would allow him to learn science without debate about competing modes
of medicine or about any scientific controversy.
Shortly after James entered the medical school in the spring of 1864, his
family moved to Boston. He was delighted by this move, which he had been
advocating for months because of “the necessity of the whole family being
near the arena of the future activity of us young men.” The city that Holmes
called the Hub of the Universe was the site of both his own scientific ambi-
tions at Harvard and his brother Henry’s first serious forays on the literary
First Embrace of Science 53
scene after brief attendance at Harvard Law School. He might have added
that in addition to the “young men,” their father would also enjoy the move to
Boston because of his involvement with the intellectual society of Boston,
including the Saturday Club that he had already joined. 39 William then lived
at home while he went to school, as he had during his semester away from
classes. This also meant that despite his intellectual wayfaring far from his
father’s thoughts, he returned to the setting of his childhood, at home with
the James family.
Looking for Living Trea sures in Brazil
Within a year of his transfer to the medical school, James again became
restless. In his prospective “resumé” of 1861, James had promised himself
years of study with Louis Agassiz. Since then, he had deci ded on medicine,
but he per sis tently referred to it for its usefulness for learning science; as he
told his mother in 1863, “I may stick to science,” especially if he could “get
into Agassiz’ museum” as an assistant. He knew the salary would not be much,
so his financial worries resurfaced because this career move would “drain
away at your property for a few more years.” Despite these worries, from
March 1865 to January 1866, he joined an expedition to explore the natu ral
history of Brazil with Agassiz, who was himself a doctor turned scientist. The
trip took him far from the orbit of his family and of American culture, im-
mersing him in the polyglot world of Brazil on an exotic adventure. While he
was happy to taste the “delightful savor of freedom and gypsy- hood,” espe-
cially after a few years of sedentary study and vocational hand- wringing,
young James mostly welcomed the trip for the “chance of learning a good
deal of Zoology and botany.” With firsthand field experience in the tropics
to crown his range of scientific and medical training, he hoped to lay the
groundwork for a career of teaching and research in the biological sciences.40
The expedition to Brazil brought a living expression of the choices James
had been debating internally. It was an adventure, such as military ser vice
or work with freed African Americans might have provided, but within sci-
ence. Here was an opportunity to work closely with one of the world’s great
scientists; but his science would be in a form his father could endorse since
Agassiz was deeply religious and a member of the elder James’s Saturday
Club no less. Also, in place of deep and often troubling reflections, James
would be doing science in a very practical way, gaining intimate familiarity
with the scientific method from prolonged field work and organ ization of sam-
ples. And most specifically, because of Agassiz’s great teaching reputation,
54 Young William James Thinking
James had hopes, as he said shortly after his arrival in Brazil, of “getting a
pretty valuable training from the Professor,” because of his “pitching in to
my loose and superficial way of thinking.” Agassiz himself was a “vast prac-
tical engine” with a prodigious knowledge of natu ral facts; and when his
students had questions, he encouraged them likewise to “go to Nature; take
the facts into your own hands; look, and see for yourself!” This expedition
with its excitement and practical learning was pushing James’s deeper ques-
tions aside, and it suggested a pos si ble vocation. Perhaps it was all that con-
templation itself that was the prob lem; instead, here was a chance for action:
he even referred to himself in this way—as “a man of action”—in a set of notes
written about the trip. Although James did not fi nally become a naturalist,
he would maintain re spect for the way Agassiz cajoled his students to learn
directly from experience, even throughout his more reflective work. Three
de cades later, in a memorial to his teacher, James honored Agassiz’s “knowl-
edge of details,” which left him with a deep re spect for the importance of
keeping faithful to natu ral facts, both in contrast with the abstractions of
theory and as a grounding ballast for his “ will to believe” theory. In 1896,
when he also first presented that theory, he also remembered that “the
hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the difference between all pos si ble
abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world’s concrete fulness [ sic],
that I have never been able to forget it”; in 1879 he had already applied his
teacher’s lessons (with the same alternative spelling) for describing even
any plausible theory as a “monstrous abridgment of things, . . . [an] inade-
quate substitute for the fulness [ sic] of the truth.” And in the “ Will to Be-
lieve” itself, he also insis
ted on remaining faithful to natu ral facts for as long
as they provide clear guidance; only in the face of ambiguous or inaccessible
facts, in situations that still demanded practical action, did he then encour-
age willing to believe.41
Louis Agassiz’s approach to science, with his infectious enthusiasm and
encyclopedic grasp of natu ral facts attracted not only young James but also
many popu lar audiences and cultural elites, who eagerly came forward with
material support for his ambitious plans. The seed of the Brazil expedition
itself was born in 1864 when a wealthy friend, Nathaniel Thayer, heard
Agassiz suggest that an exploration of the Amazon River basin would likely
produce evidence to disprove Darwinism, which Agassiz opposed with his
theories of ancient glaciers and the special divine creation of species in their
current locations, with each glacier serving as “God’s great plough” periodi-
cally producing extinctions before new special creations. Even before this
First Embrace of Science 55
expedition was planned, the Amazon River basin had been the focus of
intense scientific curiosity. Most famously, Alfred Russel Wallace, who
developed the theory of natu ral se lection concurrently with Darwin, ex-
plored the river basin from 1848 to 1852 and ironically, in light of Agassiz’s
anti- Darwinist intentions, began to develop his ideas also in Brazil. James
referred to Wallace’s theories and explorations a few years later in a psy-
chol ogy lecture; he tacitly noted the place of purposeful adaptations in say-
ing that “the color of butterflies was thought to be purely accidental by the
old naturalists. . . . Wallace found it to be other wise.” In addition to this scien-
tific work pointing toward natu ral se lection, there was growing fascination
with the luxurious and exotic beauty of the southern continent especially
since Frederick Church exhibited his widely popu lar landscape painting,
The Heart of the Andes, first in New York in 1859 and then in seven other
American cities and London by the early 1860s. The theatrical display in-
cluded a darkened room, special lighting on the centerpiece, and a frame to
create the illusion that the viewer was peering into a win dow to see South
Amer i ca as it really was. In New York alone, twelve thousand “vicarious
tourists” paid twenty- five cents each to see the large colorful pa norama on
display. Its appeal was not only for its depiction of sublime scenes of steep
mountains and treacherous gorges but also for its domestication of these
wild scenes with hints about God’s original creation and about the reach of
Chris tian ity into these foreign lands. This artwork reinforced Agassiz’s
kind of science and religion both because of its similarly broad public ap-
peal and, more specifically, because it tacitly exhibited a view of special and
dramatic creation with the South American landscape vicariously repre-
senting original divine creation. Church gave visual expression to the exu-
berant travel writings of Alexander von Humboldt, who had climbed the
very mountain, Chimborazo, that was central to the painting. The German
scientist offered exuberant depictions of gigantic and picturesque tropical
nature. 42 The science and art reinforced each other with portrayals of equa-
torial South Amer i ca as the microcosm of the world, stimulating broad en-
thusiasm for expeditions such as the one James joined in 1865.
South Amer i ca provided Agassiz a dramatic setting for potentially un-
raveling Darwinian theory since this was where Darwin himself had trav-
eled, around the continent, while reading Charles Lyell’s propositions for
the enduring impact of gradual geological changes before arriving in the
Galapagos to see evidence of species differentiation on diff er ent islands.
This was Agassiz’s kind of public science, hot on Darwin’s own trail, in an
56 Young William James Thinking
exotic setting for gaining wide attention. Moreover, the Swiss- born scien-
tist was an expert on Brazilian fishes, and he gleefully hoped that evidence
of glaciers even “ under this burning sky” would vindicate his theory, with
his hope to show that those great catastrophes would offer clearer explana-
tions than the vast stretches of time Darwin’s theory demanded. The plans
quickly expanded as the president of Pacific Mail Steamship offered an
empty mail ship and Agassiz assembled a store house of scientific collecting
equipment. In the middle of the trip, James spoofed the aggrandizing pre-
tensions of the mission, calling it “a great North American Naturalists
Expedition, which for the past 6 months had been overrunning Brazil and
ransacking her living trea sures.” Thayer paid all the expenses for Agassiz
and his wife and six scientists and artists from his museum, while six stu-
dent volunteers (including James) and a few vacationing travelers joined
the exciting venture.43
A practical prob lem in 1865 was that the Brazilian government had been
keeping the river closed to foreign traffic. Exploring parties had been excit-
ing American business interests especially since the 1840s with hopes to
expand commerce through the Ca rib bean into South Amer i ca using the
vast waters of the Amazon. In the 1850s Matthew Fontaine Maury of the
U.S. Navy argued for “ free navigation of the Amazon, and the settlement of
its valley,” with Southern slaveholders or with American slaves sold in Brazil,
but the Brazilians responded with suspicion. The famous and charismatic
Agassiz soothed Brazilian wariness by completely avoiding any commercial
or diplomatic debates. It helped that Emperor Dom Pedro II conducted geo-
graphic researches of his own; and Agassiz flattered him with frequent
letters before the trip and supported his position as an honorary correspon-
dent of the American Geo graph i cal Society. From the first moment they
met, Agassiz swept up the emperor with his enthusiasm. He personally es-
corted the emperor through the ship, spurring his interest in both the plans
for scientific collecting and the engineering of the vessel itself. The emperor
responded with lavish assistance, including the provision of a Brazilian
steamer, assistants to join the party, and, most decisively, his sanctioning of
the trip, which turned it into an almost official expedition. Back home,
Agassiz had energetically supported women’s education, and on the expedi-
tion he worked closely with his wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, who was the
lead author of their published journal for the trip. When he gave scientific
lectures in Rio de Janeiro, the emperor arrived with the whole royal family,
thus creating a first time that women had attended a public talk in Brazil. In
First Embrace of Science 57
part because of the great reception given to Agassiz’s expedition, the Bra-
zilian government officially opened the Amazon to the commerce of all
countries within a few months after the Americans left with their scientific
collections from the “King of Rivers.” 44 The sheer vigor of Agassiz’s enthusi-
asm for science would make waves well beyond his scientific inv
estigations.
Despite his broad appeal, Agassiz had little direct interest in commercial
issues, even as they clearly benefited him— and even as his science benefited
commercial interests. Like many an enterpriser, he assumed the value of
getting “the saw mill busy in these forests,” but to him the voyage to Brazil
was essentially a mission to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution. A friend
of James’s father also joined the expedition; Episcopal bishop Alonzo Pot-
ter preached on board against Darwin’s “theories of transmutation,” recom-
mending Agassiz’s religious science, with words especially directed toward
the young scientists on board. James was not impressed: he frankly thought
Potter’s words simply “wooden.” Young James did find Agassiz “fascinat-
ing” but also “so childlike” that he found his anti- Darwinism utterly unper-
suasive. And so, he added a few days later, “since seeing more of Agassiz, my
desire to be with him, so as to learn from him has much diminished.” Most
significantly, while James gravitated toward experience trumping theory,
he noticed his teacher’s readiness to shun the evidence of experience, even
to the point of letting his commitment to theory inhibit further investiga-
tion; so “if he finds glacier marks [near] Rio, he will not need to go . . . to the
Amazon.” On his teacher’s glacier theory, he added, with mock reverence,
“[O]mnia exeunt in mysterium” (all issues in mystery), because Agassiz so
readily relied on elusive religious explanations. After the trip, James was
even more blunt; for all of his teacher’s good qualities, his “evil passions” led
him to make “burlesque misrepre sen ta tions of Darwin’s book.” James was
not alone in his view of the scientific merits of the expedition; for example,
geologist Charles Lyell said of the trip that Agassiz “has gone mad about
glaciers.” 45
Despite his scientific disagreements with Agassiz, James maintained his
fascination with the august scientist even three years later and two conti-
nents away. In 1868, when studying physiological psy chol ogy in Germany,
he interrupted a notebook on philosophical and personal reflections with
an entry summarizing “Agassiz’s Amazon theory” based on glacial action
on the geological layers, including “stratified gravel [and] laminated clays, . . .