by Paul J Croce
depicts one of his team of natu ral history collectors holding a sign reading
“4,00000000000 [40 trillion] new species [of] fish.” Another scientist made a similar
joke, saying that he hesitated to attend an Agassiz lecture lest he “take me for a new
species!” (quoted in Eclipse, 120, n. 37).
First Embrace of Science 65
lala.” Here was an exuberant version of his belief in the “ever not quite” of
philosophical expressions. He did, however, find words for an artistic de-
scription of a place he dubbed the “Original Seat of Garden of Eden”: “The
hills on both sides and the path descend rapidly to the shores of a large la-
goon separated by a forest- clad strip of land from the azure sea, whose surf
I can hear continuously roaring at this distance.” Along with the popu lar
images of the South American tropics as modern vestiges of the world as
originally created, Agassiz tried to convert these sentiments into science,
with the extravagant scenes and his own idealistic hopes spurring his anti-
Darwinian drive. James the artist would have appreciated the way many
landscape paint ers were drawn to the southern continent and other tropi-
cal places to find real- life expressions for the sublime reaches of their imag-
inations. The paint ers were, like Agassiz, generally anti- Darwinian and
hoped their work would convince viewers to rest assured about the created
harmony and providential assurances of even the most grand and awesome
natu ral settings. The idealistic theories and close attention to detail of Louis
Agassiz were well suited to the artistic imagination— even more so than
much of the scientific work of his youth— and many paint ers even studied
with the great science teacher at his science school in Nahant, Mas sa chu-
setts, with the result that many canvases included polished images, like the
pages of a geology text, and like the sweeping generalizations of Agassiz
himself. James’s ready adoption of this language about Brazil’s “[n]ature
[as] an earthly paradise” shows his immersion in this perspective as a way
of seeing aesthetically; even his science did not eclipse his humanist im-
pulses, but it also kept him wary of such idealism. He saw in Elizabeth Agassiz
an example of her husband’s idealism removing science from empirical scru-
tiny: she “looks at every thing in such an unnatural romantic light that she
don’t seem to walk upon the solid earth.” James did not reject these glowing
images of nature—on the contrary, they gave him an artistic thrill, as the
joyful parts of natu ral facts. 54 Like religion and philosophy, art referred to
immaterial dimensions of natu ral experiences, experiences he sought to un-
derstand not apart from science but in relation to its naturalistic inquiries.
Brazil was a vast studio of luscious beauty, and James saw sights at al-
most every turn that tempted him to return, at least vicariously, to his first
vocation of painting. In a notebook he kept during the trip, he exclaimed: “O
to be a big painter for here was a big subject! Nothing could be more simple.
The plain beach, the red West, the giant trunks with their crooked crowns
& roots (the largest could not have been less than 20 feet in circumference)
66 Young William James Thinking
the im mense eddying stream & the thin far off line of forest. It was as grand
and lonely as could be.” During this period, some of his compatriots, includ-
ing Church as well as Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, and Louis
Mignot, were pushing landscape painting to new limits by going to just
such grand and lonely places in the American West, South Amer i ca, and all
around the world to capture sublime images on canvass. For James, how-
ever, their example and his own enthusiasm were mixed with his urge to be
a great, “a big painter” or to abandon the field. Although he had abandoned
art as a profession, these artistic impulses painted his imagination; he be-
came an artist of words. And he associated his scientific inquiries with art
because they both involve close attention to concrete natu ral facts; com-
pared to the “abstract study” of his speculations, science like art was “like
standing on one’s feet after having been on one’s head.” 55
The beauty of nature also stimulated James’s thinking about its profound
vitality— very extravagant in the rain forests of Brazil. With the tremendous
“affluence of nature,” the “vegetation invades every thing” with luxuriant
and graceful ease. He was particularly impressed that the human- made
things were no match for the per sis tent tropical growth; for example, the
“moss grows on every wall . . . and weds what is artificial to what is natu-
ral”— one simple form of dualism blurred. The total effect was “particularly
vivid,” especially compared with “the colorless state of things at home.” His
education from his father had given him reasons to think of the potent forces
embedded in nature on spiritual terms. Recently, however, those feelings had
dissipated; scientific study had turned nature into a clinical object, so that
“my enjoyment of nature had entirely departed.” But in Brazil, surrounded
by a “bewildering profusion and confusion of vegetation [and] the inex-
haustible variety of its form and tints,” nature’s power can “overwhelm
[even] the coarsest apprehension.” Far from his family, reflecting on the
richness embedded in the landscape and musing on ways to depict it, James
was discovering that he could think about his father’s spirituality on his
own terms— such self- assertion could feel lonely, but with some grand po-
tential. After these sober observations, he concluded with an irreverent de-
scription of nature’s primeval power: it “makes you admire the old Gal
nature”— a sentiment about the vitality of nature, even with an intimate fa-
miliarity of expression that he would continue to use for the rest of his life. 56
The expedition to Brazil did more than provide James with valuable vo-
cational and intellectual lessons. It also made him severely homesick. After
a few months of hard labor, he wrote home that he was “pining after books
First Embrace of Science 67
and study,” and in par tic u lar, “I pine for some conversation of an intellec-
tual character. . . . Would I might hear Father[’]s on F[aith] and Sc[ience] . . . ,
would I might hear Chauncey Wright philosophize for one evening”—he
felt an appetite for both, despite the contrast of their intellectual orientations
toward spiritualism and scientific empiricism, respectively. Toward the end
of the trip, in a letter to his mother, he exclaimed, “I thrill with joy when I
think that one short month and we are homeward bound. . . . Welcome my
native slosh and ice and cast- iron stoves, magazines, theatres, friends and
every thing!” and, per sis tently irreverent about traditional religion he added,
“even churches!” His homesickness deepened with memories of “ people
swarming about as they do at home, killing themselves with thinking about
things that have no connection with their merely external circumstances.”
He continued with a flippant description of his fellow intellectuals “study-
ing themselves into fevers, going mad about religion, philosophy, love and
sich [ sic], breathing perpetual heated gas and excitement, turning night into
day.” That scene seemed so far away, so “incredible and imaginary— and yet
I only left it eight months ago.” He concluded with a flush of enthusiasm for
his father: “I never knew what he was to me before, and feel as if I could talk
to him night and day for a week running.” 57 If the philosophical talk of his
father had seemed a bit tiresome before leaving home, his removal made
him eager to hear more— especially since he was surrounded by extrava-
gant examples of just the kind of power ful forces within the physical world
that his father proposed. He would get ample opportunity to hear more
because he would spend much of the next ten years in his father’s house.
Upon his return from Brazil in early 1866, James resumed the study of
medicine, but in a very desultory manner, explaining to Tom Ward, his
friend from the trip, that “it was some time before I could get settled down
to reading.” In place of work, James admitted, “I spent the first month of my
return in nothing but ‘social intercourse’ having the two Temple girls & Elly
Van Buren in the house for a fortnight & being obliged to escort them about
to parties &c. nearly every night. ”58 After these flirtations (with cousins), he resumed his long- neglected study of medicine. He was too late to enroll for
the spring semester, but he did study on his own, and he worked at Mas sa-
chu setts General Hospital. James’s practical experience gave him direct ac-
cess to the work of doctors for a few months from the spring of 1866 until
the middle of the summer. Medicine continued to appeal to him as a path of
compromise. In 1863, it seemed the way to mediate the twin tugs of vocational
stability and the uncertainties of a scientific career; by 1866, it seemed more
68 Young William James Thinking
like a compromise between the practical factuality of science and the re-
flective generalities of philosophy.
Still unsure about his future, James would study medicine, but he also
wanted to figure out how to implement his ideals. “I really want to know
how the building up into flesh and blood of the widesweeping plans that the
solitudes of Brazil gave birth to,” he added in the same letter to Ward, “seems
to alter them.” Before the trip to Brazil, James trained in medicine while
dabbling in philosophy; but while there, he first imagined philosophy as a
vocation. During his first months back home, James was uncertain on both
fronts, “having been in a pretty unsettled theoretical condition.” In another
letter to Ward, he even mocked himself, as if his philosophizing could ever
pres ent “the last word on the Kosmos and the human soul,” and yet this
impatience with philosophy because of the limits of theory would actually
become a keynote of his philosophy. 59 He was already noticing that philoso-
phizing could provide some cosmological direction and even some voca-
tional direction on the science and medicine he was studying.
Toward a Program of the Future of Science
Even before going on his trip to Brazil, James was starting to wrestle with
major scientific issues of the time. With his wide reading outside his medi-
cal studies, he briefly considered writing a review of Max Müller’s work on
the evolution of language, but he felt “diffident about that, as I know hardly
anything abt. the subject.” Turning from avocational reading to a text in his
own field, he reviewed Thomas Huxley’s Lectures on the Ele ments of Com-
parative Anatomy. His immediate purpose was to enhance his understanding
of anatomy and, of course, gain some status from publication. In addition, his
first turn from private to public writing gave him a chance to make some
open declarations of his reflections on science that he had been musing on
in his notebooks and in discussions with friends. And so he wrote the re-
view on two levels: most simply, as a scientific review of a book in his field
and, more dramatically, as a critique of Huxley’s naturalistic philosophy. In
keeping with this growing inclination for reflections, he maintained that
the latter, broader goal was “more valuable & more in ter est ing”; but, adding
with keen awareness of the intellectual currents around him, “I feel like us-
ing [the] perfect respectability” of the more technical, scientific parts of the
review “as a shield. ”60 Mainstream science as a way to maintain respecta-
bility was just what his father had hoped for when endorsing William’s sci-
entific course of study four years before.
First Embrace of Science 69
James first had the idea about reviewing Huxley in September 1864
shortly after he had transferred to the medical school. In keeping with the
vocational impulse that would culminate in the trip to Brazil, he wrote the
editor of the North American Review, Charles Eliot Norton, that “I sh[oul]d
prefer to write on some subject connected with Biology.” While he was
gaining professional expertise in the sciences adjunct to medicine, he de-
bated on paper about the need to balance “a short explanation [for] the un-
learned” versus an “analy sis of the book addressed to the initiated.” In place
of choosing one side, James enlisted both approaches, showing an openness
to diff er ent points of view and also a readiness to vary his writing style for
diff er ent audiences. He began the Huxley review with praise for the book as
“a comprehensive, systematic work” and acknowledged his “valuable con-
tributions to almost every province of anatomical science.” This would be
his shield of respectability before launching on the broader evaluations of
Huxley’s assumptions and their implications.61
James used the review essay as a platform for a distinction between “the
two great intellectual tendencies” of philosophical thought ever since “men
began to speculate,” the synthetic (he called the advocates for this “synthe-
tists”) and the analytic. This distinction echoes the familiar differences be-
tween Plato and Aristotle, along with the terms as used by Kant, and it also
forecasts the “two types of mental make-up,” the “tender- minded” rational-
ists and the “tough- minded” empiricists that James would use years later to
frame the mediations of Pragmatism. He was already using the terms in
this broad, less technical way: “[T]he synthetists are theorists, who require
their knowledge to be or ga nized into some sort of a unity,” while “the ana-
lysts are actualists, who are quite contented to know things as isolated and
individual.” James was able to offer a surprising twist on Huxley’s reputa-
tion as an avid man of factual science: in addition to the clear analytical
qualities in his thorough coverage of anatomy, the combative British anato-
mist and scientific pop u lar izer had the heart of a synthesizer, ready to tran-
scend the empirical in his very zeal for scientific truth. 62
These synthetic tende
ncies emerged most forcefully in Huxley’s “faith in
the doctrine of Transmutation of Species.” James noticed that this commit-
ment to Darwinism led to the application of the theory “even unto majestic
man,” which in turn aroused fierce objections, but ones that produced little
sympathy in James because this anti- Darwinist position manifested as a
kind of “aristocratic prejudice” drawing upon bruised and defensive wor-
ries about humanity’s claim to a dignified pedigree. Later that year, in the
70 Young William James Thinking
Amazon jungle, face- to- face with a spider monkey, James found vivid con-
firmation of the kinship of humans and other animals, even in personality
and emotion, just as Darwin suggested. Yet such scientific confirmation did
not lead him toward zealous endorsement of Darwinism; instead, he argued
in the spirit of his teacher Wyman that “it behooves us at any rate to exam-
ine a little into its grounds.” James was confident that with further inquiry,
the theory of natu ral se lection was “destined eventually to prevail.” His
cautious tone stood in sharp contrast to Huxley’s approach, with his “love
of coming rapidly to a definite settlement of every question, deciding either
Yes or No.” Even worse, “with all opponents,” he adopted a “uniformly rude,
and even malignant, tone.” James concluded that “it is a state of things
discreditable to Science, when . . . people go to Professor Huxley’s lecture-
room with somewhat of the same spirit as that with which they would flock
to a prize- fight. ”63
Beyond his objections on matters of tone, James also took issue with the
way Huxley used the “battering- ram” of anatomy to assert that the “phe-
nomena of life . . . result directly from the general laws of matter.” The Brit-
ish scientist turned away from identifying himself as a materialist, but in
his evaluation of the “Physical Basis of Life” (1868), he showed preference
for “materialist terminology . . . because physical conditions are accessible to
us” and “help us exercise . . . control over the world.” James’s critique was
directed against such reduction of life to its material components, but this
did not extend to rejection of a belief in the “the Self- Competency of Na-