by Paul J Croce
his general health: “I have been racing too much, kept in a state of inner
tension, . . . been jerky, angular, rapid, precipitate, let my mind run ahead of
my body. etc[.], etc.,” and as a result, “unnecessarily high pitch has produced
arterial hardening.” This was the upshot of the ner vous ness that had first
worried him about his own mental health back in 1863, and it suggested a
reason for his vulnerability to the heart injury he would suffer in 1898. It
also related to his lifelong urge to understand mind in relation to body; he
was observing in himself a case study of nondualism in practice. His tem-
peramental traits produced habits that shaped physiological conditions; as
James put it, “pitch breeds . . . diathesis [susceptibility], which comes out in
this or that organ”—in this case, the crucial impact was on his circulatory
system, culminating in heart disease. Still, the doctor was optimistic, even
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 131
as James complained of the “interminable number of months which his
method requires”; despite his impatience, he really did understand that, in
contrast with the mainstream medical expectations of rapid cures, “of course
any serious remodeling of one[’]s tissues must require months or years.” 77
This doctor’s theme about “pitch” resembled the holistic homeopathic the-
ory of resonance, which portrays par tic u lar symptoms resonating with both
that person’s constitutional traits and the well- chosen remedy.78 The ap-
proach of this homeopath, as with sectarian healing in general, also involved
managing life with one’s traits rather than focusing on achievement of cure.
Despite his reliance on homeopathic healing, James’s impatience for
health improvement persisted. He even literally let his mind run ahead of
his body when, because of only slow pro gress with homeopathy, he re-
solved in late 1909 to “try Xian Science,” in par tic u lar, the Christian Sci-
ence healer L. G. Strang. He had been visiting mind- cure prac ti tion ers at
least since the 1880s, but he repeatedly noticed more impact on friends and
family than on himself, until 1906, when “for the first time in my life I prac-
ticed the Mind- cure philosophy rather successfully.” So he visited this
mind- cure healer with rising expectations. Although a “willing patient”
through more than twenty visits, he did not substantially improve. Despite
his re spect for these approaches, he wondered if his intellectual posture put
him out of touch with the “more absolutely- grounded life” available in “only
[that] part of mankind” with greater trust and full immersion in the imma-
terial parts of life. His own development, with religious sensibilities but
also with thorough embrace of science, left him with avid curiosity and
openness, but also with “prudences and intellectual scruples” that often
kept him from experiencing these “other ways of living.” And even the most
committed medical prac ti tion ers, with spiritual or material modalities, in
sectarian or mainstream practice, faced limits in their effectiveness with
fatal diseases— James’s philosophical endorsement of “ever not quite” here
applied to medicine. 79 James’s chronic heart condition worsened as he
turned sixty- eight in January 1910, and he died in August of that year.
In 1909, a year before his death, James met Sigmund Freud at a Clark
University conference. Although slowed by his heart condition and shifting
between sectarian therapies, James was eager to meet the increasingly in-
fluential Freud, especially since he had been the first American to review
his work. The two great psychologists disagreed considerably but showed
great re spect for each other; in fact, when James paused their conversation
because of chest pains, he calmly asked the younger psychologist to hold his
132 Young William James Thinking
bag and walk ahead. The serene drama reminded Freud that “I have always
wished,” potent words from the founder of psychoanalysis, “that I might be
as fearless as he was in the face of death.” James’s calm was born at least in
part from both his openness to diverse therapies and his simultaneous
awareness of each of their limits. The flip side of his willingness to try many
of them was his realization that no one healing practice, just like no one
philosophy, could offer excusive claim to the whole of experience and its
possibilities. 80
Q
In taking alternative medicines seriously, James embraced the concept that
health was not just a product of discrete material factors but the result of
interacting facets of the whole person— including the material. Sectarian
therapies served as prime examples of the shortcomings of materialism.
While allopaths would increasingly rely upon diagnoses based on the assem-
bling of laboratory tests for par tic u lar body tissues, the sectarians attended
to the interaction of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual symptoms in
relation to each other. Their interaction produced the constitutional traits
of the patient, just as the mature James would look to the role of relations in
consciousness to convey a robust portrait of “pure experience,” and the in-
teraction of parts of experience in general. His study of anatomy and physi-
ology confirmed his commitment to the centrality of natu ral facts, and his
work with sectarians primed his openness to a wide range of experiences
also appearing in natu ral settings. Both forms of medicine would also be
resources for his lifelong attention to the importance of individual particu-
larity, his own version of the medical princi ple of specificity. He put these
ideas into practice, not in the medical profession, but in his philosophy,
which bore the imprint of his hope for a future science with attention to
va ri e ties of human experience, as expressed in natu ral facts even when
emerging beyond materialist explanations.
James’s encounter with the whole range of medicines practiced widely
in his day provided him with both a reservoir of sympathy for unorthodox
ideas and a fund of knowledge in the sciences of the human body, on his way
to becoming a psychologist rather than a doctor. He also came face to face
with the “the inside workings” of medicine, including its intellectual and
professional fissures. He did not so much take sides as use the tension as he
built up his own integrating philosophy. He even equated the medical ri-
valry around him as a “conflict . . . like that of two philosophies”; his own
emerging philosophy would be based on experience, in all its full diversity,
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 133
assessed without blinking. But all around him, he witnessed squabbles over
parts of nature’s turf: “Your experience, says one side to the other, simply is
n’t fit to count.”81 The tensions in his medical and other experiences from
his youth not only discouraged him but also prodded his eagerness to ac-
count for the plausible facts and arguments of diff er ent sides. From both
branches of his medical education, he learned re spect
for the power and
intricacies of nature. Out of this grounding, he rushed to the defense of sec-
tarian prac ti tion ers and repeatedly used their remedies; but also, from his
mainstream scientific training, he developed mental habits of careful in-
quiry for these and all experiences. He was practicing an empiricism that
included attention to a range of human experiences, not just the controlled
sensations of laboratory investigation. From his immersion in a range of
healing practices, he was repeatedly ready to criticize scientists who car-
ried a materialistic philosophy as a stowaway in their scientific methods,
even as he used and honored scientific methods and fact gathering. He
would continue to critique any medical thinking or philosophy that strayed
from grounding in natu ral experiences. While training for a profession he
never practiced as a mainstream or sectarian doctor, William James rein-
forced the outline of his hope to integrate the material and immaterial
forces of life and mind within the experiences of nature; and while on this
path, he gravitated toward still more expressions of nature’s abundant life.
When training for his own career still in the making, the young scientist
also wondered how the modern world had become so ready to pull apart
natu ral experiences into separate domains, the material and the immate-
rial. James’s curiosities ran deep, into what Victorians called the childhood
of the Western world, in the ancient Mediterranean.
Chapter Three
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace
The Greeks were far greater “Positivists” than any now.
William James, 1868
Throughout the 1860s, William James steadily worked at his scientific studies,
but some days he simply stepped away, with long pauses from his vocational
focus to read lit er a ture, go to museums, and think about philosophical and re-
ligious issues. At these moments, he let his mind range. Even though he was
stepping away from his academic training, these humanistic reflections took
him to the center of his questions about science, religion, and nature. He was
particularly fascinated by the art and thought of “the ancients,” as he would
generalize especially for the perspectives of ancient Greece and Rome during
the few centuries before and after the time of Jesus. With his focus on the art-
work of ancient Greece and the Stoic philosophy of ancient Rome, he repeatedly
contrasted their views, especially on the nature of nature, with those of the
“modern” world, which he identified either as his own nineteenth century or,
more broadly, as the time since the dominance of Chris tian ity in the Roman
Empire during the fourth century ce (the Common Era from Jesus’ lifetime).
When considering ancient insights, he wondered if pro gress toward modern
times involved a profound loss. The ancients did not define nature with refer-
ence only to the physical world; instead, starting with its root meaning in rela-
tion to birth, they associated nature with the character of all that is, with the
course of things. 1 By contrast, in recent times nature had come to occupy two separate spheres: material facts under scientific examination; and religion, humanities, and the arts attentive to immaterial realms. The ancients served
James as models for comprehending nature as all that can be experienced, and
for understanding how those spheres exist in relation, not even needing com-
promise once separate. Although James entered into reflection on the ancients
for relaxation from work, his thoughts produced suggestions for dramatic al-
ternatives to the mainstreams of both science and religion.
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 135
Before James’s birth in 1842, some romantic philosophical and literary
thinkers had already looked to the ancients and to nature for spiritual inspira-
tion. Germans in the circles of Johann von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller wrote
of the brilliance of the Greeks. British writer Thomas Carlyle proposed that
nature possessed spiritual potential, a “natu ral supernaturalism” as he put it.
In this view, nature harbored ele ments surpassing its material components,
and humanity required, according to the poet William Words worth, “nothing
more than what we are” within natu ral life. These natu ral encounters, unre-
duced to material facts and redolent with religious suggestions even without
necessary references to a transcendent realm, coincided with James’s compre-
hension of immaterial ele ments of mind and spirit as factors in nature and in
relation to physical things. From his youth, James had experienced his own
versions of these romantic impulses within parts of sectarian medicine and his
father’s belief in the correspondence of immaterial dimensions to the physical
world. Young James did not endorse alternative healing practices exclusively,
and he did not adopt the particulars of the elder James’s faith, but from his
upbringing he felt a magnetic attraction to spirituality understood in natu ral
terms. The ancient views offered a general surrogate for his father’s empiri-
cally oriented spirituality, set apart from medical controversy, and distant
enough in time and cultural setting to let him find his own way. 2 The ancients suggested innovative ways to integrate major forces of Western culture— and
major ele ments of James’s own education. While many around him remained
content with the antagonism of science and religion or their strict separation,
or looked for ways to connect the two despite their differences, the ancients had
never separated them in the first place.
In April 1868, after extensive reflections on ancient art, James read Schiller
to help him sort out his own thinking. Compared to his scientific reading, Schil er’s
essays had “some rather spun out passages” and were “all in the realm of ab-
stractions,” but they were “ingeniously thought out.” The broad generalizations
were the very basis for their appeal; they gave James’s preliminary thoughts
direction. The first Schil er essay James read, “On the Naïve and Sentimental,”
provided words for his restlessness about philosophical speculations and scien-
tific study, in stating bluntly that the naïve offers a sound “guide” because it is
“always the triumph of Nature over the ineffectual efforts of our reason.”
Compared to the rigorous work of inquiry, naïveté with its “spontaneous ease”
offers general orienting insights, so often lost in the details of reasoning. By
contrast, Schiller identified the “Sentimental” posture of those cut off from the
“harmony given us immediately” from direct contact with nature, who therefore
136 Young William James Thinking
“seek . . . a nature wh. is lost.” This essay affirmed James’s doubts about his
vocational path by spurring him to alternative ways to think about philosophy
and science with closer attention to natu ral experiences; animated by Schiller,
James would seek a sophisticated version of naïveté. The second Schiller essay,
“On Grace and Dignity,” took James further into humanistic reflections. James
appreciated the way graceful beauty emerges spontaneously from “the whole
state of the soul” with the spontaneity of the naïve. Dignity, however, sets a dif-
fer ent tone, suggesting duty, with “re sis tance overcome.” While dignity emerges
from deliberate effort, Schiller’s essay brought to James’s mind the unselfcon-
scious ease of grace in both art and religion. While he was following the duties
of his scientific education, Schiller’s writing became a tangible guide to his hu-
manistic excursions into the art and philosophy of the ancient world. The an-
cients’ ways of thinking seemed simpler and even naïve, but they often carried
the profound force of gracefulness. Thinking about a range of other fields took
young William James to questions about the grounds of science itself. The
young science student chided himself for “how little facts are consulted
throughout” his notes on the broad ideas of Schiller. 3 Even while he kept working at his science, he couldn’t stop his broader reflections.
Q
James’s steady pro gress in his scientific education culminated in an M.D.
from Harvard Medical School in 1869, with a focus on physiological study. But
every step into the sciences was a step deeper into a personal dilemma: he
recognized the importance of scientific investigation, declaring in 1868, “I
find myself getting more interested in Physiology and nourishing a hope
that I may be able to make its study (and perhaps its teaching) my profes-
sion.” Those were indeed his first vocational steps, but they were pulling
him into materialistic outlooks and commitments that he found appalling
and discouraging for their reduction of human impulses to mere physical
traits. He blurted out that even “fragments of man, . . . even the moral gar-
bage [is] better than chemical reactions.” 4 His hope for a future program for
science, which would be fully attentive to natu ral facts but without assump-
tions of materialism, served as a thin reed compared to the rising tide of
professional science operating at least with a methodological focus on ma-
terial facts, and increasingly with materialist philosophical assumptions.
The methods of science in James’s time were rooted in the study of nature,
with ever- more rigor and attention to detail and precision. By contrast, for
most believers, especially within the mono the istic traditions since antiq-