Young William James Thinking
Page 34
and often very funny, William was wholly confident. This frequently mani-
fested in what his own son called “an intimate raillery” with his “fun and
extravagant” comments on friends and family. Once when he was “compos-
ing odes to all the family,” his sister Alice said in jest that “he is fit to go to
the lunatic asylum.” This intensity, along with tendencies to ask large ques-
tions, would loom more significant after childhood. At age fifteen, he al-
ready started to brood about his future profession. His first “taste” was to
“pursue some scientific occupation,” and his family encouraged this im-
pulse not just with a microscope for a Christmas pres ent but also with sci-
ence classes at the vari ous schools of his childhood. However, in the next
few years, he grew more and more “torment[ed]” by the “choice of a profes-
sion.” He took a par tic u lar interest in a quotation from Jean- Jacques Rous-
seau that he saw posted at his school in Boulogne, France, in 1858: “Life is
gone in an instant. In itself it is nothing. Its value depends upon the use to
Crises and Construction 191
which you put it.” He could not yet imagine the pragmatic suggestions in
these ideas, but he surely would have already noticed the expression of his
father’s philanthropy with its Swedenborg- inspired commitment to social
use. By 1858, he was already feeling fretful, “for all time spent working in
the wrong direction is lost,” and this was even before the de cade and a half
he would take to find his direction. In the spirit of mid- nineteenth- century
American defiance of authority, as amplified by his father’s in de pen dent
spirit and insistence on philanthropic work, young James was skeptical of
institutions in his eagerness to serve mankind for making the world a better
place. This impulse would also extend into his young adulthood, into his
eagerness to support useful applications of his science and philosophy, and
into the reform sympathies of his mature life as a public intellectual. 6 His
youthful search for meaningful work was intensified, and postponed, by his
search for philanthropic purpose. So his education involved a search for
ideas with theoretical and therapeutic appeal; but before he could help
others, he needed to find his own direction.
Worry over career choice was compounded by hints of melancholy as
early as 1859. James’s notebook of that year contained aphorisms, personal
sayings, and general observations, which also displayed his interest in ro-
manticism and the ancients. One example is full of black humor: “Earth = host
who murders his guests,” a translation of the medieval Persian poet Divan
of Hafiz that he had likely learned from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his note-
book of 1862, after pages of intellectual wrestling and vocational indecision,
James made this arrestingly simple statement: “Life itself is what is most
valuable in life.” This suggestion about living vitality, which he was encoun-
tering in the homeopathic vital force and the conatus of Swedenborgians
such as his father (and taken up in the twenty- first century by Antonio
Damasio) provided a hint of his emerging concept that materialistic views
of biology and psy chol ogy, which emphasize reductionist physical and
chemical explanations, would not be sufficient. Despite the vigor of this
comment, the next page of the notebook included this blunt comment,
“Suicide morally & really considered.” 7 He did not specify whether this was
a comment on himself or not; nevertheless, it indicates that he was aware of
this darker side of life even as he affirmed the importance of vitality in
general.
James kept writing in that same mood later in 1862, when he began a
notebook of reading notes and deep thoughts with these bold, religiously
inflected words:
Intoning the Bible— and a Ralph Waldo Emerson Poem.
[Notebook 3], October 1, 1862, William James papers, bMS Am 1092.9 (4497).
p. [1]. Courtesy of Bay James and the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
In some of his earliest preserved writing, James quoted from the Bible and
Emerson’s poem “Give All To Love,” and these words served as a well that he
repeatedly tapped for his later work. He emphasized “stand upon thy feet” again in
1882 to support “the impulse to take life strivingly” (WB 74); in 1878, he called
Herbert Spencer a “half- god,” adept at popularizing science, but with materialist
views only halfway toward comprehending the complexities of nature (EPH 7);
and in 1902, he urged letting go of “our previous pretensions” to encourage openness
to “larger ranges of truth. . . . ‘Heartily know, when half- gods go, the gods arrive’ ”
(VRE 267).
Crises and Construction 193
SON OF MAN! STAND UPON THY FEET AND I WILL
SPEAK UNTO THEE
The all- caps screaming on a notebook page other wise mostly blank
suggests a potent intent. The Bible uses the phrase “son of man” many times,
especially in the book of Ezekiel, where it appears more than ninety times,
and in the New Testament, more than eighty. Ezekiel displays confidence in
his mere humanity before serving as a messenger from the divine. The
prophet then challenges the “rebellious people” of Israel, so “impudent . . .
and stiffhearted,” and pledges to serve as a “watchman” preaching for a re-
versal of wicked ways. In the New Testament, Jesus’s use of this phrase to
describe himself suggests the elemental power even in someone of low
worldly status, even if persecuted to death. For the New Testament evan-
gelists, the “son of man” points to the Messiah’s incarnation with divine
immanence within human flesh, and to the hopes for his triumph over
death and return as judge: “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on
the right hand of power. ”8 The biblical references in a private notebook sug-
gest that James is referring to himself, awaiting a commission to high pur-
pose, with a hope that bleak times could lead to later achievements; even
when weak or beleaguered, he must find strength, but who is issuing the
commission?
After the thunderous command about the son of man, James went on to
declare brashly,
HEARTILY KNOW
WHEN THE HALF GODS GO
THE GODS ARRIVE.
These words, again inspired by Emerson, suggest a posture of sorting
through religious claims. In his poem, “Give All to Love,” Emerson urges
readers to “Obey thy heart,” which “ ’tis a god” and “Knows its own path,”
before offering condolences when a love is lost: “Tho’ her parting dims the
day,” hope endures, but only through “Stealing grace from all alive.” James’s
forlornly uncoupled state and his eagerness to find ways to manage his
trou bles would have made him receptive to such hopeful words, especially
when delivered with ideas akin to his search for finite absolutes as rein-
forced both in Friedrich Schiller’s tribute to grace and in Emerson’s un-
churched spirituality of the god within and grace in all alive. The poem
then concludes with
the irreverent intonation that James quotes in full. The
194 Young William James Thinking
young scientist turned the poetic reference into a banner declaration of his
goals: he was setting out on a path of reflective searching, which would
soon become disruptive and troubling, but these would be first steps toward
more reliable guides to life.9
James mingled his spiritual searching with his scientific education, even
literally, in the notebook itself; after those earnest declarations on the first
pages, he recorded threads of his scientific learning, with a discussion of
the “correlation of forces . . . light, magnetism, etc.” In the dismissal of par-
tial answers suggested by the meta phor of the half- gods’ departure, science
would be part of that winnowing pro cess. Since mainstream religion and
science are so often presented in contrast with each other, their assumed
conflict would lead to distraction from understanding the world—or, as he
stated forcefully, “Divide et Impera!” (Divide and Conquer).10 When assum-
ing the division of religion and science in separation or conflict, much is
lost; because each has limits, each “half- god” is able to persuade only ac-
cording to its own domain. With his scientific education, religious interests,
and wide reading, he was aggressively looking for the arrival of his own
“gods,” his own authoritative guide, his own orienting commitment; to be-
gin with, and less grandly, he was looking for his own vocational purpose.
James made use of his notebook declarations a few years later when rais-
ing doubt about excessive confidence in science, in par tic u lar in his essay
about “[Herbert] Spencer’s Definition of Mind” (1878); on the very first page
of the essay, he flatly called the prominent enthusiast for science a “half-
god,” gaining fame by promoting zeal for science but choking off its full sig-
nificance with his reductionist thinking. Just a few years later, he enlisted
his notebook biblical phrase, now no longer just for private discovery of his
own purpose, but in application to general human effort: “Son of Man, stand
upon thy feet.” The essays surrounding these phrases were composed just as
he was graduating from years of youthful yearning, and they put words on
his strug gles and preliminary youthful resolutions. Like Emerson, he called
for the summoning of inner resources, namely “my powers, such as they
are”; when enlisting this impulse, despite any trou ble, “I can be a match for
it if I will.” Volition, in the spirit of the Stoic inner citadel, could direct
energy toward finding a worldly mission. Although the worldly focus was un-
orthodox, it carried a biblical sanction, with the indirect presence of Ezekiel
and Jesus no less; and these orthodox icons also readily acknowledged the
potential for power ful messages emerging from lowly sources or belea-
guered circumstances. Yet his impulse to “take life strivingly” with a “moral
Crises and Construction 195
creed” would not involve turning to the higher powers promoted by ideal-
ism and traditional religion, and his posture also avoided resignation to the
fatalist lack of purpose suggested by scientific materialism. Such power to
strug gle had often seemed beyond his reach in his youth, until he could find
a “rule for his will.” Then, his efforts to “stand upon [his] feet” would in-
volve both a “tonic destruction” of traditional religion, as historian David
Hollinger says of efforts to discover au then tic spiritual messages in the
midst of avid critiques of religion, and a similar tonic destruction of scien-
tific materialism that would allow richer scientific insights to flourish.11 His
program for future science would be his contribution to these hopes for re-
vision in science; and young James’s repeated use of these biblical- style
phrases cast a religious glow over his de cade of choosing direction, but not
in mainstream forms. He would be his own commissioner.
These weighty thoughts lurked beneath James’s daily fare. During the
period when he was writing these notebook entries, he tacitly followed his
father’s dictum not to specialize too soon with his study of art and then an
array of sciences, while also reading widely in religion, philosophy, and
mental science. During these first years of scientific study, he showed little
sign of poor physical health, but he had worries for his psychological health.
In 1863, reading psychiatrist Forbes Winslow’s descriptions of the onset of
insanity caught him up short since he recognized the doctor’s assessment of
its warning signs in his difficulty maintaining attention and tendency toward
reflective speculation. These general worries about warning signs turned
very specific the next year when he suffered mild depression just before
starting in medical school in the fall of 1864, and it took the form of “a feel-
ing of desolation so dire that I have never had any experience at all ap-
proaching it”— evidently, this was a new feeling, his first expression of crisis
in all but name. Perhaps he was reacting to the prospect of a vocational
commitment to medicine following his father’s objections to focusing too
soon. He was writing to his cousin, Katherine Temple, whose brother had
been killed in the war, so part of the reason for this strong feeling might
have been that “I felt at one blow all my bereavement”; or he could have
been disturbed by his own ambivalence about the war. He found some ways
to cope with his dark mood in “the symphonies of Beethoven . . . [and]
drives through the mild and misty air in the after noons when the sunshine
seemed so golden.” He joshed with Temple about their “young- lovyer- like
deportment” with each other, but he ended the letter with a more serious
reference to his psychological state: “I have something within, . . . and I
196 Young William James Thinking
can’t tell when it will quit.” His reading of En glish poet William Blake pro-
vided an explanation: “It sticks in the heart[’]s deep core, & it sticks in the
deep back bone.” He was pointing to the interweaving of his feelings and
his physical symptoms: he had a prob lem of the heart, but also, quite liter-
ally as he would soon report, in his back. Blake’s poem “The Smile” would
serve as a resource for coping with his trou bles in its poetic references to
smiles and frowns: It is the “Frown of Frowns / Which you strive to forget
in vain,” but there is also the more cheerful “Smile of Smiles.” Rather than
expecting one to win out, Blake puts his hope in both because only in their
mingling is there “an end to all Misery.” 12 As with the Stoic philosophy,
poetry provided James with clues for dealing with his trou bles.
Surges of Speculative Interest While Pursuing Health
and Physiological Study
In late winter of 1865, early in his second semester of full- time medical
study, James had a bad cold. It wasn’t very serious, but it was enough of a
setback so that it “clogged my brain and prevented the workings of my usu-
ally active mind.” Through these years, an a
ctive mind was his norm, and
here was a symptom that coincided with the neurasthenic diagnosis. James
was in effect acting like “a good barometer”; his “sensitiveness to changes in
the weather” was part of the heightened sensitivity that was a defining fea-
ture of this diagnosis. Health, mood, mental acuity, and the settings around
him continued to mingle as he reported that, with a “change in the weather, . . .
my spirits have revived.” While visiting Newport, he took a walk on the
beach with his cousin Minny Temple. His elusive and spirited cousin “sped
along in front of me, . . . and kept me so out of breath that I couldn’t talk.”
She would continue to keep him spellbound and sometimes speechless right
through her deep reflections on religion and Stoicism until her death in
1870. 13
Later that spring of 1865, when James left for Brazil with the Agassiz
expedition, he soon felt another bout of melancholy. It was triggered by the
symbolism of being at sea over deep water and by his raw physiological re-
sponse to the pitching waves. The immediate experience prompted his po-
etic description, “O the vile Sea! The damned Deep!,” and it spurred him to
reflect that “no one has a right to write about the ‘nature of Evil’ or to have
any opinion about evil who has not been at sea.” This was a reference to the
abstractions of his idealistic father who had indeed written a book with
that very name one de cade before, but he did not here pursue this critical
Crises and Construction 197
line. Instead, he reported on his own despondency from seasickness for
about a day; but then on recovering from that, emotionally, “for 12 mortal
days, I was, body & soul, in a more indescribably hopeless homeless & friend-
less state than I ever want to be in again”; the dark mood was personal and
subjective, but also social with an objective ele ment: he missed his friends.
Despite those feelings, he was moved by how “profound” and potentially
“fruitful” the experience was; “I am sure some day of an accession of wis-
dom from it,” he added showing awareness of dark times as resources for
insights.14
Once in Brazil, doing the natu ral history work itself confirmed his long-