by Paul J Croce
term vocational leanings. In the last few months of 1865, he repeatedly an-
nounced bluntly, “I thoroughly hate collecting.” But he was glad to have the
challenge since it forced him to develop basic skills in “getting to be very
practical, orderly & business like.” Orderliness attracted, even for this im-
pulsive young man, often as a respite from his impulses; and its lack would
loom large in the crises of his next few years and form the core of the habits
he would later describe in his psy chol ogy. After these vocational steps (or
missteps), he craved getting “back to books.” He gushed with enthusiasm
for the intellectual culture of his family and circle of friends in Cambridge
who “kill . . . themselves with thinking about things that have no connexion
with their merely external circumstances.” The contrast with the practical
factual work of his fieldwork made him want to rejoin the fevered debates
“about religion, philosophy, love & sich. ”15
After returning from Brazil in the spring of 1866, James did indeed re-
sume his old haunts, reading widely, discussing big ideas about “the Kosmos
and the human soul,” and taking up the study of medicine again. While sci-
entific study was his main vocation, these were also the years when he began
to circulate intensively with the friends who would form the Metaphysical
Club, especially Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright, and Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, Ju nior. He was also getting “settl[ed] down to reading” and
concentrating on medicine. But he was wary about how much he could accom-
plish. He warned himself that “each man’s constitution limits him to a certain
amount of emotion and action.” If he goes “ under a higher pressure than
normal for 3 months, . . . he will pay for it by passing the next 3 mos. below
par”— a comment reflecting his experiences with water cure and in keeping
with neurasthenic diagnoses advocating balanced effort and rest. With his
limited fund of energy, he deci ded that he had better settle for “some one
thing as thoroughly as it can be known.” Weaning himself from his father’s
198 Young William James Thinking
advice for avoiding specialization, his specific vocational choice was physi-
ology within medicine, but he frequently violated his resolution with more
general studies. 16
James responded to ner vous exhaustion not only with therapies from
scientific and sectarian medicine but also with conservation of his own en-
ergy by focusing his interests: for three years starting in 1866 his profes-
sional path was specialization in pursuit of a medical degree. He worked
slowly through the interruptions of continued illness, the distractions of
meeting friends and socializing, and his per sis tent readings outside of med-
icine. While “drudging gloomily on at the medical school,” his par tic u lar
interests in the anatomy and physiology of the ner vous system led him to
questions relating mind and body. While searching for strength and resolve,
he was applying medical means to achieve his goal of physiological and
psychological study. And in April 1867 he took his pursuit of health and
physiological study to Germany. 17
Before leaving for Eu rope, James’s health had been worsening. In May
1866 his eyes bothered him, including “a very mild but most damnable attack”
with “my right eye entirely closed.” Because his eyes and then his back
troubled him continually, the trip became as attractive for the healing baths
to visit as for the study of science. Aboard ship in the Atlantic again, he
fared better physically than he had when traveling to Brazil, but he did
again feel his spirits slide into depression. Still, he said confidently, “I have
no doubt that as soon as my foot treads solid earth my spirits will again
soar.” He made many visits to the water cures at Teplitz in Germany and
also Divonne in France. During his time in Eu rope, he shuttled between ef-
fort and rest and worried that “I work off my improvement as fast as it ac-
cumulates”: he was on a treadmill of illness emerging or deepening after a
stretch of work, followed by recovery at the water cure, which allowed him
to get back to work. Following the textbook descriptions of neurasthenic
fatigue, and as he would continue to argue later about “The Energies of
Men,” he was like a battery constantly depleted and recharged— literally
“feeling more or less alive on diff er ent days”; in the later essay, he described
human energy with an analogy conveying the same message: “[A] wire at
one time alive with electricity, may at another time be dead.” In his youth
he was at first just trying to achieve normal health, but his experience with
energy and fatigue provided introspective evidence for his theory of “our
unused reservoir of power.” As he was reading in the Stoics and from other
sources, and as he was discovering for himself, “the opener of deeper and
Crises and Construction 199
deeper levels of energy” was the will.18 James’s search for health in Eu rope
had been a means to his scientific ends, a way to achieve enough health and
strength to study physiology; but the elusiveness of his own well- being had
made the cures ends in themselves. After his return to Amer i ca in Novem-
ber of 1868, he was determined to get well “in the quiet of home” and by at-
tempting to concentrate on his work. Once he had left Eu rope and put
behind him the frustration of ups and downs in and out of water cures, he
felt “as if all anxiety were removed from me.” For the next year after his
return from Eu rope, James worked deliberately on earning his medical
degree, which he did in June 1869. He also had plenty of distractions.
Excited and Awkward about Women
Shortly after resuming his medical studies in the fall of 1868, he started to
feel “so run down” from his work, but also, after his long absence, he was
simply “run down with visits,” meeting friends again, including several
young women. Despite all the social activity, he developed no close rela-
tions with any par tic u lar woman—in this season or for the next few years—
although he socialized and flirted with Temple and other women. Even
when he had first arrived in Germany, at the age of twenty- five, his nagging
health prob lems and the lack of romance in his life made him feel “rather
precipitately old in the last year.” 19 He remained a bachelor living with his
family for the next de cade. He looked for female companionship and re-
mained hopeful about marriage, but he looked for years without success,
and that only added to his melancholy.
The trip to Brazil in 1865 had brought the first stirrings of his romantic
and erotic interests. The setting certainly promoted these feelings since the
lush landscape and the “hospitality & the free, open, careless way of living
here are very delicious.” In addition, the “lovely Indian maidens” caught his
eye as well. At one stop, when some natives hosted the visiting scientists,
James felt both excited and awkward about the beautiful women around
him. While Louis Agassiz treated t
he native Brazilians coldly as primitives
within his search for racial hierarchy, young James could see their virtues
and warmed to their beauty. Despite the allure of these women, however,
there is no rec ord of his learning any native languages, but he did learn
some of the national language, keeping a list of useful words, including the
Portuguese words for “ woman,” “servant girl,” “sweetheart,” and even the
phrase “my dear will you marry me?”— the last showing his exaggeration: in
this case, self- mockery of his single state. With one woman in par tic u lar,
200 Young William James Thinking
despite linguistic shortcomings, “we talked, gesticulated, fraternized in
short, & passed a very merry eve ning.” With characteristic drama, he called
“Jesuina, Jesuina, my forest queen, my tropic flower,” but he was frustrated
that “I could not make myself intelligible” to her. He concluded his descrip-
tion of his first major romantic encounter with a pretended boast: after the
expedition had moved on, she now walks lonely, “with her long hair floating
free, pining for my loss.” After the Brazil trip, while socializing in Cam-
bridge, he flippantly reported that he was “falling in love with every girl I
met.” He did not let himself savor the feelings, however, since after a month,
he felt “a reaction” that made him want to “decline every invitation” in favor
of concentrating on his medical studies. 20 This reaction related to women,
and intensifying over the next few years, was both cause and effect of his
bleak feelings, which descended on him more and more as he steeled him-
self into romantic isolation.
Shortly after James arrived in Dresden in the spring of 1867, while he
was on his isolated quest to learn the language and read German science, he
found relief from his “monotonous . . . life” in gazing out his apartment win-
dow to a “young ladies [ sic] boarding school.” Watching from a distance, he
grew envious of a “young en glish lout” who attracted their attention when
they were “wont to relax from their studies.” After his more confident com-
petitor left, he claimed, “I shall now monopolize the attention of the school.”
He got no closer, however, than gazing at them through a telescope; alas, he
observed with self- justifying sour grapes, “not one was good looking.” Then
he detected a “ravishing apparition” in another nearby apartment. She was
“about 18, hair like night, & such eyes!” And he added a little hope to leaven
his self- pity about all his distant encounters, “their mute, appealing, love
lorn look goes through & through me.” Still displaying deep reflection with-
out action, he never made it past the win dow, although he longingly imagined
that she looked back, “communing with” him. He deci ded with mock exag-
geration, however, that she would be right for him only if her nose were “an
inch and a half shorter.” The very next month, while at the theater in Dres-
den, a young woman sitting near him caught his eye. As with Jesuina in
Brazil, he was not deterred by ethnic difference, with the woman in the the-
ater appearing to be a “young jewess.” James did engage in blunt ethnic ste-
reotyping, but it was generally mixed with frank admiration for human dif-
ferences, an expression of his “organ of perception- of- national- differences.”
In his private writing, he spoke bluntly in both directions; for example, his
crude first reaction upon seeing large numbers of Jews in Berlin was that
Crises and Construction 201
they were “unnatural and revolting,” but he also said that they have a “deci-
sive character” that is “extremely refreshing after “the somewhat vulgar
platitude of the Christian Germanic type.” After the show in Dresden, he
saw the Jewish woman, but “she took no notice of me.” His extreme conclu-
sion to this brief incident reflected both his generally bleak spirits and his
frustration about romance: “I came near shooting myself that night.” 21
He often exaggerated, but his deadpan joking went here to a new level of
jarring intensity.
Sometimes James’s attraction to women mingled with his philosophical
questions. In a reflective letter to Wendell Holmes written while still in
Germany, he mentioned “a young lady fm. New York,” Catherine Havens,
who would continue to attract his attention for years. His letter was not just
a report to a chum about a good- looking girl, because he was particularly
impressed with “her way of accepting the world.” Her demeanor reminded
him of “an old long forgotten ele ment” in himself— perhaps his admiration
for the ability to accept the facts of the world without question or regret
that he was detecting in the ancients and the German romantics. He deli-
cately admitted to feelings toward her filled with “more vulgar ele ments,”
but to his perception, meeting her was less a physical attraction than “a
beneficent discovery,” and the “suddenness and quasi definiteness” of that
realization “all most [ sic] shatters one’s empirical philosophy.” With shades
of Schiller’s insights, empirical matters of fact were not enough when com-
pared with the naïve attractions he saw embodied in this compelling
woman’s character—or when compared to other immaterial factors of life.
His lusty side reemerged when thinking of her beautiful and graceful de-
meanor. Still more “vulgar” feelings— shaped by both sexual impulses and
class assumptions— slipped out in his ready notice of two more women
within his gaze, “a maiden, black jaketted, [and] red petticoated,” and “an
intrepid servant girl,” but instead of doing anything about his impulses, he
imagined their romantic discovery of him: “[H]ere, here! Beats that human
heart for wh[ich]. . . . thy being vaguely longs.” He could express his feelings
deeply and romantically but not face to face with an actual, empirical
woman. With his mingled shyness and longing, he asked his sister to find
him “some handsome, spirited & romantic creature whom I can fall in love
with in a desperate fashion. . . . Find her and bring her on. ”22
In May 1868 James did not have to contrive a way to meet Havens, since
she was living in the same boarding house in Dresden. One of his attractions
to her was that she too was “a prey to her nerves,” but he added hopefully,
202 Young William James Thinking
“her mind is perfectly free from sentimentality and disorder of any sort.”
She passed his Schiller test about the shortcomings of sentimental longings,
and besides, an attraction to a fellow sufferer was safe: they could each
withhold a full rush of emotion by focusing on their own issues, while he
continued to reflect on pos si ble action with all the irony of planning for im-
pulsiveness . He was most impressed with her “genius for music”— “I never
heard a piano speak as she makes it.” Despite her allure, and even inspired
by her playing, he still did not take any action; instead, he blurted out, “my
feelings came to a sort of crisis”— his first use of the term. As with his other
<
br /> times of discouragement, this was a moment of both prob lems and insights,
and especially their mixture in confusion; and as with sectarian health cri-
ses and Charles Peirce’s theory of doubt as a stage toward belief, the very
disorder provided a fertile setting for identification of prob lems and for
choosing direction. At the moment, the crisis displayed his “disgust for the
dead drifting of my own life for some time past,” and he found its source in
the weakness of “my own will” caused by too much Hamlet- like reflective
thinking without action. 23
James’s troubled musings about Miss Havens veered even further into
the kind of detailed reflections that swirled around his vocational and phil-
osophical questions. When reveling in his romantic attraction, he made a
vow to build up his will and his commitment to action, although it was still
difficult to fulfill. He tried to persuade himself to encounter experience
directly— the posture he admired in the ancients— and take practical action.
As a first step in strengthening his will, he vowed to “trace the effect” of
his choices, a tacitly pragmatic thought. While thinking about such conse-
quences, he also harked back to his youthful, father- inspired philanthropic
ideal: he sought to maintain “a mystical belief in the real ity interpreted
somehow of humanity.” With this abstraction, his mind was striding away
from his sexual attraction, but his reflections could also serve as an intel-
lectual’s way to build up the courage to make a romantic advance: romance,
like naïve thinking and mystical belief, reached beyond everyday facts, and
yet it was also embedded in tangible experience. He expressed his feelings
in terms of the philosophical and personal questions he was dealing with:
her music conveyed something “absolute and finished.” He was face to face
with an “unveiled absolute” in the beauty of the music, and in the spark of
romance. This was an embodied version of his inquiries about religion:
Should he accept the absolute, so simple and direct, as would believers in
religion— and less hesitant lovers—or continue questioning? At this moment
Crises and Construction 203
of reflective and romantic decision, he turned to a Stoical thought: he re-
solved to put in effort— after all, “we won’t lose if we try“— and he insisted