by Paul J Croce
poor vocational prospects, and frail will, made him feel that “I very nearly
touched bottom.” He could not know how much lower he would sink, but
the depths of his depression kept bringing him back to questions of purpose
in life. By May 1868, he starkly asked himself, “What reason can you give for
continuing to live?” Although his mood was more reflective than frantic,
the thought that “the highest joy of earth,” namely the affection “between
the two sexes,” which remained so out of his reach, pushed him to ask
“why the thread of your days sh[oul]d. not be snapped now.” These bleak
comments were embedded in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes that also
included references to the girls he had met, doubts about a career in medi-
cine or physiology, and reflections on his philosophy and religion. He ended
216 Young William James Thinking
the letter by calling it a general “report of my mental condition.” 41 His bleak
moods had become so frequent that he could report his feelings as part of
his latest news update.
Even though he was getting used to his trou bles and despite the sectar-
ian beliefs in the long- term benefits of crises, the experiences themselves,
especially with his low spirits, made his head swirl so that he could not fully
explain his feelings. All of his confounding issues conspired to draw him
down, as he reported with puzzlement, “I do not know [why] I am so sad.”
Even his trip to Eu rope, with hopes to reap physiological understanding in
Germany, threatened to be swamped by his “sickness and solitude,” so he
felt simply “deplorably inert,” despite all his language learning and reading.
And his slowness to improve with repeated water- cure treatments made
him feel like many of the other patients he would see shuffling around the
establishments: “fearfully old.” Although he had started the trip to Ger-
many with high hopes for his education and health, toward the end, he was
regretting it for the “loneliness and intellectual and moral deadness” of his
efforts. By the end of the stay in Eu rope, however, his thoughts of suicide
were muted by more bits of hope. When he felt “despair of ever doing any-
thing,” especially by empirical standards with its “Utilitarian venom,” he
asked, “[W]hy not step out into the green darkness?” But when he thought
of “the fermentation, and [potential] diffusion” of all he was experiencing,
even as the edifice of his learning faced “crumbling and evaporation,” then
he foresaw “some tatters and shreds of beauty that may as well last, as long
as they have been formed.” After a long letter that mixed bleak thoughts
with his “brute power of re sis tance” against their depressing power, he put
his thoughts of suicide aside; although he lamented that “I have’nt [ sic] got
the will,” he still insisted, “Never say die.” 42 Hope and repeated striving co-
existed with the sheer weight of his prob lems.
James had indeed reaped more than a few “tatters and shreds” of learn-
ing on his Eu ro pean sojourn and during his scientific and medical training
at Harvard, but by 1869 he felt little sense of accomplishment. In May, after
he had successfully completed his thesis and when he was just a few weeks
from taking his exams, he again reported that “my bottom seemed suddenly
to fall out.” From years of experience with his own prob lems, his report was
now a familiar mix of ill health and discouragement about his personal
and vocational prospects. He promised himself, like Marcus Aurelius, not
“to fret” about his condition or about his upcoming exams, and even added,
Crises and Construction 217
“with all this, I never was so cheerful. ”43 But it would not last. His ups and
downs would take him still further down.
After completing his medical degree in June 1869, James lamented that
he was living “the life of an absolute caterpillar.” That meta phor of resting
development became the basis of some of his early theorizing: His now-
routine “policy of rest” after a stretch of exertion would become the basis of
his proposition for the psychological and social importance of “Vacations.”
As in previous years, this policy was showing good results, at least tempo-
rarily: “I am far better every way” than in the previous two months. As with
crises in general, even his choice of imagery was not totally bleak; after all,
the caterpillar phase is preparation for a much grander form of life. His
choice of words may also have been shaped by the experience of his brother
Wilkie, now trying to run a Florida farm with employment of freed African
Americans, but he strug gled because by the fall of that same year, he had
“raised a whopping big caterpiller [ sic] crop”; but hope endured even there
since his brother “ will certainly pay all expenses,” and William thought his
plans looked “excellent.” A few months later, he confirmed his hopes with
words of Blaise Pascal, who would later figure so prominently in his “ Will
to Believe,” now quoted roughly and without citation, suggesting he had
committed it to memory: he began in the original French with words that
spoke to his current condition, “notwithstanding . . . [the] miseries, which
press upon us and take us by the throat.” Then he paraphrased with an em-
phasis on his own impulses: “[T] here’s a divine instinct in us, and at the end
of life the good remains, and the evil sinks into darkness.” Such possibilities
for the long run did not stop his youthful dark questions about why “ there
should be any . . . evil” at all.44 Before he could answer these large issues, he
found genuine solace in the action steps he took for his health and in enjoy-
ment of friends and family.
When things looked brighter, he held out the cheerful prediction that
“maybe it’s the beginning of a final rise to health,” but even his experiences
up to 1869 had jaded such hopes, so he added bitterly, “I’m so sick of proph-
ecying [ sic].” Even when he had a decline into “the old weakness” a few months
later, it did not discourage him completely, “for it shows that the condition,
what ever it be, is mobile & not essential.” This suggested a pragmatic- type
focus on flexible, small practical steps, ways to transform his theories of will
into a life with willful focus and energy. While contemplating these steps, he
again drew upon neurasthenic thinking, observing that “I am much run
218 Young William James Thinking
down in ner vous force.” And yet, despite all his reports of sickness and heal-
ing rest, he also felt “a good deal of intellectual hunger now- a- days.” In the
summer of 1869, he pledged to “make a creditable use of my freedom, in
pretty hard study.” He specified that he would “try to make what ever read-
ing I can do bear on psychological subjects,” but his enduring interest in
philosophical reflection and a range of other topics kept peering through, as
his robust book lists amply testify. By the fall, even with his medical degree
in hand, he resolved that he would “not study” his physiology and psy ch
ol-
ogy because they involved too much draining “brain work,” as the doctors
of neurasthenia would call it, but instead devote himself to his humanistic
reading in lit er a ture, philosophy, and religion.45
During the next few years after James earned his degree, and before he
found a work outlet for all his reading and reflection, his spirits took still
lower turns. He sometimes even felt like an invalid because his back and
eyes bothered him so much that they interfered with his work. Although he
had written a few book reviews and essays each year since 1865, he pub-
lished nothing in 1870 and 1871. He also wrote fewer letters. His life at home
explains some of this reduced correspondence: he had no occasion to
write to his parents or sister, also at home. This was the only time in his
adult life when James did not rely upon his wide circle of friends and family
to serve as written audiences for his drafts of emerging theories and reports
of trou bles. There are no existing letters for almost two months in the sum-
mer of 1869, almost two months later that winter and again in spring, and
five months from July to December 1870; most strikingly, he wrote only two
letters that have survived in all of 1871, and except for one brief note, there
is a ten- month gap from the summer of 1871 to the spring of 1872. Even as he
wrote less, he did not stop thinking; these are the very years when he kept
his long book lists. James turned inward with less communication, but
more collection of new understanding. Although he would need to find
work in the long run, the family’s resources in the short term provided him
with a seedtime for thinking about his prob lems more sharply, with learn-
ing as a way to cope.
Ac cep tance versus Strug gle
The James family spent the summers of 1869 and 1870 in Pomfret,
Connecticut—a vacation time for the others but, for young James, with his
recently completed M.D. degree, a time to explore direction, in both his voca-
tion and his personal philosophy. After years of being drawn to and discour-
Crises and Construction 219
aged by speculation, here for the first time he applied his fledgling theoriz-
ing to an introspective review of his own slide into depression. As with his
earlier feeling of being like a moth drawn to the flame of speculation, he felt
at once compelled to take on these interpretations of his experience and
was keenly aware, as he would explain years later, that such statements
from rational analy sis were “secondary products, like translations of a text”—
in this case, his own elusive feelings— “into another tongue.” He even felt his
tentative but bold ideas were “misleading from their brevity,” as he would
later describe the tension between lived experiences and abstract words.
Still, he gamely began his self- assessment by defining the terms of his in-
quiry with reference to human physical, emotional, and intellectual wants
and hopes, the full gamut of his current trou bles. He began with the undif-
ferentiated mass of individual experience: “Man = a bundle of desires, more
or less numerous.” These desires express personal interests, which he
would later identify as the key ingredients in the mind’s evolutionary adap-
tive power; but, at this point, he merely noticed their subjective character:
they “exist by mere self- affirmation.” And he evaluated these human im-
pulses with “no princi ple back of them,” that is, with no empirical substance
or transcendent or ideal references; but as natu ral facts, they are vitally
impor tant to the individual who “lives inasmuch as they are gratified, dies
as they are refused.” He then reported a transparently autobiographical
concern when these hopes and ambitions, such as his own interests in
“natu ral history [and] painting” (or his romantic hopes with Havens?), meet
“abridgement in extent of gratification . . . and in degree,” including restric-
tions from “personal isolation” and from the vexing “unfathomability” of
prob lems.46 For all of its shortcomings, theory could serve as a guide to per-
sonal issues, just as the Stoics insisted.
James evaluated the way diff er ent people approach the world and their
desires on a spectrum, from those with “centripetal, defensive” traits to
those with an “expansive, embracing tendency.” As a result of these tem-
peramental differences, “in any given case of evil,” or any challenge, each
person must choose to either “accept the universe” or “protest against it.”
These “voluntary alternatives” also appear within each person as “the mind
seesaws between . . . resignation” and “the effort to improve.” The alterna-
tives can even appear in succession, as he astutely recognized about the dif-
ficulty of change, with “the second not being resorted to till the first has
failed.” And he noticed that each posture has its prob lems: the first seemed
to involve “an insincere pis aller,” sophisticated French slang for “lack of
220 Young William James Thinking
something better”; the second implied “a superfluous vanity” about the
ability of one’s efforts and strength of will. 47 After years of living through
his prob lems, he had found a theoretical framework for dealing with them,
based on a primal choice, namely ac cep tance of one’s condition versus strug-
gle against it.
This pairing of ac cep tance and strug gle also emerged in his alternating
responses to other issues in his life: in his response to his (and his friends’)
vocational and health prob lems, he would sometimes feel overwhelmed,
but then he would rally to a fighting mood for facing them; and he regularly
built up strength resting at water cures before plunging into work for a few
months. This framework would endure as a central orientation of his ma-
ture religious thought. James would call his pragmatic commitment to a
vigorous will the religion of “the strenuous life” because “it makes the
world’s salvation depend upon the energizing of its several parts, among
which we are.” But, he admitted, it does not provide “holidays to the spirit,”
that is, the comfort that comes from ac cep tance of powers larger than our-
selves and from definite beliefs in the divine and in personal salvation. Even
though he himself largely favored the “strenuous mood,” he admitted that
every one sometimes needs “provisional breathing- spells”; he found such
attitudes of ac cep tance very useful because such holidays were “intended to
refresh . . . for the morrow’s fight.” His own periodic welcoming of these
outlooks enabled him to gain deep appreciation for the practical benefit of
idealist philosophies and the “religious power” of church traditions; advo-
cates of these positions were, by contrast, permanent residents of the “moral
holiday” mindset, endorsing “an ‘eternal’ edition of . . . the world, . . . ready-
made and complete.” 48 Ac cep tance of such ideas could indeed be very com-
forting, but he sought more.
James himself only felt “somewhat mystical,” as he reported in 1870
belief, in his youth or as a mature pragmatist, that “the world is still in pro-
cess of making,” even as those efforts require occasional relief. And when
he did integrate ele ments of “the Absolute” into his beliefs, they had to “run
the gauntlet of all my other beliefs,” including his critique of abstractions;
so he could not permanently adopt such comforting positions because they
landed him in “intellectual inconsistencies, . . . clash[ing] with other truths
of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account”— hence his attitude
toward religion of “deference rather than of adoption.” This stance, how-
ever, let him re spect both sides, as he considered them expressions of differing
Crises and Construction 221
human temperaments—or even his own temperament at diff er ent times. He
also directed some of his most impor tant work in religious studies to ex-
panding on each impulse: The Will to Believe is filled with a fighting spirit of
willful moral exuberance and readiness to strug gle, whereas The Va ri e ties
of Religious Experience chronicles and honors examples of the comforting
spirituality that accepts spiritual powers. 49 As he marched through his
trou bles, young James occasionally turned to rest, but a struggling will was
his mainstay.
Already in his youth, James not only described the differences between
the struggling stance and the accepting outlook but also asked, Could “the
two combine . . . ?” He was also noticing that theory was more than the gen-
eral speculations that had first attracted him to philosophizing. For all its
pale reflection of actual experience, theory also offered broad overviews,
and this awareness could enable mediation of diverse positions. “The solu-
tion” to their “contrasting postures,” he proposed, “can only lie in taking
neither absolutely, but in making the resignation only provisional.” Ironi-
cally, the accepting outlook, rooted in absolutism would be a free choice,
and it would show “its worth in the action rather than the result”— thus also
recalling his career advice not to wait on results too impatiently, and also
anticipating his pragmatism. The resigned stance would serve as a kind of