by Paul J Croce
between ac cep tance and strug gle, rest and work, resigned security and con-
fidence in moral energy clouded access to his theoretical blueprint. In the
same letter to Bob, William weakly claimed to have “but very few words”
and forlornly wished, despite all his avid learning, that he “could console
you with religion or philosophy”; it was indeed one of his few letters that
year, and he was feeling palpably aware of the limits of theory. The very
position of feeling down, however, reminded him of his April resolution to
strug gle against those negative feelings. He declared that “through . . . de-
privation we learn of resources within us,” but until they are demanded by
such personal strug gle, “we should else have remained ignorant” of them.
These other wise hidden energies, as he would later call them, were the con-
structive benefits of crises, and they gave the “power to resist pain, . . . and
generally to keep our heads up under circumstances where nothing but
pure courage will suffice”; so even the failed portions of his experiments
would support his hypothesis for a will to order. With Minny Temple’s
death in March still fresh in his mind, he was reminded again that “death
sits at the heart of each one of us”; especially with his physical and psycho-
logical prob lems, he even felt that “she takes possession . . . step by step.” At
these moments, life seemed to be no more than death on the installment
plan. But rather than dwelling on the real ity of death (both the end- of- life
kind and his own gradual version), which he could not control, he preferred
“to think of that alone which seems to belong to us—to our wills—in life,
namely the keeping up of a true and courageous spirit.” Here is the Stoic
emphasis on expending concern only for things that we can control. Al-
though he did not mention Marcus Aurelius by name, he did, as with the
Roman Stoic, make reference to his “own good will,” which would serve as
his “inner solitary room” where he could likewise apply a discipline of as-
sent in the midst of hostile forces. And Marcus may have been the reference
when he declared, “ ‘A strong man battling with misfortune is a spectacle
for the Gods’ said an ancient.” Then he added, admitting both the appeal of
his April resolution and the difficulty of implementing it, “so is a weak man”;
after all, ac cep tance and strug gle would each have their uses, and so too
234 Young William James Thinking
with crises. 68 Ancient wisdom joined with philosophizing and his willful
resolutions as resources for coping with his crises, even as the crises them-
selves were resources for cultivating his will.
During his strug gle to implement his hypothesis for a free and strong
will, James kept up his steady learning. In addition to his vocational work in
physiology and psy chol ogy, he maintained his often self- proscribed interest
in philosophy. That included extensive private reading, and he had already
joined “a metaphysical club, in Cambridge (consisting of Chauncey Wright,
C. Pierce [ sic] etc.),” as his brother Henry reported in January 1872, and he
had likely joined in those meetings since the late 1860s, with individual dis-
cussions going back even further. These young men pressed big ideas with
casual familiarity, and for James the settings provided chances to test out his
ideas of the will and belief. For example, just two years after his April 1870
resolution, while still searching for vocational direction, James made
mock- heroic reference to “the great Chauncey Wright,” who often used
his enthusiasm for scientific empiricism to critique James’s hopes for the
will. The Metaphysical Club’s “boxing master” made brash claims about
persuading the ambivalent James to doubt the power of the will to shape
belief in the face of per sis tent demands for evidence. In response, James
could enlist tangible experiences according to his program for future sci-
ence. James jokingly concluded that his older colleague “now lies (as to his
system of the universe) in my arms as harmless as a babe. ”69 The wrangling
would continue even after James began teaching in the spring of 1873.
In the next few months, James continued in spirited critique of Wright’s
scientific enthusiasm in an unpublished essay he called “Against Nihilism,”
because he maintained that, with his traditional empiricism, Wright “de-
nies this to be a Universe, and makes it out a ‘Nulliverse.’ ” When faced with
the “multitude of repre sen ta tions” around us, Wright denies the idealistic
view that “the repre sen ta tions come together, and seem to combine and in-
fluence each other.” James asks, “[I]f each repre sen ta tion is totally in de pen-
dent,” as his friend suggests, “how does it ever come into collision with any
other[;] how can it be synthesized with another?” In the essay, James op-
posed Wright because, although it was difficult to detect the “substantial
bonds of union, . . . they in some sense unite the heterogeneous into a Uni-
verse.” Finding support from “Peirce’s criterion, breadth of relation,” James
anticipates his own later arguments in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and he
admits that his emphasis on relation of parts and his commitment to “conti-
nuity” suggests aspects of the disparaged philosophy of idealism, with its
Crises and Construction 235
“duplication of the phenomena,” once as experienced empirically and then
again as “it is meant.” These relations seem to constitute a “transcending
[of] actuality” defying empiricism, at least in its traditional form, and they
suggest a theoretical expression of his speculative hopes for his will, despite
the very immediate empirical evidence of his trou bles. Wright would say
simply, “[T]hings only exist once,” in their empirical forms. But James de-
tects within experience that “in each thing, beside its happening to exist as
a matter of fact now, there is another kind of being which we may call ideal.”
Idealism itself proposes that each thing “has a meaning, serves a purpose, is
a cause, or an end, was predestined, has a ‘Nature’ by virtue of which it is as
it is.” While the idealists have the advantage of emphasizing meaning and
purpose, the empiricists seem truer to concrete experience. James medi-
ates these positions by suggesting that the meaning or purpose of a thing is
“not a- priori and determinant of it,” with conclusions based upon a prior
plan untouched by experience as with the idealist view. Instead, he sug-
gests that meaning is “a posteriori to the happening,” justified by appeal to
experience within the very empirical facts that empiricists such as Wright
emphasize. Michael Polanyi called this James’s “looser view of teleology”
with “intelligible directional tendencies . . . operative in the world without
our having to suppose that they determine all things.” 70
As with James’s hope for finite absolutes, he was here positing pur-
posefulness, not based upon prior fixed ideals, but in the making, as im-
mediately useful as the adaptive trait
s Darwin proposed as the active
agents of evolutionary change. A purposeful focus resides in subjective
experience, generally perceived to be decidedly unempirical, by empiri-
cists such as Wright, and therefore in sharp contrast with objective expe-
rience. By contrast, James proposed that “a repre sen ta tion” in conscious-
ness, such as his subjective assertion of will, has a kind of “objective
being,” alongside empirical facts; or in short, he suggested that “subjectiv-
ity [has] an objectivity.” These thoughts would prepare him years later for
integrating subliminal psy chol ogy into his study of religious experience:
this subconscious realm could be evaluated objectively, while religiously
it constituted subjective experience. In the early 1870s, while still engaged
in personal philosophizing, James was hoping to make his will an objec-
tive factor in his own consciousness. 71 James’s philosophizing was gelling
into the bases of his mature theories, but at the time it grew from thought
experiments in his private writing and in discussion for support of his
own willful action.
236 Young William James Thinking
The Metaphysical Club camaraderie contributed to James’s readiness to
learn through his trou bles, but he realized that his prob lems emerged from
a convergence of issues, so his improvement might only come from his contin-
ued experimentation with a clustered combination of factors in health, mood,
social standing, and philosophy. In May 1872 James visited Newport, where
he had studied painting a dozen years earlier— and where he had begun his
long, arduous path to finding his vocation. The old haunts reminded him of
“the ghost of my dead self with his ignorance and weakness”; only recently,
Temple’s death had filled him with despair, but he would soon depict such
dark reminders as parts of painful steps toward growth: vocational and
personal choices leave behind “murdered . . . sel[ves],” from paths not taken.
While still sorting out his career decision, memory of one such “dead self”
left behind in Newport now prompted him to write to his novelist brother
Henry, “I envy ye the world of art.” Without it, “we sink into a flatter,
blanker kind of consciousness.” He remembered art’s ability to “startle us
now and then,” to awaken and enliven with humanity’s “richest potentiali-
ties”; as with his reflections on the natu ral gracefulness of Greek sculpture,
he was also feeling the power of art in contrast with the abstractions of
theory. By October, he was spending still more of his time with the Meta-
physical Club, but this made him again feel the ill effects of too much
philosophical reflection: “I have been of late so sickened & skeptical of phil-
osophical activity as to regret much that I did not stick to painting.” It was
the concrete observation of physical things as experienced without inter-
pretation, like willful action or the work of science without the grubbing
subtleties of philosophical reflection, that attracted him once again to art; so
he wrote, “simply getting absorbed in the look of nature is after abstract
study like standing on one’s feet after having been on one’s head.” Although
he expressed some hope to return to painting sometime— “next summer . . .
if it is at all pos si ble”—he was already working at another outlet for tangible
study of nature. And so, he added with more immediacy, “I keep up a small
daily pegging at my Physiology.” 72
By the spring of 1873, philosophical reflection and work in physiology
competed for James’s attention. With his desire for order, he felt a “strong
moral and intellectual craving . . . for some stable real ity to lean upon,” even
as he was not persuaded by any of the clashing certainties he witnessed in
competition around him. He was teaching physiology at Harvard’s Depart-
ment of Natu ral History, which provided stable employment, but this work
included scientific messages about physical facts shaping mental choices; he
Crises and Construction 237
was continually drawn to philosophy but burned by the instabilities of its
constant questions. Could his faith in free will offer a substitute, with
strength enough in the seemingly insubstantial stuff of volition, even when
the empirical facts of his trou bles gave plenty of reasons to doubt? He wor-
ried that his reflective inquiries themselves would undercut his goals,
because “a professed phi los o pher pledges himself publicly never to have
done with doubt . . . but every day to be ready to criticize afresh and call
into question the grounds of his faith.” With this posture, he added wist-
fully, he would have to “renounce the privilege of trusting blindly, which
every simple man owns as a right”— and which he admired in the graceful
ancients. His difficulty in sustaining faith—in his case, faith in his own voli-
tional motivations— was part of a broader context of faith challenged
throughout the culture by a host of intellectual and scientific forces. He
knew from his years of trou ble that he could not sustain “such constant
duty” to engage in skeptical challenges to his faith, so he set his hypothesis
for free will in contrast with such scrutinizing philosophy: “I fear the con-
stant sense of instability generated by this [philosophical, skeptical] atti-
tude would be more than the voluntary faith I can keep going is sufficient to
neutralize.” 73 Ironically, he experienced his youthful vow for free will not
as support of the work in philosophy that he would later do but in contrast
with his wariness about philosophy for its tendency to bring skeptical dis-
missal of faith, his attempted faith in free will.
With his first teaching job in the spring of 1873, James felt a vocational
answer to his dilemma about philosophy and physiology. Choosing the
concreteness of physiology, with small daily pegging at the natu ral facts of
scientific inquiry, provided an immediate and welcome order in his per-
sonal life, because he relished “the concrete facts in which a biologist’s
responsibilities lie.” Science offered a modern equivalent to the ancients’
intimate connection to nature, which provided them with orienting direc-
tion through the modest means of everyday contact with nature; this would
avoid the “hot imperious tragic way” of thinking that he associated with
restless modern thinking. But modern science did not adhere to those an-
cient harmonious assumptions, and it offered its own challenges to his
hoped- for free will. The strongest supports for the skepticism he dreaded
were based on scientific arguments for natu ral facts determining choices
and therefore undercutting freedom. Especially from reading Herbert
Spencer in the 1860s and then teaching his naturalistic psy chol ogy in the
1870s, he perceived that these arguments from “Spencerism” against free
238 Young William James Thinking
will would challenge, as he had been reporting vehemently, the possibilities
for “moral freedom,” “passionate initiative,” “creative power,” “pure courage,”
and the
“power to resist pain [and] evil.” He could not reject the persuasive
authority of naturalistic science, but he also could not accept its determinis-
tic implications for a will directed by material forces, which would discour-
age motivations for taking up willful action. So, while relying on science for
his stable work, he continued his philosophizing now directed toward the
methods and implications of his science. After all, those natu ral facts could
“form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he please to the mastery
of the universal questions.” As he said in 1865, his aspiration was for a
“ Future Science” that would be less tied to materialistic assumptions,
which would also mean less fixity of deterministic challenges to free will.74
Rather than choosing either/or about his attractions to philosophy and
physiology, James was selecting parts of each, for his theorizing and also
for his vocational life. He approached philosophy, as he had learned from
the Stoics, for the directions it could provide, even as those directions re-
quired a free will that his science undercut; and he went to work in physiol-
ogy to learn its natu ral facts about the bodily components of thought and
be hav ior, but he felt no need to adopt its methods and assumptions that he
found confining.
In 1873 James was sharpening his diary experiment with a focus on
physiology and free will. For his continued work, he had another resource,
based on his personal reflections and his discussions with friends. James’s
attempts to assert his free will and to take effective action exhibited a tan-
gible and personal application of his 1862 Peirce- inspired declaration that
“[n]one succeed in leaving Faith entirely out,” which he turned into an ex-
periment on the strength of his own faith in free will, with a leap of faith for
adopting his voluntarist stance.75 This addition of philosophizing to his sci-
ence would bring improvements that he perceived science to need, in keep-
ing with the path of constant inquiry that Peirce championed; and applying
faith to science, with identification of initial premises as belief positions,
was a bold and even irreverent turn away from the confidence increasingly
associated with natu ral science. More immediately, this stance would en-