by Paul J Croce
position to certainty, but in contrast with belief, with a spectrum between
doubt and belief, and he supplied the insight for weighing the worth of ideas by
their consequences. In the Spencer essay, James presented free choices
as a theoretical asset for providing the adaptive advantages of humanity’s
mental spontaneity in dealing with new or surprising situations or for an-
ticipating the future. The very type of mental choices he had been facing
in the previous few years, based upon diverse interests and abundant specu-
lations, and even with the burden of indecision, would all serve as examples
of humanity’s distinctive capacities for mental adaptation through evalua-
tion of multiple possibilities rather than mental reactions to situations with
merely routine thoughts or instinctive be hav iors. The next essay offered
another theoretical response to indecision; while the inability to sort clearly
Crises and Construction 245
through abundant choices had weighed him down for years, he translated
that ambivalence into deep recognition of diff er ent points of view. The flip
side of uncertainty about diff er ent choices was his appreciation of those dif-
ferences, which enabled his decisive ambivalence with understanding of
contrasts as a step toward their mediation. 83
The order that James craved in his youth and that his volitional powers
helped him to achieve did not have the certainty of traditional philosophy
and religion. Already in his youth, he was impatient with fixed and idealis-
tic abstractions; instead, the will’s order was in the making—an order not
adopted, but adaptive. This personal will to order from his youth would be-
come central in his later theorizing. In one of his last classes before retire-
ment, he characterized his “metaphysics . . . [and] pragmatic theory” as a
philosophy that “allows order to be increasing” and “makes us factors of the
order.” Therefore, “the world . . . is what we make of it. . . . The world is
plastic.” James is more famous for his assertions about making our world,
but he is less well known for his commitment to order in the making. He
realized that references to the world’s plasticity “exposed [him] to severe
attack”; he responded tirelessly by insisting that “real ity acts as something
in de pen dent, as a thing found, not manufactured.” In his youth, James had
established the basis for his mature position: the plasticity of human re-
sponse to the world requires the effectiveness of free will. Real ity is found;
or, as the Stoics would say, fate is a given. And, as the naturalistic scientists
were saying, the material ingredients have shaping influence; unlike mate-
rialists, however, James treated this insight as a spur to continued question-
ing about a broad range of experiences. How we respond to fate and to the
natu ral world with our will is plastic— and these par tic u lar volitional ele-
ments are within our control; moreover, because of the constant interaction
of all parts of the world, our wills allow us to contribute to making the
world, to shaping real ity’s future. Toward the end of his life, in A Pluralistic
Universe (1909), James returned to his youthful theme in asserting “an or-
der must be made.” He contrasted this approach to theories based on an a
priori order that posit “an all- form . . . commonly acquiesced in as so obvi-
ously the self- evident thing.” Human striving to understand the world will
always be incomplete, so “the substance of real ity may never get totally col-
lected”—or, as he was fond of expressing informally, “ever not quite.” He
accepted the naturalistic fixity of natu ral facts but also recognized nature’s
complexities and limitations in human comprehension. Enlisting the will
for what humans can achieve, he presented his pluralism, with recognition
246 Young William James Thinking
of “the each- form,” as portions of experience are “made true by events” and
by our choices. 84
James grew to healthy maturity announcing increasingly confident phi-
losophies, albeit with confidence in his lack of confidence in scientific or
religious certainties. A saga of his youthful trou bles could conclude with
James growing past his worst difficulties when he started to live with ever-
greater vigor by mid-1870s. However, this narrative would neglect the sig-
nificant strands of these same feelings that stayed with him throughout his
life. In 1876 he was still saying that “each of us walks round with a dead man
chained to him.” The next year, when his relationship with Alice Gibbens
was not going well, the thought of “drop[ing] out of [her] existence” brought
a return of the “abyss of horrors” he had felt in 1873. Seven years later, the
difference was not as much in the content of his trou bles but in their ef-
fects—in pragmatic terms, in their consequences. He still experienced his
“oscillations,” but they no longer generated a “postponement of active life”
as they had in his young adulthood— just as sectarian medicine promised
more management of health prob lems often without cure. 85
After teaching one physiology course in the spring of 1873, he wrote
many more notes and reviews, directed the anatomy laboratory, and briefly
served as curator of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. In 1875–76 he
added a course on “The Relations between Physiology and Psy chol ogy,” in
which he brought both his reflective and empirical interests to science stu-
dents and established a psychological laboratory. These were pioneering
steps for psy chol ogy in Amer i ca, and in recognition of his impact, he was
appointed assistant professor of physiology in 1876. Despite these scientific
successes, his philosophical interests pulled strongly, so in addition to his
Metaphysical Club discussions, he turned from reviewing other people’s
work to writing his own philosophy essays, which first appeared in 1878. In
the spring, he asked his former chemistry teacher, Harvard president Charles
Eliot, to be considered for the first “philosophical vacancy that should occur
here,” and he explored the possibility for an appointment at Johns Hopkins
University. That is where he delivered his first public lectures in February
on “The Brain and the Senses in Their Relation to Intelligence”; he adapted
these for delivery as “The Brain and the Mind” for the popu lar Lowell Lec-
tures in Boston starting that October. In June he received a contract to
write a text in psy chol ogy that would become The Princi ples of Psy chol ogy
(1890). After two years of exploring his mind and heart with Alice Gibbens,
they were married in July. These events would have seemed miraculous
Crises and Construction 247
even a few years before when he had vowed not to marry, when he had de-
clared that “philosophical activity as a business is not normal”— adding ve-
hemently, and certainly “not for me”— and when he was often tortured by
depression and ill health. His resolutions through those difficult years to
take small steps without worrying about results and to make commitments
<
br /> without guarantees was paying off. Two years later, he achieved his dream
of teaching philosophy with a focus on psychological subjects when he re-
ceived an appointment to the philosophy department, not at “some west-
ern Acad emy,” as he had said forlornly twelve years before, but at Harvard
University. 86 Despite all his hesitations, he had entered the business of
philosophy.
Through this career progression and personal development in fulfill-
ment of his vocational hope for philosophy, he retained his commitments to
science that he had developed as a student and in his first professional iden-
tity. Throughout his career, philosophy as a whole was becoming more sci-
entific; James also brought science into philosophy, but it was his science
with simultaneous attention to experiential facts and avoidance of reduc-
tion to materialism. Beginning with his program for future science and
confirmed by his personal experiences and by his philosophical discussions,
he cleared a path for investigating the role of the will in human experiences
and the interaction of still more material and immaterial dimensions of life.
His understanding of science as unblinking inquiry into a range of natu ral
experiences would become his philosophy.
Fits of Weakness and Exhilaration
Beneath James’s rising career trajectory, his range of prob lems persisted.
He did not even stay long with teaching at first. The “ great fret of pressing
against and always overstepping my working powers” returned to him, and
so after one semester, he declined a reappointment; instead, his family’s
means enabled him to travel in Eu rope with his brother Henry for six months
in 1873–74, supplementing his humanist education with immersion in the
art and culture of Italy. His resolutions of the early 1870s had given him a
direction, but he still suffered from a “g— d— d weakness of nerve,” as he re-
ported anxiously in 1873. Gradually, just as sectarian health care promised,
he managed and dealt with his trou bles. In the middle of his second year of
full- time teaching, in December 1875, he was pleased to receive news that
his contract to teach physiology and anatomy would be continued, even with
a pos si ble raise. With his morale improving, he declared, “I am really better
248 Young William James Thinking
than I was last year in almost every way; which gives me still better pros-
pects for the future. ”87 And despite all his awkwardness with women and his
vow not to marry, he fi nally met a compatible soul in 1876 who could nurture
his potential through the thickets of his eccentricities.
William James met Alice Gibbens at the Radical Club, dedicated to pro-
gressive religious ideas— and his father may even have introduced them, no
less. She did not have his taste for constant inquiry or his ner vous tempera-
ment; instead, with her commitment to progressive religion and reform, she
was full of the religious and moral certainties that he lacked. He would turn
temporarily to such stability in moods of ac cep tance rather than strug gle;
and he admired certainties from a theoretical distance for their motivating
and consoling power. However, he could not adopt them in his science or
his philosophy, even as he loved them in this compelling woman, especially
when “the hardness of my stoicism oppresses me.” He even thought of
Alice with “eyes like a prayer . . . , just the expression I have been seeking all
my life, but just escaped finding.” As with his approach to religion, so with
his Alice, he showed deference to her religious views, but he could not
adopt them. After two years of courtship displaying still more fitful soul-
searching, and even another brief contact with Catherine Havens, Alice and
William married in 1878. Knowing his brother’s history of trou bles, Henry
responded to news of their engagement by gushing, “You have my blessing
indeed, & Miss Gibbens also,” and he added coyly, “or rather Miss Gibbens par-
ticularly, as she will need it most.” As with William’s continued management
of trou bles, the marriage did not completely resolve his awkwardness with
women.88 In other words, vacillation between his desire for forceful will and
his craving for ac cep tance and security appeared in his married life as well.
In an early classroom description based on introspection from his own
experience, perhaps even about his own marriage, young professor James
distinguished between “the orderly man . . . who never does ill or makes a
mistake or has a regret” and “the passionate tumultuous blunderer, whose
whole life is an alternation of rapturous excitement, and horrible repen-
tance.” While the former behaves better than the latter, his highest praise is
for the blunderer: “[H]e feels,” which is the “divinest of human gifts, the gift
of intense feeling.” His classroom analy sis did not resolve all his prob lems
but suggested a way to convert his difficult traits into assets, just as he
would convert his indecision into theories of human mental spontaneity
and reconciliation of contrasts. Similarly, James’s youthful trou bles contin-
ued to nag him for the rest of his life. He complained frequently of back
Crises and Construction 249
pain, difficulty seeing, digestive prob lems, and fatigue, and he never stopped
being ner vous and occasionally depressed, with moments of craving for
greater assurance. Despite his great genius for social interaction, his opti-
mistic enthusiasm for new people and new ideas, and his buoyant messages
of hope in numerous writings, he always carried “a deep sadness about
[him],” as his friend, the writer and reformer John Jay Chapman, observed;
“you felt that he had just stepped out of this sadness in order to meet you,
and was to go back into it the moment you left him.” He even experienced
personal crises again, and they continued to bring deep insight. In his ma-
turity, he began to think of them as revealing moments of “spiritual alert-
ness” and even indications of his “mystical germ. ”89 As with the sectarian
medical view of crises, James treated them as short- term prob lems and
long- term opportunities for insight and sensitivity. His crises, for all their
trou bles, kept providing those gifts.
In 1873 James put words on his vacillation through willful strength and
resignation with hope for comfort; he reported that he would “alternate be-
tween fits,” lasting hours, days, or weeks, of “extreme languor & depression,
weakness of body & head & pain in back,” and then rebound with “ great
exhilaration of spirits, restlessness, comparative bodily & mental activity.”
Gradually, his symptoms became better— good enough, in fact, to allow him
to function well, even superbly. In addition, areas of his youthful trou bles
took turns for the better: marriage and beginning his career provided
stability and security while he poured his willful strug gles into his ideas;
rather than an either/or choice, he found that one frame of mind facilitated
the other, like rest enabling work. In the hum of his working “busy- ness,” he
&nb
sp; achieved not cure but the management of his issues; he even exulted in 1875,
“I have never felt so well.” 90 With his general rise in health and well- being,
his symptoms improved, and he found ways to cope with them.
James also gained some distance from his prob lems when he found
“some of my own attributes” in Rev. Benjamin Babcock, a character created
by his brother Henry for the 1875 novel The American, who was the “high-
strung, . . . gloomy, . . . morbid little clergyman” who even thought “Goethe
perfectly splendid.” William was “a little amused” to notice that Henry por-
trayed the minister earnestly “try[ing] to quicken [the] moral life” of his
traveling companion, the main character, Christopher Newman, who was
by contrast an “un regu la ted epicure, . . . [who] found amusement in every-
thing.” The novelist remembered the brothers’ months together in Italy
when Henry heard William’s speculations as the endless “discrimination”
250 Young William James Thinking
of ideas that intruded on sheer enjoyment of Italian beauty.91 Despite his
brother’s spoofing, William James was learning to cope more effectively,
beginning with his philosophical plan. After professing his first act of free
will, his work, marriage, and improved health gave him yet more levels of
order in his life, and more ways to implement that plan.
The trou bles of James’s young adulthood did not emerge in a single crisis
but extended over his whole youth before their most dramatic and mysteri-
ous features would erupt between 1869 and 1872. That is indeed when he
felt most bleak and did the least work, but this was also a time when he first
crafted the theories that would help him to understand and cope with his
prob lems. Long in fermentation and calling for long endurance, his “crises”
then dissipated, becoming part of his personality, with their insights part of
his philosophy. More than two de cades after his own worst trou bles, when
observing the distinction between “ ‘healthy’ & ‘morbid,’ ” James empha-
sized their relation: “[A] life healthy on the whole, must have some morbid
ele ments,” with both the steadiness of vigorous energy and the deep in-
sights from darker troubled moments. Life’s tangible reasons for melan-