by Paul J Croce
recording a favorite prayer in his diary: “Now God help me through this! for
you know that I am in the right and you see that I am trying to help myself.”
He called it “one fine prayer” because it was designed to boost one’s confi-
dence and will, in striking contrast with most prayers for passive comfort
and worshipful piety.100 But in his fictional character, James pays homage to
prayerful religion.
When viewing others in general, James showed deep re spect for those who
had genuine “intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which
they feel themselves to be related.” Although James never put his own name
to such traditional supplications for his own trou bles, he did support the
general impulse, but in less denominational, more spiritual forms. In place
of the “refined supernaturalism” of traditional Western religion, he en-
dorsed a “crasser” spirituality, a “piecemeal supernaturalism,” circulating
in natu ral life and emerging in less august ways. Ever since his youth, he
maintained more of an attitude of “deference rather than . . . adoption” for
Chris tian ity or any par tic u lar religion, even as he more firmly believed in
the “ mother sea and fountain head of all religions” in depth psy chol ogy and
mysticism. So, when first delivering The Va ri e ties as lectures, he felt a poi-
gnant sympathy for his audience because “I seem doubtless . . . to be blow-
ing hot & cold, explaining away Xianity [Chris tian ity], yet defending the
more general basis from which I say it proceeds.” 101 While he showed abun-
dant deference for va ri e ties of religion, he himself adopted spirituality, even
as he includes in The Va ri e ties how conversion leads to the adoption of a
whole range of beliefs, including those that sick souls craved.
Despite James’s differences from his anonymous character in The Va ri e ties,
they clearly had some kinship. The pattern of seeking comfort was the same,
even if they differed in tone and degree of traditionalism; these were useful
ele ments of his story that could give The Va ri e ties immediate broad appeal;
he had already identified theoretic rationality as one of many ways of think-
ing, and here was a chance to bridge from the theoretic rationality of the
academic world to the world of popu lar thinking. He exaggerated his own
Crises and Construction 257
experiences in depicting a character who had embraced more ac cep tance
and less strug gle so that he could convey his profound admiration for the
power ful role of religious beliefs in human psy chol ogy. Taking the case as a
primary- source rec ord, its facts conform with James’s biography in one of
his own activities (visiting an asylum) and with feelings that coincide with
large portions of his trou bles and commitments in early adulthood (uncer-
tainty, depression, weakness, religious leanings); however, the case strays
from the historical young James in that it does not report on the abundant
times he showed contrasting sentiments, especially his willful efforts, a
keen appetite for learning, and his personal rather than traditional religious
leanings. The case of the Frenchman’s crisis and conversion exhibits a ver-
sion of one part of his twin leanings for comfort and for strug gle from his
quest to sort through the diverse strands of his own development. The les-
sons of his own youthful trou bles were personal guideposts to live with
enough order to provide security, and enough will to spur struggling on—
and he learned that their balance would never be fixed and final. Writing
years later, he could speak so calmly through the French correspondent
because he had already worked through how to cope with his own prob-
lems. In The Va ri e ties, James promised his readers that he would be paying
less attention to the roots of par tic u lar religious beliefs than to the “value of
their fruits,” so no won der he asked readers not to look too carefully at the
actual roots of this dramatic case. 102 He did not need to agree with the
Frenchman’s par tic u lar beliefs to realize the value of these types of fruits
for the dark nights of any soul.
For The Va ri e ties, James gathered stories based on his sense of their impor-
tance for illustrating dimensions of human psy chol ogy and spirituality. From
this story hunting and fact gathering, he arrived at his personal approach to
religion after evaluating these diverse worldviews for and against religion,
and many diff er ent religious beliefs— and also after scrutinizing diverse
parts of himself. He even said that writing The Va ri e ties would be “my reli-
gious act”—in the Frenchman’s story and throughout. He had already ex-
plained the energetic sides of his spirituality, his eagerness for willful
strug gle, in his “ Will to Believe”; now his own experiences with discour-
agement were well suited to explaining the sick soul on a path to conver-
sion, even as he selected only portions of his memories to suit the topic. This
understanding of James’s story of the French correspondent as portions of
himself, based on a composite of his crisis experiences, and stylized for
teaching about the power of religion for dealing with personal trou bles,
258 Young William James Thinking
bears some resemblance to Sigmund Freud’s theory of “screen memories.”
These are memories, Freud explains, that help in the pro cess of coping with
difficult experiences of the past; “what is recorded is another psychical ele-
ment closely associated with the objectionable one,” displacing it with a
more conventionally favorable story. Freud’s idea coincides with James’s
case in that the later rendition includes reference to earlier experiences and
a traditionalist conclusion to the narrative. However, Freud describes early
childhood memories while James is prob ably constructing an account from
experiences in his young adulthood. Where children generally have ob-
scure bits of perception that are later brought together, unconsciously, into
a screen memory, James likely had adult memories with more potential for
clarity; however, he produced a translucent memory, with its ele ments of
obscurity coming from his own deliberate reconfiguration of the narrative. In
addition, this memory of young adulthood was not just for his own private
favorable consumption but was adapted for public pre sen ta tion in lecture
and book publication. In place of a screen memory for protecting himself
from his prior pains, James had already overtly embraced his trou bles as
learning experiences; and in his maturity, he was ready to make use of por-
tions of his development in a kind of public screening for teaching about
religion’s hopeful potential. Finding his own path through his trou bles was
a test case for his construction of theories. The French correspondent ex-
pressed the parts of James that embraced religion, that felt the limits of all
human striving, including his own theoretical elaborations, because there
is something limited in us as we naturally stand, even as we strive to reason
through our issues— just the points he was trying to mak
e in the “Sick Soul”
chapter. The fictional character expressed the limits of human capacities
before the need for conversion, and James himself urged attention to the
limits of all human thoughts and beliefs. They would both endorse “ever not
quite”; the Frenchman expressed it religiously, and James extended it still
further. 103
When James wrote about an undated crisis in the guise of an anonymous
Frenchman’s deep religious experience, he could have been drawing inspira-
tion from any of his own experiences that he readily described in the language
of crises, including his sectarian medical treatments, his embarrassments
with women, the inability of the “moral business” to keep his will moti-
vated, his frustration with reductionist theories of mind, his poor health
with reduced ability to do laboratory and other work, his often profound
depression, and even his passing disappointments and reactions to the
Crises and Construction 259
gloom of winter weather. The very difficulties of his “crises,” by catching
him up short, served as cracks in the routines of life. They were moments of
pain, even of great physical or psychological suffering, but they were also
times of exposure to new experiences and new ideas. As these changes
forced him to adapt, the crises became spurs to spontaneity, moments of
openness to the range of what life’s chances could provide. He would later
identify his relish for novelty as a key feature of his philosophy, but by the
early 1870s he was already living with increased ac cep tance of spontaneity;
the hurting part of the crises became the cost of gaining such vigor and
insight.
James’s approach to his trou bles reflected his admiration for the Stoic
firmness of will. In addition, he wrote to himself in his diaries to boost his
fledgling will; he wrote to friends to encourage their motivation and com-
mitment, along with his own; and he thrashed out supporting theories of
belief and habit formation in philosophical discussion. James’s assertions of
will began in private reflection about his personal issues, but he would soon
use those introspections as microcosms of a broader support of the will and
other immaterial ele ments of consciousness; and that work of his maturity
was part of the whole revolt against the positivist confidence in science
that supported materialist philosophies. 104 Before becoming a pioneer in that
turn toward skepticism about determinism, with more ac cep tance of
chance and probabilities as integral parts of the world and as insights for
understanding its ways, James in the quiet of his diary enlisted his own free
will as a sturdy way to cope with the confident claims of science and reli-
gion, each emerging from the mother sea of ancient cosmic quests, each
with robust methods of persuasion, each subject to limitation, each provid-
ing social benefits through the public habits of evolving traditions, and each
needing to run the gauntlets of individual choice and verification. In his
youth, James established the grounding questions and orienting directions
of his mature work, not despite his trou bles or after he had resolved them,
but through them, especially as he worked his way toward embrace of
free will.
While the message James was receiving from his vocational work was
that no effort of will could generate substantial change, he developed a posi-
tion, through the school of experiences in his young adulthood and with the
sturdy theoretical sanction of Charles Renouvier, for believing in his willful
actions, with those choices serving as his first act of free will. While still
working as a scientist, and even as he would retain a lifelong re spect for
260 Young William James Thinking
scientific facts and methods, his practice of recognizing the significance of
volition and other apparently immaterial ele ments of experience would
emerge not instead of his science but from an endorsement of science with-
out commitment to reductionist materialism. Broader contexts of his youth-
ful development further supported his emerging position, including ideas
from his father, clinical and sectarian medicine, the ancients, romantic
writers, and his own experience of personal trou bles, with each presenting
alternatives to purely materialistic readings of nature. If nature was indeed
more than its physical substance, then there was room in it for forces like the
will— not reduced to material factors, but also itself materially embedded—
that was the character of his naturalism. As he gained strength, he aimed to
take these insights into the heart of the scientific psy chol ogy he was study-
ing and starting to teach—he aimed then not only to use the will but to under-
stand it as well. His personal commitments would become his vocational
work.
Q
James entered the field of physiological psy chol ogy with the personal drive
that comes with hard- won new insights. His empiricist commitment to
natu ral experiences along with his skepticism about materialist approaches
did not translate into an eagerness to dismiss science, even as he perceived
its limits, with its uncertainties paralleling the mysteries of religion. Just as
he had been learning to cope with other dimensions of his life, he would
overcome reductionism in science not by trying to defeat it or even by going
around it, but by making use of those materialist declarations themselves—
as first steps, but not the last word. He would try to find a place for the will,
religious belief, and other immaterial ingredients of experience within scien-
tific psy chol ogy by understanding them as natu ral experiences that circulate
with both material ingredients and factors beyond the palette of materialism,
and beyond the pale of positivism. This outlook, which began as a personal
philosophical orientation, became a touchstone for organ izing his mature
philosophizing, with patterns of order, but without expectations for cer-
tainty. The order James sought was not from prior plans but from patterns
in the making, woven from the cloth of human experience, starting with
his own. With this preparation for philosophizing, James developed theories
emphasizing the concrete and fallible, for offering direction through expe-
rience toward the future. Starting in his youth, he rejected the commit-
ments of par tic u lar factions of humanity with their abstract solutions
grounded in mainstream science and traditional religion. This freed him to
Crises and Construction 261
turn his inquiries about the rich and perplexing abundance of experience
into theoretical formulations in psy chol ogy, philosophy, spiritual life, and
social commentary. For James, order was not premade, but “in the making,”
and truth “awaits parts of its complexion from the future.” 105 These philo-
sophical declarations about the significance of the future from the end of
James’s life had their roots in his youth, when those theories were still in
his future. The formation of James’s own philosophy would begin with the
choices he made throughout his youth
.
Conclusion
An Earnestly Inquiring State
[M]y mind was never in a more active, i.e. earnestly inquiring state and
prob lems define themselves more sharply to me.
William James, 1869
When William James’s title as professor of philosophy fi nally caught up with
his impulses to philosophize, his earlier experiences became an asset. With his
ability to bridge psychological science and speculative philosophy, he flour-
ished in the classroom and with professional and popu lar writing, even as his
energy was often drained by feelings of weakness. By early 1880s, however, he
had simply worked his vulnerable traits into his schedule, expecting by the end
of the school year to be suffering his “usual annual collapse”— crises by calen-
dar. At the end of each academic year, he reported, “I always come tumbling
down,” so he adapted the lessons of his water- cure recuperations: after pour-
ing out his energies in teaching and lecturing, summers were his time for re-
laxing, but in characteristic active form, they were also times for hiking, and
“reading up my arrears” in psy chol ogy and philosophy, with still more reading
further afield, “in preparation for next winter’s work. ” 1
On March 13, 1884, while still on the energetic side of his annual cycle,
James delivered a lecture at the Harvard Divinity School, “One word about
Free- will,” that would become the basis of his essay “The Dilemma of Deter-
minism.” He began his lecture by frankly admitting his own endorsement of
free will, and he even paraphrased his April 1870 vow in arguing to let “our
first act of freedom . . . be to affirm that we are free.” He likely added a smile to
his insistence that a commitment to freedom, after all, “ ought not to be forced”;
besides, contrasting positions offered their own insights. In this case, the deter-
minists relied on materialist thinking with impor tant reminders about the
naturalistic character of experience and the constraints on choice. In introduc-
ing his topic, James not only relied on his intellectual commitment to possibili-
ties beyond any one point of view, including his own; he also considered the
An Earnestly Inquiring State 263
immediate context before him, the mingling of immaterial and material life