by Paul J Croce
even true to the full range of the human mind— and body— because such ra-
tional vigor, while power ful, was “but one of a thousand human purposes. ”9
Young James’s curiosity about the whole forest motivated his initial
steps in science, religion, and philosophy, even as answers often remained
elusive. This impulse first emerged in his resolution to strive without ex-
pecting results; this involved letting go of certainties about his own future.
270 Young William James Thinking
His early uncertainties gradually hardened into more confident positions,
but he would retain his early hesitations and humble orientations within his
mature outlooks in his decisive ambivalence, a confidence about his uncer-
tainties, which facilitated embrace of possibility and flexibility, and enabled
readiness to learn from diff er ent and even contrasting positions. Not waiting
on par tic u lar results became an openness to many results, with each angle of
vision contributing something to the abundant elusive whole. This open-
ness to diverse views, with emphasis on the uncertainty of any one of them, can
appear relativistic, with indifference to any assertion of truth. This critique
grows from the conventional view of ideas in contest: uncertainty is at best a
way station for the truth and at worst a callow re sis tance to truth; not
accepting confident assertions of truth, from this perspective, means its
opposite, no truth at all. This also assumes that inquiry is a fight with a clear
winner. James tacitly harbored this conventional assumption in his youth
and so, while he looked for a winner, the contrasts remained burdens. But by
the end of his youth, he began to regard the contrasts and even the burdens
themselves as opportunities. He did not abandon the search for truth, but
came to regard it as robust and complex, with no easy winners.
James noticed that uncertainty emerged not only from the absence of
truth but also from its abundance, with each perspective offering a piece,
but only a piece, of the mysterious whole. As a psychologist, he then turned
to the importance of selective attention for sorting through the abundance;
as a phi los o pher, he noticed the key role of judgment in those choices; and
he affiliated with his fellow pragmatists in identifying the crucial role for
usefulness and practical consequences in those judgments. This apprecia-
tion of uncertainties, developing from his youthful impatience with the
claims of confident but competing perspectives, would contribute to his re-
liance on the will as the selective agent for making choices within the abun-
dance. By the time James was launching his career, uncertainties became a
way to winnow through diverse competing truth claims by directing atten-
tion to their useful parts for diff er ent purposes. James preferred to empha-
size not how each side fell short, but what each contributed to the elusive
whole; this would provide contexts not only for sympathetic listening across
the divides but also for development of synthetic alternatives.
Tracing theory to biographical development displays the depths of James’s
commitment to comprehending the relation of countless dual contrasts in his
education from his spiritual father to his scientific training. And he found
support for this relational thinking in the probabilistic and empirical think-
An Earnestly Inquiring State 271
ing of his discussion partners, in his hope for less reductive science and his
work with materialist research, in his experience of sectarian and scientific
medicine, in his attraction to ancient and modern worldviews, and with his
balancing of security and strug gle in both his personal life and his theoretical
commitments. With his eye trained from his youth on the relation of material
and immaterial dimensions, James continued to encounter variations on this
theme throughout his life work, in science and religion, body and mind, na-
ture and spirit, and objectivity and subjectivity. These contrasting positions
were at once vital choices during an often- troubled youth and the raw material
for his developing theories. In his own personal experiences and then in-
creasingly in his work, rather than choose sides, James looked for their rela-
tions and the lessons each could provide; and thus the prob lem of their
differences became opportunities for deeper understanding.
James’s awareness of relations among these contrasts reinforced his view
that nondualism involved not just reconciliation of material and immaterial
parts of experience but also their simultaneous existence before the need for
reconciliation. James observed the life of mind and spirit circulating within
nature, expressed in but not reduced to the material. Just as he objected to
the reduction of immaterial to material, so also he did not reduce the material
to the immaterial; instead, he perceived, they mingle in natu ral experience.
His outlooks have attracted many names. He called his position “panpsychic”
for his evaluation of mind within body; he respected pantheist identification
of divine and natu ral, even as his thinking shows more panentheistic traits
for his recognition of spiritual forces circulating within nature; and commen-
tators on his mature theories have supplied an array of variations on these
themes: John Wild pres ents James with thought and emotion enfleshed; Eu-
gene Fontinell identifies his “panactivism”; Marcus Ford detects “pansubjec-
tivism”; Eugene Taylor links his religious and psychical studies to his depth
psy chol ogy; William Barnard observes his view of mind “physically expressed”;
David Lamberth evaluates his field view of consciousness and finite picture
of the divine; and Bennett Ramsey refers to his “polypsychism. ”10 The ideas
that would lead to these terminologies were in formation in James’s early cu-
riosity about material and immaterial aspects of natu ral facts that he first
learned as a scientist and applied across many disciplines.
As James’s career evolved from his first two de cades of work in science
while scrutinizing its assumptions, he did not so much leave science as
carry forward his approach to science into other fields. His “Program of a
Future Science,” with less certainty and fewer materialist assumptions that
272 Young William James Thinking
he hoped for in 1864, would become his mature theories, consistently with
“face towards experience”— the whole rich, entangled, elusive range of ex-
periences. In 1909 he was still associating his philosophy with “the science
of the future.” He anticipates Thomas Kuhn’s identification of the sources
of scientific innovation with a vivid observation that every future science
has been “stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious excep-
tions to the science of the pres ent,” when at first authoritative figures dis-
miss these exceptions as “wild facts.” This approach to inquiry would serve
as James’s philosophic guide, both personally and in his writings, once
he had learned to manage his introspections without feeling troubled by
the uncertainties and indecision
that such reflection had generated in his
youth. In a sense—in his sense of a program for future science—he remained
a scientist, keen to examine natu ral experiences, while nominally join-
ing the guild of phi los o phers, whose ways of thinking he both craved and
distrusted. Following Martin Heidegger, Richard Rorty presented his prag-
matism as a way to think about the end of philosophy.11 James showed no
interest in attacking or ending philosophy; he just never fully entered the pro-
fessional field, even as his ideas were useful for his own direction and for
philosophical purposes.
Early and Late James
Despite James’s discomfort with philosophy, it remained central to his life,
especially for its ability to provide personal orientation. Early on, it was not
his training, but his aspiration, and even a burden, shadowing him through
scientific and medical training and through humanistic excursions; con-
stant questions meant too many choices and indecision about direction and
purpose. By the mid-1870s, however, he began to invert his dilemmas by
making the prob lem multiplicities and uncertainties about his looming re-
flectiveness themselves the agents for dealing with discouragement. The
very diversity of choices allowed him to comprehend the diverse parts of
the world, and with enough strength for the strug gle, he welcomed the lack
of guarantee itself as the ground for genuine choice and for the chance to
shape his future directions rather than just waiting and worrying about
fate’s stern hand. Accepting such uncertainties also gave him a “ bitter will-
ingness to do and suffer anything,” he declared in 1877, as if to stare down
the personal prob lems of his previous de cade. He began to conduct his life
based on a will to create order by constructing a path through the pluralism
rather than expecting purpose from prior certainty or from definite an-
An Earnestly Inquiring State 273
swers to his trou bles. When he turned away from expecting final or abso-
lute answers in science, religion, or any field, he did not dwell in critique of
these enterprises or lament the limits of human comprehension; instead,
he encouraged engagement in the pro cesses themselves, to promote active
uses of the insights we do have and to create still more. His youthful resolu-
tion to work toward goals without expecting results would become his ma-
ture readiness for “taking life [with a] longer reach of promise,” as he was
already hoping for at age twenty- eight.12
The directions James forged in his youth would become central to his ma-
jor works. The early thoughts suggest, to paraphrase his description of diff er-
ent postures of consciousness in The Princi ples, the “flights” of his mind in
exploration rather than his “perchings” on later settled positions. His early
development is particularly impor tant for understanding his thought since
his mature settled positions emphasized pro cess and growth. Comprehending
James’s career with attention to his early thoughts in relation to his mature
theories would not have surprised James himself, but it may clash with current
disciplinary perspectives. Evaluations of James have generally presented his
mature writing as his best work, with assumptions that the passage of years
allowed more refinement of theories in contrast with his simpler youthful ef-
forts. However, his early intellectual work also offers ways to understand his
commitments in primal form, to witness his framing of broad questions, and
to follow his passionate pursuit of questions with ideas unrehearsed and
without assuming disciplines. Francesca Bordogna portrays the mature
James “transgressing . . . bound aries” for “new configurations of knowledge”;
the speculations and commitments of his youth provided initial bridges
across the bound aries and the impetus for his later contributions. 13 Before he
sought the more authoritative perch of sound philosophical reputation, he
took flights of inquiry, fueled with excitement and worries about new experi-
ences, to reconnoiter territories that would become the objects of his philo-
sophical attention, although he of course did not know he would become the
James we know. From his focus on natu ral facts, he would orient toward the
puncturing of abstractions grown distant from lived experience; from his ex-
ploration of plural worldviews and methods, he would gravitate toward con-
ciliating differences; and from his mingling of material and immaterial aspects
of experience, he would lay the seeds for his work in scientific, religious, and
related spheres, with his ready turn from one to another, guided by nondualist
thinking and a focus on natu ral facts. The earlier writings are often brief, but
they provide succinct and fresh expressions of the messages of his life work.
274 Young William James Thinking
The thoughts of the young James constitute theory written from sheer
passion— with eagerness and fear— for the personal direction that philoso-
phy can provide, in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, literally
written as notes to himself. For both authors, the very authenticity of the
personal search gave the written production the ability to inspire readers.
James’s early thought, with less “logical etiquette” but more of “the vital
heat” of personal searching, had the “aboriginal sensible muchness” gener-
ated by deep questions, which his later theories would answer with more
elaboration and “conceptual order.” These mature refinements surely made
his ideas more systematic but also less connected to his original “first-
hand . . . experience,” as he would describe such “primordial” expressions
in general. 14 In addition to their freshness and authenticity, the earlier writ-
ings provide depth, not in some comparative sense of better quality, but
with the depth of roots that would give orienting direction to later develop-
ment. They suggest the genotype of his intellectual DNA, and during his
development, they provided the choices that would point him toward the
later and diverse phenotypes of his mature work. Once he had set his direction
with early commitment to natu ral experiences living beneath conceptual
abstractions, he established the order and clarity in his thought for offering
increasingly power ful and influential explanations in dialogue with profes-
sional and public concerns. There is surely more to add to the story of
James’s early career and to his ongoing theoretical formulations and ensu-
ing relations with other scientists, phi los o phers, religious thinkers, and still
more figures in his wide cultural circles; any one book is ever not quite com-
pared to the complexities of coverage and the mysteries of the living James
himself. With evidence combed from his own experiences, this book’s sto-
ries and explanations about the young James in development offer prole-
gomena to his better- known work. The branches of James’s corpus would
grow from their common roots, and his contributions to diverse fields con-
stitute elaborated chapters of his original commitments.
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From his first experiences through the end of his life, William James de-
lighted in “the face of nature” in both mind and body. Natu ral experiences,
the vast array of “diff er ent fragments of the world,” before any interpretive
abstractions, were the basis of his intellectual inquiries in psy chol ogy, phi-
losophy, religious studies, and social commentary. And he loved wild nature
itself, especially the Adirondacks wilderness of northern New York. At age
thirty- two, he first visited there, and in 1875, with three friends, he pur-
An Earnestly Inquiring State 275
chased a “Shanty” in Keene Valley, New York. Among the trees and moun-
tains near his retreat, he engaged in tangible versions of intellectual embrace
of uncertainty, “walking and scrambling in the woods,” often without any
set path. When he married Alice Gibbens in 1878, it was the natu ral place to
go for their honeymoon. He called the Adirondacks “an absolute sanctuary,”
where he could live with free spontaneity and get regenerated in mind and
body. 15
On July 9, 1898, James enjoyed a full day of hiking in the Adirondacks,
including to the top of Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York State.
That night, despite his fatigue, he remained in a “wakeful mood.” The
exhilarations of campfire and night scenes, mingling with almost mystical
reflections on family and friends and on the puzzling challenges of his phil-
osophical tasks, kept him sleepless. That did not stop him from taking on an
extra- long hike the next day, on trails with “the steepest sort of work.” By
the end of the day, James “staggered” back to camp, “more fatigued than I
had been after any walk.” The chest pains that followed were soon diag-
nosed as angina pectoris, a restriction of the blood flow to the heart from
aortic sclerosis, now serious after a few years of minor indications. Despite
the health worry, he still found the hike exhilarating, and it did not hold
him back from further exertions. Sure enough, when the next summer
brought another chance to explore in the Adirondacks, he got lost on a hik-
ing trail, grew so hungry he fainted a few times, and staggered back to his
camp site late that night thoroughly exhausted. “This did me no good,” he
reported with understatement, and now he had to take his health prob lem