by Paul J Croce
88–99, 106–10; and Paul Croce, “Beyond the Warfare of Science and Religion.”
19. Henry James, Se nior, Chris tian ity the Logic of Creation, 191; Spinoza, Ethics, part III, prop. 7–8; Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love and Wisdom,
para. 219; Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 131–32, 36; and Self Comes to Mind, 5;
Johnson, The Meaning of the Body; Shusterman, Body Consciousness; ERE, 74, 1; and
PRG, 14. The elder James endorsed Swedenborg’s belief that the “living conatus in
man . . . ha[s] no power except through forces of the body” ( Divine Love and Wisdom,
para. 210); also see Paul Croce, “The Incarnation Writ Large,” 285, and my conclu-
sion, note 10. William James still offers insights that can enrich the nondualist
persuasion: his mingling of material and immaterial realms includes a place for
religious views, especially through his pre sen ta tion of the subliminal doorway to
extranatural possibilities, while Johnson focuses on “transformative activity” of the
body- mind that is “entirely human in every re spect” (Johnson, Morality for Humans,
xii; also see 86); and James perceives the simultaneous existence of body and mind
prior to conceptual understanding of their separation and he would support Shuster-
man’s amplifications of his therapeutic views of habit formation into “practical ways
of deploying . . . heightened awareness” (Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 165).
20. For an overview of scholarship on James, showing the impact of widespread
admiration, see Paul Croce, “Reaching beyond Uncle William.” When forecasting
work “Beyond William James,” James Dittes notes that “James was the first to go
‘beyond William James’ ” (298). On James’s psy chol ogy of attention and the mind’s
selective disregard of parts of experience, see PPS, 273–74, 380–433. Bjork, William
James: The Center of His Vision, argues explic itly that James’s integration of fields is
beyond explanation based on a theme about his sheer personal genius. Levinson, The
Religious Investigations of William James, offers an epilogue in the form of an
Note to Page 21 283
annotated bibliography summarizing a few major interpretations of James’s ideas,
especially in religion. Eclipse, 234, n. 2, itemizes scholarship in biography and cultural
context, and for more recent work, see Joshua Miller, Demo cratic Temperament;
Coon, “ ‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’ ”; Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism”; Leary,
“James and the Art of Human Understanding”; Townsend, Manhood at Harvard;
Simon, Genuine Real ity; Menand, The Metaphysical Club; Jim Garrison et al., William James and Education; Machado, Brazil through the Eyes of William James; Talisse, A
Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy; Joan Richardson, A Natu ral History of Pragma-
tism; Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy; Bordogna, William James at the Bound aries;
Robert Richardson, William James; Sutton, “Re- writing the Laws of Health,”
Throntveit, William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic; Halliwell and
Rasmussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation, part I: “Intellectual
Contexts”; Alexander Livingston, Damn Great Empires! ; and Baker, William James,
Sciences of Mind, and Anti- Imperial Discourse. For works of theory, see the next note.
21. Orvell, The Real Thing, xx; “Ph.D. Octopus” (1903), ECR, 70. In addition to biographical and historical treatments of James (see previous note), there has been
even more work in rigorous analyses of James’s theoretical contributions, understood
with diff er ent emphases; see Eclipse, 233–34, n. 1. Several scholars pursue aspects of
James’s philosophizing on the relation of mind and body to suggest his concern, tacitly
or explic itly, with humanity’s spiritual and psychological depths, through his radical
empiricism, panpsychism, kinship to indigenous contexts, and anticipations of
subsequent philosophies including phenomenology, pro cess thinking, and somaesthet-
ics. See Linschoten, On the Way toward a Phenomenological Psy chol ogy; Eugene Taylor
and Wozniak, Pure Experience; Pratt, Native Pragmatism; Wilshire, Primal Roots;
Talisse and Hester, On James; Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James; Donald
Crosby, The Philosophy of William James; Johnson, The Meaning of the Body; and
Shusterman, Body Consciousness. However, there are other rich veins of scholarship
offering innovative interpretations of James for his formulation of theories in
philosophy and psy chol ogy with minimal attention to his religious and alternative
leanings, including TCJ; Thayer, Meaning and Action; Bird, William James; Gerald
Myers, William James; Sprigge, James and Bradley; Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An
Open Question; Gale, The Divided Self of William James; Cormier, The Truth Is What
Works; Cooper, The Unity of William James’s Thought; and many of the essays in Corti,
The Philosophy of William James; Donnelly, Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James;
and Ruth Anna Putnam, The Cambridge Companion to William James. For example,
in his chapter on “Religion,” Myers notes that James in The Va ri e ties depicts the
“anti- naturalistic . . . consciousness” of spiritual experience, but then Myers remains
puzzled that “he never explained how it connects with the naturalistic thrust of [his]
theory . . . of emotions” (467), without considering James’s intent to mingle the
material and immaterial dimensions of human experience; and these intentions on
James’s part also appear in his affiliations with panpsychism, but Myers pres ents his
comments on ele ments of mind circulating within the natu ral world as evidence of his
indecision or uncertainty (612–13). Meanwhile, religious studies scholars and some
phi los o phers are comfortable in nonempirical terrain and have offered rich evaluation
of James’s religious beliefs, philosophy of religion, and the evolution of his religious
thought, with contributions to panentheism, spirituality, and depth consciousness
284 Notes to Pages 22–26
with little attention to his education in science. See Capps and Jacobs, The Strug gle for
Life; Oliver, William James’s “Springs of Delight” ; Hamner, American Pragmatism; Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds; Sprigge, James and Bradley; Eugene Taylor, William James on Exceptional Mental States and William James on Consciousness; Charles
Taylor, Va ri e ties of Religion Today; Bridgers, Con temporary Va ri e ties of Religious Experience; Hunter Brown, William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion; Blum,
Ghost Hunters; Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience; Suckiel,
Heaven’s Champion; Proudfoot, William James and a Science of Religions; Carrette,
William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination; and essays in Halliwell and Rasmussen,
William James and the Transatlantic Conversation, part II: “Philosophy of Pluralism,”
especially David Lamberth, “A Pluralistic Universe a Century Later”; and Sami
Pihlström, “Jamesian Pragmatic Pluralism.” James in his own contexts worked across
fields or without them; see Paul Croce, “Presidential Address: The Non- disciplinary
William James.” Carrette, in William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination, is also
interested in evaluating James across disciplines for a depiction of his relational
thinking, in par tic u lar for understand
ing James’s place in con temporary religious
studies, especially “post- structuralist . . . discussions about religion today”; and while
Carrette calls for attention to James’s “personal papers” to understand the “slow
unfolding of [his] ideas,” and urges rooting James’s “metaphysical passion . . . in the
history of nineteenth- century science,” his focus is on the mature James after his
scientific education in the 1860s and 1870s (5, 30, 10, 26, 8).
22. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 18–20; Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 24–27; and James, “Reflex Action and Theism,” WB, 94; and see Paul Croce, “Development
Biography.”
23. PPS, 126; Sönderqvist, “Existential Proj ects and Existential Choices,”
Shortland and Yeo, Telling Lives in Science, 47, 65, 53, 66; the recent Works of William
James (WWJ), with excellent introductory essays and masterful editorial material,
but few texts (especially few private writings) before 1878, has reinforced the
emphasis on James’s mature theories and has tacitly supported the conventional
wisdom that his youth was a time of trou bles with little substantial thought.
24. Daniel Garber evaluates diff er ent methods for combining history (and
biography) and philosophy (and theory in general): phi los o phers generally use
history, if at all, to look for “philosophical illumination,” with contextual work as
steps that offer minimal “help in discovering philosophical truth,” and so the
historical contexts are ultimately “marginal” or even “expendable.” Although
historians put less emphasis on “ultimate truth,” their work illuminates how “smart
people could have regarded [their theories] as true.” These goals shape methods:
phi los o phers focus on mature published theories, regarding them as the theorists’
“best thoughts” in “rehearsed conversations,” while tacitly or overtly neglecting the
earlier contexts and texts written before or on the path toward these polished
versions of their thought. Garber maintains “we . . . can learn from both”; “Does
History Have a Future?,” in Hare, Doing Philosophy Historically, 15, 27, 31, 36, 33, 37,
35, 42; and see Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses.
25. [Diary 4]; “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges” (1876), EPY, 4; Bjork,
William James, 248; Robert Richardson, William James, 464; and Charles Taylor,
Va ri e ties of Religion Today, 59.
Notes to Pages 27–37 285
Chapter 1 • First Embrace of Science
Epigraph. James, review of Thomas Huxley, Lectures on the Ele ments of Comparative
Anatomy, in ECR, 202.
1. Habegger, The Father, 439; Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds, 289; Caroline Tappan to Henry Lee Higginson, May 7, 1863, Higginson, Letters, 192. Paul
Croce, “Calming the Screaming Ea gle,” especially 5–6, reviews evaluations of James
and the Civil War; and on Northern enlistment and the evolution of war aims toward
emancipation, see Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War; and McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, 308–38, 350–68, 505–60.
2. Edel, Henry James, 1:172, 171; Henry James, Se nior, “The Social Significance of Our Institutions,” 251, 248; and Henry James, Se nior, Lectures and Miscellanies, 69.
3. Henry James, Se nior, “The Social Significance of Our Institutions,” 252, 251.
4. [Notebook 3], 21; Habegger, The Father, 437; Act of the Confederate Congress, May 1, 1863, quoted in Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment, 7; Maher, Biography of Broken
Fortunes, 45, 49; Garth Wilkinson James, “Story of the War,” 16; and Anonymous,
“A Graphic Story,” 4.
5. Anonymous, “Garth Wilkinson James”; Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes, 53; William James, drawing of “Garth Wilkinson James’s Return to Charleston
Harbor,” 1865, William James papers; Henry James, Se nior, “Social Significance,”
234, 236; James, [Notebook 3], 22; and “Robert Gould Shaw” (1897), and “The Moral
Equivalent of War,” ERM, 72, 73, 162–73.
6. Henry James, Se nior, to Edmund Tweedy (his cousin), July 18 [1860], TCJ,
1:192; Henry James, Se nior, “Social Significance of Our Institutions,” 245.
7. Henry James, Se nior, to Edmund Tweedy, July 18 [1860], TCJ, 1:191; Review of
Lewes, 1875, ECR, 307; James to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ju nior, May 15, 1868; and to
Edgar Van Winkle, March 1, 1858, CWJ, 4:14.
8. James to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ju nior, May 15, 1868, CWJ, 4:302; Reuben,
The Making of the Modern University. These paragraphs also make use of Paul Croce,
“From History of Science to Intellectual History”; and Eclipse, 6–10, 83–148.
9. See, for example, Numbers, The Creationists; Dembski and Kushiner, Signs of Intelligence; Shermer, Why Darwin Matters; Paul Croce, “Creationism / Creation
Science”; Russell, Stoeger, and Coyne, Physics, Philosophy and Theology; and Sarna,
Understanding Genesis.
10. Dawkins, The God Delusion; Gray, Darwiniana; and Gould, Rock of Ages.
11. For typologies of the relations between science and religion, see Barbour,
Religion in an Age of Science; Haught, Science and Religion; Paul Croce, “The Incarnation Writ Large,” for discussion of the way these typologies operated in the nineteenth
century (especially 280–84); for numerous examples, see Eclipse, 106–8; and on the
per sis tent hope for unity of knowledge, see Reuben, The Making of the Modern
University.
12. “The Sentiment of Rationality,” EPH, 53; introduction to Literary Remains, ERM, 60–63; “Panpsychism,” MEN, 179; VRE, 404–5, 413–14; and PU, 16–17, 22–23,
70–72, 140–42. Also see Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West; Zweig, “Karl Christian
Friedrich Krause” (the romantic- era German who developed the term panenthe-
ism); Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age; and Peterson, “Whither
Panentheism?”
286 Notes to Pages 37–46
13. William to Henry James, Ju nior, April 13, [18]68, CWJ, 1:48; “Notes for The
Philosophy of Evolution” (1879–85), ML, 146–77; “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition
of Mind” (1878), EPH, 7–22; “Renan’s Dialogues” (1876), ECR, 329; Comte, Cours de
philosophie positive, and Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy; and Mill,
Auguste Comte and Positivism. Also see Harp, The Positivist Republic, especially
chaps. 1–2; Pickering, Auguste Comte; Michael Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert
Spencer; Frank Turner, “Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” in Between Science and
Religion; Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology; and Hollinger, Science, Jews,
and Secular Culture.
14. Clifford, c. 1868, quoted in Frederick Pollack, introduction to Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 9; Spencer, First Princi ples, 30, 33, 60 (part I, sects. 4, 5, 14); Boring, A History of Experimental Psy chol ogy, 236, 333, 665; Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 38–41; Roger Smith, Inhibition, 69, 123; Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion;
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed; and Lightman, Evolutionary Naturalism
in Victorian Britain.
15. “Religious Guarantee” (1875), MEN, 296; “Reflex Action and Theism” (1881,
1897), WB, 105; and ERE, 106, 262. On James and liberal religion, see Kittelstrom,
“Too Hidebound” and The Religion of Democracy.
16. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William By
rd; Brainerd, Life and Diary; Alcott, Journals, 6, 15, 19, 8; Emerson (c. 1834), Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 250; and Bordelon, foreword to Go Gator, x. Also see Habermas on “The Public
Sphere.”
17. William James to his family, September 16, 1861; December 25 [1861], CWJ,
4:43, 63–64; [Notebook 1], 1859, 61; Stephen, “Spirit- Rapping,” in Essays, 233, 232; and
WB, 33.
18. William James to Katharine Temple Emmet, [November 1861]; and to Alice
James, October 19, 1862, CWJ, 4:50, 79; and Eclipse, 134–38.
19. [Notebook 2], [1].
20. B. Osgood Peirce, “Biographical Memoir of Joseph Lovering,” 333; Hale,
“Joseph Lovering,” 442–43; and two anonymous encyclopedia entries, “Joseph
Lovering.”
21. James, [Notebook 3], 1863, [3]; Fletcher, “Francis Bacon’s Forms and the Logic
of Ramist Conversion”; Eclipse, 51, 76; Gladstone, Michael Faraday; and Agassi,
Faraday as a Natu ral Phi los o pher.
22. Charles Eliot, quoted in LWJ, 1:31–32; William James to Thomas Sergeant
Perry, December 23, 1861, CWJ, 4:61.
23. William James to his family, [November 10, 1861], CWJ, 4:52; Eliot, quoted in
LWJ, 1:32; and [Notebook 3], 61.
24. Eliot, quoted in TCJ, 1:207; James, review of Barnard, 1868, ECR, 222.
25. Eliot, quoted in TCJ, 1:207; [Notebook 2], 1; PPS, 273–78, 462; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 279; and Bordogna, William James at the Bound aries, 140–41.
26. [Notebook 2], 20; PRG, 30, 28–29, 32, 41; Eclipse, 177–97.
27. William James, [Notebook 2], 1862, 20; Paul Croce, “From History of Science
to Intellectual History”; and Eclipse, 6–10, 191–207. For examples evaluating the
Metaphysical Club’s attention to the compromise of religion and science, see Kuklick,
The Rise of American Philosophy, and Menand, The Metaphysical Club.
Notes to Pages 46–54 287
28. [Notebook 2], 20; William to Alice James, Nov[ember] 19, [18]67, CWJ, 4:228;
[Notes on Kant], n.d. (“prob ably 60’s or early 70’s” according to his son Henry James
III); Murphey, “Kant’s Children,” and The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy; and
Thayer, Meaning and Action, 33–55, 136–41, 349–52, 371–75.