William James by Robert D. Richardson

1841-1910

We may be in a universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.


Henry James Senior had a stinging and life-long sense of evil. It formed the subject of some of his most vivid writing, and his sense of the reality of evil was communicated in one way or another to all of his children. “ Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens,’ he wrote in 1863, ‘begins to suspect this; begins to suspect that life is no farce, that it is not genteel comedy either; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths, the depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged .  .  . the natural inheritance of everyone capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of night chatters.’ Evil was for him and daily and practical matter. The one great evil in the universe was, he thought, ‘ the principle of selfhood, the principle of independence in man.’ He was told his youngest son Bob that ‘to seek our own private pleasure, this precisely is our concept of the devil.’

One can see a strong thread of Calvinism in Henry’s odyssey. It is perhaps most helpfully thought of as a personal; Calvinism, meaning no clergy, no churches, no liturgy, just the always inadequate individual living in a meaningless and vicious chaos called Nature. That was one side; the unknowable God was on the other side.

William’s mother Mary ran the household, which in 1850 consisted of a least thirteen people: the five children, herself, her husband, her sister Catharine – Aunt Kate- and five Irish servant girls between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. Her husband was against the women’s movement. He thought that a woman should serve as ‘man’s patient and un-repining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass.’  He had a utopian’s dislike of all institutions. He indulged in high-minded – one might say over-theorized- denunciations of marriage, yet he himself stayed comfortably, parasitically, sybaritically within a relationship from which, if he ever thought seriously of leaving, no trace of that thought has survived.

Mary tolerated it all. She was the emotional and workaday center of the family, the rock that made it all possible. And whatever her irrepressible husband wrote or said, he was, like the children – like the other children, one wishes to say – utterly dependent on her. Alice found in her ‘the essence of divine maternity, from which I was to learn great things, give all but ask nothing.’ In this way Mary made herself indispensable and, as Jean Strouse observed, put everybody permanently in her debt.

At the age of sixteen, his friend Tom Perry recalled, William obtained a copy of Schopenhouer’s  The World as Will and Idea and read ‘amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.’ It is perfectly  characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he looked on as equivalent to determinism, and twenty-five years later compared him to ‘a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is rather than lose his chance of barking at it.’

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The early months of 1870 mark the low point of William James early life. His back gave out in January on his twenty-eighth birthday, bringing with it what he called a ‘moral collapse’. James said his own case had ‘the merit of extreme simplicity’. In layman’s language, he called it an incident of ‘sudden fear’; it was probably what would now be called a panic attack. In the medical language of the time, James called it an ‘acute neurasthenic attack with phobia.’ Neurasthenia, also called nervous exhaustion or nervous prostration, was a new diagnosis in 1870. It was the specialty of Dr. George Beard, who wrote an article on it, published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal on April 29, 1869, well before his widely noticed book American Nervousness appeared in 1881.

Beard understood neurasthenia to be ‘a large family of functional nervous disorders that are increasingly frequent among the indoor classes of civilized countries, and that are especially frequent in the northern and eastern parts of the U.S.’ Beard thought neurasthenia to be most prevalent in ‘brain-working households,’ he thought it was transmittable, and considered it to be an essentially American disease. Since the main symptom was understood to be the depletion of a person’s nervous energy, which was then widely assumed to be finite, the generally prescribed treatment was rest and a proper diet. William James suffered from chronic neurasthenia for years- his fear episode was an example of the acute form of the disease – with the added problem that his eyes were affected (as his father’s had been after his experience), making it impossible for for years at a time to read for more than three or four hours a day.

[ James’ ‘failures of nerve’ were not only occasioned by the uniqueness of his upbringing but  also undoubtedly connected in a broader sociological sense to the whole generation that experienced the Civil War- the feelings of loss and futility that engendered- as well as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of American life during that period in American history. Perhaps no American in that period responded to ‘the crisis’ with greater creative urgency and broad-mindedness.]

James’s interest in people like Benjamin Paul Blood –figures from the intellectual underworld –exasperated his professional colleagues even as it moved them, sometimes, to admiration. James’s judgment, said one, was ‘corrupted by kindness.” George Santayana, first a student of James, then a colleague and a rival, and finally a eulogist, said James ‘kept  his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . he thought, with his usual modesty, that any of these might have something to teach  him . . . Thus,’ Santayana concluded, ‘William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.’

Twenty years after James died, a medium named Jane Revere Burke published a book she said had been written, though her, by William James. It was called Let us In; its main idea was that the world, our world, is crowded with the spirits of the dead, the ‘discarnate, ‘ who vastly out-numbered the incarnate – the living- and who are always pressing and pleading with us to allow them into our minds. We feel compelled to smile, of course, but there is at least a metaphorical truth here. James’s willingness to listen, his risking of ridicule, his spiritually democratic openness, still moves us to let them all in, just as he let into his life a parade –like the finale of a Fellini film – of healers, reformers, and visionaries. He let in Horace Fletcher, the diet guru and messiah of munching; Annie Payson Call, the currently invisible author of still useful books on therapeutic relaxation; Tom Davidson, the ebullient philosophy teacher and apostle of the working man; S. H. Hadley, whose conversion in a New York waterfront mission prefigures Bill Watson and Alcoholics Anonymous; Clifford Beers, who fashioned his own harrowing story of mental illness into a biting and effective call to reform; Elwood Worcester, the co-founder of the Emmanuel movement and popularizer of Gustav Fechner; Fechner himself, the German psychophysicist who, after a serious illness, woke to see the entire universe as alive; and Bill Bray, the working-class English evangelist whose vision has the reality of a summer morning and whose feet walked the road while his head swam in heaven.

William James let into his life all these and many, many more whose brash originality, looping idiosyncrasies, and private languages effectively shut out most communication with others. They are not mad, but they are not mainstream. They are strong, roiling back eddies along the edges of the great river of mind, but they are a much a part of the river as the main channel, and William James knew it.


Vivid, pointed, written on the spur of the moment, The Hidden Self has not been widely read. It begins with an extended plea to pay attention to ‘wild facts,’ irregular phenomena, strange experiences, facts that fit no stall or pigeonhole, events often labeled mystical. The opening demonstrates acute awareness of just whom he is writing for – in this case the educated lay person. ‘The great field for new discoveries,’ he begins, ‘is always the Unclassified Residuum.’ The essay is largely a presentation of Pierre Janet’s  ideas about ‘unconscious mental life. Alice James read it and it struck a deep chord, especially the part about abandoning parts of oneself, and in a long, thoughtful diary entry she described her own life as one lived on just that brink of abandonment. ‘Conceive,’ she wrote, ‘of never being without a sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given you must abandon it all, let all the dykes break and the flood sweep in.’ Henry too was affected by The Hidden Self, in 1906 he wrote a story called ‘The Jolly Corner’ in which his narrator encounters his own  hidden self. [As William said, in a phrase that became famous, he was always ‘a native of the James’ family and has no other country.’]


In this year James finally finished his seminal The Principles of Psychology. He put the final touches of the 2,970 page long manuscript at 2 AM on May 22, then went to bed. When he got up about ten in the morning, he felt, he said, a ‘great feeling of weariness’ come over him. He took down a volume of Tennyson; it was a habit to reach for poetry at low moments. He wrote to his wife; he would order the lawnmower tomorrow. Insuring the manuscript for a thousand dollars, James flung it into the mail to Holt with this spasm of self-excoriation: ‘No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1,000 pages. Had I ten years more, I could rewrite  it in 500, but as it stands it is this or nothing – a loathsome, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to but two  facts; 1^st that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2^nd that WJ is an incapable.’ Then he recovered himself enough to close, ‘Yours provided you hurry things up, Wm James.’

For some readers – and not just those interested in psychology – The Principles of Psychology is William James’ great book. For Jacques Barzun, who has written the finest general assessment to date of Principles, the book is ‘an American masterpiece which, quite like Moby Dick, ought to be read from beginning to end at least once by every person professing to be educated. It is a masterpiece in the classic and total sense- no need of a descriptive or limiting word before or after.’ George Santayana, writing in 1920 and taking the largest possible view, said that Principles was James’ best book because of its author’s ‘gift for evoking vividly the very life of the mind.’ Even for those who have concluded that The Varieties of Religious Experience or A Pluralistic Universe or Radical Empiricism is a greater individual achievement, The Principles of Psychology remains the acknowledged ramp from which all the later achievements took off.


By the end of 1891, fifteen months after publication, the book was in its third printing and a total of 1,800 copies had been distributed though congratulatory notes from friends did not always come without reservations. Tom Davidson wished that James had turned his attention more to Aristotle, as he himself had been doing. Shadworth Hodgson, who considered himself to be in James’s camp- the ‘experiential as distinguished from the empiricist’ – was fretful that James’s book had put a spoke into the chariot wheel of Hodgson’s own work.

Charles Peirce wrote a review for The Nation in which he called James ‘materialist to the core,’ and accused him of ‘tricks of language’, of ‘uncritical acceptance of data,’ and of making ‘a complete rupture with accepted methods of psychology and of science in general.’ One really expects better of a man who had himself such a gift for rupture, innovation, and linguistic razzle-dazzle. The anonymous reviewer for Science – possibly James M. Baldwin- found James’ book ‘too personal, unsystematic, etc.,’ too ‘unlike the ordinary textbook to be valuable for students.’


G. Stanley Hall, speaking for the hard-line experimental psychology, for the Wundtian, positivistic laboratory psychology, committed to psycho-physics, brass instruments, and precise measurements, said James lacked the experimental spirit, yearned for the old-fashioned idea of soul, and had written an impressionistic book. Hall was flatly unable to see that for modern psychology, as for French painting, impressionism was a breakthrough. ‘The author,’ Hall wrote, ‘is a veritable storm-bird, fascinated by problems most impossible of solution, and surest where specialists and experts in his field are most in doubt, and finding it very hard to get up interests in the most important matters, if settled and agreed to, even to state them well.’

James Sully, reviewing Principles for Mind, conceded James had done ‘the big thing,’ but had so many reservations that John Dewey could satirically sum up Sully’s verdict on Principles as ‘a good book, but too lively to make a corpse, and every scientific book ought to be a corpse.’ James’s work was received fairly well in Germany. His friends Stumpf, Mach, and Paulsen admired it, but Paulsen complained that he had seen articles making fun of the book. Even so, there were soon four separate requests to translate it into German.


The Principles of Psychology has endured, and even gained grounds, as a classic in its field. Writing in 1969, a group of distinguished psychologists, including E.G. Boring, author of the most influential  history of experimental psychology, collectively claimed that “James’s Principles is without question the most literate, most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligent book on psychology that has ever appeared in English or in any other language.’ Principles also had an impact, right from the start, on philosophy and was also recognized as a specifically literary achievement. James’s friend Josiah Royce saw clearly that James did not belong to the metaphysical, the associationist, or the neurological school; Royce called him a ‘naturalist who adopts moments of consciousness as the fundamental units of psychological description. Royce also noted the considerable implications for ethics of James’s ‘analysis of volition as an act of attention.’ James’s Principles jolted John Dewey out of his neo-Kantian slumber; it is reported that Dewey regarded the book –especially the chapters on conception. discrimination and comparison and reasoning – and not James’s later Pragmatism, as the best introduction to the pragmatic theory of knowledge.

Edmund Husserl, usually regarded as the originator of modern phenomenology, began intensive reading of Principles soon after it was published. The existential philosopher John Wild has noted this and has also noted that Gordon Allport (the modern psychologist best known for his work on personality) thought Principles, ‘if properly understood might have inaugurated a native phenomenological movement in  the U.S.  Wild’s 1969 book, The Radical Empiricism of William James, does for James what Stanley Cavell has done for Emerson and Thoreau and what George Kateb has done for Whitman. Wild hold up James as the founder (in this case, of phenomenology), a figure at the center – perhaps one should say at several centers- of modern thought. Wild and Allport here remind us why Alfred North Whitehead considered James one of ‘the four great thinkers whose services to civilized thought rest largely upon their achievements in philosophical assemblage.’

Santayana put his finger on what has so irritated some of James’s readers and pleased others. Whatever G. Stanley Hall and others like him wished to believe, James’s book showed, said Santayana, that there is no body of doctrines, held by all competent men, that can be set down in a book and called Psychology. Santayana described Principles as a ‘work of imagination’ and pointed specifically to James’s ‘lively style.’

This claim has been made repeatedly, if a little hesitantly, as if we are afraid that calling it literary will detract from its standing as science or knowledge or thought. But James’s work is literary in the broad, eighteenth-century meaning of the word, which included, along with poems, plays, and novels, Johnson’s journalism, Burke’s political speeches, and Gibbon’s history of Rome. James himself said that anything considered historically should be considered part of the humanities. It was Rebecca West who first observed, in 1916, that one of the James brothers grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy, and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction.


But the idea that James’s work has a real, substantial literary claim goes further back. Writing in 1907, William Allen Nielson, of thee Harvard English department, called William James’s literary style better than Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and he added, as a sort of note of local interest, ‘It has been one of the glories of the Harvard Department of Philosophy that it contained more men who write with distinction than any other department of the University.’

[The Principles of Psychology was and is interestingly written book. ‘Literature is news that stays news’, as Ezra Pound reminds us.] It is a partly un-weeded garden, but it is a garden, and James’s style is everywhere at work. He writes concretely, with attention to physical detail. His fondness for poetry shows up frequently. Whenever there is to be a test of memory or of attention, the content of the experiment is often lines of verse. He coined words and gave new life to old ones. He was the first to use ‘hegelism’, ‘time-line,’ and ‘pluralism.’ He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind; ‘the bitch-goddess of success,’ ‘stream of consciousness,’ ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion,’ ‘the moral equivalent of war,’ ‘healthy-minded,’ and ‘live option’. He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns his face to the reader, reaching outward though his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s.

‘We measure ourselves by many standards,’ he writes toward the end of the ninety-five – page chapter on will. ‘Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and makes us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth .  .  .He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.’

Lest we think this is an easy uplift, James circles back to consider how hard and how dark the challenge often is. Effort, for James, is linked to acceptance now, not to resistance or denial, but acceptance even of calamity and disaster. ‘The deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and the tightening of our heart-strings as we say, ‘Yes, I will even have it so!’ When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view,’ this is when effort becomes so difficult and so necessary. Even for the heroic mind, James says, ‘the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for- things.’ But the heroic mind, he insists, ‘can stand this universe .  .  . He can still find zest in it, not by ‘ostrich-like forgetfulness,’ but by a pure inward willingness to take the world with those deterrent objects there.’

James leans his whole weight on the argument; by consenting to take the world as it is, by accepting the risks and running with them, a person becomes, he says, ‘one of the maters and the lords of life.’ It is a phrase from Emerson. Such a person, James writes, ‘must be counted with henceforth; he forms part of human destiny. Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere to we care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks or sense of living on the perilous edge.’

This is where Principles peak ( though there are two more chapters to follow), as James connects attention to will, will to effort, and effort to our basic, irreducible consent or non-consent to the world we confront. Nowhere is the full literary-humanistic aspect of James’s work clearer than in his final paragraph on this personally urgent issue. “Thus not only or morality, but our religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. ‘Will you or won’t you have it so? is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most  practical, things .  .  .We answer,’ James goes on, ‘by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!’