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WILLIAM JAMES
IN
HIS SETTING

William James was one of the four or five “classic American philosophers.” He was also the only one whose fame has spread far beyond the borders of the American continent. His career spanned the first and perhaps most glorious phase of what has been called the golden age of American philosophy. During the period stretching from the end of the American Civil War to the First World War, philosophy in the United States came of age. Not only William James, but also Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and John Dewey graced the American scene. Somewhat younger than the others, Santayana and Dewey were so long-lived that they worked into the sixth decade of the twentieth century. More obviously, Peirce, Royce, and James were contemporaries, and their contemporaneity ran deeper than the coincidence of living in the same epoch. They were contemporaries engaged in a vibrant dialogue whose fertile power is evident in their profound, strong, and vivid philosophies. Affiliated with the universities on the eastern seaboard of the United States, these thinkers comprised a community of minds, a visionary company. Abreast of the major advances in literature, religion, science, technology, and social organization, they individually authored philosophies of startling originality, penetration, and comprehensiveness.

The development of American philosophy paralleled the material progress of the nation. In the decades following the end of the Civil War, the spread of American agriculture was matched by the rise of American industry. Acceleration in the production of wealth stemmed in large measure from the application of science to industry. The technological uses of science required trained intelligence which universities and other centers of learning and research were instituted to supply. Technology created wealth which, in turn, was employed to train intelligence to invent and use technology. The prevalence of scientific and technological procedures and attitudes undermined traditional adherence to the unexamined pieties of religion. Add to this the influence of the scientific theory of evolution on thought. When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, a new epoch in human culture dawned. In America Darwinism was represented in the writings of Herbert Spencer and his disciple, John Fiske. Henceforth serious thinkers regarded all things, including mind and human values, to be the products of natural processes.

Meanwhile, the growth of American cities, fed by immigrants, produced new social problems for moral reflection, and since in many cases the immigrants came from nations culturally more sophisticated than the United States, they carried with them concepts and values which compelled critical reflection and the subsequent reinterpretation and reconstruction of American beliefs. This complex of cause and circumstance was propitious for American thought. Occupying chairs available in the expanding universities, philosophers became professionals; no longer confined to espousal of a particular religious creed, they were free to traverse the entire intellectual landscape of man. Tied in with institutions that kept pace with the advance of civilization in America, philosophy came to terms with existence in the modern world.

Prior to the golden age American philosophy belonged to what George Santayana has caustically termed “the genteel tradition”¹ Taught by ministers of the various religious sects or popularized on the public forum by Emerson and other transcendentalists, philosophy was designed to edify. The exaltation of the student or listener to a domain of Truth and Beauty and Goodness higher than the mundane world in which he did his daily work may have marked an improvement over the moral exhortations and theological polemics by the Puritan preachers of earlier generations; it did at least furnish the conditions for aesthetic enjoyment and refinement. But, as George Herbert Mead has aptly pointed out, it fostered ways of thinking divorced from the actual conditions and the directive forces in American civilization.²

Since 1880 American philosophy has gradually moved out of the genteel tradition and into the main stream of American life. It has consequently displayed a diversity consonant with the pluralism of American society. To some extent this pluralism has been obscured by the inclination to interpret American thought by reference to a single movement—pragmatism. For pragmatism, above all, has seemed to capture the imagination of thinkers in the United States, and in the popular mind William James, more than any other thinker, has been associated with the pragmatist movement. Thus pragmatism has been widely acclaimed as America’s only indigenous philosophy, one sturdy enough to invade the capitals of old Europe, with William James its originator and most eloquent spokesman. However much this simple and popular interpretation of American thought may have encouraged the spread and persistence of James’s fame, it has militated not only against a correct picture of American intellectual history but also against a judicious assessment of James’s own ultimate contribution.

The pluralism of American thought has permeated even pragmatism, and no matter how uniform the movement may appear to the neophyte, the inimitable historian of ideas, A. O. Lovejoy, had discerned, at a time when pragmatism was but ten years old, a plurality so distinguishable that he spoke of “the thirteen pragmatisms.”³ Nor was James himself the kind of thinker whose thought could be labeled, defined, and filed away. As long as he lived, he was always seeking—new ideas, new experience, new values. What he sought fundamentally was a philosophy attuned to the richness and openness of human experience. He would close no doors to inquiry. Thus the final estimate of James’s thought, though appreciative of its pragmatic elements, must also acknowledge that he was more than a pragmatist—much more.

Just as suitable material conditions fostered the emergence and maturation of American philosophy, similarly it was a family of comfortable circumstances which produced the mind of William James. Civilization is an affair of the spirit, but it is rooted in matter. William James’s family was affluent in intellectual attainments as well as in material means. “A family of minds,”⁴ it has been called.

The founder of the family in the United States was William James’s grandfather—William James of Albany, New York. Emigrating from Ireland in 1789, the first William was a dynamic and successful business man who flourished for more than forty years on the American scene. Originally a merchant, he survived several business partners; he took part in the opening of the Erie Canal and the westward surge of American industry and agriculture along the Mohawk Valley; he invested in commerce, real estate, banking and public utilities from Canada to New York City. Meanwhile, he had fourteen children by three wives. One of the leading citizens of his city and state, he was also a pillar of the Presbyterian church. When he died in 1842, the year the second William and subject of this book was born, William of Albany had accumulated one of the great fortunes of his epoch, estimated at $3 million. The story of the first William’s life is the story of the making of a millionaire in the early days of the American republic, a story of initiative and energy blessed by good fortune and solidified by a dogmatic sense of self-righteousness, of Calvinist piety wedded to overbearing acquisitiveness.

Among the sons of William of Albany was Henry James, Sr., the father of the second William. Born in 1811, the fourth child of the third marriage, Henry James, Sr., exhibited from early age a curiousity about topics scientific and theological. As a boy of fourteen, he participated in an amateurish scientific experiment, flying hot-air balloons with lighted balls of tow. One of these balls accidentally flew through the window of a neighbor’s barn, and in an attempt to stamp out the fire Henry was so seriously burned that he had to undergo amputation of his leg above the knee. Despite this physical impairment he went on to live a full and robust life. He turned to problems of theology and ethics, and dissatisfied with hereditary Calvinism, he moved in directions which stirred his father’s wrath, to the extent that William of Albany tried, unsuccessfully, to cut him out of his will.

Henry James, Sr., was the leading American disciple of the religious mystic Emanuel Swedenborg; he was also a correspondent and intimate of Emerson, Carlyle, and other British and American transcendentalists. He was a sometime lecturer and the author of several books, none of which ever won a wide audience. His major concern was the relation between man and God, and his daring articulation of this concern represents a rebellion against the conventional religious and social thought in nineteenth century America. He mixed Swedenborgian theology with social ideas borrowed from Charles Fourier. Thus he conceived social democracy to be the precursor of the spiritual solidarity of the kingdom of God on earth. When Henry James, Sr., died in 1882, his niche in the history of American thought was assured.

Henry James, Sr., sired five children: William in 1842; Henry, Jr., in 1843; Garth Wilkinson in 1845; Robertson in 1846; and Alice in 1848. He provided his family with the best cultural advantages available. With numerous voyages to Europe, involving long sojourns in England and France, the James family was in fact cosmopolitan. The children had private tutors and also were enrolled in the best progressive schools; they soon attained a mastery of European languages and literatures. Shifting from one locale and regimen to another, their education lacked much by formal standards. But it sufficed to mould a type of character which bears the stamp neither of America nor of Europe exclusively, but of what might be called Atlantic man. And the cultural experiences were food enough for genius. No doubt, the genuine merits of the father have been obscured by the dazzling achievements of his progeny.

As if to demonstrate that genius has affinity with morbidity, there is the case of the fifth and last child, Alice James. Born in 1848, Alice grew up in a family circle almost entirely masculine, and she became a spinster. As an adolescent she suffered attacks of nerves, and in the late 1860’s she had a series of nervous breakdowns. For a while in 1878 she became a raving maniac with suicidal and homocidal impulses. At that time she even won parental approval to end her life if it pleased her, provided she would “do so in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends.”⁵ But the next year she recovered and befriended an energetic woman one year younger than herself—Katherine Peabody Loring. Her attachment to Katherine Loring was to last throughout the remainder of her life. She went abroad in 1884 mainly because she wanted to be with Katherine Loring when the latter traveled with her younger sister. In England she settled near her brother Henry, the novelist. In time her health began to fail, and the diagnosis indicated an organic cause—cancer of the breast. From 1889 until her death in March 1892 Alice James kept a diary, and when her pain was too great for her to write, she dictated the entries to her faithful companion, Katherine Loring. The Diary is a remarkable human document, recording how a woman, struck down by a lethal disease, savors life while wracked by pain and consciously facing death. At present the Diary continues to gain a widening audience of serious readers.

Alice James has probably won her measure of fame, merited as it may be, because of the greater fame of her brothers, William, the philosopher, and Henry, the novelist. Concerning these two men, outstanding in separate ways, a commonplace is that the philosopher wrote philosophy as though it were literature and the novelist novels as though they were philosophy. Whatever the truth of this commonplace, it is certainly true that each attended closely to the other’s work, took pride in the other’s achievements, lavished praise and encouragement, and tendered criticism, too. As William James took part in a professional dialogue with Royce and Peirce and exchanged ideas with the great and near-great throughout the Atlantic community, he also enjoyed a life-long exchange of literary and artistic views with his brother, Henry.

Henry James is the greatest literary figure to write in English during the late nineteenth and very early twentie ¿Ñ centuries. Born in New York in 1843, he died in England in 1916, a British subject. From 1873 onwards Henry lived in England and Europe, returning to America only a few times. To many critics he personified the American artist alienated from the American scene. Although some of his novels have American settings, e.g., Washington Square and the Bostonians, he devoted his artistry to interpreting a social reality which was neither provincially American nor provincially European. His country was the Atlantic community. The reason he gave for becoming a British subject is illuminating—namely, that Britain was engaged in the defense of European civilization in World War I while America remained neutral. Of course geography and social caste do not exhaust, if they even touch, the artistry of Henry James. His involuted style, with its mannered, cryptic grammar, suits the sophisticated psychologies and the subtle social intercalations he explored, and it supports a plurality of shifting perspectives on moral and aesthetic problems which assume universal significance. Although the fiction of Henry James is often construed to represent a decadent upper social stratum which passed away after the First World War, in his work as in his life he reached for that universality of culture which in our century is coming to fruition in the Atlantic community. It is indeed apt that what is critically deemed his greatest artistic masterpiece bears the title, The Ambassadors.

Henry James, the novelist, belongs to the world; but he belongs also to the family of genius, a family in which William, the philosopher, was the acknowledged giant. As token of his fealty Henry, within a year of William’s death, composed two works in order to furnish a record of the James family of their youth, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). In literary value these works belong beside his greatest novels. They utilize the literary technique of following the stream of consciousness, the psychology of which William, as shall be noted later, elaborated in his own scientific work; and the method is pressed farther than any other prominent novelist succeeded in doing before Proust and Joyce. That William was the cynosure of the family of genius is borne out in Henry’s memoirs—he was, indeed, the “small boy” to whom one of the titles refers.