William James at Harvard

What doctrines students take from their teachers are of little consequence provided they catch from them the living, philosophic attitude of mind, the independent, personal look at all the data of life, and the eagerness to harmonize them.

The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you is this: that it should help you to know a good man when you see him. William James

William James came to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1861. He never managed to obtain an A.B. degree, nor did he ever earn a Ph.D. Forty-six years after his arrival he resigned his chair in the philosophy department. During the intervening time James taught in four different fields, suffered from numerous physical ailments, and was plagued by a period of intense depression and despair. Wide oscillation in mood and great restlessness gave him a peculiar aura of unpredictability. He was forever darting off to Europe and voicing doubts of his capacity for sustained work.

Yet James did sit still long enough to accomplish something. Undeniably he belongs to the first rank of American philosophers. And his status in the behavioral sciences is, if anything, more exalted: most recent commentators regard him as the greatest psychologist in the history of this country. When the new building for the behavioral sciences was approved, the decision to commemorate James in its names was very nearly a foregone conclusion. Currently, moreover, the bookshops bear witness to a spirited revival of interest in his writings.

The Harvard to which James came in 1961 was a relatively mediocre educational institution. But affiliated with it, if by nothing more then geography, was an outstanding array of gifted and vigorous men. The home-grown Atlantic Monthly was then publishing the work of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Whittier, and Charles Eliot Norton. In science, to which James initially devoted his efforts, Asa Gray, Benjamin Peirce, and Louis Agassiz stood at the forefront. His earliest chemistry teacher, who--like Conant--later renounced a scientific career to become president of Harvard, found James "very interesting and agree able" but somewhat impulsive and of fickle academic tastes.

Golden Age

In retrospect, though, Charles W. Eliot concluded that James unsystematic excursions should have foretold the nature of his later devotion to philosophical studies. After less than three years in the scientific division of the College, James transferred to the Medical School--he obtained an M.D. degree in 1869. Like Henry Adams, and in sharp contrast to his fellow pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, James had not distinguished himself as a student. He had evidently browsed, listened to the luminaries, and talked a good deal.

The Harvard from which he retired in 1907 had taken its Great Leap Forward. Under President Eliot the University had clearly assumed the status of a national school; the celebrities, more often than in the Civil War era, actually taught courses. This period was especially a golden age for the philosophy department. At one time James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, George Herbert Palmer, and Hugo Munsterberg all held appointments. Darwin, Hegel, and Helmholtz had progressively gained influence through the intervening years. On the other hand, operationalism, behaviorism, and the Freud Bomb had not yet burst upon the American scene.

Outwardly, the fifty years between the Civil War and World War I were bountiful and serene in Cambridge. Capitalism worked without Keynes and destiny manifested itself in the right direction. How enviable it all seems! Indeed, perhaps it is envy that leads to the contemporary stereotype of James--James viewed, that is, as a shallowly optimistic, money-before-truth philosopher. One need only turn to The Varieties of Religious Experience, however, to recall that the 1800's were the century of Kierkegaard as well as of Herbert Spencer. It was at the age of 27 that James contracted the following classic case of "existential dread."

Morbid Phantasies

"While in a state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon we without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially, Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since."

Thus James was no stranger to morbid gloom--nor could he easily dispose of the problem of evil. For him evil was real and palpable, but he refused to accept it as inevitable. Surely much of his anguished grouping in the realm of religion was due to this moral sensitivity and reluctance to compromise. To say that James was not a stranger to gloom is, by no means, to place him among the eternal groaners. Long periods of vivacity and ebullience followed his occasional fits of depression.

One could claim in all fairness that James exhibited a manic-depressive tendency. But, as his biographer Ralph Barton Perry notes, a potentially dangerous proclivity became transformed into a benign trait in the total, integrated personality. The extreme variability of moods gave James a quick sympathy for both tough-minded physicists and tender-minded religionists, guilt-ridden prophets and buoyant natural men.

In the classroom James gained acclaim primarily for the qualities of his personality, rather than for demonstrations of fastidious scholarship. His extraordinary open-mindedness and verve were contagious. Characteristically he doubted his capacity as a teacher, and even wrote apologetically to one former student that he had taught "wretchedly."

In a subsequent memorial article the student said that, despite the lack of organization, the course was "one of the best I ever had because it brought me into contact with a fertile mind while doing its own thinking, and gave me the stimulus and inspiration of direct contact with a frank, outspoken, honest thinker and charming personality."

Profound Cultivation

Another student, Dickinson Miller, recalls a seminar in metaphysics with of intellectual experience, his profound cultivation in literature, in science and in art ..., his absolutely unfettered and untrammeled mind, ready to do sympathetic justice to the most unaccredited, audacious, or despised hypotheses, yet always keeping his own sense of proportion and the balance of evidence--merely to know these qualities, as we sat about the council-board, was to receive, so far as we were capable of absorbing it, in a heightened sense of the good old adjective, "liberal' education.... In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met on the day, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on the way to my class in trepidation!'"

James was not always bright and sparkling in class, and not every student found him stimulating. As R.B. Perry remarks, he would occasionally dismiss his class because he had forgotten his notes, or otherwise felt unequal to the occasion. A student adds: "Sometimes, Dr. James would put his hands to his head and say, 'I can't think to-day. We had better not go on with the class,' and he would dismiss us." Some students, especially those concentrating in the natural sciences, found him "loquacious, vague and obscure." Most people who shared his philosophical curiosity also recognized these weaknesses, but viewed them as inevitable concomitants of his greatness. To many, the uneven lecture style of James suggested a man "muddle-headed" philosophizing to the "simple-mindedness" of the neat, clean reductionists.

James possessed an extraordinary talent for ferreting out values and an equally prodigious capacity for gaining and maintaining a grasp upon them. It was this gift, as well as his flashes of brilliance, that made him memorable as a teacher. Yet the reluctance to sacrifice anything of worth for the sake of a total system produced contradictions and paradoxes.

Even though James gave primacy to pure, raw values, he did not disparage consistency as an ideal. On occasion critics have accused him of advocating belief in whatever seems most pleasant at a given moment. James considered this accusation an "impudent slander" involving a fundamental misunderstanding of pragmatism. He visualized himself, in fact, as pent in "between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him."

Harvard Pragmatism

When it is espoused by hustlers of the market place, pragmatism often sounds like a mixture of common sense and opportunism. Indeed, inasmuch as it advocates belief in propositions that provide satisfaction, it is the age-old philosophy of the common man. The opportunist who cares not a white either for ethics or selfconsistency might be termed a "soft" to get into trouble. The "hard" pragmatist seeks to avoid the eventual plight of his less scrupulous comrade by two tactics. First, he looks upon life as a constant quest for new and higher values. Secondly, he remains ever flexible, ever ready to adjust his ideas in order that the new values may be incorporated into a coherent world scheme.

Though James excelled in the hunt for values, he was less successful at attaining coherency. This failure caused him considerable anguish. It was primarily a personal trait against which he struggled and not a necessary consequence of his philosophic doctrine. One the contrary, James felt that the formal doctrine--over the long run--contained a theory of truth as rigorous as that of any positivist. But, in addition to the demand for rigor, it stresses man's freedom and ultimate moral responsibility. If it were not for his optimism, one might call James an existentialist. And the optimistic style did not come easily. With it James sought to encourage, to cure and rejuvenate--none other so much as himself.

(This is the first in a series of articles on William James, the psychologist and philosopher for whom the new behavioral sciences building will be named.