In quoting from William James’s published writings I have followed the text of the Harvard edition of The Writings of William James (1975–1988). On occasion I have silently inserted or deleted a comma to conform to modern expectations. In quoting from his letters I have silently expanded ampersands to “and” and have normalized punctuation that would appear needlessly awkward now. Eccentricities that reveal the man himself have been left unretouched. Substantive departures from the published Correspondence—explanatory insertions mainly—are, of course, in square brackets.
In the notes, the Jameses are identified by their initials: WJ = William James; HJ = Henry James, the novelist; HJ Sr = Henry James Sr.; HJ III = William’s son Henry; MJ = Mary Robertson James; AJ = Alice James; AGJ = Alice Howe Gibbens James (Mrs. William James); RJ = Robertson (Bob) James; GWJ = Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) James.
Abbreviations of works by WJ and short titles of frequently cited books are listed on [>]
Prologue
1. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 64. See also Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
2. Thomas and Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake, 65.
3. Thomas and Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake, 67.
4. Thomas and Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake, 70.
5. Thomas and Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake, 76.
6. ”On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in EPs, 333.
9. R.W.B. Lewis and Linda Simon have both remarked on the earthquake as the equivalent of a war experience for James. See Lewis, 553, and WJ Rem, 341.
11. For Jeremy Bentham’s idea that “each is to count for one and none for more than one,” see Michael Pecter, “The Dangerous Philosopher,” The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 1999, 48.
12. PU, 70. Fechner’s idea of the infinitely full and variegated universe is in what has been called the tradition of liberal Platonism. See my article of that name in Symbiosis 1, no. 1, Apr. 1997.
14. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 194–95; PU, 9–10.
15. L. P. Jacks, “William James and His Letters,” Atlantic Monthly 128, Aug. 1921, 198.
16. For the general influence of WJ on Bill W. (William Griffith Wilson), one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, see Nan Robertson, Getting Better: Inside AA (New York: Morrow, 1988). The rebuilding project, the renovation, the sudden, dramatic, and significant change (in religious language, the conversion) to a better path begins, according to Wilson, with a feeling of hopelessness as regards a medical or psychological cure. Wilson’s letter to Carl Jung of Jan. 23, 1961, details the beginning of Wilson’s understanding of the process. A friend of Wilson’s, Rowland H., had gone to seek Jung’s help with his alcoholism. “First of all,” Wilson wrote Jung, “you frankly told him of his hopelessness so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our society has since been built.
“Coming from you,” Wilson continued, “one he so trusted and admired, the impact upon him was immense. When he asked you if there was any other hope, you told him there might be, provided he could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience, in short a genuine conversion.” Wilson then recounted how, after he heard of Rowland H’s case, he went to Dr. William Silkworth, who treated him just as Jung had treated Rowland H. Shortly after his own conversion, Wilson read James’s Varieties, and he told Jung, “This book gave me the realization that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth.” Wilson told Jung that AA “has made conversion experiences—nearly every variety reported by James—available on an almost wholesale basis.” For the full text of Wilson’s letter to Jung, see http://silkworth.net//aahistory. For Jung’s reply, identifying alcoholism as in some sense a spiritual problem, see C. G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniella Jaffe, trans. R.F.C. Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 383–85. For Wilson’s later saying “that James, though long in his grave, had been a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous,” see Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson (New York: AA World Services, 1984), 124.
17. R. B. Perry, introduction to WJ’s Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920), ix.
18. Quoted in Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 55–56.
22. ”On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in TT, 134–37.
23. Thomas and Watts, The San Francisco Earthquake, 77.
1. Art Is My Vocation
2. HJ Sr to Edmund Tweedy, July 24–30, 1860; Habegger, 411.
7. HJ Sr to ET, July 24–30, 1860; Habegger, 411.
11. NSB, 141; SBO, 253; NSB, 123; Perry, vol. 2, 679.
13. Quoted in Allen, 53; HJ Letters, vol. 1, 7.
14. WJ to K. Hillebrand, Aug. 10, 1883.
15. Perry, vol. 2, 285. The original French reads, “Pour moi je pense qu’il n’est pas dans l’universe d’intelligence supérieure a celle de l’homme.”
17. WJ Notebook 1. Most of these are translations of Hafiz, which WJ found in Emerson’s essay “Persian Poetry.”
18. AJ letter of Mar. 11, 1860, quoted in Perry, vol. 1,188.
20. Corr. 4:26; Corr. 4:31. William’s letter is in French; he calls Goethe’s Werther “un livre extraordinaire bien plus digne d’attention que je n’avais été porté à le croire.”
21. Corr. 4:30. The French original says, “L’eau est toute jaune & le courant est si si rapide que cela fait l’effet le plus penible de le voir remonter par les bateaux a vapeur tant ils vont lentement.”
2. Growing Up Zigzag
2. HJ Sr to Catharine Barber James, May 1, 1844, quoted in WJ Rem, 33.
3. HJ Sr, Society the Redeemed Form of Man (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), 43f. A particularly detailed and nuanced view of this crucial episode in the life of HJ Sr is in Feinstein, 68–75.
7. Allen, 29; SBO, 266. Cole’s painting is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
8. WJ to AJ, Nov. 19, 1867; NSB, 408; SBO, 159.
9. Captain Mayne Reid, The Scalp Hunters (New York: Hurst and Co., 1899), 5; WJ, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920), 426.
13. SBO, 343,345. For an analysis of William’s interest in Delacroix, see Feinstein, 110–12.
14. Lewis, 81; NSB, 122, 123; Corr. 4:17.
15. See Perry, vol. 2, 688, and Corr. 2:403 for the mescal story. The letter about alcohol was to Barrett Wendell, Dec. 1, 1904, and is in Corr. 10:508.
16. RJ to AJ, Feb. 24, 1898(?); Maher, 7; HJ Sr to Catharine Barber James, Oct. 15, 1857; Habegger, 393.
17. SBO, 301; WJ to Ed Van Winkle, May 26, 1858, Corr. 4:16.
3. Newport and the Jameses
3. It was William who, in a letter to his sister, described his brother Henry as “a native of the James family and has no other country.” Corr. 6:517.
4. Lewis, 11; Habegger, 25. A portrait of William of Albany (Old Billy) hangs in the faculty lounge at Union College.
5. Allen, 67; Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, vol. 2, ed. Rollo Ogden (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 118.
6. Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 328; Ellen Tucker Emerson to her cousin John Haven Emerson, July 12–23, 1862, in Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982), 291–92.
8. SBO, 86; Habegger, 305, 456.
9. New York Times, Sept. 2, 1910, 8; Habegger, 453; WJ Notebook 1.
11. See, especially, Maher, 7. WJ’s response to Kitty Temple is in Corr. 4:48.
12. WJ to AGJ, July 1889, Corr. 6:510.
4. The Father
1. Habegger, 307; WJ Notebook 1.
3. The story of HJ Sr’s accident comes from Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, told in Habegger, 69. James Maraniss told me José Donoso took the title of his book The Obscene Bird of Night from this passage.
5. HJ Sr, Substance and Shadow (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 75; Habegger, 349, 50.
6. For the elder Henry James and his brother the Reverend William James, see Habegger, 121. Charles Hodge of Princeton had been a student of Tholuck, who had been astu-dent of Neander, who was Schleiermacher’s most eminent disciple. For Hodge and Henry James at Princeton, see Habegger, 132–33.
8. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: Dutton, 1936), 260–61.
9. HJ Sr to Joseph Henry, July 9, 1843, quoted in Habegger, 204.
10. Habegger, 378; HJ Sr, The Secret of Swedenborg, quoted in Lewis, 57. HJ Sr’s vocabulary was often steamy. He called Whitman’s poetry “stercoraceous.” His phrases were hard to forgive and hard to forget. WJ remembered the phrase about the “invincibly squalid little corpus” all his life. See Corr. 12: 519.
11. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 191.
5. Newport and the Jameses, Continued
2. MJ to Emma Wilkinson, Nov. 29, 1846, quoted in Habegger, 249.
4. Diary of AJ, 221; Strouse, 26. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was dated Dec. 8, 1854. NSB, 177,178; Strouse, 24,5; letter of Jan. 23, 1874, in WJ Papers at Houghton.
5. MJ to HJ Sr, May 27, 1867, Houghton b Ms Am 1093.1 (59).
6. RJ to AGJ, Apr. 19, 1899; Maher, 7.
7. NSB, 33; The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, ed. E. G. Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 81.
8. RJ, unfinished autobiography, quoted in Maher, 3; Maher, 4; The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 86, quoted in Maher, 19.
9. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982), 287–88.
11. See the illustration and accompanying note in Strouse, between 80 and 81.
12. Sally Webster, William Morris Hunt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13; NSB, 83; Webster, 55; Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge (Boston, 1911, repr. Da Capo Press, 1971).
13. Howard Feinstein has called attention to the qualities of energy and violence in WJ’s early drawings. See Feinstein, 124f.
14. NSB, 91; Allen, 53; NSB, 85.
15. NSB, 17; Cortissoz, John La Farge, 117; New York Times, Sept. 2, 1910.
16. Allen, 70; Corr. 4:31; Allen, 71. By far the most detailed account of William and Henry James and the outbreak of the Civil War is Charles and Tess Hoffmann, “Henry James and the Civil War,” New England Quarterly 62, Dec. 1989, 529–52.
17. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, 291–92.
6. Harvard, 1861
1. Charles and Tess Hoffmann, “Henry James and the Civil War,” New England Quarterly 62, Dec. 1989, 535, 536; HJ Sr to (probably) Christopher Cranch, quoted in Habegger, 430.
4. HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 215,222; Morison 1, 308.
5. HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 1, 94.
6. T. B. Macaulay, “The London University,” in Selected Writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 29. Wolcott Gibbs, the chemist who brought European laboratory standards to Harvard, began teaching there in 1863.
7. Edward H. Cotton, The Life of Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1926), 58; C. W. Eliot and F. H. Storer, Manual of Inorganic Chemistry, and Eliot and Storer’s A Compendious Manual of Qualitative Analysis (Boston, 1868).
8. Corr. 4:43; Corr. 1:2. James’s notebook for his 1861–62 course in qualitative analysis is in the Houghton Library, *57M–137. It consists entirely of detailed, scrupulously recorded lab notes made while testing substances for one or another element.
9. See James’s rather sharp comments in The Principles of Psychology on the phosphorus craze of the time.
10. It is possible that the elegant fare James describes at the boarding house was a complete invention and that he was eating pork chops, potatoes, and no dessert every night. Corr. 4:42,53. WJ’s Account Book was begun on Sept. 4, 1861.
12. Charles S. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” The Monist 3, 1893, 176–200.
7. Science and the Civil War
1. Corr. 1:2; Louis Agassiz, Methods of Study in Natural History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), iii. “Germ” here means “source.”
2. Agassiz, Methods of Study, 9,102. Cuvier’s Tableau Élémentaire de l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux appeared in 1798.
4. Edward Waldo Emerson, “Jeffries Wyman,” in The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 21–22; Corr. 4:43.
6. For the dates and a few details of WJ’s visits to Wilky at Camp Meigs, see his Account Book.
7. See E. H. Hall, “Physics,” in Morison 2.
8. For WJ on William Grove, see Notebook 3. The Faraday quotation, in the same notebook, is from Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (1859), 450. The phrase about “matter is motion” is in ECR, 295, reprinted from The Nation 20, June 24, 1875.
9. HJ Sr to Dr. G. Wilkinson, Jan. 20, 1863.
10. For WJ’s comments on his work at this time, see Notebook 3. John Dewey’s comment is quoted in Matthiessen, 211.
11. For WJ’s notes on Müller and Farrar, see Notebook 3.
12. For Pell’s return, see Notebook 3. For the story about the party, see Corr. 8:3. Buckle’s views are from Henry T. Buckle, “Mill on Liberty,” in Essays (New York: Appleton, 1863), 3, 44, 71. For Balzac, see WJ’s Notebook 3, 24. For a shrewd assessment of James and positivism, see David A. Hollinger, “James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69–83.
13. For WJ on Edwards, see Notebook 3, 24–25. The passage beginning “Surely all this being true” is on page 28 of the notebook.
14. HJ’s review of Stoicism is in the North American Review 102, Apr. 1866, 599–606. William’s early comments on Stoicism are from Notebook 3, 35.
15. HJ Sr’s appearance at Holmes’s is told by RJ and quoted in Habegger, 440.
16. Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 288–89.
17. The three hundred dollars—about six thousand dollars in today’s money—needed to buy a substitute and thus get let out was, of course, a great deal of money for many working men; this was a good part of what fueled the draft riots that broke out in many northern cities in the summer of 1863. To compare the Civil War with World War I, it may be noted that in World War I more men went to war from Harvard, but fewer died: 11,319 Harvard men enlisted in the Great War; 375, or 3.3 percent, died or were killed. Morison 1,303.
18. RJ, “Three Years Service,” address in Concord, Mass., 1896, quoted in Maher, 59. RJ’s account of his participation in the Boston riots has been called into question. See Corr. 11:128n.
19. GWJ, “Story of the War,” Milwaukee Sentinel, Dec. 2, 1883,16; Maher, 46.
8. Comparative Anatomy and Medical School
4. WJ Notebook 3; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, chap. 14, paras. 4,14.
5. C. Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses (London: Longmans, Green, 1932), 71–72. For my account of HJ Sr’s theology, I am greatly indebted to Grattan’s excellent analysis.
6. HJ Sr’s respect for science and his eagerness to extend it to his own thinking led him to correspond with his old teacher Joseph Henry and to seek out Michael Faraday, who was, like HJ Sr, a Sandemanian. It might be argued for HJ Sr, as it has been argued for Emerson by Eric Wilson, that he was alert to the earliest stirrings of the idea that there is no such thing finally as “matter.” Everything is fields of force, or energy.
7. Smith would have known that avena can also mean “wild oats” The oatmeal motto was rejected for the heavier and rather ominous Judex condemnatur et nocens absolvitur (The judges are to be condemned and the innocent absolved). The definition of “association of ideas” is from Robert M. Young, “Association of Ideas,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P. Wiener et al.; on metaphysics, see Sydney Smith, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), 4 (the book prints lectures first given between 1804 and 1806); for Pyrro, see Smith, 7.
8. For habit, see Smith, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, 392 (quoting Lord Kames), 416–17,423; for stubborn realities, see Smith, 7.
9. Corr. 4:87. Henry’s story “A Tragedy of Error” was first published in the Continental Monthly, no. 5, Feb. 1864.
10. For entrance fees, see H. K. Beecher and M. D. Altschule, Medicine at Harvard: The First 300 Years (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1977), 87. For Holmes on medical visits, see HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 280. For medical student literacy, see Edward H. Cotton, The Life of Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1926), 127, 132.
11. HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 1,275; Morison 1,339.
12. Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada (New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910), 9; Feinstein was the first to suggest this explanation of James’s pursuit of a medical degree.
13. Corr. 4:88; for WJ’s notes on leeches, see his Notebook 26, “Bo.”
16. This notebook is called Index Rerum.
17. ECR, 207, 208. We know James wrote this because his handwritten manuscript survives among his papers.
9. The Gulls at the Mouth of the Amazon
1. A Journey in Brazil by Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 9. Henry Thoreau’s work “The Dispersion of Seeds,” as he called it, has been brilliantly edited from manuscript by Bradley Dean and published as Faith in a Seed (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). Other accounts of the Brazilian expedition are in Menand, 117–48 (this superb account was published separately as a pamphlet, William James in Brazil, by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000), and in Louise Hall Tharp, Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 160–90. There is also excellent material in Four Papers Presented in the Institute for Brazilian Studies (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1951).
4. James’s notes on Agassiz’s shipboard lectures are in the Brazilian Diary at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
7. Corr. 4:106,117. On forcing talent, he wrote home, “Ne forcons point notre talent” (“We cannot force our talent”), Corr. 4:107, a view that Feinstein rightly calls romantic and Ruskinian. It was enough for James now, but was a view he would come to repudiate. Corr. 4:108. The description of Agassiz’s house is by David Starr Jordan and Jessie K. Jordan in Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1926–1937).
10. Lucy Allen Paton, Life of Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 88; letter of Sept. 8, 1865. Howard Feinstein has noted how WJ’s drawings during this trip show a new, calmer mood; see Feinstein, 177. Corr. 4:126, 111.
12. ”Louis Agassiz,” in ECR, 49.
14. A Journey in Brazil, 201–2, 241–42.
16. Letter of Oct. 27,1865; Corr. 4:118, 128, 120, 102, 117.
17. One of James’s Amazon narratives is “A Month on the Solimoens,” in MEN, 354–57. This is a transcript of Houghton b Ms Am 1092.9 (4531). The other is in James’s Notebook 4, Brazilian Diary and Sketchbook, which James originally called Notebook Z.
18. ”Louis Agassiz,” in ECR, 47; Corr. 4:122.
19. Louis Agassiz to WJ, Dec. 8,1865, Houghton b Ms Am 1092 (11).
20. Corr. 4:316; Corr. 10:169.
10. Tea Squalls and a Life According to Nature
1. Trouble hung over many of these young women. Clover Hooper would marry Henry Adams in 1872, then commit suicide in 1885. Her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper married Ephraim Gurney; she suffered periodic mental breakdowns and died in 1887 at forty-nine. Clover’s cousin Mary Louisa Shaw (called Loulie) died young in 1874. Ellen Tappan was the daughter of Caroline Sturgis Tappan, with whom Emerson had once been smitten.
2. The Temple sisters were first cousins of William’s. Mary (Minnie), Katharine (Kitty), and Ellen (Ellie) were daughters of Henry James Sr.’s sister Catharine and Robert Emmet Temple. Catharine and Robert died in 1854, leaving six children, who were brought up by Edmund and Mary Tweedy in Newport and elsewhere. Ellie Van Buren was also a first cousin. Her mother, another sister of HJ Sr, was Ellen King James. She married Smith Thompson Van Buren. Ellie Van Buren married a physician, Stuyvesant Fish Morris; the couple lived till 1925.
3. Corr. 4:135. Ellen Washburn would die before 1877. Fanny Dixwell would marry Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Amelia Holmes’s letter to her son is of July 3, 1866, quoted in Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 181.
7. For the young Holmes, see Menand, especially chaps. 2 and 3. For Holmes at Harvard and for Holmes and Emerson, see Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill, 80–82, 85–90.
8. Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill, 155.
9. Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill, 60, 6.
10. Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill, 60, 142.
12. Corr. 4:157; Charles S. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” The Monist 3,1893,176–200; Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 68.
15. ”Inner sepulcher,” quoted in Strouse, 97; “turns of hysteria,” quoted in Strouse, 118; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 10.
16. Corr. 4:197. This is a letter to Ward of Sept. 1867, but it gives a detailed account of the onset of WJ’s back problems in Nov. 1866.
17. Corr. 4:197. The letter WJ requested was to Herman Grimm, an author and critic, a friend of Emerson’s, and the son of one of the famed brothers Grimm.
11. We Must Be Our Own Providence
4. Notes on Goethe, Houghton b Ms Am 1092.9 (4533).
5. Corr. 4:185–86 (my translation); Corr. 4:189.
6. Marilynne Robinson’s comment is in an essay called “Diminished Creatures,” in The Eleventh Draft, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 156. Corr. 4:194.
8. Habegger, 349,182,348–49. The image of the waiter is from “Mr. Dooley” (Finley Peter Dunne).
10. This is not entirely fair to Bob, who spent a good deal of time later on the study of Swedenborg in an effort to understand his father.
12. A Dead and Drifting Life
1. For “many social selves,” see PP, vol. 1,294; for WJ’s choice of words, see Corr. 4:228, 294,295,336; for his complaints, see Corr. 4:197, 243, 245.
3. See Claire Salomon-Bayet, “Bacteriology and Nobel Prize Selection, 1901–1920,” in Science, Technology, and Society in the Time of Alfred Nobel, ed. Carl Gustaf Bernhard, Elisabeth Crawford, and Per Sörborn (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982).
4. Physiologists in Berlin at this time included Heinrich du Bois-Raymond and Isidore Rosenthal. James may have heard both.
9. There is a kind of depression recognized by some in the medical profession that can be accompanied by a paradoxical but real gain in insight. It must be clear, of course, that this does not apply to severe clinical depression. This disclaimer is indeed the first sentence of Dr. Jonathan Zuess’s Wisdom of Depression (New York: Harmony Books, 1998). I have tried, in this narrative of James’s life, to avoid imposing modern diagnoses backward on him, but it may be helpful to note that his condition seems best described as “depressive mixed states, which while not specifically characterized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., are best regarded as intrusions of hypomanic symptoms or hyperthymic traits into a retarded major depressive episode... The clinical picture consists of irritability, pressure of speech against a background of retardation, extreme fatigue, guilty ruminations, free-floating anxiety, panic attacks, intractable insomnia, increased libido, histrionic appearance yet genuine expressions of depressive suffering and, in the extreme, suicidal obsessions and impulses” (Merck Manual, 17th ed., 1540).
10. ECR, 238. HJ Sr’s siblings mostly died young: Robert at twenty-four, Ellen at twenty-two, Ellen King at twenty-six, Jannet at twenty-eight, John Barber at forty, Edward at thirty-eight, Catharine at thirty-three.
12. WJ Diary 1, Apr. 13, 1868.
15. Corr. 4:306, 307. “Without ceasing” is a reference to Goethe’s personal motto, “Ohne hast aber ohne rast” (“Without haste but without rest”).
16. Goethe, Faust, part 1, ll. 1224–37.
19. WJ Diary 1, July 22, 1868.
20. Leon Edel’s idea that Henry and William had a long, antagonistic, Jacob-and-Esau relationship is based in part on Edel’s observation that Henry generally flourished when William was away, and got sick when he was near. There were many times, however—and the fall of 1868 is one of those times—when this was not the case.
22. Corr. 4:342. James apparently read Schultz’s Commentary in French; see Corr. 4:229.
13. Minnie Temple
2. Corr. 4:361. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, edited by W. T. Harris, was founded in 1867, nine years before the English journal Mind. For an overview of the JSP, see the excellent introduction by James A. Good to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1867–1893 (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Continuum, 2002), v-xx.
3. Introduction to Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 2 (1867–1871), ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), xxvii.
4. From a letter of Edward L. Youmans, reporting a visit with Clifford, in John Fisk’s Edward Livingston Youmans (New York: Appleton, 1894), 340, quoted in Writings of Charles S. Peirce.
5. O. W. Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881), 1.
8. NSB, 455. Minnie Temple’s letters to John Gray are in Houghton b Ms Am 1092.12 (4 folders). These are copies of the originals made by AGJ and her daughter, Peggy, before they sent the originals to Henry James, who used them for his portrait of Minnie in NSB, then destroyed the letters. For HJ’s editing of Minnie’s letters, see Alfred Habegger, “Henry James’s Rewriting of Minnie Temple’s Letters,” American Literature 58, no. 2, May 1986.
12. NSB, 463. Harry’s remark was apropos of Minnie’s having gone to hear Phillips Brooks and come away disappointed.
14. Minnie Temple to John Gray, Jan. 7, 1869, in Habegger, “Henry James’s Rewriting of Minnie Temple’s Letters,” 168.
15. Minnie Temple to John Gray, Jan. 27, 1869.
16. See the list of missing papers in Lyndall Gordon’s valuable Private Life of Henry James (New York: Norton, 1998), 446–47; Alfred Habegger, “New Light on William James and Minnie Temple,” New England Quarterly 60, 1987, 32–33.
19. D. F. Strauss, “Worte des Andenkens an Fr. Wilhelm Strauss,” in Kleine Schriften, 1866, trans. Charles Ritter in Essais d’Histoire Religieuse et Mélanges Littéraires de Strauss (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1872). WJ read this in the French of his old Genevan school chum (see Corr. 4:368). My translation.
21. ECR, 4. The “planchette” of the title is a Ouija piece, a small movable board supported by two casters and a vertical pencil. James’s fundamental view of psychic phenomena was at this time much like that of William Chambers, author of the protoevolutionist Vestiges of Creation. Chambers wrote in the late 1860s to Alfred Russel Wallace: “My idea is that the term ‘supernatural’ is a gross mistake. We have only to enlarge our conception of the natural and all will be right.” Quoted in Randal Keynes, Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002), 280.
14. William James, M.D.
2. Morison 1. Morison got the phrase about shirks and stragglers from Charles W. Eliot’s “The New Education,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1869, 220.
3. Eliot, “The New Education,” 207, 208.
4. Eliot, “The New Education,” 205, 204, 210.
5. See Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Bros., 1943), chap. 23.
6. HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 275. For the Harvard Medical School at this time, see also Edward H. Cotton, The Life of Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1926), and F. C. Shattuck and J. L. Bremer, “The Medical School,” in Morison 2.
7. There are several versions of James’s final exam at medical school. Mine is drawn from WJ’s letter to H. P. Bowditch of Aug. 12, 1869, in Corr. 4:383, and his letter to his son William Junior of June 18, 1903, in Corr. 10:271.
1. Corr. 4:384. Minnie’s comment is in her letter of July 29, 1869, to John Gray, Houghton b Ms Am 1092.12, folder 2.
6. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (New York: Penguin, 1974), 61.
7. Corr. 1:116, 104, 105, 106, 119. Colchicum is meadow saffron, which had been used to treat gout and rheumatism since the eighteenth century.
8. Habegger, 444, quoting HJ Sr, Substance and Shadow; C. Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses (London: Longmans, Green, 1932), 257; Habegger, 257; Grattan, 93.
10. In addition to The Secret of Swedenborg, this fall WJ was also reading his father’s Moralism and Christianity and his Lectures and Miscellanies.
11. Corr. 1:102. It is reassuring to be informed by Peirce, himself a ferociously intelligent thinker with a difficult writing style, that he found reading The Secret of Swedenborg “terribly difficult.” C. S. Peirce, “James’s Secret of Swedenborg,” North American Review 110, Apr. 1870, reprinted in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 2 (1867–1871), ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 437.
16. The End of Youth
1. Minnie’s letter to HJ of Nov. 7, 1869, refers to the first trip; WJ’s letter to HJ of Dec. 5, 1869, refers to Minnie’s second visit.
2. For the argument that Bob was engaged to Catharine Barber Van Buren, see Maher, 110.
3. Minnie Temple to Ellen Emmet, quoted in Alfred Habegger, “New Light on William James and Minnie Temple,” New England Quarterly 60, 1987, 34.
4. Minnie Temple to John Gray, quoted in Habegger, “New Light on William James and Minnie Temple,” 34, 42.
5. Lyndall Gordon, The Private Life of Henry James (New York: Norton, 1998), 321.
6. Charles Eliot Norton, “Nicholas’s Quatrains de Kheyam,” North American Review 109, Oct. 1869, 576. See Minnie Temple to John Gray of Jan. 25, 1870, Houghton b Ms Am 1092.12, folder 4.
9. AGJ to HJ, Mar. 14, 1914, quoted in Gordon, The Private Life of Henry James, 354.
10. Chloral, or chloral hydrate, is a colorless, bitter sleeping potion; it was later called a Mickey Finn.
11. Minnie Temple to John Gray, Jan. 25, 1870; NSB, 511, quoted in Habegger, “New Light on William James and Minnie Temple,” New England Quarterly 60, 1987.
14. WJ Diary 1, Mar. 22, 1870. Italics added.
15. The Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Professor of Religion at the University of Chicago, says of WJ’s use of this phrase in his apostrophe to Minnie, “I think he means that death is insignificant since ultimately we dissolve back into the world soul that is consubstantial with our individual souls.” E-mail to author, Mar. 1, 2000. See also the Chandogya Upanishad, in The Principal Upanishads, ed. S. Radhakrishnan (New York: Harper, 1953), 458.
17. Hitting Bottom
2. VRE, 134–35. WJ confessed that the anonymous experience reported in VRE was his own in a letter to his French translator, Frank Abauzit; see Corr. 10:619.
4. Letter to Frank Abauzit of June 1, 1904, Corr. 10:619, quoted in VRE, 447. An excellent extended treatment of this episode is in Feinstein, 241–50. Feinstein dates WJ’s vastation as the fall of 1872, but most biographers have concluded that it took place in the spring of 1870.
5. G. M. Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia), 5th ed. (New York: E. B. Treat, 1905), 23.
6. Beard argued that neurasthenia was not generally recognized because Americans are “so blind in our deference to Europe, so fearful are we of making our own independent, original observations of the maladies peculiar to this land.” Beard thought that neurasthenia could be the effect of “wasting fevers, exhausting wounds, parturition, protracted confinement, dyspepsia, phthisis, morbus Brightii [Bright’s disease] and so forth.” In other words, it could be caused by almost anything. He further thought neurasthenia could in turn cause “dyspepsia, headaches, paralysis, insomnia, anaesthesia, neuralgia, rheumatic gout, spermatorrhea in the male and menstrual irregularities in the female.” Neurasthenia was, said Beard, often mistaken for anemia, but the specific symptoms of neurasthenia included “cerebras-thenia [exhaustion of the brain], myelasthenia [exhaustion of the spinal cord], sick headache [migraine], physical hysteria, hay fever, cerebral irritation and morbid fear.” See G. M. Beard, “Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 3, no. 13, Apr. 29, 1869, 217, and Beard’s Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion, 23–24.
8. Corr. 4:342; Charles Renouvier, L’Année Philosophique, 1867, 13.
9. Renouvier, L’Année Philosophique, 101, 107.
10. WJ Diary 1, Apr. 30, 1870.
11. WJ Diary 1, Apr. 30, 1870. The last sentence of this diary entry was convincingly reconstructed by HJ III in The Letters of William James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 1, 148. In the manuscript diary, the page is torn just at this place, removing most of the letters that make up the words “be built.” Because WJ usually dotted his i’s, and no dot appears here, it is probable that the missing word is “on.”
12. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), 154.
13. Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis, 169.
1. WJ to HJ, May 7, 1870, Corr. 1:157, 158; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America, 1983), 726.
3. These Pomfret principles were printed and discussed by Ralph Barton Perry; see Perry, vol. 1, 301–2. Perry dated them in the summer of 1869. But the Jameses also spent the summer of 1870 at Pomfret, and the language of resistance in the principles is so closely connected with James’s thought and writing in the spring of 1870 (see, for example, Corr. 4:409) that I have redated the Pomfret sheets to summer 1870.
6. James’s echo of the Margaret Fuller line (“I accept the universe”) is no accident; he was reading the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in 1870. See WJ Diary 1.
8. HJ to Grace Norton, Sept. 26, 1870, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 243.
9. WJ to Tom Ward, Dec. 17, 1870.
10. WJ’s reading for 1870 and 1871 is listed in Diary 1.
11. Many of these titles appear in Diary 1 as part of the second 1870 list. The date is WJ’s mistake, as can be seen by the fact that the titles occur in his 1871 correspondence. The Griesinger title, for example, appears in the correspondence for April 1871.
13. Fielding H. Garrison, “Henry Bowditch,” in Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1926–1937).
19. The Metaphysical Club and Chauncey Wright
1. Quoted in Philip Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper, 1965, orig. 1949), v.
2. The questioner was a Miss Shattuck; the incident is reported in Edward H. Madden, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963). I am much indebted to this excellent book for my portrait of Wright.
3. In the still indispensable Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, Philip Wiener notes that it was Peirce who later talked and wrote about the Metaphysical Club and about the term “pragmatism.” Wiener was bothered that “none of the members, including James, and none of their friends ever recorded the name of the Club which looms so large in Peirce’s accounts of the genesis of Pragmatism” (22). After Wiener’s book appeared, the Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), shows Henry referring explicitly, twice, to the Metaphysical Club and to his brother’s part in it, once in a letter of Jan. 24, 1872, to Lizzie Boott, and once in a letter of Feb. 4, 1872, to Charles Eliot Norton. WJ also mentions the club by name in a letter of Feb. 1876 (Corr. 4:532). The best account of the club and its importance to American thought is Louis Menand’s splendid The Metaphysical Club.
4. J. B. Thayer, Letters of Chauncey Wright (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1878), 121, quoted in Madden, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism.
5. Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discussions (New York: H. Holt, 1877), xvii–xviii.
6. “Holmes-Cohen Correspondence,” ed. Felix S. Cohen, Journal of the History of Ideas 9, 1948, 35; letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Cohen, Sept. 14, 1923, quoted in Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 276.
7. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), 222.
8. Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discussions, xviii.
11. ECR, 153; quoted in Perry, vol. 2, 718.
12. Madden, Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism, citing The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Appleton, 1887), 343.
13. North American Review, Apr. 1873, 250.
14. ECR, 17; HJ quoted in Perry, vol. 1, 520f.
20. Charles Peirce
6. James attended Peirce’s Nov. 13, 1866, lecture.
7. Peirce’s “On a New List of Categories” was published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Arts and Sciences 7, 1868, 287–98.
8. From Peirce’s seventh Lowell Lecture of 1866, in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 1 (1857–1866), ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 457.
10. Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1 (1867–1893), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 129.
12. Charles S. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” The Monist 3, 1893, 176–200, collected in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 352–71.
13. Charles S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshone and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 157, para. 265.
14. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 121.
15. Max Fisch, “Was There a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?” in Studies in the Philosophy... , ed. E. C. Moore and R. S. Robin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), 11.
16. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 362; Nathan Houser, “James, William,” in Supplement to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 392.
18. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 132.
19. Quoted in Houser, “James, William.”
22. Brent, 33, quoting The Century Dictionary.
23. Quoted in Brent, 2; Corr. 8:17.
24. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), 378, quoted in Brent, 303.
26. J. H. Cotton, Royce on the Human Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 204–5, quoted in Compton, 72.
27. WJ put these lines on the front of Notebook 3.
21. Cambridge and Harvard, 1872
1. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865–1915 (New York: Dutton, 1940), 23.
3. HJ Letters, vol. 1, 243; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1000.
4. Robley Dunglison, A Dictionary of Medical Science, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1874).
5. F. C. Shattuck and J. L. Bremer, “The Medical School,” in Morison 2, 555.
22. Teaching
7. In his introduction to Taine’s book, Daniel Robinson says, “What is attempted in On Intelligence is the utter elimination of transcendentalism from psychology, the installation of naturalism and the scientific method as the reigning perspectives in matters of the mind.” Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (New York: Holt and Williams, 1871), xxi–xxii.
8. Preface to Taine, On Intelligence, vii; see Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (orig. Lowell Lectures, 1925) (New York: Free Press, 1967), 54–55.
9. Taine, On Intelligence, vii.
10. Taine, On Intelligence, ix, 37, 45.
11. Taine, On Intelligence, 226.
17. Corr. 4:430. The letter is in French. James wrote, “Je commence à renaître à la vie morale.”
22. Corr. 4:506; WJ to HJ, Feb. 13–14, 1873; Perry, vol. 1, 339.
23. To Europe and Back
9. Corr. 4:452, 458, 462, 455.
10. James would mention three physiological articles by Schiff in The Principles of Psychology; see PP, 85, 67.
13. Corr. 4:475–76, 465, 473; HJ Letters, vol. 1, 431.
15. Corr. 1:183, 190; Corr. 4:486.
24. Emerson, Mill, and Blood
2. SBO, 8; HJ, The American Scene (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 265.
3. Tom Perry to Van Wyck Brooks, Apr. 7, 1924, quoted in Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950), 9. Perry also noted that he was “brought up among Philistines who scoffed whenever the name Emerson was mentioned.”
4. WJ Notebook 3; Corr. 4:246.
6. James’s copy of Emerson’s Miscellanies is the Boston, 1868, edition. It is preserved in the Houghton Library, with James’s signature and his marking of this passage.
8. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), 214.
9. Emerson’s categories are enumerated in “Experience,” in his Essays, Second Series. Aristotle held that everything that could meaningfully be said about something would fall into one or more of these ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, where, when, position, having, acting on, affected by.
11. James refers to “Mill on Comte” in his Index Rerum. In James’s usage, this kind of notation can refer to either a book or a piece in a magazine.
12. James owned the third edition of Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy; the fourth appeared in 1872. James was discussing the book in his own work by 1875. See ECR, 289.
13. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), 50.
15. Editor’s note in Mill, Autobiography, 68.
16. Mill, Autobiography, 117, 118, 121.
17. Mill, Autobiography, 147–48.
18. James’s review is in ECR, 285–88.
26. Perry, vol. 2, 229, 234, 235.
27. George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (New York: Scribner, 1913), 205, quoted in Compton.
28. Jane Revere Burke, Let Us In (New York: Dutton, 1931). There are at least eight books claiming to have been written by James after his death. In addition to those listed in Skrupskelis, 197, see Susy Smith, Ghost Writers in the Sky (Vision Press, 1990), and Jane Roberts, After Life (Prentice Hall, n.d.). I am far from being a dogmatic skeptic, but it must be conceded that if these are authentic, James’s prose style declined after his death.
25. From Physiology to Physiological Psychology
4. Bainbridge Bunting, Harvard: An Architectural History (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1985), 87.
6. ECR, 115. For the exchange on self-reflection, see Corr. 1:247, 253.
8. ECR, 284. James repeats what he learned from Agassiz in his review of Physiology for Practical Use, ed. James Hinton.
9. ECR, 11; The Nation, Feb. 25, 1875.
11. B. Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1875), ix.
12. Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe, 146.
13. Hint: the thesis statement uses the letter a eight times, the letter cthree times, and so on.
15. ECR, 292; A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Gifford Lectures for 1927.
26. Days of Rapture and Heartbreak
1. I depart from the commonly repeated story that it was Henry Senior who identified William’s future wife on the authority of Henry James III, the eldest son of William and Alice, who wrote in his 1938 unpublished biography of his mother that it was Davidson who introduced them. R. B. Perry agrees. Alice’s son acknowledges that there is a different story, which he identifies as that published by Mrs. Glendower Evans (“William James and His Wife”), but he insists, “I am sure I have the matter right.” See HJ III, “Alice Howe Gibbens (Mrs. William James),” Ms Life of AGJ, 34. The description of the Radical Club is that of Allen, 215. Allen had access to Alice Gibbens’s diary, and I have followed his good account of Alice in several places.
2. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 11.
3. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 12.
4. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 15.
5. For the story of Dr. Gibbens, see Lewis, Appendix A, “The Strange Death of Daniel Gibbens.”
6. I owe the phrase “the wreck of arrival” to the Newfoundland novelist Wayne Johnston.
7. Whittier’s gift to Alice is known only from an advertisement in MacDonnell Rare Book Catalog, no. 20, 1997, item 120.
8. According to the Harvard University Library Charging Records, p. 92, James borrowed Les Fleurs du Mal and Petits Poèmes on Nov. 23, 1875.
9. The poem was a bit of light social satire, called “The Radical Club: A Poem,” by Katherine S. B. McDowell (Boston: Times Publishing, 1876). See Corr. 4:535.
11. The Jameses were great letter burners. Henry James tells of big fires at Lamb House; Henry III read the correspondence between his mother and father and then burned most of it, perhaps because it was so personal that William had once burst out in a letter, “No third eye should ever fall upon them [the letters].” In one letter to her mother, Alice assures her that she burns her mother’s letters after reading them, probably because they were full of frank and lively gossip. The burners didn’t get everything, however, and enough remains of Alice’s letters to give us a clear impression of her as a lively correspondent. There are, for example, eighteen letters from Alice to William, written in 1892 and 1893, printed and calendared in Corr. 7.
12. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 35.
14. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 35.
16. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 35.
20. Corr. 4:574–75. I follow the printed text of this fragmentary letter, but there is a good chance that the letter originally ended with “will condemn me... Devotedly” and the signature. Later, James turned the paper sideways and wrote “(20 hours later)...” and ended with the passage beginning “If so, Amen!”
22. WJ to Alice Howe Gibbens, Mar. 4, 1888, in Ms Life of AGJ, 43.
23. Alice Howe Gibbens to WJ, in Ms Life of AGJ, 44.
26. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 45.
27. The Trouble with Herbert Spencer
3. Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 210.
12. Hocking in Dictionary of American Biography.
15. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, no. 2, 1878, 1–18.
28. The Action of Consciousness
2. “Brute and Human Intellect,” in EPs, 4.
5. EPh, 52. The colleague was John Watson, a contemporary of James’s and not the twentieth-century behaviorist.
11. Quoted in R. V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 44.
16. Corr. 5:20, 22, 19. Dr. James Jackson Putnam was a lifelong friend and colleague of William James. He also corresponded with Freud and was the central figure in what has been identified as the American school of psychoanalysis by Nathan Hale. See James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis, ed. Nathan G. Hale Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
29. Spaces
5. The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964), 230.
10. Concerning this point, Louis Menand remarks, superbly, that “the real lesson of On the Origin of Species for James... was that natural selection has produced, in human beings, organisms gifted with the capacity to make choices incompatible with ‘the survival of the fittest... ’ It was our good luck that, somewhere along the way, we acquired minds. They released us from the prison of biology.” Menand, 146.
12. See J. E. Cabot, “Some Considerations on the Notion of Space,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12, July 1878, 225–36.
14. T. H. Huxley, Science Culture and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1881), 234–35, 239.
30. The Heart Wants Its Chance
1. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 1–3.
2. “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” can be a little difficult to find. It originally appeared in Princeton Review 10 (4th series), July 1882, which is the version I quote from. Later James took part of the essay and combined it with part of “The Sentiment of Rationality” and published it under the latter title. In effect, James used that title for two different essays; see EP, 249. A few other pages from “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” were used in PP, vol. 2, 3, 12–15.
3. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 58, 59.
4. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 64, 65.
5. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 65, 66.
6. Whitehead said, “In western literature there are four great thinkers, whose services to civilized thought rest upon their achievements in philosophical assemblage; though each of them made important contributions to the structure of philosophic system. These men are Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and William James” Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938), 3. For more on liberal Platonism, see R. D. Richardson, “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism: Shaftesbury, Schleiermacher, Emerson,” Symbiosis 1, no. 1, 1997, 1–20, and R. D. Richardson, “Schleiermacher and Transcendentalism,” in Transient and Permanent (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999). WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 68. Robert Baird has pointed out to me that Luther seems a poor fit in this list of men, as he deeply distrusted our “natural” faculties.
7. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 69.
8. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 70–71.
9. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 73, 74, 75. For parallels between James’s thought here and that of Kierkegaard, see Myers, 389, 487.
10. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 78, 79.
11. WJ, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” 86.
31. The Feeling of Effort
1. Corr. 1:319; see chap. 30, n. 2.
2. Corr. 5:70. J. J. Putnam to “Cousins,” Oct. 19, 1879, ms letter at Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, HMS c.4.1., folder “JJ Putnam to Frances Rollins Morse et al.”
3. Robert M. Young, “Association of Ideas,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 1, 112, 113, 115; PP, vol. 1, 553.
4. Corr. 5:91; J. K. Ochsner, Henry Hobson Richardson: Complete Architectural Works (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 277; Corr. 5:91.
8. Corr. 5:93, 95; Sydney Ahlstrom and Robert B. Mullin, The Scientific Theist: A Life of Francis Ellingwood Abbot (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1987), 154.
13. “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” in WB, 226; Corr. 5:140.
32. Hegel in Cambridge
1. Palmer’s comment on James and the Hegel seminar is in Perry, vol. 1, 713. Good general accounts of St. Louis Hegelianism include Flower and Murphey, and H. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism (New York: Haskell House, 1970, orig. 1948).
2. G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction to the Philosophy of History,” in Prose Writers of Germany, 2nd ed., ed. F. H. Hedge (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849), 452.
3. My account of both Brokmeyer and Harris draws heavily on Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism.
4. See Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Bros., 1943), chap. 23.
5. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism, 13; P. R. Anderson and M. H. Fisch, Philosophers in America from the Puritans to James (New York, 1939), 473, quoted in H. Schneider, History of American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 164.
6. In 1878 Hiram Jones, a Platonist from Jacksonville, Illinois, came with some friends from Quincy, Illinois, to visit Bronson Alcott. The Concord School of Philosophy was born out of this meeting. It opened the following summer, 1879, with fifty lectures crammed into five weeks. The previous spring Samuel Emery, who would be the director of the Concord School, moved to Boston from Quincy, and on July 15, 1879, the first session began with Harris as one of the five main lecturers. The second session was held in the summer of 1880, by which time Harris, too, had moved east.
Hegel played a substantial role in the school. Here is Howison’s account, delivered as part of a talk there on modern German thought, of Hegel’s absolute idealism. It is, says Howison, “the doctrine of a one and only Infinite Person manifesting his eternal consciousness in an incessant system of persons, the complete expression of whose conscious lives into definite and adequate particularity forms the sensible universe of experience and the world of moral order that is perpetually being inorbed therein.” G. H. Howison, “Present Aspects of Philosophy in Germany,” in Concord Lectures in Philosophy, collected and arranged by R. L. Bridgman (Cambridge: Moses King, 1883), 30.
7. Perry, vol. 1, 725–26. James also owned vols. 2–5 and 11–15 of the 1839–1844 Berlin edition of Hegel’s Werke. Volume 5 is the third volume of Wissenschaft der Logik.
14. WB, 221; Perry, vol. 1, 727.
16. Perry noted that while Henry Senior had attacked Hegel in, for example, his review of John Stirling’s Secret of Hegel, in North American Review 102, 1866, the philosophy of the elder James, “in its dialectic movement and in its assimilation of partial evil to total good, was not dissimilar to that of Hegel.” Perry, vol. 1, 725.
17. “Reflex Action and Theism,” in WB, 116.
18. “Reflex Action and Theism,” 113, 115, 116, 125.
19. “Reflex Action and Theism,” 127.
33. Death of a Mother
1. HJ Letters, vol. 2, Feb. 3, 1882, 376.
2. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and L. H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 229.
3. Letters from Mary Robertson James, Houghton b Ms Am 1093.1 (20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 59, 62).
4. HJ Letters, vol. 2, 376; The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, 229.
5. Edel, vol. 3, 21, 41, 28, 33.
34. Goodbye, My Sacred Old Father
1. Matthiessen, 448; John J. McAleer, in Days of Encounter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 663, places William at Emerson’s funeral.
4. Corr. 5:285. Stumpf was later involved in the investigation of the famous “Clever Hans,” a horse that seemed able to read minds but was shown to be detecting slight, even unintended physical cues from his trainer. Hans could “count” by striking his hoof, but he couldn’t get the number of strikes right if his trainer was out of his sight.
6. Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, English trans. T. J. McCormack (Leipzig, 1883, 4th ed. 1919).
7. M. Schlick, “Ernst Mach and the Fortunes of Positivism,” in Science and Anti-Science, ed. Gerald Holton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. Quoted in Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Passions (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 200.
13. Corr. 1:336, 337; Corr. 5:293, 294, 313, 314.
16. Corr. 1:340–41; Corr. 5:336.
17. Corr. 1:342. William’s last letter to his father is in Corr. 5:227–28.
35. The Wonderful Stream of Our Consciousness
1. AGJ to WJ, Dec. 22, 1882, quoted in Maher, 149, and see 82. A rule of thumb for estimating the value of money is to regard one 1900 dollar as worth twenty in 2000. A more precise equivalency can be worked out with the help of a historical price index, such as John J. McCusker’s in What Is That in Real Money? (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1992), and a current Statistical Abstract of the United States.
2. The fact that Harry was appointed executor, although William was the eldest, the father’s favorite, and the one who lived in the United States, suggests that the will was drawn up when William was too depressed to function effectively, at least in the eyes of his parents.
5. Corr. 1:355–56, 354, 349, 355.
10. The other members of the Scratch Eight were Frederick Pollard, a professor of law at London University; James Sully, a psychologist and philosopher; Frederick W. Maitland, a professor of law at Cambridge; and Carveth Read, who had written a book on logic. Corr. 5:362.
11. Corr. 5:390, 404, 408, 414–15.
36. Not a Simple Temperament
1. John J. Chapman, “William James,” in WJ Rem, 56; George Santayana, “William James,” in WJ Rem, 92; John E. Boodin, “William James as I Knew Him,” in WJ Rem, 210; James J. Putnam, “William James,” in WJ Rem, 14. The supper with absinthe was on the ship Parisien in Sept. 1882; Corr. 7:374.
2. WJ to AGJ, Dec. 5, 1882; Corr. 6:13; Corr. after Apr. 19, 1875.
4. The telegram to Alice was sent on Aug. 9, 1889.
5. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 37, 41, 37–38.
6. Santayana, “William James,” 92.
7. Perry, vol. 1, 476; PP, 398; Santayana, “William James,” 105; Chapman, “William James,” 54.
8. Letter to Grace Norton, Dec. 28, 1892.
9. Quoted in Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America (New York: Harper and Bros., 1932), 331–36.
10. A similar temperament would lead Italo Calvino to project six lectures, to be given at Harvard, on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Calvino died before he could finish the last one.
11. Huxley’s comment is quoted in Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (London: Little, Brown, 1997), 33; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 165.
37. What Is an Emotion?
1. The James family apartment was at 19 Rue d’Angoulême (now Rue de la Boétie); Corr. 5:429, 420; see “The Sense of Dizziness in Deaf-Mutes,” American Journal of Otology 4, 1882, 239–54, reprinted in EPs.
4. Howison delivered “Hume’s Aim and Method” to the Concord School of Philosophy on July 19, 1883; Corr. 5:451, 453.
5. Corr. 5:477; HJ to S. Whitman, Aug. 21, 1883; Corr. 5:476, ed. note; Phantasms of the Living did not appear until 1886.
8. C.V. Calhoun and R. C. Solomon, What Is an Emotion? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 126.
9. Oliver Sacks has emphasized, apropos the history every physician takes down, the importance of narrative to medicine. See also Melanie Thernstrom, “The Writing Cure,” New York Times Magazine, Apr. 18, 2004.
38. The Literary Remains of Henry James Sr.
1. WJ to Carl Stumpf, Jan. 9, 1884; see Ernst Mach, Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen ( Contributions to the Analysis of Feelings); Corr. 5:568; Perry, vol. 1, 588; the French translation of “Some Omissions” is in Revue Philosophique, no. 17, Feb. 1884, 235–37.
2. See WJ Rem, 187, on this curious choice of a name.
3. For “balance of burdens,” see Maher, 169.
4. See Norman Green’s Apr. 28, 1998, interview with Singer at Salon.com.
9. The Literary Remains of Henry James, ed. and with an introduction by William James (Boston: Osgood, 1885), 9.
10. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 16.
11. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 10, 12, 15.
12. HJ Sr, Substance and Shadow (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863) 75; The Literary Remains of Henry James, 49–50.
13. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 17.
14. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 19.
15. There are several brilliant and distinguished treatments of HJ Sr; the most useful and detailed is Alfred Habegger, The Father. Other notable assessments include Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses (1932); Austin Warren, The Elder Henry James (1934); and F. H. Young, The Philosophy of Henry James Sr. (1951).
16. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 25.
17. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 72.
18. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 118. Note how the phrasing of this passage echoes the description of the green-skinned idiot in VRE; see chap. 17.
19. The Literary Remains of Henry James, 119.
21. There is also a letter from WJ to C. A. Strong of Sept. 17, 1907, saying this essay was the fons et origo of all his pragmatism as a theory of truth. See MT, 205.
22. MT, 15, 25, 29–30. Pound’s “Canto 2” begins, “Hang it all, Robert Browning / There can be but one “Sordello” / But Sordello and my Sordello? / Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.”
39. The Death of Herman
1. Leon Edel notes that Harry twice used the word “abandoned” in letters to William’s wife at the time. See Edel, vol. 3, 46.
3. This is WJ’s summary of Royce’s argument; see ECR, 386.
5. See R. V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). The social consequences of Royce’s new allegiance to the Absolute are striking. “We thus must see ourselves as little members of a vast body, as little fragments of a mighty temple, as single workers whose work has importance only by reason of its relations to the whole” Quoted in Hine, 125.
8. Of this amount, $128.50 was Harry’s share of some Syracuse rental income from buildings Old Billy James had acquired; the rest was a loan to be repaid “whenever you are able.” Corr. 2:19.
2. Eliza was a frequent visitor to the house on Beacon Hill, where the maid was a sister of Mrs. Piper’s maid. See Alta L. Piper, The Life and Works of Mrs. Piper (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), 21.
6. Piper, The Life and Works of Mrs. Piper, 12.
7. Piper, The Life and Works of Mrs. Piper, 13.
10. EPR, 131. James’s phrase about white crows became so well known that R. Lawrence Moore could title his 1977 book In Search of White Crows (New York: Oxford University Press).
12. Introduction to The Writings of Andrew Jackson Davis, ed. J. L. Moore (Boston: Christopher House, 1930), 13. For a serious treatment of Davis and spiritualism, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and Catherine L. Albanese, “The Subtle Energies of Spirit,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, June 1999, 305–25.
13. Free Religious Association, Freedom and Fellowship in Religion (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875), 223–64.
14. Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Robert Bruce Mullin, The Scientific Theist: A Life of Francis Ellingwood Abbot (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1987), 130.
15. Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Scientific Theism, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1888), 218.
18. See “Report of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1, July 1886, 102–6, reprinted in EPR, 14–18.
21. Corr. 2:34, 44. The fitness equipment William sent Harry is in an illustrated brochure filed with the letter, in Houghton b Ms Am 1092.9 (2628).
41. My Only Absolutely Satisfying Companion
2. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 66. This scrap is all we know about an incident that sounds a little like Henry’s great story “The Turn of the Screw.”
3. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 66–67.
4. This list, which sheds light on those interests of William James to which his wife wished to direct the attention of posterity, also includes several other works on hypnosis: “George M. Beard, M.D., Study of muscle-reading Transc. state in Inebriety, Archives of Electrology and Neurology no 1, May 1875, II, May 1875, neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) as a cause of inebriety; Dr. Christian Baumler [Der Sogenaunte] animalische Magnetismus [oder Hypnotismus, Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1881]; [Albert P.] Schrenck-Notzing, Ueber Spaltung der Personlichkeit [Vienna: Holder, 1896]; G. H. Schneider Die Psychologische [ Ursache der Hypnotischen Erscheinungen, Leipzig: A. Abel, 1880]; Hans Kaan (2 copies) Ueber Beziehungen zwischen Hypnotismus und cerebraler Blutfullung [Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1885]; Dr Rudolf Heidenhain Der sogenante thierische Magnetismus...and a review of it in the Nation from Breslau by W. J. [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1880; no review by WJ is included in ECR]; [Emile] Boirac L’hypothese du magnetism Animal [Paris: Librairie de la Nouvelle Revue, 1895]; Dr’S[amson] Landmann, Die mehrkeit Geistiger Personlichkeiten in einem individuum [Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1894].” There are English editions with varying titles. For the entire list, see b Ms Am 1092.9 (4581).
6. MacDonnell Rare Book Catalog, no. 20, 1997, item 120.
7. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 40.
10. Corr. 11:50; Corr. 8:573; Corr. 7:545; Corr. 9:281; WJ to HJ III, July 20, 1904; Corr. 10:577.
19. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 84.
42. Hypnotism and Summers at Chocorua
2. WJ mentions Braid in his 1868 review of Liébeault, in his 1886 report of the Committee on Hypnotism (EPs, 190), and in his 1889 report on automatic writing (EPR, 45). J. K. Mitchell, father of S. Weir Mitchell, took the same view. James knew J. K. Mitchell’s work because Mitchell’s son sent him his father’s work; see Corr. 6:91–92.
7. Corr. 2:51; Corr. 6:124, 156, 168.
9. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 18. James bought the Savage Farm from Adam Leppere in the early fall of 1886. My information on early days at Chocorua comes from Lydia and Alan Smith, Chocorua Recalled (n.p., 1996); F. G. Balch, Reminiscences; Frank Bolles, At the North of Bearcamp Water (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1893); and Marjorie G. Harkness, The Tamworth Narrative (Freeport, Me.: Bond Wheelwright Co., 1958).
10. Robertson typeset the first half of the chapter on the self, then held it. Eventually it became chap. 10 of PP.
12. “Edmund Gurney’s Death,” in ECR, 26.
14. Review of Phantasms of the Living, in EPR, 27.
15. John Dewey, Psychology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 174, 212.
43. Instinct and Will
1. Corr. 6:200. The Dressers, Annetta and Julius and their son, Horatio, were ardent defenders of Quimby. Whereas Mary Baker Eddy added a strong Christian strain to Quimby’s ideas and then denied his influence on her, the Dressers told Quimby’s side of the story and stuck to it for decades. WJ never showed any interest in Christian Science, though one of the books he was supposed to have dictated from “the other side,” Jane Revere Burke’s Messages on Healing (n.p., 1936), has him saying, “I told you before that Mary Baker Eddy had become a great friend of mine” (15). On this side, however, James was clearly in the camp of the Dressers. See Annetta G. Dresser, The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, 3rd ed. (Boston: C .H. Ellis, 1899, orig. 1895); Julius A. Dresser, The True History of Mental Science (Boston: A. Mudge and Son, 1887); and Horatio W. Dresser, ed., The Quimby Manuscripts (New York: Crowell, 1921), the first edition of which has letters between Quimby and Mrs. Eddy, which are missing in later editions.
2. Corr. 2:59, 63; Corr. 6:204.
3. ECR, 400. In his review of Ladd, James somewhat confusingly used the word “spiritualistic” to mean idealistic.
4. In a letter of Apr. 8, 1887, to Alice, William gave a list of names he thought suitable, with the clear inference that the final choice was not his. In HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, her son reports that Alice thought baby Herman’s name was a “hair shirt” for him and that she longed to have it off him.
5. Corr. 6:213. William attributes this description to Alice. Whether it was his or hers, it says as much about the parental expectations of the times as it does about the baby itself. Still, times were changing. Alice had the services of a female doctor, Emma Call, for her lying-in.
7. PP, 1004, 1010, 1023, 1024, 1035.
8. PP, 1040. Young Harry’s and young Willy’s ages do not fit for 1887. James may have been remembering an incident, or, given the fact that he was indeed introducing the boys to Homer this year, he may have changed the ages for protection—or conceivably the story is about some other children.
12. Corr. 6:238–39, 265; Corr. 2:69.
16. PBC, chap. 26 and p. 372; EPs, 231.
21. Call is a neglected figure. Her Power Through Repose remains an appealing, unpretentious self-help book.
44. Santayana at Harvard
3. WJ Rem, 116; Corr. 2:87, 89.
4. Corr. 6:395, 420; Corr. 6:425.
5. Flower and Murphey, vol. 2, 774.
6. See, for example, Santayana 1 and 2, as well as his “Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), repr. in Winds of Doctrine (1913), and “Three American Philosophers,” American Scholar 22, Summer 1953, 281–84.
7. G. W. Howgate, George Santayana (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961, orig. 1938), 3.
9. See George P. Adams and Wm. P. Montague, eds., Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 251, quoted in Howgate, George Santayana; George Santayana, “William James,” in WJ Rem, 93.
10. Corr. 6:483, 468; Santayana 2, 390, 234, 238, 239.
45. The Psychology of Belief
10. One sees how welcome Aunt Kate’s legacy must have been when one notes that William had borrowed $2,000 from his mother-in-law, $1,000 from a sister-in-law, $1,688 from his banker (an advance, no doubt, on his Syracuse rents from the buildings that were part of Old Billy’s empire), and $4,000 from a savings bank.
46. Reunion with Alice: The Hidden Self
1. Corr. 6:487, 490, 496, 499.
4. Corr. 2:108, 109; Diary of AJ, 51; Corr. 6:510.
6. Corr. 6:510, 511; Diary of AJ, 51.
10. R. V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 140.
11. “The Hidden Self” could not be incorporated into The Principles of Psychology as written, so James broke it up, with a few pages going into the Principles and the opening used in “What Psychic Research Has Accomplished,” in WB. The balance was only rarely reprinted in its entirety, until the 1983 EPs.
12. EPs, 247. Dissociative personality disorder is still in the medical books. The description in the 1999 Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, ed. M. H. Beers and R. Berkow (Whitehouse Station, N.J.: Merck Research Laboratories), 1522–24, uses terms quite close to some used by Janet.
14. EPs, 262, 264; Merck Manual, 1522.
18. WJ to HJ, Mar. 10, 1887; WJ to Renouvier, Aug. 5, 1883; WJ to Kitty Prince, Aug. 11, 1885; WJ to AJ, Oct. 19, 1885; Corr. 7:53.
19. WJ to Sarah Whitman, July 24, 1890.
47. Response to Principles and the Moral Philosopher
1. Corr. 7:45; Corr. 2:144, 146, 142, 148.
3. Barzun, 35; see the chapter called “The Masterpiece.”
4. Santayana’s assessment is in his “Character and Opinion in the United States,” in WJ Rem, 93.
6. Principles sold for six dollars a copy. James’s royalty was 18 percent, or 33% cents per copy. A number had been given away, so James’s receipts for the fifteen months were slightly under $600. As he told his brother, he had himself bought $450 worth of presentation copies, so his net income from the book was “not likely to be immense.” Corr. 2:150.
7. Corr. 7:113, 578; The Nation 53, 1891, 15, quoted in Perry, vol. 1, 105. On impressionism as a breakthrough, see John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience (New York: NYU Press, 1976), 29–34. Baldwin’s review was in Science 16, Oct. 10, 1890, 207–8. The attribution to Baldwin is in Perry, vol. 2, 104. Hall’s review is in American Journal of Psychology 3, 1891, 585–91, quoted in Perry, vol. 2, 109. Dewey’s comment is quoted in Perry, vol. 2, 104.
8. The group’s comment is quoted in Myers, 485.
9. Barbara Ross, “William James: Spoiled Child of American Psychology,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, ed. G. A. Kimble, M. Wertheimer, and C. White (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1991), 24. Ross credits J. R. Angell’s 1911 editorial in Psychological Review, no. 5, 1911, 78–79, where Angell lists six of the points, naming habit, emotion, instinct, the vague, the pathological, and space perception.
10. Josiah Royce, “A New Study of Psychology,” International Review of Ethics 1, Jan. 1891, 143–69; précis from Skrupskelis, 5.
11. P. A. Schilp, The Philosophy of John Dewey (New York: Tudor, 1939), 23.
12. John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), vii; Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938), 3.
13. George Santayana, Atlantic Monthly 67, Apr. 1891, 553; WJ Rem, 93.
14. Rebecca West, Henry James (New York: Holt, 1916), 11.
16. Howells’s review is in Harper’s Magazine, no. 83, 1891, 314–16.
18. “Will you or won’t you have it so” was the favorite James passage of a colleague of mine, Hope Weissman, who taught at Wesleyan in the 1990s and who had a wasting disease from which she knew she would die early. PP, 1182.
19. Student papers from WJ’s Philosophy 2 class for 1890–91 are in the Harvard University Archives, call no. HUG 1466.406.
20. This not very heavily annotated copy (in the Houghton Library, call no. AC85.J2376.890p) is the basis for the new Harvard edition of 1981, incorporating WJ’s later thoughts on the book. All earlier editions had been printed from the original plates, with only the most minor corrections that did not affect pagination.
22. Lewis has a good account of Alexander James (see 625); Corr. 2:162, 163.
23. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 78.
26. Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, 78.
48. Flooded by the Deep Life
6. Alice’s reply is in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 185–88.
8. PBC, 448n; Perry, vol. 2, 90.
9. Perry, vol. 2, 125. Gerald Myers recently chose this eminently readable volume over the longer Principles of Psychology for inclusion in the Library of America edition of the writings of WJ.
10. The anonymous story of James and the O. Henry student is in James’s faculty file in the Harvard University Archives, call no. HUG 300 William James.
11. Quoted in Suzanne Smith, “Calkins, Mary Whiton,” in Women in World History, vol. 3, ed. Anna Commire (Waterford, Conn.: Yorkin Publications, 1999), 305.
12. Marion Cannon Schlesinger, Snatched from Oblivion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 45–46.
13. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 33, 38.
14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 133; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 37.
16. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 70.
17. Quoted in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle (New York: Praeger, 1974), 49–50.
18. Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, 69.
19. Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 60–61.
49. The Death of Alice James
1. ECR, 133; letter to Grace Ashburner, Aug. 25, 1891, Houghton b Ms Am 1092.9 (724).
8. Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Duran, 1929), 316–18.
10. The two sources for this story are WJ’s letter to AJ of Feb. 1885 ( Corr. 6:2–3) and the account by Logan Pearsall Smith in his Unforgotten Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 116–20.
12. G. H. Palmer, “Münsterberg,” in The Development of Harvard University, ed. S. E. Morison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 17.
15. The address given on Feb. 10, 1892, was edited for publication in Forum 13, 1892, 727–42, and is reprinted in EPR. Parts of it were combined with “The Hidden Self” and published in WB as “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.”
18. Corr. 2:200, 203, 204n, 205.
19. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Alien Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 10:128.
50. European Sabbatical
1. AGJ to Eliza Gibbens, June 9, 1892, Houghton b Ms Am 1092.11.
2. AGJ to Eliza Gibbens, May 29, 1892.
3. Corr. 7:325; AGJ to Eliza Gibbens, Aug. 13, 1892.
4. Corr. 2:222, 250; Corr. 7:396, 399. The Tennyson passage is from “The Two Greetings,” which is part one of De Profundis. HJ III, introduction to “Counsels of Courage.”
5. Corr. 2:222, 236; Corr. 7:396; Corr. 2:254.
6. Corr. 7:418; Corr. 2:246; AGJ to Eliza Gibbens, June 8, 1892.
7. Corr. 7:441; letter of June 3, 1893; Corr. 7:421.
8. AGJ to Eliza Gibbens, June 27, 1892; Corr. 7:417–18.
9. Corr. 7:296, 355; Corr. 2:248.
10. Corr. 7:381; HJ III to Elizabeth Glendower Evans, May 25, 1931, ms. in Schlesinger Library, Cambridge.
11. Corr. 7:143; Corr. 2:202, 217, 232.
16. “A Plea for Psychology,” in EPs, 270–77.
51. Abnormal Psych 1
1. Ahlstrom, 814. On the rise of modern fundamentalism, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
2. Richard Hughes Seager, ed., The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions (La Salle, 11l.: Open Court, 1993), xiii.
3. WJ to HJ, Oct. 1, 1893; Corr. 2:292; Corr. 7:466, 469, 474. The word “melancholy” had for James the force that “depression” has for us. See his letter to his son in Corr. 12:487.
8. Corr. 2:299–300, 303–4. For the relationship between HJ and Constance Woolson, see Lyndall Gordon’s excellent and suggestive book, The Private Life of Henry James (New York: Norton, 1998).
10. The visitor was Harry Kozol, quoted by Ellenberger in “Pierre Janet and His American Friends,” in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, 1894–1944, ed. Geo E. Gifford Jr. (New York: Science History Press, 1978), 71.
11. ECR, 470, 471, 472; Ellenberger, 406.
12. See editor’s introduction, by James Strachey, to Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 1957).
13. This article, “Über den Psychischen Mechanismus Hysterischer Phanomene,” appeared in Neurologisches Centralblatt, Jan. 1 and 15, 1893, and was republished immediately in Weiner Medizinische Blatter, Jan. 19 and 26, 1893.
16. For the Brown-Sequard elixir, see S. W. Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria, 8th ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1905), 213–14.
17. Mitchell, Fat and Blood, 215.
18. See Corr. 7:474 and Corr. 9:270–71, where WJ says that Miss Clarke’s treatments were “absolutely no use to me,” and that he went “solely to pacify Alice.”
21. Alice’s diary was not properly published until Leon Edel’s edition in 1964. The best edition is that reissued by Northeastern University Press in 1999, with a fine introduction by Linda Simon. For an account of the long, slow process by which Alice’s work became known, see Strouse, 319–26.
22. Diary of AJ, 59, 60, 66, 77, 55. Alice’s comments on pain are quoted in French from a source I have not identified. My translation.
24. HJ III, Charles W. Eliot, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 98.
52. Talks to Teachers
1. Corr. 7:530; EPs, 315, 317, 321.
2. Corr. 7:539, 538; EPh, 87–89.
3. Corr. 7:541, 542, 544; Corr. 8:48; Corr. 2:403.
4. Stevenson wrote The Wrecker in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, the second son of his wife Fanny’s first marriage.
53. Abnormal Psych 2
1. James Pope-Hennessy, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 96.
5. George Santayana, Persons and Places, vol. 2, The Middle Span (New York: Scribner, 1944–1953), 166.
6. Herbert B. Adams, The Study of American History in American Colleges and Universities (Washington, D.C., 1887), quoted in Sheldon M. Stern, “William James and the New Psychology,” in Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860–1920, ed. Paul Buck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).
11. Eugene Taylor has shown that WJ took this book out of the college library. See Taylor, 193–94.
12. Account given in the Boston Herald, Nov. 15, 1896, 9, quoted in Taylor, 149, 202n.
54. Sarah, Rosina, and Pauline
1. Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1907), v, viii.
2. Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman, 20–21.
3. Corr. 8:41; Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman, 117.
5. Corr. 2:355, 356; letter of Aug. 11, 1897; Corr. 2:360.
7. Letter of Apr. 18, 1899; letter to F.C.S. Schiller, May 19, 1899. Pauline was the daughter of a celebrated beauty, Regina Wehle Goldmark. See Josephine Goldmark, Pilgrims of’48 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930).
8. Josephine Goldmark, “An Adirondack Friendship, “Atlantic Monthly 154, Sept. 1934, 266.
9. Letter of Sept. 14, 1901. Pauline Goldmark had a long and productive career with the National Consumers League. She wrote a 184-page report, Women and Children in the Canning Industry, in 1908, a study called Boyhood and Lawlessness in 1914, and studies of longshoremen and public utilities and franchises. With Mary Hopkins she edited The Gypsy Trail: An Anthology for Campers.
10. Henry’s living off Minnie Temple and Constance Woolson, emotionally speaking, is the subject of Lyndall Gordon’s Private Life of Henry James (New York: Norton, 1998).
55. Is Life Worth Living?
56. The Gospel of Relaxation
1. Corr. 8:60, 62, 65; Corr. 2:372, 374.
3. ECR, 151; Corr. 8:109, 111, 112.
4. Corr. 8:114; Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, ed. Elting E. Morison et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), 504–5.
7. TT, 126, 127, 128, 131; Corr. 8:131.
57. The Right to Believe
3. WB, 16, 18. For an excellent discussion of James and Clifford, see David A. Hollinger, “James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69–83.
9. Corr. 8:162. The Will to Believe was also turned down by Houghton Mifflin.
58. High Tide
6. Edward Holton James, “Tangent,” Harvard Monthly 21, Dec. 1895, 107–17; E. H. James, “Cloistered,” Harvard Monthly 21, Jan. 1896, 151–63; Rosina Hubley Emmet, “Alternating Currents,” Harper’s Weekly 40, Dec. 5, 1896, 1199–1200; HJ III, “Above the Trail,” Harvard Advocate 62, Jan. 5, 1897.
7. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Macmillan, 1900), vii. Royce gave the Aberdeen Giffords in 1899 and 1900.
16. Charles Bakewell, “The Philosophy of George Herbert Palmer,” in George Herbert Palmer, 1842–1933: Memorial Addresses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 3–43.
17. AGJ to HJ, quoted in VRE, 522.
59. Walpurgisnacht
5. The Journal of George Fox (London: J. M. Dent, 1924), 6.
10. This comment by Henry James III was first noticed among the James papers at Harvard by Saul Rosenzweig and is printed in his Historic Expedition to America (1909), 2nd rev. ed. (St. Louis: Rana House, 1954), 186, and n. 6. Corr. 8:391.
60. California
1. Corr. 8:403, 405, 406; Corr. 3:36.
7. Edwin Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion (London: Walter Scott, 1899), 16.
2. There is some question as to when and where this lecture was first given. In a letter of Oct. 20, 1898, quoted in TT, 244, James writes of delivering the talk at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, though the letter makes it sound like a repeat of a talk already given. The blindness theme is strongly present in WJ’s “Human Immortality” and in “Philosophical Conceptions.”
6. The contract for VRE has not survived, but see Corr. 10:205 for a sense of the financial success of the book, and see Corr. 11:89 for James’s comments on Longmans, Green’s approach to consignment.
7. Corr. 8:460, 539; Corr. 3:59.
8. Albert J. Beveridge, campaign speech, Sept. 16, 1898, in Modern Eloquence, vol. 9, ed. Thomas B. Reed (Philadelphia: J. D. Morris, 1903), 224–43.
12. Corr. 8:546. For a shrewd analysis of James on bigness, see R. Posnock, “The Influence of William James on American Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 326–27.
62. The Logic of the Absolute
1. James M. Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, new ed., vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 3.
2. Clendenning, 259; WJ to AGJ, Feb. 29, 1888; Corr. 7:83; Clendenning, 212.
3. Josiah Royce, California: A Study of American Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 501.
4. “Words of Prof. Royce at the Walton Hotel in Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1915,” Philosophical Review 25, 1916, 510, 511.
5. Herbert Wallace Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 417.
7. I owe this summary of Hegel on the Absolute to Jere Surber of the University of Denver.
8. Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (New York: Macmillan, 1897). Clendenning reports the student gossip.
9. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Macmillan, 1900), ix.
14. Lithaemia: an excess of lithic or uric acid in the blood (OED).
1. Corr. 9:104–5, 111; Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 316. WJ’s account sounds firsthand, but I have found no proof that he was there.
2. The full title of the most recent English translation of Flournoy’s extraordinary book is From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages. The 1994 Princeton University Press edition has particularly helpful commentary. Corr. 9:99.
4. Corr. 9:105. James considered a variety of titles for the first set of lectures, including “The Phenomena of Religious Experience,” “A Discussion of Religious Experience,” “The Demands of Religious Experience,” and “Types of Religious Experience.” He listed similar alternatives in his notes for the volume on religious philosophy.
6. VRE, 12, 14, 480. James is a proto-existentialist as well as a proto-phenomenologist. See John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James. For James and phenomenology, see Myers, 504; for James and existentialism, see Myers, 584.
7. VRE, 150. It is hard not to see an Emersonian strain here, a reflection of the opening of Nature.
12. VRE, 33, 32; see lecture four of Schleiermacher’s Talks on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers. For a modern quarrel with James, see Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, a brilliant and deeply informed account of James’s failure to start from the given of the Christian Trinity. It is difficult to get away from James; even Hauerwas’s title echoes a phrase of James’s in “Concerning Fechner.”
13. VRE, 34. James clearly seems to have understood that all the major American transcendentalists believed not in a transcendent deity but in an immanent one.
64. The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness
1. Corr. 9:149. Behind the domestic turmoil at Hyères was a tragic story. Fred Myers had once had an affair with his cousin Annie Marshall, who drowned herself in Ullswater in September 1875. During the last three years of his life (he died in 1901), Myers had some 150 sittings with Mrs. Thompson. “He was undoubtedly convinced that he had made contact with the spirit of Annie Marshall, and persisted in this conviction until the week of his death.” See Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 117–24, and James Webb’s introduction to F.W.H. Myers, The Subliminal Consciousness (New York: Arno Press, 1967).
3. VRE, 61; this is James Russell Lowell speaking.
5. Corr. 9:215, 216; Corr. 3:120.
7. VRE, 78–79, 81, 83, 84, 92.
8. In the opening lecture of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 4, Carlyle remarks that all the “isms” “had a truth in them or men would not have taken them up.”
9. VRE, 97, 99, 104. For a thoughtful treatment of WJ and religion in the context of mind cure, see Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of American Religion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 331–35.
65. The Sick Soul: Slouching Toward Edinburgh
1. VRE, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120. The “old poet” is Lucretius.
2. VRE, 122, 134. In a letter of June 1, 1904, to Frank Abauzit, the French translator of the Varieties, James wrote, referring to the book’s original edition, “The document on page 160 is my own case—acute neurasthenic attack with phobia. I naturally disguised the provenance!” VRE, 508.
6. Corr. 9:382; Corr. 3:134; Corr. 9:366.
8. Corr. 9:412; see also WJ’s letter to Flournoy, Jan. 18, 1901, Houghton b Ms Am 1505 (27); Munthe’s description of Myers’s death is in The Story of San Michele, illus. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1936, orig. 1929), 280–82.
9. Corr. 9:626 and Houghton b Ms Am 1092.1 (letter from WJ to Eveleen Myers, Apr. 9, 1901); for the neuralgia, see letter to Giulio Cesare Ferrari, Apr. 1, 1901; for his equilibrium, see Corr. 3:167.
66. The Twice-Born
6. VRE, 163, 165, 166–68. The letter by William G. Wilson to Carl Jung, Jan. 23, 1961, is reproduced at http://silkworth.net/aahistory/billw_carljung 012361. Jung’s fascinating reply is also reproduced in facsimile. See note 16 in the Prologue for a fuller account of this point.
8. VRE, 189, 193, 200, 202, 208.
10. Corr. 9:503, 504, 505, 632.
67. Voluntary Poverty
5. Corr. 9:339, 494, 566. The story of WJ watching baseball is from a clipping of an article by Sidney Lovett in James’s faculty folder in the Harvard Archives, Pusey Library, call no. HUG 300 William James. Corr. 3:180, 184.
8. H. D. Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 206, abridged by WJ and quoted in VRE, 222.
9. VRE, 253, 256, 254, 259–60.
68. The Mystical Center
2. VRE, 303, 304, 307, 308, 310n, 330, 332, 333. In an e-mail to the author, Professor Wendy Doniger provided the key to James’s use of this Sanskrit phrase to refer to things that were, for him, almost beyond words, such as his love for Minnie Temple.
5. Corr. 10:33; VRE, 376, 377.
6. The letter to Billy was dated Apr. 9, 1902. The phrase about “absolute addition” occurs in lecture two, VRE, 46, and is used here only as a summary of what the last chapter says in detail.
69. William James at Sixty
1. The description of the older WJ is from observations by Winifred Smith Rieber, who painted a group portrait of the Harvard philosophy department. See Myers, 41. Santayana’s description is in WJ Rem, 92–93.
2. Corr. 8:31; WJ to Frank Thilly, an American philosopher; Robert C. Le Clair, ed., The Letters of William James and Théodore Flournoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 129. James here was, as he noted to Flournoy, borrowing a line from Whistler. When an admirer had said there were only two painters, Whistler and Velázquez, Whistler said, “Why drag in Velázquez?”
3. HJ III, Ms Life of AGJ, 40–41.
4. Though any of these drugs could be harmful if taken too freely, all were standard treatments, and James was, of course, a physician. Chloral hydrate is still used as a soporific, and Veronal, or diethylbarbituric acid, was a common sedative in James’s time. It tended to lose its effect if taken over a prolonged period.
5. Corr. 11:228, 35; see, on this subject, Frederick J. Ruf, The Creation of Chaos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
9. The journalist was Marion Hamilton Carter. Mach’s response is in Perry, vol. 2, 341.
10. See Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun Martínez, “The Reception of William James in Spain and Unamuno’s Reading of the Varieties,” Streams of William James 5, no. 2, summer 2003, 7–9.
12. See Hendrika Vande Kemp, “The Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology,” Streams of William James 4, no. 3, fall 1902, and S. L. Jaki, Lord Gifford and His Lectures (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986).
13. Today, that $10,000 would be worth around $200,000. See letter of Jan. 26, 1903, to Bill, for details. James’s 1902 diary has a cryptic entry on July 14 headed, “Longmans account for VRE”; it reads, “2876. 8622 dollars.” This works out pretty closely if the first number is copies, the second dollars.
17. It is interesting that the year of publication of VRE was also the year of the founding of the American Bible League, an event that led to the publication of The Fundamentals as pamphlets in 1910, the beginning of modern fundamentalism. See The Fundamentals, ed. R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker House, 1917). The dates of this movement are not agreed upon. Clark Blaise, in Time Lord (New York: Pantheon, 2000), gives 1902 as the date when the first of the essays later known as The Fundamentals was published. In an e-mail, Blaise further noted that the first publication was in St. Catherine, Ontario.
70. Bergson
4. See James Mark Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 5th ed., vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 256.
5. Corr. 10:118. Psychasthenia is defined in George M. Gould, Pocket Medical Dictionary (1907), as “mental fatigue,” an example as much as a definition of the subject.
8. For the whole sorry episode, see TT, 256–66.
10. See, for example, André Robinet, Bergson et les Métamorphoses de la Durée (Paris: P. Seghers, 1965), facing p. 65.
11. Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd ed., trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1955), 54.
12. Henri Bergson to WJ, May 9, 1908, translated and printed in Perry, vol. 2, 622–24.
13. Irwin Edman, foreword to Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Random House, 1944), xiii–xiv.
14. Robinet, Bergson et les Métamorphoses de la Durée, 9.
16. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 51, 53.
17. Einfühlung was coined in 1903 by Theodor Lipps, who thought that the perception of another person’s emotional expression or gesture automatically activates the same emotion in the perceiver. WJ mentions Lipps as among “the more exciting to my imagination” of the people who were going to attend the International Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904. See Corr. 10:356. The word “empathy” shortly thereafter appeared in English. Though the term is fairly new, the idea strongly resembles John Keats’s notion of negative capability and Henry Thoreau’s remark that “the highest we can attain to is not knowledge but sympathy with intelligence.”
18. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 53.
71. The Ph.D. Octopus and Dewey’s New School
2. Corr. 3:225; Corr. 10:183, 185.
4. “The Ph.D. Octopus,” in ECR, 68, 69, 71, 73, 72. The incident with which James began his attack involved Alfred Hodder, a Harvard Ph.D., and his troubles at Bryn Mawr. James’s account claims that Bryn Mawr refused to appoint Hodder, who was to teach English, until he had finished his Ph.D. in philosophy. A letter from President Thomas of Bryn Mawr to James, Apr. 4, 1903, disputes James’s account of the facts. See ECR, 568. James’s hostility to what he saw as the increasingly mandarin atmosphere in American colleges is a little ironic in that he had recently been chairman of a Harvard committee on academic robes. The committee report recommended such a complicated and subtly graded variety of insignia, such fastidious attention to sumptuary detail, that it was quietly ignored by the university.
7. Corr. 10:210, 215; EPh, 102.
8. ECR, 103, 104. The sentence beginning “Thought must reconfigure” is my paraphrase of James’s account; see EPh, 104.
72. Emerson
2. Corr. 3:229. Alice was much attracted to Emerson’s writings. One of her early gifts to William was a copy of Emerson’s Lectures and Biographical Sketches. There is a small puzzle about the copy of this book Alice gave William. The front flyleaf says, “William James from his wife / Quincy Street Cambridge June 1879” in William’s handwriting, but the volume is the 1884 Riverside Press edition, vol. 10 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Perhaps it was a replacement for a lost copy.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series (Boston: Fields Osgood, 1869), 61. James’s copy is in the Houghton Library, call no. AC 85.52376.Zz2869e.
5. Emerson, Essays: First Series, 40, 129.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, 38.
7. ERM, 109, 112, 115. Lawrence Buell, in his bicentennial Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), strikes the same note of individualism as the lasting heart of Emerson.
73. The True Harvard
1. Sharon Cameron’s Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s “Journal” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) makes this point persuasively.
2. Flower and Murphey, vol. 2, 774.
3. Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 103; Morison 1, 420, 422; Corr. 3:207.
4. “The True Harvard,” in ECR, 74, 75–76, 77.
74. A Life of Interruptions
1. William James Jr., “Sport or Business?” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 12, Dec. 1903, 225–29.
3. Lewis has a fine account of Peggy, which I have drawn on.
4. Corr. 10:270, 278, 279; Corr. 3:255.
6. Corr. 10:234; review of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in EPR, 203.
7. ECR, 170–76, for WJ’s original piece, and ECR, 686–87, for a supplemental comment. Quotations are ECR, 170, 171, 172. For statistics on lynching, probably understated, see the NAACP pamphlet 30 Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (1919).
9. Corr. 10:292; MEN, xix. James is quoting from Moby Dick.
75. The Many and the One
3. Back in 1866, when Henry James was twenty-three, William Dean Howells observed him one day eating nothing “except a biscuit he crumbled in his pocket and fed himself after the prescription of a famous doctor then prevalent among people of indigestion” Quoted in Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 114.
76. The Modern Moment: Radical Empiricism
1. The best short treatment by far of the centrality of radical empiricism in James’s thought is the introduction to McDermott. The Chicago edition of 1977 is especially valuable, including, as it does, the best bibliography of WJ’s writings.
4. Corr. 10:416, 422, 424, 480.
6. “Letters of John Ruskin,” Atlantic Monthly 94, July 1904, 12.
7. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1927), 210; ERE, 3, 4.
8. Russell, Philosophy, 210; ERE, 4, 19.
13. Corr. 11:226; see WJ’s letter to Howison of July 24, 1898. Speaking of the lecture he is going to give, he writes, “I wanted to make something entirely popular, and as it were emotional, for technicality seems to me to spell ‘failure’ in philosophy.”
14. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 812.
15. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 143 (orig. Lowell Lectures, 1925).
16. “Selving” is McDermott’s word. Compare the process here described by James with Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of ‘Self,’” in Sociology and Psychology, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999), 59–94.
77. Schiller versus Bradley versus James
1. HJ, The American Scene (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 2; Corr. 10:475.
3. Mind! A Unique Review of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. A. Troglodyte [F.C.S. Schiller] (London, 1901).
4. Mind 9 (new series), 1900, 458; letter to’S. Ilsley, Sept. 23, 1897.
5. F.C.S. Schiller, Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1903), xvi.
6. Corr. 10:392, 393, 430, 431.
7. Corr. 10:336, 446, 447, 455, 501, 533.
8. Sprigge says James and Bradley never met (xiii), but an entry in James’s pocket diary for 1908 says he called on Bradley on May 9, 1908, while he, James, was giving his pluralistic-universe lectures and three days before receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford. “Very courteous,” says James’s note. “Showed me Merton College and Library.”
9. F. H. Bradley, Essays in Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, orig. 1914), 469, quoted in Sprigge, 572. Eliot wrote at Merton College under the direction of a Bradley disciple, Harold Joachim. Peter Ackroyd says Eliot did not meet Bradley. Lyndall Gordon notes that “Bradley himself was almost inaccessible.” See Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 4.
10. Sprigge, 573, 575–76, 583.
11. WJ to F. H. Bradley, Jan. 3, 1898; Bradley to WJ, Feb. 24, 1898; Corr. 8:347; Corr. 10:431, 433, 434.
78. Royce: Pragmatic Stirrings
2. For WJ’s use of the Dyaks’ heads in his course, see ML, 332, 333, 341. The full description is from “A World of Pure Experience,” in ERE, 24.
3. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 344–45, quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 34.
4. To help in charting the evolution of WJ’s radical empiricism in detail, the following list of his nine articles on the subject includes both the first publication as an article and the name of the book in which it eventually came to reside. (1) “Humanism and Truth” was published in Mind in Oct. 1904 and later in MT. (2) “Does Consciousness Exist?” was first published in Sept. 1904 and in book form in ERE. (3) “A World of Pure Experience” was first published in Sept. 1904 and later in ERE. (4) “The Pragmatic Method” appeared in Dec. 1904 and was later incorporated into P. (5) “The Experience of Activity” came out first in Dec. 1904 and later appeared in both ERE and PU. (6) “The Thing and Its Relations” appeared in Nov. 1904 and in book form in both ERE and PU. (7) “How Two Minds Can Know the Same Thing” was written by Feb. 1905, published in March of that year, and eventually reprinted in ERE. (8) “Thomas Davidson: A Knight Errant of the Intellectual Life” appeared in Jan. 1905 and was collected in Memories and Studies. (9) “The Place of Affectional Facts” was finished and sent off in Feb. 1905, published in May of that year, and collected in ERE.
6. John Ruskin, Praeterita, vol. 35 of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1908), 562.
7. The text of the last Wellesley lecture is in P, 283–85.
79. William and Henry
4. Corr. 11:8, 33; George Santayana, The Life of Reason (New York: Scribner, 1905), 13, 29; Corr. 11:28, 34.
5. French uses the feminine noun conscience for both “conscience” and “consciousness.”
6. “The Notion of Consciousness” (“La Notion de Conscience”), trans. Salvatore Saladino, in ERE, 261, 271.
7. WJ Diary 4, May 28?, 1905; Corr. 11:21, 24, 42.
8. This was the same Bruce Porter who later married Peggy James.
10. Henry James was listed in Who’s Who at least as early as 1899, whereas William appears from 1904 on.
13. See Corr. 3:300 for a letter to HJ in which William talks about being done with lecturing in Philosophy 1a “for good”
19. “The Miller-Bode Objections” are in MEN, 65–129.
20. The way James posed the question raised by Bode and Miller comes at the start of the first notebook: “In my psychology I contended that each field of consciousness is entitatively a unit. But in my doctrine that the same ‘pen’ may be known by two knowers I seem to imply that an identical part can help to constitute two fields... The fields are not then entitative units. They are decomposable into ‘parts’ one of which at least is common to both, and my whole tirade against ‘composition’ in the psychology is belied by my own subsequent doctrine! How can I rescue the situation? Which doctrine must I stand by?” MEN, 65f.
80. California Dreaming
4. “Reason and Faith,” in ERM, 125.
6. “A Suggestion Concerning Mysticism,” in EPh, 161.
7. Boris Sidis’s letter to WJ of Oct. 9, 1905, in Corr. 11:101, mentions both Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams.
8. EPh, 161; McDermott’s hint for getting at William James is to pay attention to the italics.
10. Erikson made James a major figure in his book Identity, Youth, and Crisis, and while one hesitates to quarrel with the conclusions of such a splendid writer, it must be noted that he got a few basic details wrong in his account of this part of James’s life. Erikson was under the impression that the dream occurred a few months before James’s death, when in fact it was four years before. Erikson himself might have been willing to reconsider his view in light of the biographical record. Nevertheless, his treatment of James as a primary example of the processes of identity formation is, in most respects, a brilliant and helpful analysis.
11. Henry A. Murray, “Morton Prince: Sketch of His Life and Work,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 52, 1956, 292.
12. The fullest account of James’s understanding of Prince’s work is’S. Rosenzweig, “Sally Beauchamp’s Career: A Psychoarchaeological Key to Morton Prince’s Classic Case of Multiple Personality,” Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 113, no. 1, Feb. 1987, 5–60.
13. Murray, “Morton Prince,” 292.
14. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality (New York: Longmans, 1906), 523. The book was copyrighted in 1905 and James had a copy before he went to California.
15. Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, 3. For Miss Beauchamp’s different personalities and their different dreams, see chap. 20.
18. Leo Stein, “William James,” American Scholar, Apr. 17, 1948, 165, repr. from American Mercury 9, Sept. 1926, 68–70.
81. Earthquake
5. See the description of Shaler in W. David and R. A. Daly, “Geology and Geography,” in Morison 2, 310–21.
6. HJ Letters, vol. 4, 396–97.
8. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 132.
11. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (New York: Doubleday, 1924), 92.
82. A General Theory of Human Action
3. Giovanni Papini, The Failure (Un Uomo Finito), trans. Virginia Pope (New York: Greenwood, 1972, orig. 1924), 204. The full sweep of Papini’s vision is evident in his “Dall’Uomo a Dio,” published in the periodical Leonardo, Feb. 1906, 6–15, and read by James around this time.
6. EPh, 146, 224n (for James’s comparison of Papini to Nietzsche), 147, 148.
7. Clifford W. Beers, A Mind That Found Itself, 5th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1921), 242.
10. The bound volume of offprints James deposited in the philosophy department library in Emerson Hall may have been intended for the use of his students. The volume is now in the Robbins Library in Emerson Hall, cat. no. AJ465.54.11B. See ERE, 200–202.
11. Corr. 11:267. In a separate incident that year, James again felt impelled to apologize for his countrymen. He wrote the Russian writer Maxim Gorky to apologize for the way Gorky and his female traveling companion were ostracized in New York when it became known that the woman was not his wife. The letter was hearty and friendly, but it did no good. “James is a wonderful old man,” the disgruntled Russian wrote, “but he is also an American. Oh, to hell with them.” Corr. 11:271.
12. Corr. 11:257; Corr. 3:323. Linda Simon gives a full account of the Hodder affair in Genuine Reality, 345–46. Brenda Wineapple has a fine portrait of Hodder in her Sister Brother (New York: Putnam, 1996).
13. Corr. 11:271. The backup person James had in mind was Apthorpe Fuller.
83. Pragmatism
2. P, 11, 12, 13, 15. The chapter on WJ in Carl Jung’s Psychological Types is concerned with the distinction between the tough- and the tender-minded.
3. P, 22–23; Corr. 3:328; P, 25.
5. P, 31, 37, 42, 44, 122. The last two clauses of the final sentence show the ever-present shadow of radical empiricism in the later James.
6. See Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949). Charles Peirce proposes, in “Design and Chance,” a lecture he gave at Johns Hopkins in January 1884, that chance may be an anti-entropic force. He specifically cites the “dissipation of energy” and the “death of the universe,” then says, “But although no force can counteract this tendency, chance may and will have the opposite influence. Force is in the long run dissipative; chance is in the long run concentrative.” In The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
7. John Dewey, Characters and Events, vol. 1, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Holt, 1929), 109; letter to A. Johns, Aug. 26, 1907; Corr. 11:59; letter to Schiller, Oct. 26, 1904; Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance,” in Prose Works 1892, vol. 2, ed. F. Stovall (New York: NYU Press, 1964), 731; Corr. 7:375.
1. “The Energies of Men,” in ERM, 199n, 130.
2. ERM, 130. Insofar as James’s pragmatism sounds like functionalism, it owes more to Dewey than to Durkheim, whose great work on religion, Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse, appeared in 1915, five years after the death of WJ. Psychology did not become a separate department at Harvard until 1934.
85. The Harvard Elective System Applied to the Universe
2. H. V. Kaltenborn, “William James at Harvard,” Harvard Illustrated Magazine 8, no. 5, Feb. 1907, 1–2.
4. WJ Diary 6, Feb. 15, 1907; Corr. 11:322. The text in Corr. reads “radial artery not badly stressed”; the diary entry, in James’s handwriting, reads “sclerosed,” not “stressed.”
5. Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 24, mentions James’s ideas about war.
6. WJ’s Diary 6 lists “Copeland, Tchaikowsky [not the composer], Alladin, Hurlbut, Bloomfield, Garland and other Russian revolutionists.” Feb. 24, 1907.
10. Corr. 11:379, 389, 613, 614 (paraphrase), 397, 392–94, 423–28, 614, 604. G. W. Pierson, Yale College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 11. McDermott says Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” is the best contemporary critique of Pragmatism.
11. Mind 9, no. 36, Oct. 1900, 436; Charles Peirce to WJ, Dec. 6, 1904.
12. Corr. 3:344; Corr. 11:410, 419.
13. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Winds of Doctrine (New York: Scribner, 1926).
14. WJ Diary 6, June 27, 1907.
19. HJ, The American Scene (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 17, 77.
86. The True Race of Prophets
1. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 357.
2. Manchester, now Harris Manchester College, was founded in 1786, moved to Oxford in 1889, and became part of Oxford University in 1996. The college, on its Web site, suggests that it is still uneasy about having invited William James, noting that it is especially strong in the idealist tradition and putting ironic quotation marks around James’s “great success.”
4. PU, 214–15. Edward Caird’s Gifford Lectures of 1890–91 and 1891–92 were published as The Evolution of Religion (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1893). John Caird’s Giffords, several years later, appeared as The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1899). WJ to Henri Bergson, May 8, 1908.
5. Corr. 12:2; Corr. 3:360. Trional was the trade name of a synthetic narcotic, another drug in the long list of James’s remedies for sleeplessness.
8. See Helmut Adler, “Gustav Theodor Fechner: A German Gelehrter,” in Portraits of Pioneers of Psychology, vol. 3, ed. G. A. Kimble et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1991), 8.
9. “Fechner,” Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996).
10. PU, 69; Adler, “Gustav Theodor Fechner,” 5; PU, 69.
11. “Introduction to Fechner,” in ERM, 119.
14. “The eye of the world” passage would seem to come directly from two lines in Shelley’s “Hymn of Apollo,” written in 1820 and published in 1824. “I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine.”
87. A Pluralistic Universe
1. PU, 113, 115, 117, 118, 220, 121.
8. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 453–54; Corr. 12:58–59. Chesterton’s remark is quoted by Robert Patten in his introduction to Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (New York: Penguin, 1986), 19.
88. Psychical Researches Redux
3. WJ’s son Henry would write a two-volume Life of C. W. Eliot, which would win a Pulitzer Prize.
4. See HJ’s letter to J. B. Pinker, Oct. 23, 1908, in HJ Letters, vol. 4, 497–98.
6. See the lively description of a Paladino sitting in the New York Times, Apr. 19, 1908.
9. Corr. 3:376; EPR, 371, 374.
10. EPR, 251; Corr. 12:127; EPR, 252.
89. The Meaning of Truth
2. William showed Henry’s telegram to Fletcher, who, horrified, asked William not to make it public. See Corr. 3:383.
4. Ralph Barton Perry first noticed the close similarity. See Perry, vol. 2, 445. There are also close connections between the book and the syllabus for the fall 1906 course at Harvard and for other courses James gave. See SPP, 202.
5. SPP, 10. See the first sentence of chap. 15 of Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
7. WJ Diary for Jan. 1909 shows him promising three hundred dollars a year for two years to a Morton Rosse.
10. Moses Hadas, Ancilla to Classical Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 309.
90. Ever Not Quite
1. Corr. 12:318, 319. The famous and devastating Dutch elm disease did not arrive in North America until the early 1930s.
4. In the interview, by Adelbert Albrecht in the Boston Evening Transcript, Sept. 11, 1909, part 3, 3, Freud specifically attacked hypnotherapy and the Emmanuel movement, a precursor of modern clinical-pastoral counseling. The leaders of this Boston movement were Dr. Richard C. Cabot and the Reverend Elwood Worcester. The practitioners provided religious and psychological treatment for functional nervous disorders; treatment was sometimes done in groups. It was endorsed at the start by James’s friend James J. Putnam, and James himself read and admired Worcester’s book The Living Word, which was an explicitly and profoundly Fechnerian work. James’s “Energies of Men” was published as pamphlet 3 by the Boston Emmanuel Church in 1908. Corr. 12:334.
5. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 167–68.
6. Bair says, “After his second conversation with James, Jung came to the realization—startling and troubling in equal parts—that Freud ‘due to the narrowness of his intellectual horizon let himself be overwhelmed by the object.’” Jung, 167. The last part of the sentence quotes Jung.
7. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, quoted in Allen, 467.
8. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: H. Holt, 1930), 112.
9. EPh, 157, 159. The correspondent was Marion Hamilton, who was very interested in psychic research. See Corr. 12:451.
14. Plato, Theaetetus, 183b, l. 5, trans. John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 64. James had mentioned the Theaetetus as recently as Aug. 24, 1906.
17. Diary of AGJ, quoted in Edel, vol. 5, 442. The current whereabouts of this diary are unknown.
18. Henry Adams, Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Putnam, 1958), 137–38.
19. Adams, Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 178–79.
24. Diary of AGJ, quoted in Allen.
Epilogue
1. Diary of AGJ, quoted in Allen, 491–92; HJ Letters, vol. 4, 561–62.