12. A Dead and Drifting Life

IN SEPTEMBER 1867, at the same time that he was squaring off philosophically with his father, William shifted his German perch from Dresden to Berlin. He took rooms with his old friend Tom Perry, he worked on his German, and he met the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who was then writing a life of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose work strongly prefigured that of James himself. (This meant so little to James at the time that he couldn’t remember Dilthey’s name when he wrote home about him.) His letters insist that he was drifting and loafing, but by the end of October he was at least behaving like a man with a purpose, attending a heavy schedule of lectures in physiology at the University of Berlin.

William’s year and a half in Germany, from April 1867 to November 1868, is complicated and difficult to keep in focus, partly because William was an increasingly complicated person. He wrote later that a person “has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” One self was the quick-witted and high-spirited brother and son, full of bounce and sass, who wrote “conversash” for “conversation,” “orflings” for “orphans,” “Bosting” for “Boston,” who called his father’s new book “Substance and Shadder,” called Potsdam “Potsd—m,” who said “suspish” for “suspicion,” “condish” for “condition,” who could call an acquaintance “the very Poetry of general imbecility,” and would observe that “Spring is whanging through the fertile country of Bohemia in fine style.”

But living in the same skin at the same time was a sickly young man with a dark, self-absorbed, despondent streak. After he told Tom Ward that medicine was out for him, “much to my sorrow,” he added, “The future is very uncertain.” He complained about the “gloomy dripping November day[s],” about his lack of education, about his lack of money, about his endless reading leading “to nothing at all.” “I shall hate myself,” he wrote, “till I get some special work.” He complained about being in the “dismallest of dumps,” about “living down this foreignness,” about the “accursed thing in my back.” His mood, which had been low when he left home, drifted further downward while he was in Germany. By March 1868 he felt he was in a “permanent depression.”¹

Behind the cheerful banter lay illness and despondency and complaint; behind or beneath that there was yet another, a third self—or at least there was something else going on. For all his protestations about his lack of direction, his drifting and empty life, and his inability to study, he was nursing a plan for the future, and he was doing it with a surprising clarity and steadiness. Medicine—meaning the practice of medicine—may have been out, as he told Ward in September 1867, but he had set his sights on the related fields of physiology and psychology, not with the idea of practicing, but more with an eye to the study and perhaps the teaching of those fields. To Ward he wrote, “I am going to try to stick to the study of the nervous system and psychology.”²

Physiology is the study of how the body actually works. It is not concerned primarily with taxonomy or surgery or pharmacology as such. It is the science that studies the physical processes of living. For the old-school medical professors of the late 1860s physiology was an unwelcome intruder into the curriculum, a science that deflected student interest and energy from the healing arts. But physiology was the entering wedge of the movement that would soon remake the study of medicine entirely. After about 1900 biology would become the catchall word for the life sciences; before 1900 the general word was physiology.³

James’s interest in physiology did not begin with this trip to Germany; his American medical school notebook for 1866–67 is dominated by physiological details, processes, and hypotheses. But by November 1867 he was doing little else. He told Ward he was attending five courses by three physiologists in Berlin. He was going to eleven lectures a week.⁴ He wrote that he was blocking out “some reading in physiology and psychology which I hope to execute this winter.” Starting in November, then, James’s focus was increasingly on the field of psychology, which was just being reborn as a hard science, grounded firmly in physiology. “It seems to me,” he wrote Ward, “that perhaps the time has come for Psychology to begin to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness—(in the shape of sense perceptions) and more may come of it.”⁵

In late December James confirmed all this in a letter to his father. Though he was careful to hedge and protest (“ultimate prospects... pretty hazy... health... so uncertain”), he nevertheless declared, boldly enough, “As a central point of study I imagine that the border ground of physiology and psychology, overlapping both, would be as fruitful as any, and I am now working on to it.”⁶

By his mid-twenties William James already had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight, and accepting trouble was the first step in overcoming it. In January 1868, as his twenty-sixth birthday rolled past and he did his annual stocktaking, he wrote Holmes that he was in the dismalest of dumps, unable to understand “how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter.” He could not have known that it would be a little over two years before he really hit bottom. But as he was complaining about not reading, and about his back, and his loneliness, and the “inhuman blackness of the weather,” and about the fact that all the brothers except him were now working productively, he was, at the same time, becoming fluent in German, reading—apparently with huge enjoyment—a great deal of poetry, and launching again into the writing of reviews and soliciting editorial help with them from Harry.⁷

James once noted that Darwin gave up reading poetry for years and then, finding it impossible to pick it up again, wished that he had not let it go. James himself read poetry—actively read poetry—all his life. Now he found Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” speaking to him. He told Ward to look at the closing lines of Emerson’s “Give All to Love” and Christopher Cranch’s “Stanzas” (“Thought is deeper than all speech / Feeling deeper than all thought”) and recommended particularly Robert Browning’s “A Grammarian’s Funeral.” “It always strengthens my backbone to read it,” he wrote. He admired the poem’s advice to just do your work, day by routine day, and leave to posterity or eternity the troublesome task of justifying or recognizing the work.

This was helpful to a young man who wanted to write but found writing difficult and uncongenial. Plunging in, he wrote a review of Ernest Aimé Feydeau’s La Comtesse de Chalis, ou Les Moeurs du Jour and sent it to Harry, requesting him to “take care of” it and “smooth if possible the style.” Writing the review at all was a positive step; sending it to Harry, who was now successfully writing and selling reviews and stories, must have cost William something in pride, acknowledging as it did that he had something to learn from his younger brother. The review itself is an ill-tempered tirade. “As a work of edification,” James sniffed, “we consider [the book] a total failure. Viewed as a work of art it is not much better.” Harry did an excellent, if radical, job of editing, cutting away most of Willy’s long diatribe against French culture. Later in the month William sent another review, this one of Quatrefages’s anthropology text, to Harry with a similar request for whatever editing might be needed.⁸

The exact process by which James turned trouble into insight and self-loathing into energy is pretty well hidden. In March, as he was admitting to a “permanent depression,” catching the flu, and groaning about “one of the emptiest years of my life,” he sent Harry a letter of backhanded thanks for his editing. He complained that his authorial pride, his “schrift-stellerisches selbtsgefuhl,” was “naturally rather mangled by the mutilations you had inflicted on my keen article on Feydeau,” and went on to comment on some of Harry’s recently published stories with retaliatory relish. William had praised an earlier story, “Poor Richard,” as “good much beyond my expectations; story, character and way of telling excellent in fact.” But now he said, at length and behind a disingenuous cover (“I suppose you want to hear in an unvarnished manner... ”), that “the material of your stories (except ‘Poor Richard’) has been thin,” that the treatment was “rather dainty and disdainful,” that the stories had a “want of blood,” and he advised him, preposterously, “to select some particular problem, literary or historical to study on... then you could write stories by the way for pleasure and profit.” There was in William some of his father’s willingness to let fly, to unload snap judgments; at the same time he backpedaled a bit, admitting his taste to be “rather incompetent in these matters.” In a later letter he apologized for his “law-giving tone,” and went on, “I hope it did not hurt you in any way or mislead you as to the opinion I have of you as a whole, for I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual and moral companions I have.”

He had been, of course, prescribing for himself. One way William responded to depression was to get angry—at himself, at the French, at Harry’s style. Another way was to work. There was a certain resiliency deep inside him; no matter how overwhelming his circumstances, a hidden spring would free some Queequeg’s coffin, which would pop to the surface and save him, at least temporarily.⁹

While feeling down this spring, he read Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication and wrote a review of it. In this book, Darwin returned to the subject with which On the Origin of Species begins. The enormous changes that can be wrought in a short time by selective breeding—making the ears of cocker spaniels longer and longer by choosing and mating those with the longest ears in each litter, for example—prove that variation is possible, that selection can take place, and that a species of animal can change. The Origin had then moved on to the subject of natural, as opposed to artificial—that is, human—selection. In revisiting the question of variation under domestication, Darwin was focusing on the nature and limits of inheritance. William observed in his notice for the North American Review that Darwin “comes to the conclusion that every character of the parent, whether new or old, tends to be reproduced in the offspring either in a patent or a latent form.” James was so interested in this book that he wrote a second review, and while he said in both notices that the general reader would probably prefer On the Origin of Species, he came back again to the same points about inheritance he discussed in the first review. He credited Darwin with discovering the “curious law” that “when two individuals which have diverged from a common parent stock are mated, there is a tendency in their offspring to take on features of that stock that may have been absent for great numbers of generations.”

Inheritance was a live subject in the James family. If William ever glanced back at his own family, at his father’s siblings and their children, at the illnesses, intemperance, instability, and early deaths of so many uncles, aunts, and cousins, to say nothing of the debilitating conditions that afflicted himself, Harry, and Alice, he could hardly have forgotten his own discovery, via Darwin, that in crossbreeding “itself we have a direct cause of reversion to a character long extinct.”¹⁰

James’s talk of depression was replaced in April and May by talk of being totally demoralized, yet April and May of 1868 were months of intellectual and emotional vitality for him, and he registered solid gains. He went back to Teplitz for the baths, then again to Dresden. Lacking the structure the physiology lectures had given his life in Berlin, he started a diary at the beginning of April. He stepped up his reading, and in letters and diary he began to write with a newly energetic feeling of intellectual engagement. He looked at paintings (by José Ribera, Guido Reni, Rubens, and Bellini), he visited a museum full of plaster casts of Greek sculpture, he studied Homer, and in early April he wrote Harry an extraordinary letter about it all.

His point of entry into Homer was his own Brazilian voyage. “My South American indians keep rising before me now as I read the O[dyssey],” he wrote, “just as the Iliad rose before me as I went with the Indians.” The subject with Father had been creation; now the subject with Harry was evil. William suddenly found himself open to a whole new view of the world, a view that constellated for him around the question of evil. He admired “the health! the brightness, and the freshness!” of the Greeks, and marveled at the “total absence of almost all that we consider peculiarly valuable in ourselves.” What most struck him was “the cool acceptance by the bloody old heathens of everything that happened around them, their indifference to evil in the abstract, their want of what we call sympathy, the essentially definite character of their joys, or at any rate of their sorrows (for their joy was perhaps coextensive with life itself).” What James was finding and working out for himself was that the Greeks simply didn’t have the sense of the world as pervaded by evil that, say, Father had. “The Homeric Greeks ‘accepted the universe,’ their only notion of evil was its [the universe’s] perishability—we say the world in its very existence is evil—they say the only evil is that everything in it in turn ceases to exist.”

William’s excited letter to Harry circles again and again to the same point in different ways. “To the Greek a thing was evil only transiently and accidentally and with respect to those particular unfortunates whose bad luck happened to bring them under it.” In other words, evil was not a deliberate and inevitable condition of life, willed or sanctioned by an all-powerful and inscrutable force or deity. “Bystanders could remain careless and untouched—no after brooding, no disinterested hatred of it in se, and questioning of its right to darken the world, such as now prevail... Are you free?—exult! Are you fettered or have you lost anything?—Lament your impediment or your loss and that alone.” This is not a Pollyanna move: to deny evil is not to deny suffering; all it does is remove the comfort—or the utter horror—of there being a cosmic or providential reason for the suffering.

Liberating himself from the concept of evil paradoxically permitted James to accept all the more fully the present reality of sadness and suffering. It is itself “ultimate,” he said. And he added, “There is no ‘reason’ behind it, as our modern consciousness restlessly insists.” What the Greeks gave James was one of the great acceptances that enabled him, both now and later, to embrace, to deal with, to get past trouble, though not without a certain cost. He summed it up for Harry: “This sad heroic acceptance (sans arrière pensée) of death seems to me the great tragic wind that blows through the Iliad, and comes out especially strong in Achilles.”¹¹

One such moment of insight would suffice many people for a month or a year, but James’s intellectual and emotional openness, which was in some ways helped, not blocked, by his physical vulnerability, gave him one good moment after another during April and May this year. He went to see a performance of Hamlet. He was familiar with the play but had never felt the power of it before, “the endless fulness of it—how it bursts and cracks at every seam.” He responded particularly to the darkly brooding, romantically introspective, and emotionally brimming figure of Hamlet while at the same time recognizing how completely different Hamlet is, as a type, from Achilles.¹²

Yet a week after his conversion to the Homeric worldview of action, acceptance, and bright, clear expression, James could voice an equally convincing description—if not quite acceptance—of the opposite point of view. “Hamlet,” he wrote in his diary, “is about as big an example as can be found of the Germanic way I spoke about here last night”—he had written then of a spirit of “unquenchable longing”—“the fulness of an emotion becomes so superior to any possible words, that the attempt to express it adequately is abandoned, and its vastness indicated by the slipping aside into some fancy, or counter sense—so does action of any sort seem to Hamlet inadequate and irrelevant to his feeling.”¹³

“Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up,” James would write in his lecture “The Energies of Men.” James himself was one of the latter. His seemingly contradictory but actually fruitful combination of physical discouragement and mental excitement continued into April and May, and he seems to have been aware of his own complex condition. In April he went for the third time to the baths at Teplitz and wrote in his diary that he was “in a queer state of weakheadedness from bathing and a sort of inward serenity and joy derived from reading Goethe and Schiller.” He was particularly struck by Schiller’s famous essay “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” and he reformulated Schiller’s distinction for himself in his diary: “In the first, harmony is given us immediately, the poet is Nature; in the second the harmony is a reflection, the poet seeks a nature which is lost.”¹⁴

He read a great deal of Goethe, including the Roman Elegies, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, the Goethe-Schiller correspondence, Hermann und Dorothea, Wahrheit und Dichtung, Egmont, and more, and he told Tom Ward that he was “just beginning to break through the skin of Goethe’s personality and to grasp it as a unity.” He was unable to summarize or pinpoint it; what he kept coming back to was not this or that idea but his sense of Goethe’s point of view. “The man lived at every pore of his skin, and the tranquil clearness and vividness with which every thing printed itself on his sensorium, and found a cool nook in his mind without interfering with any of the other denizens thereof, must have been one of the most exquisite spectacles ever on exhibition on this planet.” What he was learning from Goethe, he wrote Ward, was respect for the world outside himself. He thought Goethe “had a deep belief in the reality of Nature as she lies developed and a contempt for bodiless formulas. Through every individual fact he came in contact with the world, and he strove and fought without ceasing ever to lay his mind more and more wide open to Nature’s teaching.” Goethe’s natural gifts could not be communicated, James knew, but his enthusiasm could, and James rated that enthusiasm as “one of the important experiences of my own mind.”¹⁵

Goethe had many gifts for this particular young American. There was the figure of Faust, who, confronting the problem of creation and the problem of one’s personal starting point, turns to the opening of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the word.” Rejecting “word” because there must be a mind before there can be a word, Faust rewrites John: “In the beginning was the mind [sinn].” But now Faust rejects “mind” too, since there must be some force or energy or power that creates mind. “In the beginning was the power [kraft]” But power is nothing until it is exerted; as Emerson understood, “Power ceases in the moment of repose.” So Faust comes at last, but not to rest, with “In the beginning was the act.” The German word here is tat, the Greek, pragma.¹⁶

James responded most to Goethe’s openness to life, and the result was that he was more open to life himself. Friendship mattered intensely to him. Isolated and lonely as he often felt, he wrote long letters to Ward, to Arthur Sedgwick, to Henry Bowditch, to Wendell Holmes, and, always, to Alice and Harry. “I have grown into the belief,” he wrote Holmes, “that friendship (including the highest half of that which between the two sexes is united under the single name of love) is about the highest joy of earth and that a man’s rank in the general scale is well indicated by his capacity for it.”¹⁷

He longed for a practical focus. “Much would I give,” he wrote the thoroughly focused Holmes in his new Germanic English, “for a constructive passion of some kind.” On May 22 he had another of his now frequent turning points or crises. As he listened to the musical performance, the “magic playing,” of a Miss Havens, “my feelings came to a sort of crisis. The intuition of something here in a measure absolute gave me such an unspeakable disgust for the dead drifting of my own life.” He struggled to turn the moment to some use. “It ought to have a practical effect on my own will—a horror of waste life since life can be such.” He yearned for “an end to the idle idiotic sinking into Vorstellungen [ideas, notions, images] disproportionate to the object.”¹⁸

Though he despaired of ever being able to do laboratory work in physiology because of his back, he nevertheless pulled himself together and went to Heidelberg, where the great physiologists Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt were laying the experimental, laboratory-based groundwork for the emerging science of physiological psychology. James left for Heidelberg on June 26, but the venture was a total failure. He simply funked it. He seems to have had no letters of introduction, no entrée to the homes or the classes of the great men. Overwhelmed, perhaps, by feelings of inadequacy or insignificance, he fled back to Berlin, where his mood of course darkened horribly. He felt himself sunk in “blue despair”; he tormented himself by asking how much money his younger brother Harry had made in the past year; he conducted a conversation with himself in his diary, in French, that begins, “Tu veux mourir, hein?” (So—you want to die?) Still, he concluded that even if all that was alive in him were fragments of a man, it was better to have fragments than nothing at all.¹⁹

He went back to reading novels; he listed George Sand’s Daniella, her Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, Théophile Gautier’s Caprices et Zigzags, and his Capitaine Fracasse, “one or two Balzacs, [and] a volume of tales by Mérimée.” His back not improving, he tried blisters, which he recommended to Harry for his back.²⁰ “The application is uncomfortable but will pay. Blisters (strong) the size of a 50 cent piece. One every night on alternate sides of the spine. Empty bubble in morning. Dress with cloth covered with cerate”—a thick ointment made of wax or lard—“kept in place by straps of adhesive plaster. After each dozen blisters, omit a fortnight and recommence.”²¹ He continued to feel, as he told Henry Bowditch, that he was “tossing about Europe like a drowned pup about a pond in a storm.” He also said, revealingly, to Bowditch, “I have talked with no one about scientific matters since leaving home.”

He did not feel much like studying, but as he told his father, he managed “to keep something dribbling all the while.” And in October he turned to confront a book he had been working himself up to for almost a year. He had read Johann Schultz’s Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in November 1867. In April 1868 he had read Victor Cousin on Kant. His friend Charles Peirce had read Kant years before, virtually committing the Critique of Pure Reason to memory when he was in college. Now even Wendell Holmes had read it. With all this preparation and with his new facility in German, James turned at last to the book itself, the mere reading of which felt like a triumph or a culmination. He wrote his father that Kant’s book “strikes me so far as almost the sturdiest and honestest piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or wrong, (and it is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details of its Analytik part—however the rest may be) there it stands like a great snag or mark to which everything metaphysical or psychological must be referred. I wish I had read it earlier.”²² He also read a piece by Charles Renouvier, of whom he had not heard before, and was impressed by Renouvier’s taking his stand on Kant and by his “vigor of style and compression.”

James had been abroad for a little more than a year and a half, during much of which he had drifted, feeling in low spirits, albeit with a general intention to pursue the nascent field of physiological psychology. It takes time to turn a large ship around, but by November 1868 the ship seems indeed to have turned. Instead of drifting away from the career problem, James steered into it, bringing himself to return to America, to go back to medical school, and, for once, to finish something he had begun. He confirmed again to Tom Ward that “my only ideal of life is a scientific life,” and on November 7,1868, he left Europe on the Ville de Paris, bound home, through heavy gales, to Cambridge and to one last push toward his medical degree.