18. The Turn to Physiology

FOR ALMOST TWO YEARS after Minnie Temple’s death, James seems like a man with his back against a wall. He struggled all during the spring of 1870 to control his despondency and general depression of spirits. It was all very well to talk about the “self-governing resistance of the ego to the world,” but the practical consequences of such a belief, by itself, with no supporting enthusiasm, no recent victories, were stark. We hear no more of optimism, nothing further of scriptural texts. His ebullience over Renouvier temporarily evaporated. On May 5 he had a tooth pulled. Two days later, his jaw still aching, he wrote Harry describing Cambridge as cold and rainy, and himself as hunkered down under an “Indian Winter,” as “melancholy as a whippoorwill.” William came back to the subject of resistance; this time it sounds lonely and grim and far from hopeful. “All a man has to depend on in this world,” he told Harry, “is, in the last re-sort, mere brute power of resistance.” William here seems a little like Henry Adams, who would be appointed to teach history at Harvard in September 1870, at the age of thirty-two, and who would write in The Education of Henry Adams, “Resistance to something was the law of New England nature.”¹

William did not know it, but Harry was already on his way home from Europe with Aunt Kate. They landed on May 10, after a nine-and-a-half-day voyage without a storm or serious discomfort. The Harry who returned to Cambridge in the spring of 1870 was on the threshold of his first real success as a writer. He had now published fourteen stories, many of them running to around fifty pages; there was enough for a good-sized volume. He had also written forty-two critical articles and reviews. He was about to undertake a commission for a series of travel articles on America, and his first novel, Watch and Ward, was going to be serialized in the Atlantic. Florence and Italy were on his mind and in his plans. Henry’s general position was now in the greatest possible contrast to William’s. William was working out a grim doctrine of resistance and endurance. Henry was a rapidly emerging, successful, confident, and calmly focused young writer as he stepped ashore and returned to the family home on Quincy Street.

The James family went to Pomfret, Connecticut, again in the summer of 1870, and William continued to work out his idea of resistance, which now seemed, even to him, more bleak than heroic because it was too passive and too negative. He wrote brother Bob a distilled version of his position. “All thought,” he wrote, “all emotion which does not tend to action, is morbid and should be suppressed.” By “action” William here means just resistance—that is, our “power to resist pain, to rely on our hearts alone, to do without sympathy.”²

This is a Stoic line of thought, not a Christian one. As James bore down on it during the summer at Pomfret, it developed into a quasi-existentialist position. He laid out the idea of the human being as “a bundle of desires, more or less numerous. He lives, inasmuch as they are gratified, dies as they are refused.”³ These desires simply exist: there is no transcendental self, let alone a creator behind them. They are backed by exactly nothing except the self. “They exist,” wrote James, “by mere self-affirmation; and, appealing for legitimation to no principle back of them, are the lowest terms to which man can be reduced.”⁴

In place of an idea of evil, James put instead the idea of limits or abridgment of gratification. He identified two human tendencies, the centrifugal, or “expansive embracing tendency,” and the centripetal, inward-moving or “defensive.” He noted that these tendencies represented two different modes of self-assertion, the expansive representing the sympathetic mode, the centripetal the self-sufficing mode, and he wondered, inconclusively, if the two together might add up to self-respect.⁵

James now saw that to “accept the universe” and “to protest against it” were voluntary alternatives.⁶ He himself wished to accept it, but without illusions; he therefore termed his acceptance “resignation,” and thought of it as strictly provisional. To be resigned, he thought, should not be taken to mean “it is good,” “a mild yoke,” but rather, “I’m willing to stand it for the present.” So resistance came to mean not so much rejection as provisional resignation, to be measured by three things James listed as necessary to determine: “1) How much pain I’ll stand; 2) how much others’ pain I’ll inflict (by existing); 3) how much others’ pain I’ll accept without ceasing to take pleasure in their existence.”⁷

One wonders whom he had in mind in points 2 and 3. Perhaps it was his sister Alice. More likely it was Minnie. James wrote his Pomfret philosophy notes that summer of 1870, and the rest of that year and most of 1871 were a curiously empty, flat time for him. The four months from August to November 1870 are a blank. He wrote no letters and diary entries that we know of; he figures only marginally in Harry’s letters, in which his health is the only aspect of his life discussed, and that minimally, guardedly, without detail. To Grace Norton, the sister of Charles Eliot Norton and a lifelong friend of both Harry and William, Harry wrote in September 1870, “My brother’s health has small fluctuations of better and worse, but maintains steadily a rather lowly level.”⁸

William’s eyes and back were giving him trouble. Amid the silences and muted notices, William made strange minor errors of dating, poked into unlikely subjects, and put things off. He wrote the date June 21, 1870, at the head of the diary he had started in 1868, then made no entry for that June date. He kept a book list headed 1870, but when he continued the list for 1871, he put the new date down as 1870. In December 1870 he wrote Tom Ward that he had resolved to “look into mathematics... if I ever get able to study.”⁹ On December 29, he started a letter to Henry Bowditch, telling about his light reading. Full of self-disgust, he broke off the attempt to write, and picked the letter up again only on January 23, 1871.

Yet if the second half of 1870 and most of 1871 represent a low point in an otherwise active life, they were also a seed time during which James read widely. This was also a period of gathering resolve, for in mid-1871 he made a decisive turn toward physiology.

Simply to list the books he read in 1870 and 1871 gives one the sense that James was, in this downtime, busily filling up the well. He read travel books, favoring those by naturalists. He read Alfred Russel Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, Raphael Pumpelly’s Across America and Asia, and the travel writing of Georg Forster, who had been around the world with Captain James Cook. He read Henry Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thomas Cubbin’s Wreck of the Serica, Jane Smith’s Captivity Among Indians, and Daniel Drake’s Pioneer Life in Kentucky.¹⁰

He read very little in the classics, a bit more widely among standard authors. Cicero’s De Amicitia and De Senectute appear on his list, as does Saint Augustine, probably for his Confessions. He read, among Shakespeare’s history plays, Henry VI Part 2, Richard III, and Henry VIII. He read Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, Parkman’s Jesuits in North America and The Discovery of the West, and Goethe’s Torquato Tasso. In July 1871 James acquired two volumes of Emerson’s writings.

He read novels, ranging from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (again), Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Turgenev’s Récits d’un Chasseur (Huntsman’s Sketches) to the light political-historical novels of Erckmann-Chatrian (Histoire d’un Sous-Maître) and the Swiss Victor Cherbuliez (Prosper Randoce). James also did quite a bit of family reading, keeping up with Harry’s frequent stories, going back for yet another try at Substance and Shadow, as part of the systematic read-through of Father’s work that William had been engaged in since the fall of 1869.

William kept up a certain amount of reading in religious studies. By the time of Minnie’s death, he knew something about the Upanishads. Now, during 1870, he read several books on Buddhism and Hinduism, including Alabaster’s Modern Buddhist, volume one of Koeppen’s Religion des Buddha, Hippolyte Taine’s Le Buddhisme, Bastian’s Weltauffass der Buddhisten, and Keshab Chunder Sen’s Brahma Somej: Four Lectures. Still trying in 1871 to take his father’s measure, he read Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Wisdom and his Divine Providence. He also read a tight little theological book by his uncle the Reverend William James, called The Marriage of the King’s Son. This is not a novel; the title refers to a New Testament parable.

His preferred light reading (ignoring the fact that William would have considered everything just listed as light because it wasn’t physiology) ran to biography and memoir. As he put it to Henry Bowditch, “I fill my belly with husks—newspapers, novels and biographies.” He read Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s autobiography, Prince Eugene’s memoirs, Channing’s memoirs, Margaret Fuller’s memoirs, Blanco White’s autobiography, Stanley’s life of Dr. Arnold, Sir Samuel Romily’s autobiography, and that of Benjamin Franklin. He read the better-known and the lesser-known alike: Massimo d’Azeglio’s recollections, W. M. Rossetti’s memoir of Shelley, Marmontel’s memoirs, F. W. Robertson’s life and letters, and the life of Sir James McIntosh. James’s partiality for biography and memoir—for narratives of personal experience—stayed with him, feeding what, over time, became a central structural principle in some of his best writing.

Somewhere around April 1871, James’s reading took a more professional turn, toward books and articles on physiology, psychology, and philosophy. These three fields, which now seem so disparate (perhaps because they belong to different divisions in modern universities), were then more closely associated, and at a certain level of generalization, one sees why. Physiology concerns itself with the physical processes of the body. Psychology, as it was newly being shaped, was concerned with interactions between mind and body, while philosophy, having left behind such subdivisions as natural philosophy (i.e., science), was more and more concerned simply with mind. One book James read was John D. Morell’s Introduction to Mental Philosophy. He also read Wilhelm Griesinger’s Pathologie und Therapie der Psychische Krankheiten, Hippolyte Taine’s De l’Intelligence, Henry Maudsley’s Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Joseph Pierre de Gros Durand’s Essais de Physiologie Philosophique, Thomas H. Green’s Facts of Consciousness, Samuel Bailey’s Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, and Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology.¹¹

It wasn’t just books that impelled William James toward physiology just now; it was also, and perhaps principally, his friend Henry Bowditch. In April 1871 James wrote to Bowditch that he had just bought a ticket for a course of lectures, “Optical Phenomena and the Eye,” to be given by B. Joy Jeffries. He told Bowditch it was “the first mingling in the business of life which I have done since my return home.”¹² He had been home for two and a half years, and if his statement to Bowditch is not exactly a full account of what he had done, it does show how he felt about this time. His letters to and from Bowditch are a substantial percentage of James’s surviving correspondence from these years, and Bowditch seems to have been the only person outside the family and outside Cambridge with whom James kept in close touch.

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between their careers to date. Where James had tacked this way and that, hesitated, and now lay hove to, Bowditch had already steered a brilliant career course, as befitted the grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch, the author of The American Practical Navigator. Henry Bowditch was two years older than William James, and had entered Harvard in 1857 while William was attending school in Boulogne and thinking he would be an artist. After college, Bowditch entered the Lawrence Scientific School at the same time as James. He soon left, served as a lieutenant in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, then returned to the Lawrence School, where he studied comparative anatomy under Jeffries Wyman and also fulfilled the requirements for a degree from Harvard Medical School. Bowditch took his M.D. in 1868, one year before James did, and went abroad to Paris, where he studied physiology with Claude Bernard and neurology with Jean-Martin Charcot, who was later a teacher of Sigmund Freud’s. Bowditch next moved to Leipzig when he had a chance to enter the lab of Carl Ludwig, “the greatest trainer of physiologists who ever lived.”¹³ Bowditch promptly invented a new method of recording blood pressure changes, discovered by experiment the nature of cardiac muscle contraction, and found that the compound delphinine (found in larkspur and similar to atropine) would make the apex of an isolated heart beat rhythmically.

Bowditch was a “sturdy, gallant, well-set-up figure, of medium height, with aquiline features, pointed beard, and a cavalry mustache.” By 1871 he was well on his way to becoming a leading American physiologist. His work on rates of growth in school-age children was the basis for the first school lunch programs. His steady application and his laboratory orientation represented exactly what William James said he wanted for himself. In April 1871, just as James was struggling back to work and writing Bowditch about it, Harvard’s President Eliot offered Bowditch an assistant professorship of physiology and invited him to help reform medical education at Harvard. Bowditch wrote James in June to say he was bringing home lots of apparatus and books. He hoped the medical faculty would give him a room and some money so “we can set up a laboratory at once.” His use of the “we” was not accidental, as he explained in his letter to James: “I say we for I expect you to join me in working at experimental physiology.”¹⁴

William James in this period of his life was an accomplished complainer. During 1870 and 1871 we hear endlessly about his eyes, his back, his low spirits, his aimless existence. No doubt he felt down much of the time, but his drone of misery conceals something important and different. Beneath all the Sturm und Drang he was in fact pursuing, and preparing to further pursue, physiology, not just in an intellectual but also in a practical way. He was already at work, and his letter of April 8, 1871, has at least one line of thought and phrase that would hold good and reappear in The Principles of Psychology. “It is a pleasing confidence,” he wrote, “that... by working our stint day by day on the one line we have chosen, without looking ahead or thinking much of the final result, we are sure of waking some fine morning, experts in our particular branch, with a tact, so to speak for truth therein: a judgment, and ideas and intuitions of our own—all there without our knowing exactly how they came.”¹⁵

This sounds like a person ready to go. James now believed it, and Bowditch did too, for it was after reading this letter that Bowditch wrote to say he expected James to join him when he came home.