22. Teaching

WILLIAM WAS SCHEDULED to begin teaching in the spring semester of 1873. During the previous spring, most of the James family was again on the move. On May 11 Harry departed with Alice and Aunt Kate for England and the Continent, where he noted “Alice’s immense improvement.” Harry was himself thinking of a permanent move. “I incline more and more to decide to remain abroad,” he wrote William.¹ Father and Mother went to Milwaukee by rail, starting out on May 30, to visit Wilky and Bob, both of whom had settled there after the collapse of the Florida schemes.

William’s eyes were still giving him trouble, so he hired students to read to him, but he felt well enough otherwise to make a three-day trip to Newport, where he found the family’s old stone house “dismally mildewed and dirty inside.”² It was not like William to dwell on his own past. He was very fond of reading autobiographies, but he never wrote anything approaching one himself. His recollections of the past were apt, like this one, to be sad. “The old wall papers in the 3rd story smote me with their familiarity,” he told Harry and Alice and Aunt Kate, “but they were peeling from the walls, and the old views from the little low windows were masked by the upgrowth of the trees.” His impression was of a world, and a self, that no longer existed. “The ghost of my dead self with his ignorance and weakness seemed to look out strangely at me from the whole place—it was the same in Pelham Street and wherever I went, and made the total impression of the visit a very sad one.”³

With his sense of his own ignorance and weakness now in abeyance, and with his health slowly getting better, James plunged, as he usually did, into anything he could regard as a new life. In June he and his father attended the wedding of Wendell Holmes and Fanny Dixwell. In July he left Cambridge for Mount Desert, Maine, just then becoming a popular summering spot for New Englanders. “You steam into a harbor,” he wrote Alice, “studded with steep rocky islets feathered with birch and fir, up to a wharf behind which is a settlement of white wooden buildings dumped about miscellaneously... Behind the settlement rise two good-sized hills or mountains as they call them here, and over the bay is a long waving blue line of others, more distant and still higher, on the mainland of Maine.”⁴

There was already by the summer of 1872 a considerable colony in and around Bar Harbor of sociable, intellectually inclined people from Boston, Cambridge, and New Haven, people who talked, sailed, rowed, botanized, and “commun[ed] with the sea from the cliffs.” There were Ashburners, Sedgwicks, Parkmans, Paines, Trowbridges, and Andersons. William was particularly attentive to Sara Sedgwick, then in her early thirties, a year or two older than William. He described her to Alice as “the most lovely of beings”; to Harry he said, “I am absolutely ashamed of not falling in love with Sara Sedgwick.” There was also an Elizabeth Greene, “the only woman I have met who can be classified with Minnie Temple for originality and inexhaustible good nature.”⁵

James was now thirty, but he neither talked nor wrote about marriage—that we know of—beyond repeated assertions that he was unsuited and unfit for it. This seems to reflect his conviction that he was too sickly and neurasthenic to be a proper husband or father. But it was more than that, and it was more than an unwillingness to follow the model of his own father. Beneath William James’s flirtatious and animated exterior was a completely different person, and one he loathed. He said once that he felt “chained to a dead man.”

James finished, while at Bar Harbor, a long review of Hippolyte Taine’s On Intelligence. He praised the early chapters as containing “the clearest and best account of the psychology of cognition” he knew, and he predicted the book would “play a vital part in the revival of philosophy on an empirical basis which is about to begin in France.”⁶ Taine, a well-known French critic, was working, in this book, along the English line of Bain, Spencer, and Mill; he was trying to eliminate transcendentalism from psychology.⁷ Taine was opposed to so-called faculty psychology, to Cartesianism, to philosophical realism, and to the concept of universals. In place of all this, he proposed a psychology of naturalism based on the scientific method and on clinical data. He emphasized the connection between psychology and the neural sciences, and was deeply attentive to Darwin. Taine regarded such notions as “faculty,” “capacity,” and “power” as examples of what Alfred North Whitehead would call misplaced concreteness. Such words, Taine said, “do not indicate a mysterious and profound essence, remaining constant under the flow of transient facts.”⁸ Transient facts were exactly what he did accept. “In little, well-selected, important, significant facts, stated with full details and minutely noted, we find at present the materials of every science.”⁹

Taine wrote provocatively and boldly. “History,” he said, “is applied psychology, psychology applied to more complex cases.” He began his book with a long discussion of signs. “What we have in our minds when we conceive general qualities and characters of things, are signs, and signs only.” All our ideas can be reduced to images, and these images constitute our reality. Taine gives the example of Flaubert. “My imaginary persons affect me,” Flaubert wrote, “pursue me, in fact, I live in them. When I was describing the poisoning of Emma Bovary I had so strong a taste of arsenic in my mouth, I was myself so far poisoned, that I had two consecutive fits of indigestion, and real indigestion, for I threw up my dinner.”¹⁰

James pulled up short, for now, of accepting some of Taine’s cleverest points, such as the view that “external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we must call external perception a true hallucination.”¹¹ This, says James, is admirable, considered as psychophysiology, but it raises a philosophical problem, which is “how, out of a conspiracy of hallucinations, anything real can be hatched.”¹² James was strongly attracted by Taine’s liveliness, his vivid style, his passion for detail, his narrative method, his distrust of vague and unsupported generalities, and his bright sympathy with the empirical approach.

On July 27, 1872, William wrote Alice about “Bowditch’s offer to let me replace him in teaching the physiology elective next Spring term.” When the appointment came through, William wrote Harry that the work was “a perfect godsend to me just now. An external motive to work, which yet does not strain me—a dealing with men instead of my own mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late.”¹³

William was experiencing a general turn toward the outer world this summer—Goethe’s advice was always that turning outward to the world was health, while turning inward was disease—and he reveled in female company and in nature, and sometimes in both together. He went with a local boatman and some friends for a long row to Great Head, four miles south of Bar Harbor. The wind came up on the return trip; he sat beside Sara Sedgwick and steered the boat. “The fresh wind, the interminable spotless twilight, the dark, heaving ocean, the solemn might of the cliffs on our left hand, the incipient northern light which later became one of the finest I have ever seen, all made a first-class night of it.”¹⁴ Later, in mid-August, he took the steamer back to Portland, then drove by buggy to the Atlantic House, near Prout’s Neck, where he’d been the previous summer with his family. There he saw old friends and people who remembered Alice and Wilky and Aunt Kate.

Here too William found himself open to things. He enjoyed “the steady heavy roaring of the surf” coming “through the open window borne by the delicious salt breeze over the great bank of stooping willows, field and fence.” He told Harry he had “never so much as this summer felt the soothing and hygienic effects of nature on the human spirit.” This new interest in nature made him sorry that he had let his drawing die out. He said he regretted not having stuck to painting, and he thought he ought still to learn to sketch in watercolor. He knew, as he now said, that a person “needs to keep open all his channels of activity, for the day may always come when the mind needs to change its attitude for the sake of its health.”¹⁵

As his spirits rose, his feistiness returned. He hectored Harry about his writing style: “Your own tendency is more and more to over-refinement, and elaboration. Recollect that for Newspaporial purposes”—William had in mind Harry’s recent travel sketches—“a broader treatment hits a broader mark.”¹⁶ Here, as so often, William’s remarks reflect his own case and his own aspirations as much as or more than Harry’s. It was becoming a pattern with him. He would criticize Harry, then read something splendid by him—he soon was calling Harry’s “Madonna of the Future” “a masterpiece”—then apologize for his earlier criticism.

The fall went swiftly. Chauncey Wright was in England, visiting Darwin in September. In early November William wrote a warm letter to Charles Renouvier: “Thanks to you I have for the first time, an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom.” He told Renouvier that because of his, Renouvier’s, philosophy, “I am beginning to be reborn to the moral life.”¹⁷ The link was clear to him. If we are not free to make choices, we are not responsible for our lives. If we are free, we are responsible.

On November 9 and 10 a huge fire destroyed 775 buildings in downtown Boston. “Rich men suffered,” William wrote easily to Harry, “but upon the community at large I should say its effect had been rather exhilarating than otherwise.” William seems not to have known that in one of those buildings was the studio of his former painting teacher, William Morris Hunt, who lost all the works stored there. But he undoubtedly knew that heroic volunteers had saved the Old South Church by spreading wet blankets on its wood-shingle roof while fire engines from as far away as New Hampshire sprayed the steeple with water.

On November 18, Bob James, now twenty-six, married a young woman from Milwaukee named Mary Holton. Bob and Mary made a trip east soon after, and William reported that “Mary has won the hearts of all of us by her combination of prettiness, amiability, vivacity, and modesty with a certain dash of pluckiness which is very charming.”¹⁸ But by late December William was writing Bob again about depression. Bob had not written for a while; William said he was afraid it was “one of your low-spirited moods again.” It was probably at least partly his own condition he had in mind when he told Bob, “When the mind is morbid only the gloomy images have any vividness. We may try to realize the reverse of the picture, but it won’t bite, and even concentrated reflection will fail often to give it substantiality for us. Then the only thing is to have faith and wait, and resolve whatever happens to be faithful ‘in the outward act’ (as a philosopher says) that is do as if the good were the law of being, even if one can’t for the moment really believe it. The belief will come in its time.”¹⁹

“Your If is the only peacemaker,” says Touchstone in As You Like It. “Much virtue in If.”

 

In January 1873, just after his thirty-first birthday, William James began to teach. His first course was an elective, Natural History 3: Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates. The course came under the Department of Natural History, the examining committee of which had had Henry Thoreau as a member in 1859 and 1860. Thomas Dwight was responsible for the anatomy part, James for the physiology. The course attracted fifty-three students, all upperclassmen, and met at eleven o’clock in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was then located in Boylston Hall. James received three hundred dollars for his work; it was the first substantial money he had earned, even if it amounted to only 10 percent of what Harry would make this year. Neither William nor Henry mentioned the contrast, but in a family where money mattered, it would have been noted by both of them.

The new instructor still parted his hair in the middle, though he kept it shorter than before. In 1869 he had worn a full mustache, and now he added a full beard, trimmed to medium length. Photographs show a serious, unsettled face with a faintly troubled expression around the eyes. One acquaintance of his from around this time said that he looked “foreign”: “He was very slender, his clothes were of an entrancing, unfamiliar cut, he had a little pointed beard, he wore a soft flowing blue-and-green-plaid necktie, its bows and ends outside his waistcoat.” He had an “air.”²⁰

He was disappointed in his students at first. His mother spoke in a letter of the “loutish character of the young men generally, so few show intelligence or interest,—still there are a few.”²¹ “Dealing with students is a queer thing,” William wrote a friend. “There is no rebound to them. You say your say and they depart in silence.” This suggests that James was not yet the teacher he would become. Still, he enjoyed teaching from the very beginning. He wrote Harry that he found “the work very interesting and stimulating,” and he added that it might be “not unpleasant as a permanent thing. The authority is at first rather flattering to one.” William’s fond father saw it as a wild success. “Willy goes on swimmingly with his teaching,” he wrote Harry, adding with his burdensome optimism that the students “are elated with their luck in having such a professor, and next year he will have no doubt a larger class still, attracted by his fame.”²²

As William settled into teaching, his spirits and outlook underwent a marked change for the better. His physical health was slower to mend, but even that seemed to him better. By mid-February he was writing to Harry, “My own spirits are very good as I have got some things rather straightened out in my mind lately, and this external responsibility and college work agree with human nature better than lonely self-culture.”²³

One day in mid-March William came into the living room of the Quincy Street house. As his father recorded the scene, Willy, after walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, exclaimed, “Dear me! What a difference there is between me now and me last spring this time.” Last spring, Willy said, he had been a hypochondriac, “and now feeling my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It is the difference between death and life.” When his father asked “what specially in his opinion had promoted the change,” William replied, his father said, “Several things: the reading of Renouvier (specially his vindication of the freedom of the will) and Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while: but specially his having given up the notion that all mental disorder required to have a physical basis... He saw that the mind did act irrespective of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first-hand, and this was health to his bones.”²⁴

We must be careful not to take Henry Senior’s words completely at face value. What he reports is what he longed to hear, but the general drift of his account fits well with the rest of William’s new outlook. William had already rejected strict psychophysics (the idea that measurements of reaction times and other physiological processes are the sole legitimate basis of psychology) and accepted the notion that, as Milton moved it and Emerson seconded it, the mind is its own place. It is primary and active, not secondary and passive.

William James’s decision to teach was a major turning point in his life, marking the beginning of the end of his early troubles. James is famous for his work in psychology, philosophy, and religion, but it is clear that his real vocation was teaching. It gave him a position of authority he had never had before, and it kept him in constant contact with bright young people. At the end of the first week of April, William told Eliot he would take on both parts of the anatomy and physiology course for the next year. This triumphant, if a trifle premature, announcement is the subject of the final entry in the diary of troubles William had been keeping for the past five years, ever since the gloomy days in Germany in April 1868.²⁵

James’s initial term of teaching, some fifty classroom hours of it, was the first regular work James had done in his life. It taxed his precarious health, and he was glad enough when the term was over, but it had a tonic effect on him. Now that he was a working man, and with the enthusiasm of a convert, James wrote a piece on vacations for the North American Review. He loudly denounced the proverbial New England advice “Better wear out than rust out,” and he called for the institution of vacations for all working people. He even proposed the establishment of “vacation trusts”: “One million dollars properly invested would set free every year no fewer than fourteen hundred such persons” for a “month of idleness.” He does not supply the math behind this; neither does he say where the funds would come from.²⁶