25. From Physiology to Physiological Psychology

IN THE FALL OF 1874 William James returned to Harvard and again taught Natural History 3: Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. He had fewer students this time, thirty-three, compared to fifty-three the first time, and he was paid six hundred dollars for the yearlong course. His attitude was changing and he was edging toward stability, both inner and outer. He behaved more and more like a man with a place and a purpose. He had for years championed America over Europe as a place to live. Now he began to talk proudly and a little defensively—but with humor—about Cambridge. “There are very good elements here,” he told Kate Havens (the Catherine Havens whom James met in Dresden in 1868), “but every one lives in his shell, doesn’t care to be spoken to, and evening visits are only paid by one man who is so profound a philosopher and so late a visitor as almost to make his friends wish to transport him.”¹ He began to have a little proprietary feeling about Harvard too. In an obituary notice of Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard professor of comparative anatomy and physiology, James’s teacher, and the man whose position James had filled, James spoke personally about the force of Wyman’s “example on us younger men,” and he referred comfortably to “our Cambridge” and “our University.”²

James was now the acting head of Wyman’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and in December 1874 he joined the Harvard Natural History Society.³ The old order seemed finally to be passing. Agassiz had died in December 1873, Wyman the following April. President Eliot’s energy and ambitious building projects were remaking Harvard. By 1874 the large dining room in Memorial Hall was finished and opened as a commons. Sanders Theatre was substantially completed by May 1875 and used for commencement the following year.⁴

James’s world, both its professional and its social side, revolved around the rising generation. He went to Edward Emerson’s wedding, and was invited to Naushon by Will Forbes, who had married Emerson’s daughter Edith. Of his visit to this most private and storied of the Massachusetts islands, summer redoubt of the Forbeses, James wrote, “They live in great opulence but not in state for they are the simplest and most genuine and unpretending of human beings... They have a great shabby old house, two yachts, and no end of horses, and the way we galloped through the beautiful old beech woods dashing past their trunks and under their level boughs at the risk of smashing knees and heads was enough to make one’s hair stand on end.”⁵

Back in Cambridge, his life settled quickly into a routine. He taught his class and went to the lab every day except Sunday. He undertook a program to improve his eyes, forcing himself to read for half a minute, then a minute longer each day until he had worked himself up to three hours. He avoided tobacco and coffee (neither Harry nor Alice could drink it either) and read for half an hour every night before bed. On Sundays he paid a morning visit to the Sedgwicks: there seems to have been a little something between him and twenty-three-year-old Theodora Sedgwick. When the Metaphysical Club was reorganized in late 1875 or early 1876, it met on Sunday afternoons for three hours. For relaxation and “wash[ing] out the cobwebs from the mind,” James went to the theater, as he had ever since he was a little boy in New York.

Early in the fall of 1874, Henry James came back from Italy, first to Cambridge, then to New York. His writing had been going splendidly. He was now thirty-one. By the end of 1874 he had published eighty-three reviews, twenty-eight travel sketches (one in eight installments), and twenty-four short stories. He would bring out his first three volumes in 1875: A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories in late January, Transatlantic Sketches in April, and Roderick Hudson at year’s end, following its serial appearance in the Atlantic Monthly.

William, for his part, had published twenty reviews, an obituary, the piece on vacations, and a letter to the editor. None of it was substantial, none of it was even signed. Not until 1874 did he make any serious effort to concentrate on one subject, physiology. So compared with Harry, he had achieved almost nothing. His sense of rivalry still expressed itself in frequent advice to his brother about how to write, advice that Harry allowed to pass over him with exemplary patience. When William suggested to Harry that the characters in Roderick Hudson reflected too much on themselves, Harry responded with a long and admiring description of Turgenev characters doing just that.

William’s reviewing, if it was insignificant when set beside Harry’s, was nevertheless bright, informed, and decisive. It was an apprenticeship of sorts, as well as a barometer of his mind. In December 1874 he took time to write the editor of The Nation on the subject of science and faith. “Physical science,” he wrote, “has well earned the great authority she enjoys.” But he was wary that some scientists were becoming so confident that they sometimes allowed their conclusions to run well in advance of proof, yielding occasionally “to the pleasure of taking for true what they happen vividly to conceive as possible.”⁶ Troubled now by a too easy use of the word “science” as a simple synonym for “truth,” and of “scientist” to mean “authority,” he said such usage represented “the mood of Faith, not Science.” Dubious already about too large claims, he concluded, “In ‘science’ as a whole, no man is expert, no man an authority; in other words, there is no such thing as an abstract ‘Scientist’—fearful word!”⁷

But James’s own working life was precisely that of a scientist. He was not an abstract “scientist,” however. He had learned thoroughly from Agassiz and loved to repeat that no one “could understand more of a generalization than his knowledge of particulars would cover.”⁸ James both taught and conducted lab work in anatomy and physiology. He dissected frogs even while on vacation. He wrote a short piece in February 1875 defending vivisection. It was not that he couldn’t identify with the lab animals, nor did he sidestep the awfulness. “A dog strapped on a board and howling at his executioners, or still worse, poisoned with curara, which leaves him paralysed but sentient, is, to his own consciousness, literally in a sort of hell,” he wrote. He called for compassion among researchers, and he thought the day might be near when all that could be learned from vivisection would have been learned. But he also said that, at present, the entire science of physiology “is based, immediately or remotely, upon vivisectional evidence... To taboo vivisection is then the same thing as to give up seeking after knowledge of physiology.”⁹ He also argued in a way a modern reader finds uncomfortable that if the dog understood what was going on, “and if he were a heroic dog, he would religiously acquiesce in his own sacrifice.”

James was, in fact, enormously fond of dogs. In the summer of 1875, on his way home from his Wisconsin trip, he acquired a setter pup named Dido. He adored her, as did Alice, and when Dido began to bark too much and range too far, and couldn’t be kept from “swill debauches” in the neighbors’ garbage “and consequent nocturnal attacks,” James reluctantly sent her off to Bob in Wisconsin and got Alice a Scottish terrier.

James spent a good deal of time during 1874 and 1875 trying to look after Bob. In the summer of 1875 he went west to see him. Bob, though settled in Wisconsin, married, with a son, Edward, born in 1873, and another child on the way (she would be a daughter, Mary), was in profound spiritual trouble and writing harrowing letters to William, who had a special tenderness for Bob. “When the darkness seemed totally cruel and the despair too savage for anyone to bear,” Bob wrote, “I have tried prayer and friendship and memory... But thro’ them all I have always felt the avenue that I am treading growing narrower and less well cheered until finally I have reached that part of it w[h]ere we are alone, quite alone and the power of despair ahead of you.”¹⁰ Bob too had some of the family gift for vivid self-expression as well as the family curse of depression. “I cannot understand,” he went on in a letter to William, “how even the smallest experience of human insufficiency can fail to make one crave and demand with a loud voice some little or great entrance behind the horrid mask which clothes us.”

William’s own mood this year ranged from gaiety to melancholy. Apropos the hundredth anniversary celebration of the battles of Lexington and Concord, James wrote Kate Havens, “The beauty of it is that the hatred of tory and rebel was brotherly love compared to the sentiments of Lexington and Concord today toward each other, each wishing to have the sole credit of the first battle.” To Annie Ashburner he wrote to say that her photograph (James was an avid exchanger of photographs) brought back the old days, but, he added, “Alas, I fear me those days are past forever.” He went on to lament, in reference to which friendship he does not say, “Every year changes our personality, and the splinters of a parted friendship will not keep sharp enough to rejoin exactly as they broke.” Perhaps one reason James seldom referred to the past was that thinking about it gave him such an acute sense of loss.

But it was science, especially new science and its procedures and assumptions, that now commanded his deepest, steadiest attention. He maintained his interest in Darwin and Darwinism; in 1875 he was reading in modern physics as well. James Clerk Maxwell had become in 1871 the first professor of experimental physics at Cambridge University in England. In 1873 he brought out his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In May 1875 James read and reviewed a book called The Unseen Universe, by the physicist and mathematician Peter Guthrie Tait (who helped develop modern mathematical physics) and the physicist and meteorologist Balfour Stewart (whose work on radiant heat helped found modern spectrum analysis). The Unseen Universe was written to show that “the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist.”¹¹ Tait and Stewart suggested that “the visible system is not the whole universe, but only, it may be, a very small part of it; and that there must be an invisible order of things, which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away.”¹² The authors clearly regarded this as a live issue. They formulated the thesis in a grotesquely compressed form (“thought conceived to affect the matter of another universe simultaneously with this may explain a future state”) and published it—to establish priority—in Nature in 1874, in simple cipher. The announcement as printed in Nature read, “A8 C3 D E12 F4 G H6 I6 L3 M3 N5 O6 P R4 S5 T14 U6 V2 W X Y2.”¹³

“Modern physics,” James begins his review, “postulates, in addition to the gross matter which we can weigh and feel, another form of material existence called the ether or medium.” Details aside, James goes on, “The upshot of all these speculations is that matter and the medium, or the visible and the invisible, are considered materially and dynamically continuous.”¹⁴ It makes all the difference in the world whether we regard this notion of matter and ether as a new outbreak of the visible and invisible worlds of, say, Cotton Mather, or as a forerunner of, say, A. S. Eddington’s twofold description of the table—one description emphasizing the commonsense substantiality of the table, the other the scientific description in which “there is nothing substantial... it is nearly all empty space—space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force.” Maxwell’s ether would disappear with later discoveries, but the distinction between the apparent table and the scientific table is still with us. James was interested in how the new physics of his day made it possible to entertain the conception of “a continuity of being, both conscious and material, between the worlds.” He was also interested in how Tait and Stewart aimed simply “to explode the notion that science debars the supposition of such a continuity.”¹⁵

Since this continuity was, from now on, an important and recurring possibility for James, it is necessary to understand how nuanced and ambivalent his approach to it really was. He objected, for example, that the invisible world of modern physics was “by no means identical with the world ‘behind the veil’ of religion,” noting that religion spoke not just of “another” but of a “better” world. But then James doubled back on himself and noted that Tait and Stewart believe in the “betterness” of the “other” world, not because they are scientists, but by “the same simple act of teleologic trust, the same faith that the end will crown the work, with which the most narrow-minded old woman so quickly envelops her briefly recited cosmogony.” Then, in the most surprising turn of all, James swept on: “We for our part not only hold that such an act of trust is licit, but we think, furthermore, that any one to whom it makes a practical difference (whether of motive to action or of mental peace) is in duty bound to make it.”¹⁶

This is not a modern version of Pascal’s wager (it makes sense to bet on the existence of God, because if God exists we will be better off, and if God doesn’t we have lost nothing by such a bet). Nor is it a modern version of Kant’s categorical imperative (act only on those principles you are willing to have everyone act on). We are obliged to believe, James says here, because such a belief will make a difference in how we live. Whitehead uses a similar line of thought to announce the imperative of education. “Where attainable knowledge could have changed the result,” he wrote in “The Aims of Education,” “ignorance has the force of vice.”

Elsewhere James expressed a more provisional skepticism. In, for example, his June 1875 review of Fernand Papillon’s Nature and Life, he expresses doubt about “a rewatering of the well-watered thoughts of Janet, Lévèque, and Vacherot,” writers who, “adopting recent scientific theories about the conservation of energy and the constitution of matter, spiritualize the latter by identifying its force with the will-force, which is the only [force] of which we have any immediate personal experience. Matter is motion, motion is force, force is will.” James met the new physics with only provisional acceptance. It seems to have been enough for him to think of the invisible world of the new physics as a possibility, without for the moment having to press it into probability or fact.

James shook himself free of Cambridge in mid-June 1875, after classes and exams ended. He headed west, mainly to see his brothers. Bob had taken a railroad job in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, eight hours by rail west of Milwaukee. But he had recently left this position, and with money from Father he bought a farm in Whitewater, a couple of hours southwest of Milwaukee. The farm was terribly hard work, a second child was due in August, and Bob was depressed and uncertain. He began to drink again, and also to lean heavily on religion.

Wilky was in Milwaukee and also married. He had left his railroad position and gone into the chain and bolt business with a man named Whaling. William visited Milwaukee, where both his sisters-in-law had family. Then he went home the long way, traveling to St. Paul and down the Mississippi to Prairie du Chien, then to Chicago, Niagara, down the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and home by rail through Vermont, where Alice and Aunt Kate were staying at the Bread Loaf Inn in Ripton. His summer reading included Darwin’s Expression of Emotion and the poetry of Shelley and Whitman. Thinking back to his first enthusiasm for poetry seventeen or eighteen years earlier, he wrote, “No verse has ever renewed that feeling in me as Walt Whitman has succeeded in doing this summer.”¹⁷

Chauncey Wright died in September 1875, before James got back to Cambridge from his summer travels. College started up again, and James taught Natural History 3 for the third time, to yet fewer students. He was also giving a graduate course in the relations between physiology and psychology, and he offered a small, informal course in practical anatomy. “The only way to understand the brain is to dissect it,” he wrote later. “The brains of mammals differ only in their proportions, and from the sheep’s one can learn all that is essential in man’s.” He recommended several printed guides, noting that if one couldn’t get the books, a few practical notes—subjoined—would suffice. “The instruments needed are a small saw, a chisel with a shoulder, and a hammer with a hook on its handle... In addition a scalpel, a pair of scissors, a pair of dissecting forceps and a silver probe are required.” James made it all seem easy. “The solitary student can find homemade substitutes for all these things but the forceps, which he ought to buy.”¹⁸

In October Harry returned to Europe, this time with a sense that he was going for good. “I take possession of the old world,” he wrote home in a triumphal letter from London on November 1. “I inhale it—I appropriate it!”¹⁹

Less dramatically, but no less decisively, William reached out this fall in an effort to take hold of his own life. In early December he wrote to President Eliot proposing a new course, in psychology. James began by explaining how the course would fit in with existing offerings. The letter thus shows how James conceived of the entire broad field he now called “mental science” rather than “philosophy.” Mental science, he says, is “the study of one thing, the human mind, its laws, its powers, and the authority of its conclusions.”²⁰ He identified four subdivisions: “a) logic, b) History of Philosophy, c) Metaphysics (involving ‘erkenntnisslehre’ [epistemology] methodology, or all questions as to the reach of man’s cognitive faculties), d) psychology.” James noted that the four courses already in the Harvard catalogue belonged mainly to the history of philosophy.

James went further and, in the same letter, specified the need for the particular kind of psychology he wanted to teach. “On every side,” he noted, “naturalists and physiologists are publishing extremely crude and pretentious psychological speculations under the name of ‘science.’” On the other hand, “professors whose education has been exclusively literary or philosophical, are too apt to show a real inaptitude for estimating the force and bearing of physiological arguments when used to help define the nature of man.” Now, James wrote, “a real science of man is... being built up out of the theory of evolution and the facts of archeology, the nervous system and the senses.” Since neither the pure physiologist nor the literary person who lacked firsthand knowledge of “nervous physiology” could really do the job, James proposed “a union of the two disciplines” in one man, a man such as himself. And if Eliot and the college wanted a traditional appointment, James pointed out that Rudolph Hermann Lotze, at Göttingen, and Wilhelm Wundt, first at Heidelberg and then at Zurich, were the kind of person James was proposing. Like James, both Lotze and Wundt had started out as students of medicine, both were interested in physiological psychology, both brought wider philosophical views into consideration. James made it plain to Eliot that he, William James, embodied just such a union of disciplines.

James had an interview with Eliot during December; Eliot spoke of offering James an increase in salary. In February 1876 James was promoted to assistant professor of physiology at an annual salary of $1,650. The new course, Natural History 2: Physiological Psychology, was offered during the next school year.