ABOUT A MONTH AFTER he sent off his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” James sent off, in January 1878, an article called “The Sentiment of Rationality.” He later described it as “the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize,” and he noted ruefully that it might better have been called “The Psychology of Philosophizing.”
We may, at this distance, prefer the original title, if only for its fresh and unorthodox, not to say brash, announcement that rationality is at bottom a feeling. Not a matter of logic or math, not reasoning or ratios, not induction, deduction, or syllogism, not something higher than and detached from the senses, not the opposite of a feeling or emotion—rationality is itself a feeling or emotion. He might even have called the essay “The Feeling of Rationality.” He begins by asking how we recognize the rationality of a conception, and he answers, “By certain subjective marks, that is, a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest.” He amplifies, saying, “This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness—the absence of all need to explain it, account for it or justify it—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.”1
James simply sidesteps the long history of reason, right reason, pure reason, and practical reason, walking right past the conventional notion that rationality means abiding by set rules of reasoning. James is not really interested in the history of philosophy or the taxonomy of logic; he is interested in how particular minds actually work. His starting point is not Greek or medieval philosophy but modern scientific or experimental knowledge of the functions of the brain and the senses. “All logical processes,” James says in another piece written at this same time, “are today hypothetically explained as brain processes.”2
James wants data, facts, and examples. He is suspicious of grand, prematurely unified schemes, and we may suspect that he has Herbert Spencer in mind when he observes that “the craving for monism at any cost is the parent of the entire evolutionist movement of our day.”3 This does not constitute a rejection of Darwin, just a rejection of Spencer’s pre-Darwinian, totalizing, monolithic—and in James’s view, forced—unification of everything into a grand theory of evolutionary progress. It is Spencer, not Darwin, whom James has in mind when he says, “The ignoring of data is, in fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining unity in one’s thought.” James is also suspicious of Hegelian moves to unify. “The crowning feat of unification at any cost is seen in the Hegelian denial of the Principle of Contradiction. One who is willing to allow that A and Not-A are one can be checked by few farther difficulties in philosophy.” James argues against the passion for unifying and for its opposite, the passion for “distinguishing”—that is, for “the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.” Now “the greatest living insister on the principle that Unity in our account of things shall not overwhelm clearness is Charles Renouvier.”4
However much James might wish to explain everything in terms of “molecular movements,” he is unwilling at present to accept any explanation as the final explanation. “A single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view,” he writes. This is a workable pluralism. He cites a colleague’s formulation of the “truth which constitutes the back-bone of this article, namely that every manner of conceiving a fact is relative to some interest, and that there are no absolutely essential attributes.”5 In his own rephrasing he says, “No concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.”
“The Sentiment of Rationality” stakes out ideas James will fight to hold for years. Already suspicious of such Hegelians as William T. Harris, who controlled America’s only philosophy journal, and G. H. Palmer, who had a main hand in setting the course for the Harvard philosophy department, James was opposed to the Hegelian unifying that tended to reinsinuate God—cloaked now as the Absolute—into modern thought, with arguments based on logic rather than revelation. James’s first skirmish with the Absolute, in this piece, is an effort to put it, too, into psychological terms. “The Absolute,” he writes, “is what has not yet been transcended, criticized or made relative. So far from being something quintessential and unattainable as is so often pretended, it is practically the most familiar thing in life. Every thought is absolute to us at the moment of conceiving it or acting upon it.” James ends this extraordinary essay, which is a call for a whole new philosophy of mind based on what mind actually is and does, by saying, provocatively, “The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails,” and he appeals for an example to Whitman: “Even the least religious of men must have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning that ‘Swiftly arose and spread around him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth’...To feel ‘I am the truth’ is to abolish the opposition between knowing and being.”6
To James’s “Remarks on Spencer,” published in January 1878, and “The Sentiment of Rationality” must be added a third essay, “Brute and Human Intellect,” also completed and sent off for publication that same month. This piece is James’s take on the question Charles Darwin put to Chauncey Wright, namely, At what point does the thing known to us as human consciousness arise? Once more James frames his essay as an attack on Herbert Spencer and then proposes an alternative. “Devoted to his great task of proving that mind from its lowest to its highest forms is a mere product of the environment... [Spencer] regards the creature as absolutely passive clay, upon which ‘experience’ rains down. The clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall thickest.” James goes after this with gusto and with a mildly zany example. According to Spencer’s theory, he says, if there were a “race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, [they] would have characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety of form and combination,” and the result of this repeated “experience” would be to make them “dissociate and discriminate before long the finest shades of these peculiar characters. In a word, they would infallibly become, if time were given, accomplished connoisseurs of sculpture.”7
What this leaves out, of course, is the factor of active interest. The mind must have some interest in a given subject before it even bothers to register impressions, let alone form opinions. “My experience is what I agree to attend to” is how James puts it. What the dogs will attend to in the sculpture gallery will be “Who peed on this pedestal?” The dogs can be as smart, lovable, conscious, sensitive, and attentive as you like, but, says James, “the great, the fundamental defect of their minds seems to be the inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to routine... Sunsets will not suggest heroes’ deaths, but only supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical animal.”8
Taken together, these three essays—which James tried to place in the most important journals—suggest a platform for a new kind of philosophical work, a new account of mind, based on the new physiological psychology, the whole enterprise seeking to learn, for the first time, how mind actually works.
In early February 1878, James went to Johns Hopkins to give a series of ten lectures to an audience of about sixty people: “The Brain and the Senses and Their Relation to Intelligence.” His opening lecture gives a good indication of the context in which he understood himself to be working. “Geology, zoology, astronomy and human history all seem to be coalescing,” he said, “into a vast system called the theory of evolution.”9 The big question, then, is What is the relation of mind or consciousness to evolution?
James’s procedure was to start with a barrage of physiological detail, an empiricist survey of the operation of the senses (“the study of sensation... is the base of psychology”), focusing particularly on the mechanics of vision. James took issue with the prevailing Spencerian position that consciousness is composed of small units, which, like bricks, are assembled in our minds into larger units. Surviving notes for these lectures are sketchy, but they do show that James approached the subject on a detailed and technical level. He later recalled these lectures as “exclusively experimental,” meaning he limited himself to reporting what could be shown experimentally.
His mind was very much on Alice Gibbens even while he was giving the lectures in Baltimore. Alice saved the following passage from James’s letter of February 24: “To me such decisions”—probably about whether to marry and have children—“seem acts by which we are voting what sort of a universe this shall intimately be, and by our vote creating or helping to create ‘behind the veil’ the order we desire.”10 This is a modern, democratic version of Pascal’s wager. Since there is no certain way to prove or disprove the existence of God, it makes sense to put one’s money on the existence of God and behave accordingly. James drops the principle and the language of gambling in favor of the idea of voting. The decisions we make about how to live are not bets but ballots for a particular kind of world. It is perhaps no accident that this way of viewing the importance of individual decisions comes up in James’s thought shortly after the disputed Hayes-Tilden election.
In the spring of 1878, James was voting on several issues that would profoundly affect his life. He and Alice were close to a final vote to trust their love for each other, a vote against the obstacles of infirmity, hereditary instability, and feelings of personal inadequacy and unworthiness. James was also casting a vote of confidence in his Baltimore lectures by negotiating to present them as Lowell Lectures in Boston. He cast a similar vote of confidence in his ability to make sense of his new field when he accepted a proposal from the publisher Henry Holt to write a textbook on psychology for Holt’s American Science Series. James warned Holt that the project would probably take two years. Holt replied that he was “a little staggered” by such a length of time, but he agreed nonetheless. One wonders what Holt would have done if he had known it would take James not two years but twelve.
There were also, this spring, a pair of new colleagues who would in different ways be with William James for life. In June, Granville Stanley Hall became the first student to complete the new graduate program in philosophy at Harvard, and at the same time Josiah Royce became one of the first four people to earn a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, the new university founded exclusively for graduate study. Hall was well built, athletic, and full of energy. A hiker and climber with a dominating personality, he had deep-set eyes and a broad, high forehead. He was two years younger than James. He came from an impoverished New England family with Mayflower ancestors on both sides. Hall had gone to Williams College to become a minister. Next he attended Union Theological Seminary, but after a talk with Henry Ward Beecher he went to Germany, where he studied theology with Isaac August Dorner and philosophy with Friedrich Trendelenburg. In 1874 he read Wilhelm Wundt’s Grundzuge [Characteristics] der Physiologischen Psychologie and quickly became convinced that the future of psychology lay in physiology. In 1876 he went to Harvard, where he served as an instructor in English while working on a Ph.D. in philosophy. His thesis was “The Muscular Perception of Space,” one of the subjects James was most interested in. The thesis was based on work done in Bowditch’s lab. Hall quickly set about writing a textbook on the new psychology. He later became a professor at Hopkins, then the president of Clark University. It was Hall who invited Freud to America in 1909 and who presided over the conference at Clark where Freud gave the lectures that were published as Five Lectures in Psychoanalysis. The founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first important writer on adolescence—its inventor, one might say—Hall became a dominant figure in American psychology. His early attitude toward James was not only respectful but enthusiastic. As time passed, however, they would pursue quite different paths and Hall would come to feel a sharp rivalry with James.
Josiah Royce was born in California in 1855, in Grass Valley, a mining town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Royce’s English parents had set out for California by wagon in the gold rush of 1849. The trip took them six months. They got lost, were rescued, had to abandon their wagon, and just made it over the mountains, on mules, before the winter snows. They did not find gold.
Royce was short, stocky, and unathletic, with an enormous round head set close on his shoulders. He had light, almost invisible eyelashes, intense blue eyes, and full lips that seemed pouty. He talked and smoked incessantly, stayed up late, and took little exercise. As a boy of ten he read astronomy books. At night he would gaze at the stars. “I came to seem so far from home,” he would write later, “and the contemplation of the mere magnitude of Being gave me a choking in the throat, and a lonely kind of fear,—a fear which seemed all the more hopeless because nothing that I could conceivably do, or could pray God to do, or could hope for, could be expected to alter in the least the essential situation, or make this cold world of the beautiful stars and the terrible distances comfortably smaller.”11 A yearning for what he called “the beloved community” was one of the permanent themes of his life.
His family moved to San Francisco when he was eleven. At sixteen he entered the brand-new University of California at Berkeley, graduating in 1875. Encouraged by the president of the university, Daniel Coit Gilman, and with letters of introduction from him, Royce set off for Germany. On the way he stopped in Boston, where he was invited to dinner by George Dorr, a Boston socialite who came to have a strong interest in psychic research. At this dinner Royce met William James for the first time, and James later recalled the occasion as notable for “the charm and delight” of Royce’s conversation.12
Royce spent a year in Germany, at Göttingen and Leipzig, listening to Lotze and Wundt, among others. In 1876 Gilman, who had left the University of California to be the president of Johns Hopkins, offered Royce a fellowship (in literature) there. Gilman was assembling a true community of scholars. The recently opened university was a very modest assembly of “six professors, several associates, occasional lecturers, and twenty-one fellows.”13 Royce loved his time at Hopkins. In addition to studying and writing his Ph.D. dissertation, he gave a course on Schopenhauer and a set of five lectures called “Return to Kant.”
James, Hall, and Royce all had unconventional educations. Each worked in a wide variety of academic fields, which in those days had loose, semipermeable boundaries. Each followed paths that branched, backtracked, and crisscrossed in unexpectedly fruitful ways. Hall thought of himself as a scientist, wrote much on education, and in 1917 published Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology. Royce took a job as instructor in English at Berkeley after earning his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1878.
In 1877 Royce visited James in Cambridge, hoping for encouragement in pursuing philosophy as a career. When James gave his lectures on the brain at Hopkins in February 1878, Royce was there. In 1882 James found a way to get Royce to Harvard, where a series of temporary positions finally turned into a permanent one. Royce published early and widely in philosophy. He wrote a book about California and a novel. Eventually a famous philosopher of religion, Royce was thirteen years younger than James but published four books before James had finished a single one.
He and James were close lifelong friends who differed on most important matters. The boy from the California gold camp insisted on the importance of community in all his mature work, while the boy from the East Coast and European communities became a spokesman for the individual. Hall and James became rivals, in part because they were somewhat alike, and their later relations were uneasy at best. Royce and James were warm friends and colleagues who disagreed merrily with each other. James said Harvard would be known in a hundred years as the place where Royce had taught, and he once wrote Royce, with his usual mischief, “I am sorry you say we don’t see truth in the same light, for the only thing we see differently is the Absolute, and surely such a trifle as that is not a thing for two gentlemen to be parted by.”14
After their July wedding in Boston, William and Alice left immediately for a ten-week honeymoon in the Adirondacks, at the Putnam family camp, a primitive shanty—more camping than housekeeping—at the end of the only road into the mountain village of Keene Valley, New York. Both William and Alice had been there before: the town was a tiny level opening deep in the wild High Peaks region, fifty miles from the Canadian border. William long retained the image of Alice, this summer of 1878, in her green plaid dress “as we used to stumble up the hill together and you would stop and laugh with dilating nostrils at me!”15
“Matrimony is an easy and natural state,” he told Arthur Sedgwick, and to another friend, Francis J. Child, the ballad scholar, he wrote, “We have spent... a ballad-like summer in this delicious cot among the hills. We only needed crooks and a flock of sheep. I need not say that our psychic reaction [James is having fun with his professional jargon] has been one of content—perhaps as great as ever enjoyed by man.” William was dictating to Alice—his eye trouble again—and Alice here inserted “(and woman! A.H.J.).” They wrote to thank the Putnams effusively for “the privilege of passing a honeymoon in this romantic and irresponsible isolation.”16 Things went swimmingly, apparently, as William sent off on August 10 a longish technical paper about space and how we experience it. By the end of August Alice was pregnant.