JANUARY 1879 SAW William James with more confidence than he had ever felt before. In midmonth he had an “explicit conversation” with President Eliot and came away convinced that he had the inside track for Francis Bowen’s position in philosophy, if and when Bowen retired. Vague as this prospect might seem, and despite the risks of delay, James decided to stay at Harvard and take his chances, so he scrupulously wrote Gilman to say he wouldn’t be available for a job at Hopkins. “The Spatial Quale” came out in the January issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and “Are We Automata?” appeared in the January issue of Mind. In February James agreed to teach women for the Harvard Annex (which would become Radcliffe), and despite an already overfull schedule he proposed yet another series of Lowell Lectures, “Evolution and Mind.”
His eyes still gave him trouble, but his sister was better now, and he found time in early April for a quick visit to Milwaukee to see his brothers. In Cambridge, the old Metaphysical Club, which after the death of Chauncey Wright had been held together by Davidson, Howison, and Cabot—all of them friends of James’s—came to an effective end in the latter part of April. James remarked that the group seemed about talked out. But his attention was elsewhere. On May 8 Alice gave birth to a son, named, inevitably, Henry.
Alice and the baby stayed with her mother and her two as yet unmarried sisters in the mother’s Boston house at 29 West Cedar Street. The four Gibbenses, together with an ever-changing roster of cooks and housemaids and an “encompassing ring” of aunts and cousins, constituted a large, formidable realm made up almost entirely of women. Alice, her sisters, and their mother did everything together. They mended and sewed and talked together, or one of them read to the others. They “were welded together in the closest affection and community of experience. Their memories were a common storehouse.” William had a special place in this circle, of course, but it was and it remained a world of women.1
William was permitted to visit, but not to live, with his wife and new baby. He was archly proud of his eight-and-a-half-pound “domestic catastrophe,” with his orange complexion, black head of hair, “musical but not too musical disposition,” and a “lovely and benignant little expression on his face.” They swaddled him with nicknames: Embry, Goblin, Goblington, Fatling. Staying at her mother’s place gave Alice a comfortable setting and abundant female support, and it left William more or less free to hover about, travel, and work. He was neither expected nor allowed to take on a share of the load of raising the child. Not surprisingly, therefore, he kept working, and just about the time Henry III was born, William wrote a piece he called “Rationality, Activity, and Faith.”
It was the capstone of almost two years of high emotional excitement, rapid maturation, and feverish activity. It was in August 1877 that Alice had given him the little compass as a present and a broad hint. That fall, while teaching a full load, he wrote his first signed piece (on Spencer), arguing that the central fact of mind is not the passive recording of, or reacting to, outside stimuli, but the active quality of preference or interest. In retrospect, this is clearly the central and never-to-be-relinquished perception of James’s life and work. Alice’s compass seems to have done the trick on more than one front.
James conceived “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” as a continuation of “The Sentiment of Rationality.”2 The point of the earlier essay, he now insisted, was “the exhibition of the failure of the purely logical function in philosophizing.” The essay starts from “the assumption that if thought is not to stand forever pointing at the universe in a maze of helpless wonder, its movement must be diverted from the useless channel of purely theoretic contemplation.” James then undertook to redeem thought from what he understood as unmoored theory. He aimed, he said, to determine “what that definition of the universe must be which shall awaken active impulses capable of effecting this diversion.” He was looking, not for some definition of the universe that would prove “true” in some absolute or abstract way, but for a definition that would call upon our best energies. “A conception of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked, and inhibited in the purely contemplative path will... make the world seem rational again.”3
The boldness and novelty of this approach can hardly be overstated. James seemed and can still seem to have abandoned the centuries-old notion that philosophy is the search for the truth. He already doubted that either “the search” or “the truth” existed or could exist. He was trying to turn the river of thought into a new channel. To be successful, to be generally accepted, a philosophy must be able, he felt, “to define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers.” No philosophy that “baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers can succeed.”
James here singles out for disapproval “a pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer’s incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann’s wicked jack-of-all-trades, the Unconscious.” The trouble with determinism, fatalism, pessimism, the unconscious, and materialism is that in our better hours we feel such limited and limiting forces to be “so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in human affairs.” Each explains away the objects of our thought or translates them “into terms of no emotional pertinency, [leaving] the mind with little to care or act for.”4 James pins his argument to daily life. “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests,” he writes. “Cognition is incomplete until discharged in act.”5
Having set out the checkers on the board, James steps back for a wider view of the game. “If we survey the field of history and ask what features all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this; that each and all of them have said to the human being, ‘the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.’”
This is William James, not yet forty, at the top of his form. This is the “philosophical assemblage” for which Whitehead would single him out. James here aligns himself with what we may call the liberal Platonic tradition, a Platonism not of the Republic but of the Timaeus. James instances “the emancipating message of primitive Christianity,” the “Platonizing renaissance,” Luther and Wesley, the “wildfire influence of Rousseau,” Kant, Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, Carlyle, and, above all for James, Emerson. “Emerson’s creed,” writes James, “that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself—He who will rest in what he is, is a part of Destiny,” and this thought, says James, is “an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of one’s natural faculties.”6
This is the central, sustaining—or, as we would now say, empowering—conviction. The most successful, because most widely adopted, philosophy will contain an “assurance that my powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to [the Universal Essence] but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif.”7
James is quick to insist that we are all, nevertheless, different, that although “all men will insist on being ‘spoken to’ by the universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the same way.”
James moves on to the third term of his title, to the “one element of our active nature which the Christian religion has emphatically recognized,” and which philosophers have “tried to huddle out of sight in their pretension to found systems of absolute certainty.” That is “the element of Faith,” which he adroitly defines as “belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible: and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.” Faith, says James, is an essential function; it is “the power to trust, to risk a little beyond the literal evidence... Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.”8
In fact, he maintains, “we cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.” He moves now to examine “a certain class of truths” that “cannot become true till our faith has made them so.” He asks us to consider a climber in the Alps who has worked himself “into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap.” With hope and confidence, he feels he can make the leap. But if “fear and mistrust preponderate,” he may hesitate until “at last, exhausted and trembling,” he launches out in a moment of despair, misses his footing, and falls into the abyss. “In this case,” which, James insists, “is one of an immense class, the part of wisdom is clearly to believe what one desires, for the belief is one of the indispensable conditions for the realization of its object.” Faith here “creates its own verification.” “Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. Doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.”9 This is not a leap to faith but a leap resulting from faith.
So the individual matters, or at least may matter. “That the course of destiny maybe altered by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt,” he writes, and he explains why. “Whenever we espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary standard of right... Again and again,” he urges, “success depends on energy of act, energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail, and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself.”10
It is hardly too much to see the germs of his later books, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and even Pragmatism, in this stirring essay, the arguments of which were now active in James’s own life. In choosing, in acting, in “voting” to marry Alice, to have children, to stick it out in Cambridge, to address the wider audience and the professional one, indeed to get out of bed in the morning and go to work, James was acting on faith, risking his happiness, taking his chances, rather than waiting and planning for certainty. But then, as he said, “all that the human heart wants is its chance.”11