JAMES TRIED HARD to find someone to publish “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” but it proved difficult. He asked his brother Harry to submit it to various English periodicals; Harry tried three, including the Fortnightly Review and the Contemporary Review, but none of them wanted it, and Harry was obliged to send it back to William with “much sorrow and shame at British unappreciativeness.” The piece was personal, urgent, well written, and accessible; it was also sketchy, with the argument not fully developed and with many details and processes remaining to be worked out. Then too, the author of the piece was, in the general public’s mind, nobody in particular. He was still Dr. William James, assistant professor of physiology. The essay was not published until three years later, in the Princeton Review, and it had no real impact until it was retitled (and slightly revised) as “The Sentiment of Rationality,” and then it was not published until 1897—eighteen years later—as one of the essays in The Will to Believe. In one sense, James was, in 1879, well ahead of the arc of his recognition.1
Living space continued to be a problem. The baby made the boarding arrangement at Harvard Street untenable, and there were problems, particularly for William, with having Alice and the baby at her mother’s place in Boston. In June 1879 William began to think about building a house on the lot owned by his father on Quincy Street, though the most elementary accounting would have shown that he could afford no such thing. In July he went to the Adirondacks and the White Mountains, trying, especially in Franconia, New Hampshire, to find summer quarters suitable for his new family. In August, while working on the chapter on space perception for his Principles of Psychology he rushed back to Cambridge and rented a small house (no longer standing) at 4 Arrow Street, which he described to a friend as a “box 20 feet by 50.”
We catch a glimpse of James’s life this fall from his friend Jim Putnam, who came and had tea with William and Alice in their “cozy house.” Tom Davidson dropped in while Putnam was there; Putnam noted it was “quite a treat” to hear the two of them. Davidson, said Putnam, was “as learned, dogmatic and hard-headed as any North German.” Davidson assailed a new book by John Fiske, insisting there were “some contradictory statements made at the very start.” James said, “Yes, it was perfectly true, but did not interfere with the argument at all, but they could only be noticed by little critics who could jab at them and only end in showing how insignificant they themselves were.” Davidson’s reply is not recorded.2
At Harvard James was freer to concentrate on psychology. He no longer had to teach the big comparative anatomy and physiology course. He gave a course in the philosophy of evolution, another on Renouvier, and his graduate course on the relations between physiology and psychology. When he could, he worked on his book. His eyes, he told G. Stanley Hall in January 1880, were “damnable.” He proceeded by fits and starts, laboring in late August over the problem of how humans perceive space, for what would become the 150-page chapter 20, deep in book two. In the winter of 1879–80 he worked on “association,” which would become chapter 14.
Associationism was a crucial problem for James because his idea of consciousness being a stream depended on his being able to discredit the standard idea of the association of ideas, which had held the field since the publication of David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations in 1749. Newton had suggested that “vibrations of corpuscles of light might cause vibrations in the retina of the eye and the brain and produce the sensation of sight.” Hartley followed up on this, arguing that “physical vibrations in the brain, spinal cord and nerves are the basis of all sensations, all ideas, and all motions of men and animals, and that all learning is the consequence of repetitive juxtapositions of corpuscular vibrations and mental associations in space and time, producing habits according to the pleasure-pain principle.” Herbert Spencer extended the idea, welded it to Lamarck’s notion of how socially useful adaptations are passed on, and argued that “the evolution of species, and even the origin of forms of thought, could be accounted for by an extension of the association of ideas.”
The mechanism by which association was thought to proceed was atomistic; that is, it was assumed that the mind takes in simple impressions or sensations a bit at a time and then assembles the bits by the process of association into complex impressions or ideas. But James was now convinced that this was too neat, too simple, too orderly a description of how the mind works, and he announced that “the whole historic doctrine of psychological association is tainted with one huge error—that of the construction of our thoughts out of the compounding of themselves together of immutable and incessantly recurring simple ideas.” James had concluded the “doctrine of simple ideas or psychic atoms” to be simply “mythological.”3
It is not ideas at all that we associate together, James thought. Ideas constitute a huge jungle of possible connections: “existence, succession, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant.” It is things that we associate together, not ideas about things. The basic laws of association are “laws of motor habit in the lower centers of the nervous system. A series of movements repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves with peculiar ease in that order ever afterward.” He gave as an example children’s counting rhymes, such as:
The second time one says it is easier than the first, and after many repetitions the second line will rise unbidden in the mind when the first line is recited.
In March 1880, just as his piece on association was published, James went into what he described to his brother Bob as his annual “collapse,” which, he said, “lasts till I get to the country.” His house plans were his great interest of the moment, even though it was still unlikely he could afford to build. He had approached H. H. Richardson, one of the best-known architects of the time, to design a small house—Harry referred to it as a cottage—on the Quincy Street lot. A surviving sketch shows the “cottage” with a ground-floor study twenty by thirty feet and a dining room eighteen by seventeen, with four bedrooms on the second floor. James was both attracted and repelled by the project, however, and by April he was planning a summer vacation alone in Europe, “out of reach of the house building and domestic cares.”4
Amid it all, he kept at the psychology book, another piece of which, “The Feeling of Effort,” was published as an article in June 1880. No one in modern times has written more movingly about the “amount of effort we are able to put forth”; no one has seen more clearly how closely our understanding of what constitutes will is tied to what we call effort. James tried to start from the beginning and ask what effort is and what is the source and path of the feeling of effort. How do we experience effort?
James is here, as so often, disconcertingly literal and physical; he wants not high moral urgency or lofty formulations, such as freedom of the will, but “the physiology and psychology of volition.” Starting from the fact that “we have a feeling of effort,” James marches out the standard explanation, that of Bain, that “the sensibility accompanying muscular movement coincides with the outgoing stream of nervous energy, and does not, as in the case of pure sensation, result from any influence passing inwards, by incarrying of sensitive nerves.” James, who was usually at his best when he was combative, objected. “In opposition to this popular view,” he writes, “I maintain that the feeling of muscular energy put forth is a complex afferent [incoming] sensation coming from the tense muscles, the strained ligaments, squeezed joints, fixed chest, closed glottis, contracted brow, clenched jaws etc.”
This is a foretaste of the later James-Lange theory of emotion, which holds that we do not cry because we are sad, or run because we are frightened, but that we are sad because we cry, and afraid because we run. What James argues is that volition is not a simple matter of the brain issuing an order, a fiat, via the appropriate nerves to the appropriate muscles. “What makes it easy to raise the finger, hard to get out of bed on a cold morning, harder to keep our attention on the insipid image of a procession of sheep when troubled with insomnia, and hardest of all to say No to the temptation of any form of instinctive pleasure which has grown inveterate and habitual?” It is a question of what we call will, but it is more complicated and elusive than that. It is a question of getting to the point where we want to will something or other. “In our bed we think of the cold, and we feel the warmth and lie still, but we all the time feel that we can get up with no trouble if we will. The difficulty is to will. We say to our intemperate acquaintance ‘you can be a new man, if you will.’ But he finds the willing impossible.”5
Most of the time, says James, we find that the looked-for result just suddenly happens, without any specific output of will. “I am lying in my warm bed, engrossed in some revery or other, when the notion suddenly strikes me ‘it is getting late,’ and before I know it, I am up in the cold, having executed without the smallest effort of resolve, an action which, half an hour previous, with full consciousness of the pros and the cons, the warm rest and the chill, the sluggishness and the manliness, time lost and the morning’s duties, I was utterly unable to decide upon.”6
James’s search for the precise mechanism of volition leads him through many pages of physiological experiments to suggest, finally, that we are able to take an action only when the reasons for not taking it disappear. The more we struggle and debate, the more we reconsider and delay, the less likely we are to act. Don’t wait until you feel better to go the gym; go to the gym and you will feel better. The physiology lab provided fresh, detailed scientific backing for what Goethe’s Faust had found earlier. To begin anything, it is not word or thought or power that matters; it is the act that matters.
In a further effort to describe the all-important moment of decision, the fiat, the “let’s do it,” James says, “It is literally a fiat, a state of mind which consents, agrees, or is willing, that certain represented experiences shall continue to be, or should now for the first time become part of Reality.” The “action of the will,” he concludes, “is the reality of consent to a fact of any sort whatever, a fact in which we ourselves may play either an active or a suffering part. The fact always appears to us in an idea: and it is willed by its idea becoming victorious over inhibiting [and competing] ideas, banishing negations, and remaining affirmed.” In a terse ten-point summary, James throws out this astonishing line: “Attention, belief, affirmation and motor volition are thus four names for an identical process, incidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one in spite of the opposition of others. The surviving idea is invested with a sense of reality which cannot at present be further analysed.”7
His own life was, at the moment, full of problems and conflicts that seemed always to scuttle the full focus of attention. His eyes continued to limit both his reading and his writing. His back gave him trouble; he had severe stomachaches. He engaged in a prickly and strained tug of war with Frank Abbot, who was trying, so far without success, to get a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard.
Francis Ellingwood Abbot, six years older than James, was self-pitying, emotionally inauthentic, ambitious, and narrow, determined equally to lose and to make an immense tragic fuss about losing. He was tetchy, courted martyrdom with gloomy self-satisfaction, and had what would now be called a passive-aggressive character. He had, say his biographers, the “unique gift for being able to derail or ruin almost every organization or cause to which he belonged.” Abbot wanted to take his examination on such and such a day. James replied that he would be out of the country. Abbot wrote a long, snide critique of James’s “Sentiment of Rationality,” which he assured James he had written “after I had recovered from the delight caused by its unsurpassed literary charms.” Abbot could not fathom why he could not persuade James that he, Abbot, had taken “up [James’s] view and Mill’s too, and perfectly reconcil[ed] the truths which you and he alike have grasped.”8 We will see more of Abbot later.
James wrote Renouvier that he was “more unsettled than I have been for years.” He was also being a difficult husband, not easy to live with, though it is often hard to be sure when he is serious and when he is clowning and when he is both at once. “How can you be so cruelly careless,” he wrote Henry Bowditch, the colleague who had steered him into physiology at Harvard and a close friend with whom James kept up a ping-pong match of mock-hostile banter, beginning one letter to Bowditch with “Schurk, Lump, Unverschampter [shameless] Mensch, Halb-physiologue... You showed my note to your wife, or left it, as she says, lying about and the consequence is she has sent it to my wife.” James is dictating this to Alice, who is the one actually penning the letter, and we have to imagine the two of them together here. “I have had a scene with her and my mother-in-law which I shudder to recall,” James said and Alice wrote. “They have gone off together, I hope for good, and I am to sail on Wednesday for Berlin where I hope Helmholtz’s lectures, Munck’s vivisections in the veterinary school and a year of laboratory work under Hall will bring peace to my distracted soul.” In fact, James no longer trusted Helmholtz, had mixed feelings about vivisection, and could imagine nothing more awful than spending a year in anybody’s laboratory, Hall’s least of all. The whole letter is a joke, but hardly the joke of a placid and contented soul.9
On June 5, 1880, he sailed for England alone. He needed to get away from school, from home and baby, from house plans, from Abbot. And as soon as a little physical distance opened up between him and home, James sent back a steady stream of mushy, loudly intimate, yearning letters and postcards. He was full of affection and of promises to do better. “I have but one business in life now, to be your husband well—better than I have been it.”10
In England he stayed with Harry, whose sixth novel, Washington Square, was just beginning to appear serially. William was introduced at a reception to Robert Browning, who, however, “would not speak to me.” He also met Alexander Bain, “a little hickory nut of a scotch man” with “no atmosphere to his mind.” Bain, he wrote Alice, “does not read German, and altogether makes me glad to have seen him once but never more.” Shadworth Hodgson was another matter entirely. He was, said James, “shy and silent on general subjects, wears spectacles and blushes when spoken to, is about my own figure.” And James was elated to find that Hodgson, whose work he much admired, considered Renouvier “the most important living Philosopher.”11
James had a brief, polite, but inconsequential lunch with the great Herbert Spencer. He saw Henry and Clover Adams, visited the Isle of Wight (“never saw such an absurdly picturesque spot in my life”), then rushed on to Heidelberg, where Alice had once lived, and where he and G. S. Hall talked psychology for twelve or more hours a day for three days running. Then it was on to the heart of Switzerland and the Bernese Alps. He went by wagon to Grindelwald, under the Eiger, then on foot four hours farther to a little chalet, the Rhône Glacier Hotel. “As I write in my little wooden bedroom,” he told Alice, “an avalanche thunders on the Wetterhorn opposite.” The next night, irritable and full of rage at himself for what he called his “unmanliness” (by which he must have meant his impetuous escape to Europe), he underwent what he described to Alice as “a great crisis.”
James, in his published writings, always disclaimed having had mystical experiences, taking pains, we may guess, not to seem to distance himself from ordinary life and daylight reasonableness. But as the following necessarily lengthy extract from his letter to Alice shows, he did have experiences that, if not mystical, are well down the road toward mystical.
A sort of moral revolution poured through me. I seemed to have been rolling down hill and now to be beginning to mount again, and this dear sacred Switzerland, whose mountains, trees and grass and waters are so pure, so good, and as it seemed to me so honest, so absolutely honest, all got mixed up in my mood, and in one torrent of adoration for them, for you, and for virtue, I rose toward the window to look out at the scene. Over the right hand near mountain the Milky Way rose, sloping slightly toward the left, with big stars burning in it and the smaller ones scattered all about, and with my first glance at it I actually wept aloud, for I thought it was you, so like was it unto the expression of your face—your starry eyes and the soft shading of your mouth. Dearest, I’m afraid you’ll think I’ve gone crazy and I certainly hope you won’t read this aloud at the Petersham dinner table, for they will be sure of it. [Alice was spending much of the summer with her mother and small son in this Massachusetts town.] I am not crazy dear at all, only I had one of those moral thunderstorms that go all through you and give you such relief... I felt ten years younger the next morning although I’d slept so little and Nature, God and Man all seemed fused together in one life as they used to 15 or 20 years ago.12
Beneath the ragged and frantic scurrying, the Zerrissenheit, the avalanche of everyday living, the pieces of James’s inner life were coalescing, fusing together. At least he hoped they were.
A few weeks later, toward the end of August, he sailed from England back to Boston, arriving a little ahead of the publication of another essay, this one called “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment.” It was a defense of the idea that great persons influence the course of history; its argument had a neat Darwinian twist. “The relation of the visible environment to the great man,” said James, “is in the main exactly what it is to the ‘variation’ in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him.” Potentially great individuals arise at uncertain intervals in the natural course of events. But only those who are selected by their social environment come to have an effect on society. Both the individual and the “social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts” were needed for social change. This piece was also aimed explicitly at Spencer, but James’s mood, in the fall of 1880 and in general now, was not skeptical or contradictory. “I am tired,” he wrote to Davidson, “of the position of a dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man.”13