38. The Literary Remains of Henry James Sr.

AS JANUARY 1884 came around, and with it William’s forty-second birthday, he was complaining to Carl Stumpf that his work “has hardly advanced at all in the last six months.” This was only partly true, but it expresses James’s impatience and the fact that his energies, as so often, were scattered in many directions, over many projects, with competing claims pulling at his attention. The big psychology book was progressing very slowly, though he did manage to finish the 137-page chapter on space perception in February. His articles were attracting attention and being taken seriously not only at home but also abroad. Ernst Mach wrote him in January from Germany to say that he had taken James’s experiments in dizziness into account in his new book. Théodule Ribot wrote from France to say that an analysis of “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” had appeared in the Revue Philosophique and to ask for a chapter of James’s psychology book to translate. In England James was now a regular and prominently featured contributor to Mind, whose editor was as heartily anti-Hegelian as James.¹

College life had its demands too. James was angling for teaching appointments for Davidson (unsuccessfully) and Royce (successfully). He was teaching again. The Harvard faculty was debating whether to drop Greek and Latin requirements and whether to shorten the undergraduate course of study to three years. William and Alice and the two boys were living in the rather small house on Appian Way, where, on the last day of January, Alice gave birth to their third son, who had dark hair and who looked, William thought, distinctly Jewish. From London, Harry implored William to give the baby a name of his own, not a family name, and to give him one name, not two. William and Alice took half of Henry’s advice and named him, no one seems sure why, Herman Hagen James, after a faculty friend, a German-born entomologist Louis Agassiz had brought to Harvard.²

As the months passed, Alice and the baby flourished, though Alice’s life was necessarily centered on her three boys. Sister Alice, by contrast, was not well, and went off in April to New York for treatment. Harry was hard at work on two big projects for which he had great hopes, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima.

William’s family spent a disjointed summer. First they all went to Otsego Lake (the Glimmerglass of The Deerslayer, near Cooperstown, about halfway between Albany and Syracuse). Then William went back to Cambridge alone, to work in the Appian Way house, which was fast becoming too small. Later he went to Keene Valley with his son Henry, who was now five. In October Alice James set out for England with Katharine Loring, where she would remain for the rest of her life. It was only one more Jamesian move, but it underscored and deepened the shift or divide in the family. Father, Mother, and Wilky were dead; Harry and Alice were living in England. In America there was William and his family, and Bob and his.

William had for some time regarded Bob as his special responsibility, just as Harry had taken pains with Wilky and was now doing the same for Alice. Bob made frequent trips east; sometimes he worked as William’s research assistant, sometimes as a secretary and letter writer, and sometimes he roomed nearby and took meals with William’s family. It was, then, an added heaviness when, in the fall of 1884—still unsuccessfully fighting alcoholism—Bob left his wife and children and his Milwaukee home for a fling with a Miss B. William did what he could with Bob, who felt terrible after the very brief affair was over. William offered advice, money, friendship, and general support, and he wrote gentle, solicitous, but frank letters to Bob’s wife, Mary, trying not to smooth things over but to hold things together.³

With this string of cares and changes, it is unsurprising that William made little headway on his psychology book. It was not that he stopped working, however; he kept busy enough, giving a talk called “The Dilemma of Determinism” at the Harvard Divinity School in March 1884. Free will versus determinism is of course a very old problem, appearing frequently as a sort of game of capture the flag, with freedom flying over one goal and determinism over the other, despite the fact that chance and habit seem to occupy most of the ground between. James starts out with an adroit, happy protest that he has no wish to erect a coercive argument for the existence of freedom. This is in the same spirit in which Isaac Bashevis Singer once answered the question “Do you believe in free will?” “Of course I believe in free will,” Singer is supposed to have replied. “Do I have a choice?”⁴

James repeats his old personal turning point, the insight he had gotten from Renouvier: “Our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.” The dilemma, as James sees it, in the argument for a completely determined world, is both a moral problem and a mathematical, statistical problem. In one way, James’s piece is an updated version of William Ellery Channing’s “Moral Argument Against Calvinism.” (Channing, as we saw, was one of the thinkers most admired by William’s Alice.) James is determined that the argument should take place in an arena of particulars, and so he cites “the confession of the murderer at Brockton the other day; how, to get rid of the wife whose continued existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, ‘You didn’t do it on purpose, did you dear?’ he replied, ‘No I didn’t do it on purpose,’ as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.” James says with lethal mildness, “We feel that although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest of the universe, [this incident] is a bad moral fit, and that something else would really have been better in its place.” James drives home his point, saying, “For the deterministic philosophy, the murder, the sentence, and the prisoner’s optimism were all necessary from eternity and nothing else for a moment had a chance of being put in their place.”⁵

Seen another way, in terms of chance and probability, the problem with determinism is that it leaves no room for the operation of chance, which the nineteenth century was coming to recognize more and more as a major factor in everything. James’s striking move here is to point out that chance is really the same thing as freedom. “Chance,” he says, “is at bottom exactly the same thing as... gift, the one simply having a disparaging, and the other, a eulogistic, name for anything on which we have no effective claim.” With a shrewd sense of where his opposition lay, James observes, “The stronghold of the determinist sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance.”⁶

Chance, of course, is crucial to Darwin’s argument about how species originate (in natural, as opposed to artificial, selection the all-important variations are random, completely a matter of chance), and James, in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” moves from the world of Jonathan Edwards and William Ellery Channing to the world of Charles Darwin. James is relentlessly plain in his defense of chance, or as he also calls it, indeterminism. He points out that he is, for example, free to walk home after the lecture via Divinity Avenue or Oxford Street. For all practical purposes, we are, in such matters, quite free to choose. The result is “a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will no doubt remain for ever inacceptable.”⁷

James was now pretty well committed to his “pluralistic restless universe,” and he rushed into battle whenever he saw it challenged. In the January 1884 issue of Mind, the piece printed right after James’s “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” was an effort by the young J. S. Haldane to give a modern, physiologically phrased defense of the old idea of design. Noting how some creatures can regrow lost limbs and how cut nerves can regenerate, Haldane argued that we should regard the body not as separate parts with separate functions but as a whole, and that this wholeness operates “through and through” an organism, affecting and directing every part of it.

James could spot contraband rationalism when it washed up in front of him. He was fond of controversy (out of liveliness more than belligerence), he was increasingly sure of his own positions, and he charged in at once to attack Haldane. The editor of Mind made room for James’s response in the next issue. James called his short piece “Absolutism and Empiricism,” and in it he flatly admitted to having “a strong bias toward irrationalism.” Far from thinking of it as a pejorative term, James considers irrationalism just another way to describe empiricism, or respect for fact before system, just another way to register his opposition to what he saw as neoscholastic rationalism. “Fact,” he says, “sets a limit to the ‘through and through’ character of the world’s rationality.” Once again James quotes with approval Faust’s decisive rejection of “In the beginning was the word” and his replacing it with “In the beginning was the deed.” He ends by articulating a problem that concerned him all his professional life. “The one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism,” he writes, “is over the repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor”—temperament, he would call it elsewhere—“in the construction of philosophy.”⁸

James’s main work during the summer and early fall of 1884 was the preparation of The Literary Remains of Henry James, in the course of which, as he told his cousin Kitty Prince, “I seemed to sink into an intimacy with Father which I had never before enjoyed.” He gave up his original idea of selecting all the best passages from the elder James’s writings and settled instead for a volume that contained the book Father had been working on when he died, plus a lightly disguised autobiographical fragment and essays on Carlyle and Emerson. The volume began with a 119-page introduction in which William exerted himself to restate and summarize his father’s work. The introduction is a filial and personal coming to terms with his father; it is also James’s most serious and extended consideration of religious matters so far.

Early in the introduction, William takes on the problem of style, that quality Alfred North Whitehead called “the ultimate morality of mind,” which is, paradoxically, both the weakness and the strength of Henry James Sr.’s work. Indeed his style, said William, “to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters, rather than that of an American today.”

The problem with Henry Senior’s style—besides its Carlylean tilt toward incendiary rant—is his Alice-in-Wonderland use of terms to suit himself. What most people call “theism” he calls “deism.” “Moralism” is for him a pejorative term meaning the opposite of religion. “Conscience” is, however, a positive term, often used by Henry Senior to mean “religion.” And so on. Instead of throwing up his hands, William cut through all this, seeing in his father’s style not only high originality but an intensely personal, indeed a raging articulation—an essentially prophet-like utterance and repetition of a few central ideas. “With all the richness of style,” William wrote, “the ideas are singularly unvaried and few... saying again and again the same thing: telling us what the true relation is between mankind and its Creator.”⁹

Henry Senior’s central ideas were bonded to his temperament, and were difficult—perhaps impossible—to express satisfactorily. “The core and center of the thing in him was always instinct and attitude,” William wrote, “something realized at a stroke, and felt like a fire in his breast: and all attempts at articulate verbal formulation of it were makeshifts of a more or less desperately impotent kind. This is why he despised every formulation he made as soon as it was uttered, and set himself to the Sisyphus-like labor of producing a new one that should be less irrelevant.”¹⁰

“His truths were his life,” said William; “they were the companion of his death-bed: and when all else had ebbed away, his grasp of them was still vigorous and sure.” He was now, for his eldest son, an old-fashioned truth teller, “a religious prophet and genius [who] published an intensely positive, radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our connection with him.” Henry Senior’s work “all flowed from two perceptions, insights, convictions, whatever one pleases to call them... In the first place he felt that the individual man, as such, is nothing, but owes all he is to the race-nature [i.e., human nature] he inherits, and the society in which he is born. And secondly, he scorned to admit, even as a possibility, that the great and loving Creator who has all the being and all the power and has brought us as far as this, should not bring us through and out, into the most triumphant harmony.” This is a first formulation of what William would later say were the two fundamental teachings of all religions: first, that something is wrong, and second, that it can be set right.¹¹

Some of the elder James’s best writing occurs in his repeated efforts to shadow forth the appalling extent of what it is that is all wrong. William quotes the following, from Substance and Shadow: “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect this: begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even: that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths,—the depths of the essential dearth in which its subjects’ roots are plunged... The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life, is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of night chatters.”¹²

This dearth or lack or emptiness or nothingness is the central fact of our individual lives or selves. The unaided individual is nothing, is destitute, is helpless. “So too our ennui, and prevalent disgust of life,” wrote the elder James, “which lead so many suffering souls every year to suicide, which claim so many tender and yearning and angel-freighted natures to drink, to gambling, to fierce and ruinous excesses of all sorts,—what are these things but the tacit avowal... that we are nothing at all and vanity, that we are absolutely without help in ourselves.”¹³

Standing over against this scorched and raging cry, this voicing—half Ecclesiastes and half a premonition of Allen Ginsberg—of the emptiness within, is Henry James Sr.’s other main point, that there exists a “Divine-Natural Humanity”; that “the creator gives invisible [but real] spiritual being to the creature, the creature in his turn gives natural form—gives visible existence to the creator”; and finally that “society is the movement of redemption, or the finished spiritual work of God.” As individuals we are exactly nothing; it is only as we associate, only as we are present and useful to others, that we are saved.¹⁴

William’s account of his father’s vision is more lucid than his father’s own account. Indeed, for the modern reader who has tried again and again, without success, to grasp the elder James’s ideas, William’s version is the most helpful one there is.¹⁵ William is also quite aware that he has injected clarity into what was for his father a most intense but not at all clear urgency. In referring to his father’s “scheme” he wrote: “I fancy that his belief in the truth was strongest when the dumb sense of human life, sickened and baffled as it is forever by the strange unnatural fever in its heart of unreality and dearth struggling with infinite fullness and possession, became a sort of voice within him, and cried out ‘this must stop!’”¹⁶

It was only after his father died that William recognized him as one of that small group of people who are perhaps too quickly labeled prophets and thus are elevated from ordinary life by verbal promotion, but who, by their witness, make religion real. “Mr. James was one member of that band of saints and mystics,” William wrote, “whose rare privilege it has been, by the mere example and recital of their bosom experiences, to prevent religion from becoming a fossil conventionalism—and to keep it forever alive.”¹⁷

With this generous summary, as indeed with the whole introduction, William comes to the end of his long resistance to his father and gives him his due. And in the very statement just quoted, in which he sums up his father’s work and life, he sets out, so to speak, on his own religious search. The testamentary method of the later Varieties of Religious Experience is here hinted at. Religion must be the firsthand experience of particular persons or it is nothing but shells and formulas, costumes, magic, and books. But it was his father’s example, much more than his ideas, that propelled William now. William disagreed profoundly with his parent’s conception of the self as nothing, and he disagreed equally profoundly with the idea that “being” is what matters, not “action.”

In a coda to his introduction to his father’s memorial volume, William sketches out some of the great questions he will take up later. He notes the difference between the pluralism—indeed the polytheism—of popular religion (commonsense theism, he calls it, and he points to the multiple gods, saints, and devils of popular Christianity) and what he sees as the much rarer “ultra phenomenal unity” of true monotheism. William also contrasts what he was now calling the “healthy-minded” as opposed to the “morbid” view of life. “The feeling of action... makes us turn a deaf ear to the thought of being; and the deafness and insensibility may be said to form an integral part of what in popular phrase is known as healthy-mindedness.” But thinking perhaps of poor Bob, or of his own earlier self, William acknowledges the power of the other, the morbid, way of living. “To suggest personal will and effort to one “all sicklied o’er” with the sense of weakness, of helpless failure, and of fear, is to suggest the most horrible of things to him... Well, we are all potentially such sick men.”¹⁸

Throughout this long piece William carefully refers to his subject as “Mr. James.” Only in the last sentence, the sendoff, does he drop the formality and refer simply to “my father” and to the “life-long devotion of his faithful heart.”¹⁹ As he was finishing the introduction in Cambridge, William wrote to his wife, who was with the children at Otsego Lake, “I feel as if I had stated the gist of him in a way he would be glad of and glad that I should do. How petty were all my criticisms of inessential details, like ‘Pantheism,’ ‘Idealism,’ ‘self-consciousness,’ etc. even when I was right! Why couldn’t I more heartily acquiesce in the big heart of the whole, the scorn of a salvation not universal, and the scorn of any creative love not able to quicken our very nature in the end!”²⁰

The book came out in December 1884, just after James finished work on another, much shorter piece called “The Function of Cognition,” a dry, semitechnical bit of epistemology prepared for delivery to the Aristotelian Club. It was duly published in Mind in January 1885 but not put in book form until 1909, in The Meaning of Truth, in which it forms the lead essay and where, in a footnote, James cites this essay as the starting point of the pragmatic conception of truth.²¹

“The Function of Cognition,” which might more helpfully have been called “What Cognition Is,” claims only to be “a chapter in descriptive psychology... not an inquiry into the ‘how it comes,’ but merely into the ‘what it is’ of cognition.” It is, says James, “a function of consciousness,” which “at least implies the existence of a feeling.” He explains that he is using the word “feeling” to “designate generically all states of consciousness,” including those sometimes called “ideas” or “thoughts.” “Feeling” remains for James the most general, most inclusive term for “state of consciousness.” If it leaves him open to charges or irrationalism and subjectivity, he welcomes them, believing, as he now does, that no adequate account of mind can exist that does not take full cognizance of subjective and nonrational states of mind and feeling.

In this short essay James makes a clear distinction between a perception and a thing perceived, and he works to avert solipsism by saying, “Let us... reserve the name knowledge for the cognition of ‘realities,’ meaning by realities things that exist independently of the feeling through which the cognition occurs.” The nature and limits of cognition become clearer when James illustrates—in an example Ezra Pound would imitate many years later in his “Canto 2”—how “everyone knows Ivanhoe... [but] few would hesitate to admit that there are as many different Ivanhoes as there are different minds cognizant of the story.” Here, as later, the test question for James is, can two minds know the same thing? An affirmative answer, at least now, requires him to take a step toward belief. “In the last analysis then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world, because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common.”²²

Three of the pieces William James wrote in 1884 were published only much later in book form, though they were all quickly printed as articles when first written. “The Dilemma of Determinism” initially appeared in a book thirteen years later, in The Will to Believe. “Absolutism and Empiricism” appeared twenty-eight years later, after James’s death, in 1912 in Essays In Radical Empiricism, and, as already noted, “The Function of Cognition” appeared twenty-five years later as the opening essay in the 1909 Meaning of Truth. If one looks just at the sequence and chronology of James’s books, it can easily seem that his “later” work followed his interest in psychology. But what we think of as his later interests actually arose at the same time that he was working on his Principles of Psychology, and it is almost as though that book couldn’t itself go forward until certain religious and philosophical problems had been faced and resolved in a preliminary but important way.