THE MID-1880S WERE an expansive time in America. In 1885 the U.S. postal rate doubled, to two cents. The firm of Johnson & Johnson was founded; so were Stanford University and Bryn Mawr. The Boston Fruit Company, which would become United Fruit, opened for business. George S. Parker thought up a game called Banking and started Parker Brothers. With newly invented machines, American tobacco companies produced a billion cigarettes a year. In 1886 the first trainload of California oranges made its way to the East Coast. Coca-Cola went on sale in Atlanta in May, the same month the Haymarket riots occurred in Chicago. The Knights of Labor and others were agitating for an eight-hour workday. William James deplored the riots, but defended the new labor organization.1 Strikes were rampant in the United States and England, where Henry James was working on his most political novel, The Princess Casamassima. Marx’s Capital appeared in English. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor.
James was making real progress with his psychology book, though the huge scope of the project—nothing less than how, physiologically, the human mind works—kept pushing him outward, centrifugally, even as his effort to clarify, illustrate, and set it all down provided a counterimpulse, a centripetal force. It was exasperating that every time he got down to writing, he became unable to sleep.
One of his tangential interests, hypnosis, was to prove not really tangential after all. Today hypnosis enjoys some mainstream acceptance in America, used as an anesthetic (mostly in dentistry), as a treatment for eating disorders and smoking cessation, and as relaxation therapy, but the road to acceptance has been a rocky one. Originally called mesmerism, after the eighteenth-century Viennese doctor Franz Mesmer, hypnosis was discredited by Mesmer’s extravagant showmanship and his claims for the wonders of “animal magnetism,” which, he said, worked by means of a “magnetic fluid” that supposedly passed from an operator to a subject. A royal commission, which included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, examined the subject and reported in 1784 that it could not accept the evidence for magnetic fluid.
In the 1840s Dr. James Braid of Manchester, England, reinvestigated the somnambulistic trance, which was the most obvious aspect of mesmerism, and found it to be not at all the terrifying mechanism for controlling others that Mesmer had made it seem. In Braid’s view, the hypnotic trance could be induced only in a willing subject, and it consisted of an altered psychic state, the leading feature of which seemed to be anesthesia, which could occur in any part of the body and which was initiated by a suggestion made while the subject was in the trance state.2 Braid renamed the somnambulistic trance “hypnosis.” But this sober and promising line of investigation met two serious setbacks in the late 1840s: the Fox sisters’ carryings-on again cast the shadow of charlatanry over any kind of trance state, and the discovery of the anesthetic properties of inhaling ether meant that the chief usable effect of the hypnotic trance was no longer needed.
To make matters worse, the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s teacher, who began working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in 1862, was soon teaching that hypnosis was a symptom of hysteria or of hystero-epilepsy, a view that was generally rejected by the late 1880s. Ambroise-August Liébeault, at Nancy, had much success with less sensational views; he saw how important expectation was to inducing a trance, and he understood that increased suggestibility is the main feature of a trance. James had been familiar with Liébeault’s work for many years, having written a long, thoughtful, and sympathetic review of Liébeault’s Du Sommeil et des États Analogues back in 1868.
In his review, James had noted especially how attention is focused, diverted, intensified, or redirected in the hypnotic state, and he strongly approved of Liébeault’s suggestion that the therapeutic possibilities of hypnotism should be pursued. “As the mind calls forth disease in hypochondriacs and hysterics, so it should be employed to banish it.” He had ended the review by saying it was “high time that a realm of phenomena which had played a prominent part in human history from time immemorial should be rescued from the hands of uncritical enthusiasm and charlatanry and conquered for science.”3
Now, eighteen years later, James picked up the subject again. As a member of the Committee on Hypnosis of the Society for Psychical Research, he hypnotized a recent Harvard student, Gouverneur Carnochan, at a meeting of the society in January 1886, and he wrote up the experiment in a report delivered in June of that year. He further reported hypnotizing fifty or sixty others, mostly Harvard students, with the aim of trying to learn more about the physiology underlying the hypnotic trance. His (tentative) finding was that its main feature was not “sensorial anaesthesia,” not a simple “failure to notice,” but a much more complex thing, an “active counting out and positive exclusion of certain objects.”4 The idea that hypnotism is not a passive state but an active, if very narrow, one was something he had glimpsed and even commented on eighteen years earlier. (“Sleep, in other words, is an active function set up by a state of extreme concentration of the attention.”5) It occurred to him that hypnosis might be something for his sister Alice to try. He wrote Harry to say so.6
During the summer of 1886, James wandered about New England, looking for a summer place he might buy. “The earth hunger grows on us,” he wrote his sister. “The more we live the more attached we grow to the country,” he told Harry. He visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then Jaffrey. He climbed Mount Monadnock, circled back through Cambridge, then went to Bar Harbor, where he was down with a fever for eight days. But for all the traveling, he was working well, which meant he wasn’t sleeping. He read Tristram Shandy and Robert Louis Stevenson’s new book. Stevenson was already, for William, the “most delightful of living writers, except Harry.” He wrote his sister that his wife “began to read aloud Stevenson’s Kidnapped yestreen, and I ache for the hour to go at it again. That man is a magician!” He wrote her again, a little later, to add that “there is something about the story that sings, from beginning to end,” and he thought it had a good chance of lasting.7
On a different scale, he began this summer to read F. H. Bradley, the English idealist and neo-Hegelian philosopher. Attracted perhaps in part by the vigorous clarity of Bradley’s bright prose, in his article in Mind called “Is There Any Special Activity of Attention?” (Bradley thought no, James thought yes), James picked up and read Bradley’s Principles of Logic while traveling through the White Mountains. “What a fresh book,” he wrote George Croom Robertson. “How he plows up the black mould in every direction! I don’t know when I have read a more stimulating and exciting book. And in the style there is a man, tho’ whether his sarcasms flow from an acidulous and unsocial, or from a genuinely humorous temper, I can’t well make out. At any rate, it will be long ere I ‘get over’ the effects of reading this book and digest its results.”8
It was a good summer for James. He resolved to give up psychical research for a year to concentrate on finishing the psychology book. His health improved and his spirits rose, so he could say he had never felt more in the mood for the start of the college year. Central to the new mood was the decision, formed by mid-September, to buy, for $750, a seventy-five-acre farm known as the Savage, or Salvage, Farm, with two houses—one a farmhouse—and a barn overlooking Mount Chocorua, on the southeastern edge of the White Mountains.
James loved these mountains as he loved the Adirondacks. He was an avid hiker, and he said over and over how he felt a real craving, a hunger for nature, a physical need to spend several months a year in the country. The farmhouse required work, of course, but James was delighted by its fourteen outside doors. James was drawn to the freedom of open spaces; his son would say of him that he “would have been happy sleeping and working in rooms as big as the nave of a cathedral.” This was in sharp contrast with Alice, who did not like a house to be wide-open and whose idea of comfort was snugness. She yearned for “a sound little old New England farmhouse with the typical central chimney of brick ovens and its intricate economy.” What they got was a “sprawling and poorly built” place it took her years to make into “something very personal and homelike.”9
The town, then called Tamworth Iron Works and now called Chocorua (local legend has it that James and his friend John Runnels got their neighbor Grover Cleveland to use his Washington influence to change the name of the post office), was and is little more than a tiny village crossroads in the middle of New Hampshire. But three trains a day ran up from Boston on the Boston & Maine, and there was a stop in nearby West Ossipee. Getting to the farm from Boston took four hours on the train and an hour’s buggy ride. The farm sits two and a half miles north of the village center, on the right-hand side of the road, now Route 16, overlooking Lake Chocorua and the 3,500-foot Mount Chocorua. The Hammond Trail up the mountain, the trail on which the visiting Henry James once got lost, takes off just three tenths of a mile north of the James place, opposite a big boulder by the roadside. It is still easy to get lost on this trail as it winds through the mixed New England forest of beech, birch, scarlet oak, hemlock, and maple.
Chocorua was just beginning to become a summer colony. Marshall Scudder, whose brother Horace was an editor at the Riverside Press and later the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, bought the Emery house in 1874. James’s friend Charles Pickering Bowditch bought the Cone Farm on the lake. The farm had been sold at auction because the previous owner, Sylvester Cone, was in debt and in prison for killing one of a group of local boys who swam naked in the lake after Cone had warned them not to.
The summer people, known to at least one local as the “summer complaints,” also included John Runnells, president of the Pullman Palace Car Company, whose daughter Alice married William James’s son William; the Lorings, the family of Alice James’s companion, Katharine Loring; George Baker, of Harvard’s “47 Workshop” for aspiring playwrights; Sophie Hunt, a Browning scholar and head of the English department at Wellesley; and various Cummingses, Wards, and Peabodys. Fathers would arrive from the city on Friday and leave on Sunday.
There were many summer parties, there was much gaiety, and the young people trooped from house to house and fell in love over the long warm days. They swam in the lake from a raft. They took hikes and had picnics. They swung the young birch trees (the gray ones, not the white ones); they played Scouts, which was like Prisoner’s Base, except you catch people by saying their names. They played charades, and in the evening, when it was really dark, they would take a pack of Necco Wafers and show each other how the candy disks gave off a spark when they were broken.
Chocorua was a marvelous place. The whole family loved it, but nobody loved it more than William James. As the Jameses worked on the house, the surrounding area became ever more developed and visited. The very old Liberty Trail up Mount Chocorua was improved in 1887, made into a toll bridle path in 1892, and in 1894 more than a thousand visitors registered at the Peak House, halfway up the trail.
The school year began at Harvard on October 1, 1886, and James plunged in with enthusiasm. His psychology book was well under way, seeming more and more substantial, as can be glimpsed from James’s excited publishing plans. He corresponded with Robertson, the editor of Mind, about printing either the 140-page chapter on the perception of space (eventually chapter 20 in The Principles of Psychology) or the almost equally long chapter on the self.10 James also toyed with publishing the short chapter on instinct (later chapter 24), but decided not to. All this material was ready to go, more or less, but the only piece that was actually published this fall was “The Perception of Time” (chapter 15), in the October number of Harris’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
As he does with all his subjects, James asks in this piece, How, physiologically, do we experience (in this case) time? He provides what would come to be called a phenomenology of time, just as his treatment of space provides a phenomenology of space. Both pieces clearly anticipate phenomenology, though he does not use that modern-sounding word. Abstractly speaking (his argument goes), we say time consists of the past, the present, and the future. But the real present is so short, so like a knife edge, that as soon as we say “now,” the uttered word becomes a part of the recent past.
Practically speaking, then—and James here draws heavily on Shadworth Hodgson and E. R. Clay—our apprehension of time consists of four parts: the obvious past, the specious present (which I just called the recent past), the real present, and the future. Strictly speaking, three of these four are “nonentities,” which in turn means that our sense of time is almost completely a sense of Clay’s “specious present”—that is, of things recently passed, passing as we speak, or expected soon. “The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration,” James writes, “with a bow and stern, as it were—a forward and a rearward-looking end.” The rest of the chapter discusses experimental efforts to determine the actual length, in seconds, of the durations of which we are in fact aware. “The specious present,” James concludes, “varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute,...is the original intuition of time.”11
James found time this fall to read Benjamin Paul Blood’s Lion of the Nile and George Eliot’s Spanish Gypsy. He took time to write a short preface for a book on ethics by a Harvard graduate of 1881, a Unitarian minister who had died young (J. E. Maude, The Foundations of Ethics), and he gave time to the huge two-volume Phantasms of the Living, just published by Edmund Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. James considered the book to have “at least forced a new present branch of study on the unwilling scientific world.”12 Much of the evidence concerned thought transference, which was something James considered possible. “The moment a context is found to make it continuous with other phenomena, I shall be much surprised if it does not become an orthodox scientific fact.”13 Inclined to believe, James still held out for proof with an eloquent hedge: “The next twenty-five years will then probably decide the question. Either a flood of confirmatory phenomena, caught in the act, will pour in... or it will not pour in... In one case Messrs Gurney and Myers will have made an epoch in science, and will take rank among the immortals as the first effective prophets of a doctrine whose ineffectual prophets have been many. In the other case they will have made as great a wreck and misuse of noble faculties as the sun is often called to look down upon.”14
In late December he began reading John Dewey’s Psychology, with which he was disappointed, as he had been “hoping for something really fresh” from the twenty-seven-year-old Dewey, who had just published a couple of lively articles on psychology and philosophy in Mind.
Dewey was seventeen years younger than James. He came from Vermont, studied under George Sylvester Morris at the University of Vermont, then took a Ph.D. in 1884 at Johns Hopkins. Psychology was his first book, and while it has been described as an effort to mesh neoidealist Germanic thought with laboratory psychology, the book is heavily and rather obviously written in the language of idealism. “All products of the creative imagination,” Dewey writes, “are unconscious testimonies to the unity of spirit which binds man to man and man to nature in one organic whole... Every concrete act of knowledge involves an intuition of God; for it involves a unity of the real and the ideal, of the objective and the subjective.”15
James did not have much to learn from Dewey just yet. But when Dewey read James’s Principles of Psychology in the early 1890s, and as a result changed his whole view of psychology to a wholehearted endorsement of what Dewey then called the biological approach, the two men became colleagues and allies in the shaping of the new American psychology and philosophy.