44. Santayana at Harvard

THOUGH HE FELT himself on the home stretch with the psychology book, countless other matters pressed for William James’s time and attention. Alice was due to return to Cambridge from South Carolina in May, but was delayed because the baby, Margaret Mary, was again sick. Alice began the move north by shipping a horse. James went down to the docks in Boston, saw to the unloading and then the reloading of the animal on a train for Chocorua. He also thought about buying a cow. He couldn’t find shoes that fit him properly. He wrote his cousin Ellie, “Yesterday driving a cow home and drilling a hole in a rock to blast, today staining a floor, and so forth to the end of time.”¹

He was trying galvanization and, sometimes, chloroform to get to sleep. He went to New York to investigate a medium, Madame Dess de Bar, whom he described as “obese, wicked, jolly, intellectual, with no end of go and animal spirits.” He corresponded with Christine Ladd Franklin, a fellow psychologist and philosopher, and he patched up relations with G. S. Hall. He missed Alice dreadfully, writing in every letter and lamenting, “Why can’t we ever be alone together such a night as this?” We do not know whether Alice found this endearing or just tiresome.²

There were hard losses too. Lizzie Boott, with whom William had talked and lounged on the lawn at Pomfret, Connecticut, way back in the late 1860s, and who had married the painter Frank Duvenek, died in Paris in March 1888. Then in June Edmund Gurney, whom James regarded as the great hope for psychical research, died of an overdose of chloroform. He was found “dead in bed holding an impregnated sponge to his mouth,” Harry reported, adding, “Suicide is suspected—I gather—from the strangeness of the form of his death.” “These deaths,” William wrote back, “make what remains here seem strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.”³

During the summer he went back and forth between Chocorua and Cambridge. Early in August he reported to Alice from Cambridge that he had ordered a plow, harness, and whiffletree, canvas for the piazza cover, and lag screws for the “piece against the house.” He was reading an autobiographical novel of Restif de La Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, a racy and extended account of Restif’s sentimental and sexual adventures. Alice seems not to have approved, but James was interested enough to keep reading, explaining to her, “It is not for the dirt but for the whole sense of reality of which the dirt is part that I find these books so renovating.” He also read the Danish psychologist Carl Lange’s book On the Emotions, a “brilliant little work I learned to know some months ago,” he wrote a friend in July 1888. He read Tolstoy’s Confession in a French translation, which had been written in the early 1880s, after, and in many ways about, Tolstoy’s conversion. James found the book “coldly and ironically analytical both of himself and everyone else,” and marked by “artistic malice.”⁴

Harvard made calls on James’s time and energy too, calls that were welcome, that were more or less manageable for a man of forty-six, but that were still taxing. He had eighty-seven students in Philosophy 2: Logic and Psychology, thirty in Philosophy 4: Ethics (Recent English Contributions to Theistic Ethics), and five advanced chickens in Philosophy 20a: Questions in Psychology. Royce was back from his long recuperative trip to Australia. His depression had lifted, and he was in good health. The Philosophy Club—mainly grad students—flourished and was something James enjoyed. There were more graduate students in philosophy now, and many of them would have lives of accomplishment. Benjamin Rand, who later did work on Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was the great champion before Rousseau of the idea that people are basically good), was James’s reader for Philosophy 2. George Herbert Mead (of the Harvard class of 1888 and later a well-known professor of philosophy at Chicago) was the tutor for the James boys. There were five prospective students in the wings. One, Charles Augustus Strong, who had graduated from Harvard in 1886 and was later a colleague of James’s and the author of a remarkable book, Why the Mind Has a Body, was writing James for career advice. And Strong’s close friend and classmate George Santayana returned this fall to Harvard to complete his Ph.D.

First as a student of James’s and then as a colleague, Santayana was to be closely associated with James for many years. He was different not just from James but from the world in which he found himself. Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey point out that Santayana was “a Catholic in a Protestant country, a humanist in an age of science, a pessimist in a nation in which optimism was a national religion, a fatalist in a culture which preached the ability of creative intelligence to master the world, a man who advocated resignation as a cardinal virtue in a land wedded to activism.”⁵

Interested more in aesthetics than in practical matters, a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, a homosexual in a society in which his sexual life had to be hidden, Santayana would seem to have had little in common with James. It is often said that they didn’t like or understand each other, but Santayana’s writings suggest otherwise. By being so different, they were perfect foils for each other. Underlying good will counted for something. Each made room for the other in his intellectual universe, both wrote better prose than anyone in the Harvard English department of the time, and Santayana wrote some of the best and most generous descriptions we have of William James.⁶

Santayana was now twenty-five. Born in Spain in 1863, he was twenty-one years younger than James. He had been sent to Boston for an education; he was taken in by the family of his mother’s first husband, and he spent eight years at Boston Latin School. He entered Harvard in 1882, writing poetry, studying philosophy, helping start a new magazine, excelling in everything. He felt himself an outsider at Harvard, as nearly everyone there does. Santayana was drawn to things bohemian and was fond of the company of brilliant, good-looking young men. Between Boston Latin and Harvard College, Santayana acquired the rounded classical education James had missed out on. “William James enjoyed in his youth what are called advantages,” Santayana began a much later piece on James. Advantages for Santayana meant money; for all his superb education, he had expensive tastes and limited means and was self-conscious about it all.

Santayana’s college class photograph shows a broad-faced, strong, handsome young man with short, somewhat curly hair, a mustache that concealed nothing, and large, deep-set, striking eyes that revealed everything. Margaret Münsterberg, the daughter of a colleague of Santayana’s, also noticed his “dark Spanish eyes,” in which “there was a sudden illumination, an extraordinary focusing of light rays having the effect of a blaze of pure spirit... and then his laugh! He laughed not with his lips only, but with his whole face. His was a laugh to delight a child’s heart, the laugh of Peter Pan, brimming over with pure merriment.”⁷

Santayana had won a fellowship to travel and study abroad, had been reading and going to lectures in Germany in pursuit of a Ph.D., which he now returned to Harvard to finish. He wanted to write a dissertation on Schopenhauer, but his adviser, Royce, “shook his head,” saying Schopenhauer might do for a master’s thesis but not for a doctorate. Santayana should write on Rudolph Hermann Lotze, a key figure in physiological psychology and founder of a philosophy called theistic idealism. This Santayana did, though his later opinion was that Lotze was only “a higher form of George Herbert Palmer.”⁸

Santayana passed his Ph.D. exam in late May 1889 and was appointed instructor in philosophy at Harvard, where he started teaching the following fall. James praised his thesis as “simply an exquisite production,” and told a prospective employer that Santayana was “the best intellect we have turned out here in many a year.” Santayana later said he was told by his teachers that he was “the most normal doctor of philosophy they had ever created.”

It is doubtful that Harvard was fully responsible for either claim; Santayana was self-possessed to an unusual degree, and even as an undergraduate there was a whiff of presumptive equality in his relations with his teachers, or at least in the account he gave of them. He admired Josiah Royce’s “powerful and learned mind,” and found that Royce’s “comfortless dissatisfaction with every possible idea opened vistas” for him. He studied Locke, Berkeley, and Hume with James. During 1889 Santayana was part of a small class with which James read and discussed chapters from his manuscript of The Principles of Psychology. Later Santayana considered the Principles to be James’s best achievement. “What distinguishes it is the author’s gift for evoking vividly the very life of the mind.”⁹

Santayana observed how James, in these years, gave a medical turn to everything, and he referred to the importance, for his own thought, of “the early medical psychology of James.”¹⁰ And he recognized, in James’s teaching, the ultimate common ground for such different personalities: “Here there was as much honest humanity in the teacher as in the texts.”