61. A Certain Blindness

ON THE LAST DAY of September 1898, James wrote Henry Rankin to thank him for the shower of books, letters, and clippings. He was not, he told Rankin, “a Christian in the sense in which you are one, and yet in some way or other I shall probably come out not incongruously with your specifications.” He had written nothing toward his Gifford Lectures, which were a little more than a year away, but he had thought about them constantly and did have a subject and an approach. “I mean them to be on the psychology of the religious consciousness, in its developed state, and not anthropological. I want to quote as many first-hand documents as I can of the different elements and factors that enter into man’s religious needs.” With his customary self-deprecation he added that his “serious education in the subject has all to be made in the next fourteen months.”¹

He was plunged back into full-time teaching, into Cambridge social life, and into the ever-expanding circle of admirers and their requests. No, he wouldn’t come to nearby Brookline to lecture. But yes, he would write a preface for the English translation of his new friend Wincenty Lutoslawski’s Seelenmacht (A World of Souls).

In late October he presented “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”² This talk, with its strong central image from Stevenson’s “The Lantern Bearers,” became for James a central statement. The blindness he means is “the truth... that we are doomed, by the fact that we are practical beings with very limited tasks to attend to, and special ideas to look after, to be absolutely blind and insensible to the inner feelings, and the whole inner significance of lives that are different from our own. Our opinion of the worth of such lives is absolutely wide of the mark, and unfit to be counted at all.”³

When the book containing “On a Certain Blindness” was published, James sent a copy to Pauline Goldmark, saying he wanted her to read it, “because I care very much indeed for the truth it so inadequately tries by dint of innumerable quotations to express, and I like to imagine that you care for it, or will care for it too. What most horrifies me in life is our brutal ignorance of one another.” To Elizabeth Glendower Evans he wrote even more plainly, calling “On a Certain Blindness” “the perception on which my whole individualistic philosophy is based.”⁴

When the essay came out in book form—it was included in Talks to Teachers—James tried again in the preface to explain why its message meant so much to him. “The truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed ‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal.” Again he drew out the political significance: “The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality—is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant.”⁵

During the first week of November 1898, James sent Henry Holt a letter and, the next day, the manuscript of Talks to Teachers. James was in a hurry. The Atlantic was going to publish many of the talks; Scribner’s Magazine would print at least one. James wanted to know at once what Holt planned to do. Holt replied to the letter before even seeing the manuscript: he would publish it. He offered James 10 percent of the list price until he recovered his costs, and 20 percent thereafter. James responded as many an author has yearned to do but has lacked the nerve. He proposed to publish the book himself (edit, design, print, and bind it), then let Holt advertise and distribute the book and take 10 percent of the list price for his pains.

Publishers do not like this kind of talk. But Holt wanted the book. James’s royalties from Holt for 1898 for The Principles of Psychology and Psychology: Briefer Course came to $1,281.03. This was a substantial fraction of James’s income, and it meant that his work had been very profitable for Holt. Besides, Holt liked James, so he wrote back that James could have it his way, only he would have to understand that teachers got a 20 percent discount and dealers got another 20 percent. James would manufacture the book and would receive either 50 percent of the retail price (the book was to sell for a dollar) or 60 percent of the net (defined as the teachers’ price of 80 cents).

This arrangement cost James a huge amount of work and correspondence, as he worried about paper, design, type, binding, production schedules, bills, delivery and pickup, and coordination with Holt, who gleefully hounded James with details. Holt obviously wanted to make the whole process as difficult as possible so that James’s cheekiness didn’t spread to other authors. But the book appeared in April 1899, and in January 1900 James got word that the Indiana Teachers’ Reading Circle had adopted it. This meant sales of between ten and fourteen thousand copies; James stood to make a minimum of $4,500 from this one adoption, and there were others to come. This was a great deal of money, more than the Giffords paid for a year and nearly the same as a year’s salary at Harvard. Talks to Teachers freed James of money worries. His feisty, provocative, and unconventional publishing gamble had paid off, even though it was a nuisance to bring off. James had learned something, and when the Varieties was ready for publication, he made a similar deal with Longmans, Green.⁶

 

Ever since his Walpurgisnacht and the next day’s overexertion, James had been experiencing “queer cardiac symptoms.” He had first had heart palpitations while camping out in California. In November he reported to Howison, “My heart has been kicking about terribly of late, stopping and hurrying, and aching.” He went to see a doctor, probably Jim Putnam, who picked up a murmur indicating a “slight valvular lesion.” The same thing had been diagnosed in Wilky years before. James also described his present condition as “valvular insufficiency.” He was shocked at the finding, he said, but he professed to be encouraged that he had no symptoms of impaired circulation.⁷

As the new year, 1899, turned, James was teaching, trying to look after his heart, and hoping to find time to work on his Giffords. In spite of the splendid large library on the ground floor of his home, James now preferred to write in the attic, which was a bare room fifty-two feet long with nothing in it but a chair, a table, and the work he brought up with him.

Royce was in Aberdeen giving his Giffords, which were published about a year later under the ambitious title The World and the Individual. In 1898 other ambitious Americans had charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba. The firing line was three miles long; Teddy Roosevelt and his much-heralded Rough Riders were there—on foot—and so were elements of the unheralded 10th U.S. Cavalry (the black “buffalo soldiers”). American ships sank the Spanish fleet off Santiago Harbor on the southern coast of the island, while Admiral Dewey defeated another Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines. An American fleet on its way to the Philippines casually annexed Guam. The U.S. Army doubled in size overnight. Hawaii was annexed. Great Britain pressured China to open all its inland waterways to foreign commerce, signed a ninety-nine-year lease for the Kowloon Peninsula opposite Hong Kong, and sent Kitchener to Sudan to defeat Khalifa Abdullah and reconquer Khartoum. Russia was demanding Port Arthur and Dalian, the dominant ports of the Liaotung Peninsula, between northern China and Korea. Imperial expansion was everywhere; James found himself more and more opposed and drawn further and further into the fray. He attended mass meetings for anti-imperialist demonstrations, and over the next eighteen months he wrote and published six pieces against American policy in the Philippines.

The first salvo he fired off was the angriest article he had ever written. Called “The Philippine Tangle,” it appeared in the Boston Transcript on February 26,1899. After U.S. troops defeated and evicted the Spanish from the Philippines, James expected the Americans to recognize the local independence movement, made up largely of Tagalog people under Emilio Aguinaldo. But to the dismay of James and others, President McKinley refused to deal with Aguinaldo, kept him out of Manila, and bottled up his forces while installing an American protectorate to rule until the Filipinos proved “worthy of self-rule.”

The battle against Aguinaldo would take three years and cost hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. James was incensed at the American war spirit; he also felt, as did many, that American business interests were dictating foreign policy. Albert Beveridge, then running for the U.S. Senate from Indiana, talked about “the beginning of the commercial empire of the republic,” and maintained that “the commercial supremacy of the republic means that this nation is to be the sovereign factor in the peace of the world.”⁸

James’s attack on American policy in the Philippines radiates outrage. “I have been cheered and encouraged at the almost unanimous dismay and horror I find individuals express in private conversation over the turn which things are taking,” he wrote, adding that the most frequent comment he heard was “a national infamy.” He noted what “an absolute savage and pirate the passion of military conquest always is,” and he called the American treatment of Aguinaldo’s movement “piracy positive and absolute,” with the American people appearing as “pirates pure and simple.”⁹ He warmed to his subject: “We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world—the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals.” He denounced what he called “war fever,” “the pride which always refuses to back down when under fire,” and the “belief... in a national destiny which must be ‘big’ at any cost.” Responding to the popular notion that Americans should “take up the white man’s burden,” James erupts with rage and scorn: “Civilization is, then, the big, hollow, resounding, corrupting, sophisticating, confusing torrent of mere brutal momentum and irrationality that brings forth fruits like this!...The issue is perfectly plain at last. We are cold-bloodedly, wantonly and abominably destroying the soul of a people who never did us an atom of harm in their lives.”¹⁰

All during the spring of 1899, his letters rumbled with impotent, inarticulate outbursts of fury and despair. “I am too heart-sick over the infamy of our Philippine conduct to care for much else,” he wrote one friend. “The stars and stripes... are now a lying rag, pure and simple.”¹¹ And it was now, while he was contemplating empire and expansion, that he came to detest what he called “mere bigness.” He wrote about it to Sarah Whitman: “I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms; and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of this world like so many soft rootlets or like the capillary oozing of water and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time.”

James’s vascular imagery, his “heart-sick” response, was deeply felt, deeply rooted in the family habit of strong language and perhaps even in his own physical condition. James trained his prose on imperial expansionism, but his own experience was with the ever-growing institution of Harvard, and while he does not say so here, Harvard’s expansion would have given him no great satisfaction. “The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost, and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.”¹²

James’s anti-imperial activism was not incidental; it grew naturally from his advocacy of pluralism and individual self-determination and from his conviction that we are mostly blind to the vital centers of the lives of others—to the lives of, for example, Filipinos.