NOTHING IN WILLIAM JAMES’S writings is more effective, more disarming, more surprising than the turn he gave to the next lecture. Having convinced the reader that he is firmly of the party of the healthy-minded, James doubles back to make the case for the twice-born, the sick souls, those who have “a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it.” It is the outlook “based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence.”
If it is true that “the sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line” (“misery-threshold” he also calls it), it is also true that the sick souls, “the depressed and melancholy” souls, live beyond it in the other direction, “in darkness and apprehension.” And here, James suggests, may lie the deeper truth, the truer account of how things are. “Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up, a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell; for, fugitive as they maybe, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness.” Robert Louis Stevenson knew the same thing: “There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert; whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”
That being the case, it is little wonder, says James, that theologians dwell so on failure, lack, dearth, and sin. There is a certain sadness that “lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.” Seen from the point of view of naturalism, says James, “mankind is... a set of people living on a frozen lake surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting.”1 Jonathan Edwards himself could not have put the predicament of natural man more vividly.
One curious thing about the sick soul is that it is possible for it to convert its outlook to the opposite one, though the process is generally harrowing. “The securest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered.” James quotes extensively from the experiences of Tolstoy, Bunyan, and Henry Alline, then moves to take up what he considers the “worst kind of melancholy... that which takes the form of panic fear.” He quotes his own experience of years earlier when he “went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.”2
This devastating incident from his own life serves as James’s ultimate example of the extreme state of the sick soul, presenting us squarely with “not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence.” We can get no further down. This is the bottom. “Here,” says James, “is the real core of the religious problem. Help! Help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these.”3
This, then, is the profounder view, ranging over and acknowledging a wider, deeper, grimmer, and more generally shared experience than healthy-mindedness. And perhaps the worst thing about the sickness is how it embeds itself in the commonest parts of life. “The normal process of life,” says James, “contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic time is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim.”4
With “The Sick Soul” James’s Gifford Lectures reached their full power and conviction, and his work here joins that of Bunyan and Tolstoy—on whom he leans so heavily—as a major testimonial to the darkness of mind that precedes, complicates, and ultimately leads—sometimes—to the change commonly called conversion.
James had written his lecture on healthy-mindedness back in July 1900. He was unable to complete this next one, on the sick soul, until mid-November. The intervening months were trying ones. In August his doctor peremptorily ordered James back to Bad Nauheim for treatment; James fell into his “Nauheim depression.” His blood pressure rose, and he had, he said, “no strength at all” He told Alice, “I have rarely felt more weak and depressed.” His friend Henry Sidgwick died at the end of August; two weeks later his dearer and older friend Tom Davidson died. These losses didn’t help matters, but they came after James’s mental and physical collapse and thus had no part in its onset. We cannot “explain” the darkness of James’s writing on the sick soul by pointing to current events in his life. It seems more likely that the reexamination of his long-held ideas about evil or the revived memory of the green-skinned idiot in the asylum cast its old pall over his present life. It is not so much that the life influences the work, as that, in James’s case anyway, the work is always influencing the life.5
The gaseous baths seemed to do no good. He was pushed about in a wheelchair. Dr. Baldwin showed up in Nauheim and treated James with Roberts-Hawley injections, which were to be kept secret from the other doctors. The injections contained “goat’s lymph from thoracic duct, the juice of lymphatic glands and brain substance, and testicles—not a glycerine or other solution as in Brown-Sequard’s extract, but the straight material sterilized by a process which is the inventor’s secret.” William told Henry about the new treatment. Henry exuded sympathy: “Oh your poor distracted doctor-ridden carcase.” In a state of advanced and chronic exasperation, William wrote Jim Putnam, “Although I have no confidence in three-quarters of what the doctors tell me, I have so little independent hold on the situation that I am hypnotized by the remaining quarter, and by the prestige of their authority and obey their orders.”6
By contrast, Henry’s life was stabilizing nicely. In early October 1900 he signed papers to buy Lamb House in Rye, and he signed a contract for a novel to be called The Wings of the Dove. Also in October William committed himself to begin lecturing at Edinburgh in mid-May 1901; at the same time he told Henry, “I have resigned irrevocably from the second course [of lectures], which under no circumstances, however favorable, could I in the time now left hope to get ready by the... date appointed.”
Told by his doctors not to return to England with winter coming, James went to Rome, where he had “three acute knock-downs of catarrhal and intestinal disturbance with fever,” each one lasting a week, but he kept grimly at work, finishing the lecture on the sick soul in mid-November, and the next one, on the divided self, by December 10. But the end of December brought yet another crash. “My nerves have all gone to pot, and I really feel ‘kind o’ OLD’ as the Adirondack guides say when they wake up in the morning after a night of tending the campfire. My intellectual vitality seems for the first time to have given out... The fact is that my nervous system is utter trash, and always was so.” As of January 1, the first day of the new century, James calculated that he had four lectures left to write. But by January 9 he had finished the one on conversion.7
James’s friend F.W.H. Myers—a year younger than James and already very sick with a bad heart and arteries and an associated respiratory problem called Cheyne-Stokes breathing—contracted double pneumonia and died in Rome on January 17. James wrote Eleanor Sidgwick (the widow of his friend Henry Sidgwick and a close friend of the Myerses) that, instead of the usual sickroom atmosphere of “physical misery and moral suffering,” Myers’s eagerness to go, and his mental clarity up to the time the death agony began, had been a “superb” thing to see, “a demonstration ad oculos of the practical influence of a living belief in future existence.”
James was, in part, putting on a good front. Another glimpse of the effect of Myers’s death on James is provided by a young doctor, Axel Munthe, who, along with Baldwin, attended Myers. Munthe says, in The Story of San Michele, that he saw James sitting with notebook and pencil outside the room in which Myers was dying, waiting for some communication from the other side. “When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open notebook on his knees. The page was blank.”8
By the end of January, as he turned to think about the actual giving of the Edinburgh lectures, James realized that while he hadn’t completed his outline, he already had enough written to fill ten lectures. The material on healthy-mindedness had grown by the addition of examples to fill two lectures; the same thing happened with the sick-soul material. The contents of the conversion lecture—if we include the consideration of “the Divided Self, and the process of its unification” as an introduction to the subject—would require three lectures and would complete the first series of talks. Apparently James could now see that his ideas about saintliness, mysticism, the philosophy of religion, and some conclusions might easily grow into a further ten lectures. As significant as the expansion of the early part of the subject is the corresponding shrinkage—or perhaps it was just a postponement—of the later part. The philosophy of religion, which James had once envisioned as the subject of the entire second set of talks—half the whole enterprise—would now contract to one tenth of the second series, or one twentieth of the whole.
Spring of 1901 brought another stretch of poor health for James. He told Eveleen Myers he was very short of breath and feeling as if his breast were “shot in two.” He complained of continued neuralgia. He dreaded the social side of the coming Edinburgh visit; he wrote ahead to his hosts that dinners and afternoon receptions were out of the question. He looked forward to regaining his equilibrium “after the Edinburgh nightmare is over.” He felt more and more like an exile; he and Alice had been abroad for almost two years straight.9
He touched up lecture two at Henry’s house in Rye, where Henry’s new secretary set to work typing William’s lectures. In early May his son Harry arrived from the United States. On May 14 William and Alice and young Harry went to Edinburgh.