75. The Many and the One

THE NEW YEAR BEGAN badly, though perhaps not quite as badly as it appears from the letters between William and Henry. Over the first three months of 1904, William was down with gout, influenza, erysipelas, a “poisonous catarrh,” vertigo, and vomiting, with discouragingly short intervals between. He made a quick trip to Florida, traveling with Edward Emerson and family, with whom he stayed in a disappointing Tallahassee hotel. We catch James’s mood from a postcard to Alice: “Extremely dreary hotel, to be sold at auction next Monday, us in- eluded.”¹

In February the Russo-Japanese War broke out. James took the Japanese side, telling one friend, “The insolence of the white race in Asia ought to receive a check.”² Closer to home, James gave in to President Eliot’s entreaties, withdrawing his resignation and agreeing to stay on at Harvard for the coming year. To Henry, William sent a copy of the ebullient Horace Fletcher’s new book, The New Glutton or Epicure, which contained a fulsome acknowledgment to William. Fletcher’s way to health was to chew each bite of food until it liquefied and a swallowing reflex set in. Henry, who had a long history of digestive woes, found the book entirely to his taste, was so excited by his first reading that he couldn’t sleep, and was determined at once to try it.³ Subsequent letters to William show that Henry was soon hooked on Fletcherizing, even as he poked inevitable fun at Fletcher’s “precious definite little munching message” and at “salvation through salivation.” Fletcher was cheerful, upbeat, and had a nice sense of humor. He noted how “munching lunches” had become popular in London. Henry merrily told William that he was inclined to swallow Fletcher, at least, whole.

William meanwhile was chewing away at his own book, for which he had made, by October 1903, some two hundred pages of notes and jottings. His working title was The Many and the One. By late May 1904 he had written, he said, exactly thirty-two pages. James’s expectations for this book were high. He seems to have approached it not as a continuation of his earlier work but in an almost boyish spirit of making a brand-new start at the big questions. “I prefer,” he wrote, “to start upon this work romantically, as it were, and without justification.”⁴ He made huge and impossible claims—“For myself the result I shall try to set forth will be true”—even as he recognized the problem with what he was saying. “I am convinced,” he had written Sarah Whitman in August 1903, “that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing.”⁵

Beliefs looking very much like conclusions tumbled out in advance of evidence. “I do not believe... that even if a supreme soul exists, it embraces all the details of the universe in a single absolute act either of thought or of will.” James seems to have settled beforehand the big question, whether the world is at bottom one great fact or many little facts. What, he asked, can “One” “mean when applied to such an object as the universe?” The drafts and scraps of drafts James wrote on this project do not make any sort of whole, though some of the parts are excellent. Deprecating the “mere dry chrysalis or cicada skin” of intellect-generated abstractions, James bursts out in protest: “Immediate life holds all the blood.” A few sentences later, he wrote, “There must be an intellect that is reconstructive, not destructive.”⁶

The best parts of James’s scattered assault on the problem are his statements of the problem the book posed for him. James is most articulate and persuasive when describing difficulties, not when prescribing solutions. There is no escaping the influences that have shaped one, he says. “Whatever principles he may reason from, and whatever logic he may follow, he [the philosopher] is at bottom an advocate pleading to a brief handed over to his intellect by the peculiarities of his nature and the influences in his history that have molded his imagination.” James was unable or unwilling to understate the complexity of any part of the human condition. “Mental and social life are at all times a strange blending of purpose, accident, and passive drift,” he wrote. “Both in biography and history, designs are modified to suit events which interfere with the original plan... No man, no nation ever carried out a plan foretold in all its detail. No consciousness ever embraced in a single act of thought the whole of either an individual or a national life.”

But while one may suspect that the trouble lay with James’s preconceptions—he was inclined to believe in the many and not to believe in the one—the problem at hand became insurmountable when he tried to focus the question. In one draft he wrote, “How, on the supposition that the manyness of things precedes their unity, does any unity come into being at all?” In the margin opposite this paragraph, James wrote, “Stop!”⁷

He tried again, and after several pages reached the position that “substances whether material or spiritual are unrepresentable; and the inherence in them or adherence to them of properties seems a mere verbal figure. The notions of cause, power, possibility are equally unintelligible. Knowledge of one thing by another is a mystery. If things be individual (as common sense affirms) how can they interact at all, for how can what is separate communicate?” Then, opposite this paragraph too, he wrote, “Stop.”