AT THE END OF AUGUST 1904, Henry James arrived in America after a twenty-three-year absence. He had left when he was thirty-eight; now he was sixty-one, a celebrity followed by newspaper reporters. He was well into the period of his late novels—The Ambassadors had appeared in 1903, The Golden Bowl was just out. His ship landed at Hoboken. When he crossed to New York City, he eagerly noted the “brave sense of the big bright breezy bay, of light and space and multitudinous movement; of the serried, bristling city, held in the easy embrace of its great good-natured rivers.”
The trip started so well that after only a few weeks his brother William was already declaring it “a great success.” William clearly enjoyed Henry’s company. Henry seemed “to be delighted with everything he sees, especially with the prettiness of Chocorua,” William wrote Katharine Rodgers. To Pauline Goldmark he wrote about Henry’s “delightful fortnight” at Chocorua, adding, “It is a pleasure to be with anyone who takes in things through the eyes.” Henry’s trip bore its planned fruit as a series of travel pieces, gathered together in book form in 1907.1
William’s own spirits were high. He felt better than he had in five years, and he too was taking in things through his eyes. Describing Chocorua for Pauline in late September, he burst out, “Such a green and gold and scarlet morn as this would raise the dead.” He thought things were really moving his way in the world of philosophy. “It seems to me that the movement [radical empiricism] has all the characters of the birth of a big scientific revolutionary conception.” It was, he observed elsewhere, “great fun to be a philosopher after they have once begun to take notice of what you say.”2
There was, for example, Schiller, whom James had known for some time but who was now becoming important to James. Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller took two firsts at Oxford (classical moderations and litterae humaniores), came to the United States to take a doctor’s degree at Cornell, left without the degree, and went back to England, where he settled in as a tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was twenty-two years younger than James, high-spirited, brash to the point of recklessness, outspoken, and full of jokes.
He was undeniably brilliant, but his schoolboyish humor, his abusive personal attacks on philosophical opponents, and his eagerness to turn philosophical debate into a blood sport made him enemies. In 1901 he put out a parody issue of Mind, the main English journal for philosophy and psychology. Schiller called his parody Mind! Among the spoofs were “The Place of Humour in the Absolute” by F. H. Badly and “The Critique of Pure Rot” by I. Cant.3 Schiller called anyone who disagreed with him “the enemy.” He wrote constantly of the need for “a decisive defeat of B[radley],” of “our aggressive campaign against Jericho,” of the “big guns” and our “ammunition.” He once likened the dispute between the pragmatists and F. H. Bradley to a bullfight. The bull was Bradley, the picadors were Dewey and company, the first banderillero was Schiller. After the bull had been stuck with banderillas named after Schiller’s writings—including, of course, Mind!— it was time for the “MATADOR: wj.”
Schiller wrote a clear and graceful prose, and his fundamental position was deeply congenial to James. For Plato, Schiller once wrote, “the Idea remains the only true reality and the Idea as such is unchanging Being, out of space and time... To Aristotle, the real world, i.e. the world whereof we desire an explanation, is after all the world of change in which we move and live.” James was enthusiastic about Schiller’s first book, Riddles of the Sphinx, which tried to combine Darwinian evolution with philosophic idealism; James called it a “pluralistic, theistic book, of great vigor and constructive originality... and quite in the lines in which I incline to tread.”4
Shortly after moving to Oxford, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Schiller began to attract attention as a proponent of what James called pragmatism and Schiller himself called humanism. In 1904 Schiller published a book called Humanism: Philosophical Essays, dedicated to “my dear friend, the humanest of philosophers, William James, without whose example and unfailing encouragement, this book would never have been written.” In it he talked a good deal about James and pragmatism, proposed the name “humanism” for it, and set out to rescue philosophy from “the hands of recluses who have lost all interest in the practical concerns of humanity, and have rendered philosophy like unto themselves, abstruse, arid, abstract and abhorrent.”5
James reviewed the book favorably, as did Dewey and Flournoy. Many others were offended. Bradley wrote James to explain why a piece he, Bradley, had written contained “strictures on Schiller and incidentally on yourself.” In Bradley’s view, Schiller had been “advertising himself and his wares for some years incessantly,” and had been spreading the idea that he, Schiller, “had behind him a large and important following in Oxford.” Münsterberg refused to invite Schiller to his Congress of Arts and Science because he considered “the level of the Congress too much lowered if a personality of his type [should be] in it.” Münsterberg openly sneered that “the Congress was not made for men who are unable to pass a Doctor’s examination in Cornell.”6
The stately G. H. Palmer found Schiller “insufferable.” Santayana said he “hated Schiller and his thought.” James stuck up for him through it all, explaining at length to Bradley why he should take Schiller seriously, and even rebuking J. M. Baldwin for calling Schiller “vulgar” in print. He also wrote Schiller long letters trying to persuade him to calm down. In August 1904 he told Schiller, “It is astonishing how many persons resent in your past writings what seems to them ‘bad taste,’ in the way of polemical jeers and general horseplay.” James explained in detail, with appropriate disclaimers and qualifications. “I think your whole mental tone against our critics is overstrained... Nothing is gained by calling them names... What I earnestly beseech you to do therefore is (no matter at what literary cost) to suppress those [first seven] pages.” (Schiller had sent James a draft of a new blast against Bradley.) Schiller replied, lighthearted as ever, “Will you pardon me if I’m neither willing nor able to take your advice?” James’s tone with Schiller remained friendly and admiring, if at times that of an exasperated parent. “To me,” James wrote him, “it is unspeakably sad that when a man reasons and writes as you do, more clean and clear in style than anyone, full of new insights and new handlings of the old on every page, people should consider themselves free to ignore your philosophy because forsooth their taste doesn’t quite relish your jokes, and some of your other ways. One of them is mentioning my name too often—cut that out!”7
If James was pleased, and a little flattered, by Schiller’s adherence and was dedicated to working with him, he was also deeply and fruitfully engaged with F. H. Bradley himself, once Bradley began to take notice of James’s writings. In 1904 Bradley and James had not yet met.8 Bradley was four years younger than James. A severe kidney ailment obliged him to lead a quiet, reclusive life. As an undergraduate he read the same subjects Schiller would read later, and though his showing at Oxford was not as good as Schiller’s, Bradley received a fellowship at Merton College in 1870. The fellowship was for life, involved no teaching, and would be terminated if he ever married. In 1895 Bradley wrote James a letter about the latter’s “The Knowing of Things Together,” starting a correspondence that continued off and on until James’s death. James was much impressed by Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, so there was a substantial foreground to the renewed correspondence of 1904 and 1905.
A friend of Bradley’s, A. E. Taylor, summed up Bradley’s writings by saying they “probably did more than those of any other man to effect the naturalization of Hegelian thought in England which was so marked a feature of the close of the nineteenth century.” Bradley believed in “the thoroughgoing super-rational unity of all reality.” T. S. Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation on Bradley, and there are places in Bradley’s work where one glimpses foreshadowings of Four Quartets. Bradley wrote: “‘For love and beauty and delight,’ it is no matter where they have shown themselves, ‘there is no death nor change’; and this conclusion is true. There things do not die, since the Paradise in which they bloom is immortal. That Paradise is no special region nor any given particular spot in time or space. It is here, it is everywhere where any finite being is lifted into that higher life which alone is waking reality.”9
Bradley was Platonistic, monistic, and a neo-Hegelian. He was much like Royce, and James’s relation to Bradley was much like his relation to Royce, only Royce was his neighbor and colleague and could talk things out directly with James, whereas Bradley’s relationship with James was always through the written word. At first glance, Bradley and James seem poles apart. “Bradley’s main affirmation,” Timothy Sprigge writes in a recent book, “is the existence of the Absolute, a single infinite experience of which everything finite is an agent, and much of James’s thought is devoted to the critique of such a claim.”
But James and Bradley—and James and Royce—had, and realized they had, a lot in common. Though James was a pluralist and Bradley a monist, both believed in “panexperientialism,” a term of art for the belief that “concrete reality is composed of innumerable pulses of experience.” Bradley’s monistic world was somehow composed of the same experience as James’s pluralist world. Bradley’s world incorporates James’s, saying the pluralism is only apparent, not real. James, on his side, had a covert monistic impulse, in that he “came to believe in a single mother-sea of consciousness which all finite consciousnesses emerge from, and return to, with enrichments won when separate.” Timothy Sprigge compares James and Bradley at length and finds them locked in a symbiotic embrace. Sprigge concludes, “While I think Bradley right upon the whole about the whole, I think James right in very large part about the parts.” It is a line Schiller would have liked.10
Bradley and James took on the big questions in their correspondence. James had written in 1898 to Bradley, “The deep questions which the moral life suggests are metaphysical. 1) Is evil real? 2) Is it essential to the universe? If these questions are to be answered with a yes I cannot see who is responsible, or may be called so.” Bradley thought James had failed to account for the “moral and intellectual repugnance” to chance felt by ordinary people. “It is, I presume, certain that the tidings that the best things in the world go, or may go, by chance, would be received by ‘the plain man’ with horror.” Now, in 1904 and 1905, the correspondence flared up again, with Bradley apologizing for having to remonstrate with Schiller, and with James urging Bradley to overlook Schiller’s immaturities and recognize the solid substrate of thought.
Most notable in the letters between Bradley and James is the invincible civility of their forthright disagreements. “Naturally I am far from suggesting that there is nothing in ‘pragmatism,’” Bradley wrote James in July 1904. “I think there is a good deal, though not as a theory of first principles.” James replied to what he called Bradley’s “exceedingly courteous letter,” defending Schiller’s writing as “absolutely objective” and insisting that “you, in your article, seem to me to have sought for whatever interpretation of Schiller would allow you to reject the most of him.” James could also fault his own Will to Believe as a “luckless title, which should have been ‘The Right to Believe,’” and he took care to sign himself “always truly and amicably yours, Wm James.” Where Schiller could be an embarrassing ally, Bradley’s unflinching decency, which was reciprocated by James, made him a constructive and welcome opponent.11