WILLIAM JAMES’S LIFE reached another high tide during the academic year 1904–05. His health remained excellent, his philosophical work was being taken seriously, and his teaching and writing were going well enough to satisfy even him.
Throughout the fall of 1904 until the end of January 1905 he taught the first half of Philosophy 9. It was a “general introduction to philosophy on... ‘radically empirical’ principles,” he told one correspondent. “The course as given this year, is more successful in awakening serious interest than any course I have ever given.” It was a yearlong course; Royce taught the second half. James explained how it worked in a letter to Bradley: “We have the same students—I give them pluralism the 1rst half year, he monism the second half—no one can take a single half of the course, and R and I love each other like Siamese Twins.” As the metaphor suggests, James saw it as more than a simple matter of opposition. “I think I understand his absolute pretty well, and it is essentially a vehicle of conjunction, and of making things monistic. He is a first-rate empirical mind, and to a great extent gives away in detail the monism which in general he affirms.” Bradley replied good-naturedly that he had “smiled at the idea of the bane and the antidote being put before students in due order.”1
James’s outline for the course has survived, and even in its naked form it makes engaging reading. “Out of chance can come order” is followed at once by “Out of order no chance.” There is also a wonderfully succinct restatement of Royce’s argument that the existence of error proves that there is such a thing as truth. “If you say there is nothing but opinion, neither truth nor error, that opinion at least claims truth; the opinion that there is truth is at least an error.” And James gave his students another of the startling images with which his work swarms. If the universe of absolute idealism was like “an aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming,” the empiricist universe was “more like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads and loose appendages of every description float and dangle from it, and save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so my experiences and yours float and dangle.”2
Both James and Royce brought a saving sense of humor to the undertaking. James took potshots at the Absolute. Royce gave as good as he got. Once he imagined a pragmatist taking his oath on the witness stand: “I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me future experience.” The vivid photographs of James and Royce on the stone wall at Chocorua were snapped just as James was saying “Damn the Absolute!”3
The crowning achievement—felt as such by James—of this academic year was the series of pieces James produced with uncharacteristic dispatch. In February 1905 he wrote Santayana that he had finished teaching his part of Philosophy 9 and “shall have published 9 articles since September 1.” One of these was essentially a reprint of his California talk on pragmatism, another was his piece on Tom Davidson, but the other seven were all professional, technical, or polemical aspects of the radical empiricism that was now firmly at the center of James’s energies and interests.4 To his friend Giulio Cesare Ferrari James wrote in late February that he was more interested in radical empiricism “than I have ever been in anything else.” And in March he wrote to the editor of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, in which most of his work was now appearing, “Every step I make confirms me in the view that radical empiricism is It.”5
James’s active, restless life reached a kind of crescendo during this winter. He completed negotiations to spend half a year teaching at Stanford University. He was writing and reading proofs of half a dozen papers on radical empiricism. He was finishing his lectures in Philosophy 9 and frantically arranging for reprints of his current articles to be run off in time to get them to his students before Royce could lay his monist hands on them. The outside world had claims on him as well. He watched the early days of the Russian Revolution with interest, and accepted the vice presidency of the Filipino Progress Association, one of the anti-imperialist efforts he worked for. He followed the Russo-Japanese War abroad, and he kept an eye on his brother’s travels at home. Henry stayed in Washington, D.C., with Henry Adams and dined with President Roosevelt. The novelist ran into an ice storm at Biltmore in North Carolina, visited Charleston, South Carolina, and lectured on Balzac in Philadelphia and again at Bryn Mawr to crowds of six or seven hundred.
William’s reading this winter—one wonders where he found time for it—included Ruskin’s Praeterita, his autobiographical remembrance of things past, a three-volume work of a nostalgic sort that James had a weakness for. The last paragraph of the book, and the last thing Ruskin wrote, was a memory of a moment shared with James’s neighbor Charles Eliot Norton in Siena, when they went together to the Branda Fountain: “I last saw [it] with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! Moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves.”6
James also read this winter a social novel called The Common Lot, about the life of a corrupt architect who sees the light. The novelist was a former student, Robert Herrick; James wrote an appreciative letter. He now read, apparently for the first time, Gustav Fechner’s amazing Zend-Avesta, and another book by the English Whitman enthusiast Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation. He had recently read and extravagantly admired William Dean Howells’s epistolary novel, Letters Home. Hamlin Garland wrote James for help with material for his spiritualist novel, The Tyranny of the Dark. If there was always something of the artist about James, there was always something literary too.
As if all this were not enough, James agreed to give, between February 28 and March 10, a series of five lectures at Wellesley College, “Characteristics of an Individualistic Philosophy.” He did not write out these talks, but his outlines survive, showing that he was aiming at a more general, less professional audience than his just ended Harvard course on radical empiricism. The five lectures are usually seen as a first draft for Pragmatism, but they also embody, at this stage, ideas from what was eventually published as Essays in Radical Empiricism and ideas from what would become A Pluralistic Universe. From the late winter of 1905 onward, James was working toward all three books at more or less the same time. Inevitably his projects overlapped. The technical work fed the general lectures, beefing up their serious philosophical content, while the requirements of a general audience leavened the technical work, making it accessible to more people.
James devoted the first of the Wellesley talks to individualism, the second to pragmatism. The third talk was on varieties of unity, and the fourth defended the “pluralistic scheme.” The fifth argued for empiricism against absolutism. This final lecture also advanced a summary. His outline shows how he ended his last talk; the telegraphic form only amplifies the tone of urgency.
This then is the individualistic view...
It means many good things: e.g.
Genuine novelty
order being won, paid for.
the smaller systems the truer
man [is greater than] home [is greater than] state or church.
anti-slavery in all ways
toleration—respect of others
democracy—good systems can always be described in individualistic terms.
hero-worship and leadership.
the vital and the growing as against the fossilized and fixed in science, art, religion, government and custom.
faith and help
in morals, obligation respondent to demand.
Finally it avoids the smug ness which Swift found a reproach.
Then he concluded with a quotation from his old correspondent Benjamin Paul Blood: “What is concluded that we should conclude etc.”7
He gave the last talk on March 10. Moving at his customary breakneck speed, James boarded a ship the very next day and sailed for Europe and a change of scene.