THE DAY AFTER the second flurry of dreams, James, still hobbled by gout and walking with crutches, went to San Francisco to meet Alice’s train. A week later he gave a talk, “The Psychology of the War Spirit,” to a Stanford student assembly. The assembly had been scheduled in response to a call, from the 1905 Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, for student meetings, to be held on or about George Washington’s birthday, to agitate for arbitration as an alternative to war. In the Varieties James had proposed voluntary poverty as a moral equivalent for war. Now he underlined, as he always did, the plain fact of “the bellicose constitution of human nature” and pointed out that war was not about to just vanish. He proposed, citing Emerson, that students start by “speaking out as individuals whatever truth however unpopular is in you.” He also said that “the wars of the future must be waged inside of every country, between the destructive and constructive ideals and forces.”1
The Stanford semester hummed along. The big introductory class went well. James told friends, perhaps a bit defensively, he thought Stanford was getting its money’s worth out of him. He told his son Harry, “I have lectured better than I ever did before.”2 He had accepted a salary of $5,000, the salary of a full professor for a year, to teach one course for one semester and build a philosophy department. He worked hard at both assignments, trying to get President Jordan to hire Ralph Barton Perry and writing Perry urging him to accept the offer. The generous salary also helps explain why James gave so many little talks around the Bay Area. His job, remember, was to “get Stanford on the map” in philosophy.
Early in March he began another course of lymph injections, and as often happened, he felt better almost at once. Two days after starting the shots, he was writing to Aleck (who, with his older brothers, was back in Cambridge) about its being a glorious day, similar to one of which his old friend Holmes had said it “looked as if God had just spit on his sleeve and polished up the universe till you could almost see your face reflected in it.”3
Yet shadows intruded. Alice’s migraines continued. Back in Cambridge, Nathaniel Shaler, whom James called “the best-loved man in our university,” died. When James wrote his disconsolate widow, she returned the compliment, saying Shaler had always said James was “the dearest boy on the planet.”4 Shaler had taught geology but had been active in a dozen other fields. He wrote on earthquakes, whales, the moon, climate, hurricanes, mining metals, floods, red sunsets, altruism, the silver question, dreams, the Negro problem, and more. He was tall, erect, and active. “If he hears you call him old man,” said one of his students, “he’ll walk your damned legs off.” He was one of the grand, outsize personalities James loved to be around. James called Shaler “a myriad minded and multiple personalitied embodiment of academic and extra-academic matters.” When Shaler’s Civil War poems were published posthumously, James felt, he said, “an epic wind of sadness” blowing all through the book.5
William and Alice spent a few days off in early April in Los Angeles, where Alice wrote Henry a long letter—her second—about a recent sitting with Mrs. Piper back in Cambridge, before Alice had left for California. A message had come through Mrs. Piper on January 29 for Henry from his (and William’s) mother, Mary James, dead now for twenty-four years. Alice’s first letter seems not to have survived, so we do not know what the message was. All we know is that Henry was strangely stirred by it. He explained to a friend that it was “an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me—not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law, and an allusion so pertinent and initiated and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one’s part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me.”6 Alice wrote Henry on April 6, going back over the incident, and saying, “William remains unmoved and unconvinced.”
William could not let this stand quite so baldly, so he added a postscript to Alice’s letter. “The episode of the message so exactly hitting your mental condition is very queer,” he said, conceding that “there is something back there that shows that minds communicate.” William went on to gently deprecate “the costume, so to speak, and the accessories of fact” as merely symbolic and “due to the medium’s stock,” but concluding nonetheless, “What it all means I don’t know but it means at any rate that the world that our ‘normal’ consciousness makes use of is only a fraction of the whole world in which we have our being.” And he carefully signed himself “your loving W.J.”7
It may be too simple to say that Henry and Alice were the real believers in the messages from the discarnate. William cannot be described as just an opposed skeptic, but over and over it seems that Henry and Alice entered more fully, less reservedly, more emotionally into it than William, though he is the one whose name figures so prominently in the annals of psychical research.
By April 9 William and Alice were back in Stanford; James took up lecturing again, feeling himself “on the home stretch.” Then on April 18 came the great earthquake. Alice Toklas was living with her widowed father and younger brother in a large house in San Francisco near the Presidio. The quake came, the chimney was demolished. Alice went to her father’s bedroom. As James R. Mellow tells the story, “Ferdinand Toklas, incredibly, seemed to be asleep. Drawing the curtains aside and pushing up a window, Alice called to him, ‘Do get up. The city is on fire.’ Her father barely roused himself. ‘That will give us a black eye in the East,’ he said.”8 For William James it was a sort of message—in some uncanny way, a personality. “It was to my mind absolutely as a permanent Entity that had been holding back its activity all these months,” William wrote his brother. William even made the earthquake speak German: “And on this exquisite early morning [it came] at last saying ‘nun geht’s los! Now, give it to them.’”9 As he said now to Henry, and later in the piece he wrote about the quake, it was “impossible not to feel it as animated by a will, so vicious was the expression of a temper displayed.”
The devastation was appalling. Most of Stanford lay in ruins. James went into San Francisco and saw the “whole population in the streets, with what baggage they could rescue from their houses about to burn, while the flames and the dynamiting were steadily advancing and making everyone move farther. Every horse and vehicle was dragging property, every sidewalk encumbered with trunks being dragged along by people, every vacant spot occupied by furniture and families.”10 The farther James got from the event, the more the destruction and suffering struck him; on May 24 he told Katharine Rodgers about the “big heritage of woe” the quake had left behind. But even though decent humanitarian feelings caught up with him later, and he sent money for the relief effort, there is no question that James’s first, instinctual response was to greet the earthquake with a wild Olympian joy. There can be no real doubt that William James, in his heart of hearts, embraced and welcomed chaos, cataclysm, change, Zerrissenheit, impulse, and chance. He may have had a certain fellow feeling with the quake as a force for disorder.
He required himself to meet every demand made on him. Quite naturally he would read the human response to the quake as the calling up of heroic inner resources. James needed constant challenges and perpetual demands, if only to prove to himself that the inner well hadn’t run dry. This mandatory—almost military—openness to experience, even to disastrous experience, is the key to the temperament that was now driving James’s interest in radical empiricism, panpsychism, pluralism, and pragmatism. We may ignore no experience. As Joseph Conrad put it, “The unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness maybe our appointed task on this earth.”11