THE PRAGMATISM LECTURES ended facing outward, away from the study, away from the college, to the wider world beyond. But the entire effort, an amazing one for a man in declining health, was underlaid and in some ways powered by a surge of inner energy. That surge was itself something James was interested in. “Whence is your power?” had been Emerson’s question; now it was James’s.
About a month after the San Francisco earthquake, James had given a talk to the psychology club at Harvard about how we occasionally work ourselves free of our inhibitions and “find we have more resources than we thought,” and about how, “in great catastrophes and crises, folks astonish themselves.” Then, in late 1906, a couple of weeks after the pragmatism lectures came to a close, James reworked this material into a talk, “The Energies of Men,” for the annual December meeting, in New York, of the American Philosophical Association, of which he was the current president. Thus the work in pragmatism was bracketed—or contained, so to speak—by James’s inquiry into “the amount of energy available for running one’s mental and moral operations by.”1
James considered this a problem in functional psychology. He firmly takes the clinicians’ side against the analytical or laboratory psychologists, noting at the start that the concept of the amount of energy available to a person was something “never once mentioned or heard of in laboratory circles.”2
He took as his starting point a feeling with which everyone is familiar: “Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked.” Whatever this subject should be called in clinical psychology—James called it dynamogenics—it is the long-standing American interest in awakening to new life and new power, the great theme of Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman, the great theme too of Jonathan Edwards, now carried to the new American century by William James.3
He starts, as he often does, with a common example: “The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us in the phenomenon of ‘second wind.’” It can be mental as well as physical. “In exceptional cases, we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own.” What exactly enables us to reach this reservoir? James identifies three kinds of things: excitements, efforts, and ideas. Excitements that are capable of “carrying us over the usually effective dam” include love, anger, crowd contagion, despair, war, and shipwreck. He glancingly mentions the earthquake. “People must have been appalled lately in San Francisco to find the stores of bottled-up energy and endurance they possessed.”4
Turning next to efforts, James cites heroic responses to unusual situations, but puts the most emphasis on how “the best practical knowers of the human soul have invented the thing known as methodical ascetic discipline to keep the deeper levels constantly in reach.” James mentions the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, then quotes at length from his friend Lutoslawski’s experience with hatha yoga, which James calls “the most venerable ascetic system and the one whose results [“strength of character, personal power, unshakability of soul”] have the most voluminous experimental corroboration.” He quotes Lutoslawski’s identification of hatha yoga with mind cure. “This is the truth at the bottom of all mind-cures,” Lutoslawski had written James. “Our thoughts have a plastic”—i.e., a shaping, formative—“power over the body.” Putting these together as “suggestive therapeutics” and as “methodical self-suggestion,” James insists that “we habitually live inside our limits of power.”5
Then James moves to the “third great dynamogenic agent,” namely, ideas. Like excitements and efforts, ideas are triggers. “Ideas set free beliefs, and the beliefs set free our wills.” He lists “Fatherland,” “the Union,” “Holy Church,” the “Monroe Doctrine,” “Truth,” “Science,” “Liberty,” insisting shrewdly that “the social nature of all such phrases is an essential feature of their dynamic power.” Moving to a strictly personal level, he cites “the idea of one’s honor” and finally “conversions.” “Conversions, whether they be political, scientific, philosophic, or religious, form another way in which bound energies are let loose. They unify, and put a stop to ancient mental interferences. The result is freedom and often a great enlargement of power.”
As he speaks with evident personal interest about the “very copious unlocking of energies by ideas in the persons of those converted to ‘New Thought,’ ‘Christian Science,’ and ‘Metaphysical Healing,’” it is hard to avoid at least the suggestion that James was, in his December address to the American Philosophical Association, giving a sort of account of the energies unleashed in him by his recent realization, taken from Papini, that his pragmatism was not just a new philosophy but a whole new conception of philosophy as “a doctrine of action in the widest sense, the study of all human powers and means.”6