IN THE MIDDLE of November 1907, Josiah Royce began a series of public lectures that would be published the following year as The Philosophy of Loyalty. Though Royce explicitly intended for them to present a theory of truth and reality that was “opposed to the doctrines of recent pragmatism,” his thought and language both now bore the marks of his long, friendly controversy with James. He agreed with James on the importance of experience. “Loyalty,” said Royce, “is the Will to Believe in something eternal, and to express that belief in the practical life of a human being.” Emphasizing the last clause, he added, “We can deal with no world which is out of relation to our experience.” Ten days after Royce commenced the series, James cabled his acceptance of an offer to give a set of lectures at Oxford six months hence.1
The invitation came from Manchester College, which was located in the town of Oxford but was not then part of Oxford University. Only recently moved from the Midlands, Manchester was a “dissenting” school, meaning in this case Unitarian; it published a leading liberal periodical, the Hibbert Journal.2 The college asked James for eight lectures, preferably on “the religious aspect of your Philosophy.” James hesitated for only a week before accepting; he gave “The Present Situation in Philosophy” as a working title.3
Even though he would be lecturing in an ancient and famous university town, James seems to have considered the occasion a final chance to reach a general intellectual audience, not just a club of professional specialists. For one thing, he decided not to write the lectures out but to deliver them from detailed notes. The result, as it was eventually written out and printed, stands in marked contrast to the more tightly argued professional work he was doing at the same time on the meaning of truth.
As his decision to do the lectures came comparatively easily, so did the lectures themselves. His idea was to quickly trace the previous forty years in philosophy and “sum up by saying that idealism had displaced Theism, but that the issue that has defined itself more and more is that between a pluralistic and a monistic way of thinking.” By “monism” James meant the absolute idealism of the Cairds and Royce; by “pluralism” he meant his own radical empiricism. He also thought of his project in these lectures as championing experience over intellectualism, prizing as he did “multifarious unfiltered nature” over “generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating.” In a letter to Bergson, James said he was thinking of calling the book “Intellectualism and Reality.”4
The lectures, which would eventually be published as A Pluralistic Universe, arose out of a pluralistic life. In the week before agreeing to the Oxford lectures, James attended Royce’s last lecture on loyalty and began work on a lengthy report—it ran to 110 pages in print—on the’séances in which Leonora Piper had professed to be in contact with the departed Richard Hodgson. He went to see Lohengrin, met for two hours with Clifford Beers about mental health reform, and had Mrs. Piper to dinner. As he worked on the lectures during the months ahead, he would give talks to professional groups on the meaning of truth, read and respond to Henry Adams’s Education, and reread Fechner’s Zend-Avesta as well as his brother’s Roderick Hudson in the splendid New York Edition that was just coming out.
William had by now a printed card with which he could impersonally turn down invitations to speak. He reached out to Royce, who was shattered by the mental collapse of his son Christopher, who had to be institutionalized in January 1908. He began to sit for Bay Emmet as she started an oil portrait for the Harvard philosophy department. As winter turned into spring, he was down with colitis and vertigo, and by early April he was suffering “as bad nervous fatigue as I have ever been in my life.” He hung on, took Trional in order to sleep, and kept pegging away at the lectures, sailing for England on April 21, 1908, “eager,” as he wrote Henry, “for the scalp of the Absolute.”5
Though he began with necessary distinctions—empiricism and absolutism, pluralism and monism—he had no faith in neat little systems and glib exclusionary categories; his deepest instinct was to sketch large circles of inclusion. “The most a philosophy can hope for,” he said, superbly, in his opening talk, “is not to lock out any interest forever.” The second lecture was a critique of “monistic idealism,” lambasting the usual suspects (Bradley, Royce). The third lecture was a consideration of Hegel. James was willing now to concede that “merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual, Hegel, then, is great and true.” The trouble still, for James, was that “Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on everyone, and certain, which should be the truth, one indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary.” James, of course, believed no such thing existed. Perhaps his most telling comment about Hegel is his asking his audience, If dialectical reasoning is so great, why don’t scientists use it? “Doesn’t it seem odd,” he asked, “that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in ‘science,’ namely, the dialectical method should never once have been tried?”6
By contrast, it was the scientific method, “hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere,” which was the method of Fechner, to whose work James turns in lecture four. This chapter, innocuously titled “Concerning Fechner,” is the high point of A Pluralistic Universe, the part of it James singled out for his friends’ attention. What he chiefly admired in Fechner’s writing was what Fechner called his Tagenansicht, his daylight view, the view that “the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious.”7
Gustav Theodor Fechner was a man of Emerson’s generation, born in Saxony in 1801 and educated as a scientist at Leipzig, where he became a professor of physics. He is considered the founder of modern scientific psychology, owing to the publication, a year after Darwin’s Origin of Species, of his Elemente der Psychophysik. Fechner’s psychophysics aimed to “set up the proper operations by which numerical values could be assigned to psychological variables.”8
But Fechner is more interesting than his psychomeasurements make him sound. His ideas were wide-ranging and imaginative. He wrote on aesthetics, and under the pseudonym Dr. Mises, he wrote satires; one was called “Proof That the Moon Is Made of Iodine.” The Royal Saxon Secret Police maintained a file on Dr. Mises. Fechner was influenced by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, which he got to by reading Oken.9 He moved in the best Leipzig circles, which included Felix Mendelssohn and the Schu-manns. Clara Schumann, who would teach the young Alice Gibbens singing, was the stepdaughter of Fechner’s sister.
In 1836, the same year as Emerson’s Nature appeared, Fechner published A Little Book of Life After Death, the first English translation of which, in 1904, had (as we have seen) a short preface by William James. In 1839 Fechner underwent “a terrific attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the functions, from which he suffered for three years, cut off entirely from active life.” Unable to bear light, he lived in a darkened room, going out only with metal cups he had made over his eyes, and communicating “with the family through a funnel shaped opening in the door.” This illness, which struck Fechner at age thirty-eight, is similar in some ways to the experience James went through in America thirty years later. Fechner’s recovery, as James tells it, seems eerily like James’s own. “This illness,” he writes, “bringing Fechner face to face with inner desperation made a great crisis in his life.” “Had I not then clung to the faith,” Fechner says, “that clinging to faith would somehow or other work its reward, so hatte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten” (I would not have gotten out of that time alive).10
By the time James wrote about Fechner for A Pluralistic Universe, he had known about him for a long time, had in fact learned, and then rejected as too mechanical, “Fechner’s law” of psychophysical measurement. But he was drawn to the larger speculative themes that preoccupied Fechner after his recovery. The heart of Fechner’s thought is more a point of view than anything else, the view that “inner experience is the reality, and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may appear to one another when they affect each other from outside.”
James had been excited since at least the summer of 1904 by the way he saw this giddy-seeming conclusion to be firmly based in physiological psychology. “The whole scheme, as the reader sees, is got from the fact that the span of our own inner life alternately contracts and expands.”11
Fechner has a way of making the counterintuitive seem natural. James’s account in the Oxford lecture is graphic: “The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule, but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only.”
Fechner, as James presents him, looks back to the Plato of the Timaeus and forward to Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist and philosopher. “The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon and planet; so must the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the sum of all that is, materially considered, then that whole system, along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of God.”12
The psychophysicist Fechner was also a visionary, just as was the physiological psychologist James, who recognized Fechner (in a letter to Bergson) as belonging to “the true race of prophets.” Here is James’s rendering of Fechner’s account of how he came actively to understand that the earth is indeed alive:
On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth: it was only one moment of her existence: and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to heaven, and carrying me along with her into that heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky.13
It has been remarked that the person with a literal mind lives in a perpetual comedy of errors. William James escaped this fate. In his Fechner piece, James leaps to embrace what he calls Bain’s definition of genius: “the power of seeing analogies.” Analogies are to thinking what metaphor is to poetry—its inner life—but one must respect differences as much as samenesses. “Through his writing, Fechner makes difference and analogy walk abreast,” says James, “and by his extraordinary power of noticing both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his conclusions into factors of their support.”
The reader toils up the mountain after James, who toils after Fechner. The view from the top is “that the constitution of the world is identical throughout... The whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope... The more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms... We are closed against its [the earth soul’s] world, but that world is not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction.” Finally, “Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth’s soul. We add to its perceptive life so long as our own life lasts.” When we die, “it’s as if an eye of the world were closed.”14 Perceptions from that eye may cease, but “the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever.”
James is edging up on a notion of immortality here. He was thinking of more than his own. The day before he started lecturing at Oxford, he had been at Leamington, where his sister Alice had lived, and where he had so memorably rushed up to see her nineteen years before. Though it was raining, James made a point of looking up her old lodgings. What of Alice James might remain at 9 Halliburton Terrace?