WHEN JAMES RETURNED to the United States in mid-October 1908, it was to a scene of changes, disappointments, discouragements, and losses. He had stayed abroad through the summer and early fall, traveling and working on the four lecture-chapters of A Pluralistic Universe he had promised as articles for the Hibbert Journal. The book was to be held back until April 1909 to allow these pieces to appear first. James debarked in Boston and passed through East Boston and East Cambridge to get home; the trip “suggested a country fallen into irremediable decay.”1
He went immediately to Chocorua, where he found the New England autumn “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” He described for Henry “the smoky haze, the windless heat, the litter of the leaves on the ground in their rich colors, with enough remaining on the trees to make the whole scene red and yellow, the penury and shabbiness of everything human.” James was struck by the stark contrast between the sense of dearth in the American scenery and the “robust fullness” of England’s. The American sky and earth he found empty compared with England’s, though he thought the American sky made up for it by its “spiritual profundity and saturation of color at sunset.” But comparisons were finally pointless, he told Henry; there were no common denominators. To Pauline he wrote, after a long descriptive complaint, “All I know is this, that my heart is american.”2
Charles Eliot Norton died on October 21, five days after James got home. The resignation five days later of Charles W. Eliot as president of Harvard signaled the end of an era. No other single person before or after Eliot has had a comparable influence on the school. He was its president for forty years, and when he went to his last faculty meeting, everyone in the room had been appointed by him.3 One thing William did not know, though the repercussions would soon affect him, was that in October Henry James got word from his publisher that from the point of view of sales, the New York Edition was a distinct failure.4
William repeated his Pluralistic Universe lectures in Cambridge starting in early November. The initial audience of six hundred declined to two hundred; James felt he was talking to “inert listeners” compared with those at Oxford. Within a week of starting the lectures, James’s health and frame of mind were so bad that he began a complicated and expensive series of visits to a homeopathic physician, Dr. James R. Taylor, who had treated Alice’s sister Mary with good results. James went to Dr. Taylor every day except Saturdays and Sundays for the next six months, 150 visits in all. The daily treatment consisted of “8 minutes of ‘vibration’ along the spine, in 6 minutes of ‘high frequency’ electricity, in 12 daily inhalations of a certain vapor, and in homeopathic pellets 6 times a day.” James admitted to his brother that he had “no reason whatever to think that these things exert any effect beyond that of making me feel that something is being done.” He also conceded Dr. Taylor to be “a poor talker, and a relatively uneducated man,” but he was impressed by his persistent interest in “the ‘pitch’ at which a man lives.” Taylor convinced James that the “unnecessarily high pitch” of his life, “by being indulged in all these years,” was responsible for his present condition. “He has made me at last,” William wrote Henry, “by his indefatigable talk, acutely conscious of my inferiority to my best possibilities, but it is hard to write down what I mean by this.”
But he did write it down, and the result is a strangely moving self-portrait of the habitual temper—the pitch—of William James’s life as he stood on the threshold of trying to change it. “Suffice it,” he wrote, “that I have been racing too much, kept in a state of inner tension, anticipated the environment, braced myself to meet and resist it ere it was due (social environment chiefly here!), left the present act inattentively done because I was pre-occupied with the next act, failed to listen etc. because I was too eager to speak, kept up when I ought to have kept down, been jerky, angular, rapid, precipitate, let my mind run ahead of my body etc etc.”
He had always been intensely active; now the intensity and activity both seemed to be the problem. Finding Taylor’s sincerity effective, James accepted the likelihood of months and years of work devoted to “the serious remodeling of one’s tissues,” and he confessed with apparent relief that Taylor had “at last got his suggestive hook into my gills, and aroused my confidence, and it will be interesting to see what comes.”5
What came was a period of concentrated philosophical writing, editing, and arranging of earlier articles. But even as he turned to grapple with four book-length projects simultaneously, he also, perhaps inevitably, immersed himself again in the psychic research enterprise on which he had lavished a woeful amount of time and energy over the years. There was, to begin with, the impending American visit of the famous Neapolitan medium Eusapia Paladino. Paladino was an uneducated woman, vigorous, vivacious, and high-strung. She had dark, lively eyes, and her hair, turning gray, had a single snow-white streak in the middle. She was fifty-five in 1910, and had been performing for scientists and investigators for more than fifteen years.
Despite her transparent willingness to cheat whenever possible, she still left investigators impressed and baffled. In semidarkened rooms, often before a dozen or more observers, Eusapia, as she was usually called, would have an investigator on either side of her, holding her hand. Other investigators lay on the floor, by her feet, half under the table. It all sounds hopelessly comical, but no matter what measures were taken, the table rose into the air, a mandolin played, visitors were struck or seized by solid though invisible hands, and a special “luminous hand” often appeared.6
At a séance attended by the flatly skeptical Hugo Münsterberg, a commotion occurred when an investigator grabbed hold of Eusapia’s foot as she was, apparently, trying to raise the table with it. The episode was trumpeted by Münsterberg as a damning exposé. James, who had been impressed by accounts of Eusapia’s “successes” with the Curies, Cesar Lombroso (the Italian criminologist), and others, but who was also disgusted by her “methods,” kept his distance after this episode. Royce, another skeptic, circulated his view: “Eeny, meeny, miney mo. / Catch Eusapia by the toe. / If she hollers that will show / That James’s theories are not so.”7
A more serious, but in the end a no less dispiriting, enterprise was James’s undertaking to write up for publication an account of numerous sittings by various persons with Leonora Piper, sittings that were all intended to make contact with the spirit of Richard Hodgson. If there was no dramatic exposure of Mrs. Piper, there was also, to James’s mind, no positive clincher, no one sitting or moment that compelled belief. “My own poor stuff about R.H. is reaching its conclusion, amid sad interruptions,” he wrote a fellow psychic researcher. “If I had to bet or take practical risks I should say of R.H.’s spirit non-adest” (it didn’t come).8
During January 1909 James wrote and mailed off a piece called “Confidences of a Psychic Researcher.” It was intended to sum up a lifetime of persistently hopeful though often disappointed interest in matters in which his wife and his brother Henry were at least as emotionally involved as he was. He told Henry he was working on the piece, observing, “It will be queer if after all these years I have nothing to say.” In the article James confessed himself “baffled as to spirit return and as to many other special problems.” But he accepted that there were “real natural types of phenomena ignored by orthodox science,” and insisted that “one cannot get demonstrative proof here.” He stated that he neither accepted nor rejected psychic phenomena, but was content with “waiting for more facts before concluding.” He ended by insisting again that there is more in the world than we are able to take in, “that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other’s fog-horns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so,” he said, with a sweeping gesture, “there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”9
If we smile, albeit indulgently, at James’s repeated assertions that it is better to believe too much than not enough, we need also to recognize how deeply his scientific skepticism really ran. Nothing in the annals of Mrs. Piper or Eusapia Paladino shows this as well as a single brief episode that occurred at Bar Harbor in early December 1908. A group of spiritualists, including George Dorr, a longtime friend of James’s (and the man responsible for the creation of Acadia National Park), had been meeting weekly for a long time. The group had a table with a Ouija-board sort of alphabet and pointer built into it. The table had a brass ring around the edge, mounted on brass stems and collars that were screwed to the table. What happened on December 3, with William James present—he had made the difficult trip in winter weather—was that the brass rail moved all by itself, under brightly lighted conditions. James was quite clear that he saw the rail move, sliding six inches through the collars, and he was convinced that “I saw all there was to see.” But what most amazed James was not “the sight of an object moving without contact” but his own response. “Since this is the crack in the levee of scientific routine through which the whole Mississippi of supernaturalism may pour in,” he wrote his wife next day, “I am surprised that the spectacle hasn’t moved my feelings more.”
James’s old friend Holmes had once accused James of turning down the lights so as to give magic a chance. This is not quite right. James no doubt wanted to turn down the lights, wanted the levee to break, but in the end, even with his extravagant investment of time and energy in psychic research—his habitual holding open the door, his insistent defense of one’s right to believe—when it came down to it, he simply couldn’t cross the line. His skeptical and scrupulous approach had become his conclusion. Even though he saw the brass rail move up there in Maine, he was no closer to being able or willing to seize upon it as proof of what he had hoped for all along. When he wrote up this incident for publication, he concluded, “I find, however, that I look on nature with unaltered eyes today, and that my orthodox habits tend to extrude this would-be levee-breaker. It forms too much of an exception.”10