Psychology and Its Cities

Henry James Sr. and his family arrived in Switzerland in July of 1855. He had high expectations for the “progressiveness” of the private schools that he had picked out for his sons in Geneva, but his hopes were dashed almost the instant they enrolled. He quit the schools by September and the family removed to Paris, then to London, all by October. After less than two years in London, they moved again, this time to Boulogne. Henry Jr. contracted typhus there and took several months to recover.

William, now a teenager, took strongly to the study of art while in Europe. He was especially drawn to the revolutionary work of Eugène Delacroix. One psychoanalytic biographer has attributed young William’s keen interest in the theme of ferocious animals attacks, which is found in some of Delacroix’s paintings, to an unconscious murderous rage against his father,¹ but it seems more parsimonious to note simply that violent scenes excite the attention of many adolescent boys, and William was no exception. As he matured, William also developed an interest in mathematics and science, about which he wrote much to his New York friend, Ed Van Winkle. Van Winkle was entering Union College in engineering, an exciting prospect that sparked the interest of young William. By March of 1858, however, William had concluded that he was not “cut out for an engineer”; that he would rather “get a microscope and go out … into the woods and fields and ponds … to make as many discoveries as possible.”² His father, delighted with William’s growing interest in science, bought him a microscope for Christmas that year. Henry Sr.’s own relationship with natural science had been a fraught one since his youth. He was largely ignorant of the topic but nevertheless fascinated by it. He urgently wanted to find a principle of unification among the “bewildering heap of facts” under what he presumed would be “laws exclusively spiritual”; such disparate phenomena as one finds in the natural world can only be, he presumed, “the material expression of spiritual truth.” He then quoted Scripture (Hebrews, 11.3) as support.³ His former science teacher at Albany Academy, Joseph Henry, replied only that science was not merely a “heap of facts” but, instead, a systematic search for overarching laws.

Five years before this exchange, when Henry Sr. was meeting with Faraday, he may have thought that the great physicist, armed with his Sandemanian faith, had unlocked the secret to the unification of spirit and science, and that he might be willing to share it with his young American visitor. On the contrary, though, Henry Sr. found that Faraday kept his religion and his science in distinct mental compartments.⁴ Now, a generation after the encounter with Faraday, it is possible that Henry Sr. expected his intelligent oldest son, William, whom he had carefully raised in his stew of unorthodox theologies, would uncover the answer to Henry Sr.’s questions about the spiritual foundations of science, if only he grew up to be a scientist.⁵

Although, with historical hindsight, we have come to see William James as a highly cosmopolitan figure, the teenage “Willy” was a parochial American through and through. Living in Europe for the first time since he was a toddler, he came to despise Paris, comparing both it and London unfavorably to his native New York in terms of physical beauty. Parisians he found to be dishonest and rude. Londoners, by contrast, he thought too polite.⁶ The level of privilege to which he had become accustom—and the vast but unrecognized gulf that existed between his standard of living and that of most people—is revealed in the same letter, where he described residing in even a rather luxurious Paris appartement as “a queer way of living, this, all huddled up together on one floor.” Two years later, he had come to attribute his early impressions of the French to “miserable prejudice” that he was “heartily ashamed of.” “I like the French more and more every day,” he confessed.⁷ Trying out a youthful, optimistic socialism on his old friend, he now opined that if food and shelter were assured everyone … even “a common laborer who digs a canal” might be able to “find out something new.”⁸ In his view, the aim of everyone’s life should be discovery.

The Jameses returned to US in July of 1858, but Henry Sr. could not bring himself to live once again in the hurly burly of New York. After a brief stay in Albany, the family set up, instead, amidst the genteel charms of little Newport, Rhode Island. William had fully expected to join his friend Ed Van Winkle at Union College, but Henry Sr. forbade it, declaring colleges to be “hotbeds of corruption”⁹ (probably recalling his own wild years at Union).

Newport was probably the least cosmopolitan environment in which the James children had ever lived. William described his summer as “a very pleasant but a very idle one… . But that’s the drawback of living as such a place as Newport, where Nature offers such irresistible temptations.”¹⁰ Both William’s and Henry Jr.’s interest in art began to intensify. They took lessons from the well-known American painter, William Morris Hunt, who was then living in Newport as well. They became acquainted with another of Hunt’s students, the multi-talented John LaFarge, who was just then beginning his long and successful career as a painter, illustrator, and worker in stained glass (see Plates 1 and 2 in the color plate section). LaFarge—from New York City, like the James boys—was Catholic, having attended St. John’s College (now Fordham University). This fact may have “horrified” Henry Sr. just as much as the emerging artistic inclinations of his two eldest sons.

Mere months after settling into Newport, the perennially discontented Henry Sr. insisted that the family return to Europe. Plans were made to leave in late September. Then plans were changed: Henry Sr. went alone, leaving the family behind. The family was supposed to follow in the spring. In fact, they did not leave Newport until October of the following year, 1859. A few weeks later, they were back in Geneva in search of educational opportunities not only for William and Henry Jr., but also for the two younger sons, Wilky and Bob. (Education for the fifth child and lone daughter, Alice, did not concern her father much.) The plan was to stay on the Continent for at least three years. Whatever Henry Sr.’s hopes might have been for the renewed European adventure, though, it did not lessen William’s love of painting. In August of 1860, he declared art to be his “vocation.”¹¹ Then, from Bonn, where he was expected to learn German, William wrote to his father, then living in Paris, inquiring in the most serious intellectual tone he could muster about Henry Sr.’s ideas with respect to the nature of art.¹² The family returned to the US a month later.

Although the Jameses could not have been unaware of the increasing American tension over the issue of slavery, little could have prepared them for the political turmoil that greeted them in the fall of 1860. The Democratic Party had split in two, the northern segment nominating Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas for president; the southern faction having separately nominated President Buchanan’s vice president, former Kentucky senator John C. Breckinridge, who was not yet 40 years of age. The old Whig party had dissolved entirely. Those former Whigs who were inclined to limit the spread of slavery in the new western territories had joined the new Republican party, which nominated former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln. Southern Whigs, who hoped to continue the decades-long effort to ignore and finesse the slavery issue, joined with former Know-Nothings of the north to form the Constitutional Union Party, led by former Tennessee senator John Bell. In the November election, Breckinridge, the southern Democrat, won almost all of the South, including Maryland and Delaware. Bell of the Constitutional Union Party won the border states of Virginia and Kentucky, plus his home state of Tennessee. Douglas and the northern Democrats were nearly shut out, winning just Missouri and a minority portion of New Jersey’s electoral votes. Lincoln won the nearly all of the northern states plus the far western states of California and Oregon. This gave him a landslide in the electoral college, his 180 votes being more than twice the total of his closest competitor, Breckinridge. But Lincoln had received the endorsement of less than 40% of the voting populace. Immediately, southerners declared Lincoln’s victory illegitimate and, within six weeks, states started seceding from the Union, beginning with South Carolina. Four months later, the country would enter upon the bloodiest war in its history.

The national crisis did not exactly launch the James family into action. The two younger sons, Wilky and Bob, still underage, were sent to a school in Concord, run by a personal friend of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s: Frank Sanborn. Sanborn was a “progressive” educator and a defender of the radical abolitionist, John Brown. Whether the senior James had become a fervent advocate of the abolitionist cause remains uncertain. William restarted his art lessons with Hunt on a nearly daily basis until April. Then he abruptly quit, apparently having changed his mind about a career in art. At the outbreak of war, William signed up for a ninety-day stint with the local militia, but opted not (or, perhaps, was forbidden by his father) to enlist for the three-year term the War Department imposed in May. Instead, he decided to attend the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, starting in the fall of 1861.

2. Boston and New York

The story of Boston’s origin and development was radically different from that of New York, where James had grown up. The religious Dissenters (from the Church of England) who founded the old Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s had been hardened by religious persecution in England. They were furiously puritanical in spirit and demanded a strict conformity from their fellow citizens.¹³ When they noisily campaigned for religious freedom, what they meant was the freedom to practice their specific form of faith. As soon as they acquired some measure of power over their own situation, they ruthlessly persecuted and excluded not only the hated Anglicans, but also Quakers, Baptists, and anyone else who departed from their particular variety of Dissent.

Even the various groups of Puritans who came to Massachusetts did not get along well, quarreling one with another over minor doctrinal details. The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies—so similar to each other that they are hardly distinguishable in the minds of many today—remained distinct and separate entities, both politically and religiously, until 1691 when William and Mary stepped in to unite all the English possessions along the north coast (and, not incidentally, to end the 70 years of theocratic rule that had dominated several of them).¹⁴ As Alexis de Tocqueville so acutely observed, “Puritanism … was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. No sooner had they landed on this inhospitable shore … than the immigrants turned their attention to the constitution of their society.”¹⁵ And a large society it was, drawing some 20,000 colonists over the course of the 1630s alone.

As early as 1624, a plot of land across the river from present-day Boston was first occupied by Europeans. In 1628, the area was formally christened Charlestown (named after the British monarch). Just two years later, though, unable to secure a reliable source of fresh water, the Charlestown residents purchased from one William Blaxton (or Blackstone) a plot of land covering much of what is now the Boston Common and Beacon Hill. They renamed the area “Boston,” after a small city in Lincolnshire (central England, near the eastern coast). John Winthrop, a leading figure of the Massachusetts Colony, famously declared Boston to be the Biblical “City upon a Hill.” As elsewhere in the colonies around the bay, strict obedience to the church was enforced. Transgressors were vigorously prosecuted. For instance, in 1635, the theologian Roger Williams was exiled for sedition and heresy. Although Williams is often lauded today as an advocate of religious freedom and of a separation between church and state, he first angered Bostonians by declaring their church to be not wholly “separate” from the Church of England; in other words, they were not “pure” enough. After being banished from Boston, he established a new colony at Providence (only later united with Rhode Island), where he founded the First Baptist Church in America. Just three years after the Williams case, in 1638, Anne Hutchinson was banished from Boston for the heresy of antinomianism (refusal to submit to religious law when the Holy Spirit inwardly instructs the individual otherwise). She and some of her followers were invited by Williams to settle near him at Providence. They did for a time, but she soon moved on to land in present-day Brooklyn. Perhaps most notoriously, in 1660, one of Hutchinson’s former followers, Mary Dyer, was hanged along with three others, for violating the ban on Quakers in Boston. The following year, the English government stepped in to legally protect Quakers. Now it was the British King instructing the Dissenters on religious tolerance.¹⁶

Nevertheless, for all the rigidity of early Boston society (or perhaps because of it), from the very start the city had a near-obsession with education. Just five years after its founding, in 1635, the Boston Latin School was established to educate the young in erudite matters far beyond the farming and trade that was necessary to keep the young colony afloat. The following year, in 1636, New College was created just across the river in a town they dubbed “Cambridge,” the first such institution in North America. Two years later, when a local pastor bequeathed his library and half of his fortune to the school, the trustees renamed it after their generous benefactor, John Harvard.

It is worth noting just how markedly the story of the early of New York contrasts with that of Boston: The southern tip of the island that the local indigenous people called “Manahatta” was first occupied by Europeans in 1624. The settlers here were not English religious radicals, like in Boston, but Dutch traders. As such, the guiding objectives of Nieuw Amsterdam, as the outpost was first called, were mercantile rather than spiritual. It was run by the massive Dutch West India Company, and its primary purpose was to funnel beaver and otter pelts back to the Netherlands. Because the focus was nearly exclusively on business, the town was religiously and culturally diverse in ways that would have horrified Bostonians of the era. Many of the first few hundred residents were not even Dutch, but French-speaking Belgian Huguenots who were escaping oppression at home. Unlike their Boston counterparts, their aim was not to establish an exclusively Huguenot society. (Indeed, there wasn’t even a church in Nieuw Amsterdam for the first 17 years of its existence.) Their aim was to use their newfound freedom to get rich, and that is just what many of them did.

All was not happy in the first years, however. The new colony struggled to establish itself as the northwesternmost outpost of the international Dutch trading network. Fur, although it could be lucrative, was not as prestigious and attractive a commodity as spices or slaves. In 1643, an incompetent governor tried to tax the local Indians, then launched a war against them that almost brought the colony to ruin. In order to recover its investment, the Company brought in a new governor in 1647, Peter Stuyvesant, who, perhaps ironically, was a Puritan. Stuyvesant started by banning drinking on Sundays and imposing fines for missing church. This was a new order for the unruly colonists, but Stuyvesant also built new roads and canals, improved and expanded the port, and the raised the colony’s profile by converting it from being primarily a fur market into a slave market. He also built a wall from the Husdon River straight across the island to the East River, in order to keep out not only Indians but also the hostile English, who had their eye on this potential lynchpin between their Massachusetts and Virginia colonies. Stuyvesant’s wall would mark the basic path of the modern Wall Street.

Despite Stuyvesant’s own personal Puritanical principles, as a matter of business he let nearly anyone into the colony who was willing to work. By the early 1650s, the population had risen to 3000 people who spoke 18 different languages. By 1654, the Dutch were a minority in their own colony. That same year, 23 Sephardic Jews, fleeing persecution in Brazil, arrived to take up residence. This turn of events exceeded what Stuyvesant’s religious conscience could tolerate; he petitioned the Dutch West India Company to bar Jews from living in Nieuw Amsterdam. To his astonishment, the Company Directors refused his request, reminding the governor that the colony was a business venture, not a religious one. The new immigrants were allowed in and, with it, the first Jewish community in North America was established. Perhaps no other single event points up the different characters of early New York and Boston.

Dutch control of the fabulous port was not to last long, however. In August of 1664, just 40 years after it began, the English sailed four warships into the harbor, intent on taking the city. Stuyvesant prepared for battle but the residents, including his own son, petitioned him to give the city up without a fight order to avoid damage to, or even destruction of, their homes and businesses. Stuyvesant reluctantly agreed and the transfer was peacefully made. Apparently national interests were no more relevant than religious ones when this city’s residents were faced with a possible disruption of commerce. The former governor, far from being persecuted by his new masters, retired to his lucrative fruit farm north of the city. The main visible change to the city, apart from the Union Jack flying above it, was that it was henceforth known as New York. The next day, business carried on pretty much as usual. The strong commercial character of the city was set during its brief Dutch period, and even a transfer of national possession did little to alter it.

3. William James Arrives at Harvard

By the time James arrived in Boston, the city had, of course, shaken off much of the religious authoritarianism that marked its beginnings in the 17th century. As early as the 1640s, the various religious groups of New England had agreed to a statement called the Cambridge Platform, under which each individual church was independent, not subject to the rule of others or to higher religious authorities. This is often taken to be the founding document of the Congregational church in America. However, the Platform also had the consequence of enabling some churches to gradually liberalize their theologies without having to answer to the more conservative churches. Many adopted a provision call the Half-Way Covenant, which granted membership to those who lived a “Christian life” without demanding that they publicly recount their “regeneration” (being “born again,” as we might say today). Less dramatic paths to faith were recognized. In particular, the role that reason can play in the growth of faith was increasingly acknowledged by some sects. The more liberal churches became especially popular in the Boston area, in no small part because they recognized the need of urban businessmen to carry on their affairs—often with people of very different faiths on other continents—with a minimum of intervention from the church.¹⁷

By the end of the century, a layman named John Leverett and two of his colleagues published a manifesto calling explicitly for a “broad and catholick” church. Far from prompting the kind of dire official reaction that had been seen earlier in the century, the pamphlet led to Leverett’s being appointed president of Harvard College in 1708. This was the start of Harvard’s long trek from being a Congregationalist institution to being a Unitarian one, though there was another century or so to go before it was complete. Traditional Puritans were horrified at the direction Harvard seemed to be headed. Many of them abandoned the Cambridge college and, in search of a new home, rallied around Connecticut’s Collegiate School, which had been founded only in 1701. In 1718, Cotton Mather, scion of one of Massachusetts’ leading religious families, persuaded a Welsh businessman with family connections to Connecticut, Elihu Yale, to contribute goods worth £560 to the school and its cause.¹⁸ In exchange, Mather arranged for the school to be renamed after its benefactor, and Yale College was born. Yale became the conservative Congregationalists’ bulwark against the suspect liberalism of Harvard. Traces of this ancient antagonism between the two schools can be seen even today.

The 1730s saw the rise of a popular religious movement in the US that has come to be called the Great Awakening. It preached the old Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but embraced a simpler, more emotionally direct, revivalist form of faith. Led by a Yale graduate named Jonathan Edwards, the movement—simultaneously conservative and radical—became widespread in New England. The liberal ministers of Boston, however, were not impressed. Led by one Charles Chauncey, the opponents of revivalism emphasized ever more strongly the critical role that they believed human will and thought to play in the process of salvation. This was precisely the opposite of traditional Calvinist doctrines of sudden conversion and predestination. The liberals were adopting a controversial position known as Arminianism.¹⁹ They also began to question the doctrine of Trinity. Although the New England churches united behind the cause of the American revolution in the 1770s and 1780s, a rift within the old Calvinist consensus on which New England had been built was deepening.

In 1805, the controversy came to a head when Harvard filled their long-vacant Hollis professorship of theology with a well-known liberal named Henry Ware. In response, the remaining Massachusetts conservatives abandoned Harvard utterly and turned to Yale for their general education. They also established their own seminary just west of Boston, Andover, for the training of conservative ministers. What had been, until this time, a growing unease among diverse strains of Calvinism, now flared up into open conflict. In 1815, Harvard was accused by conservative Jedidiah Morse of being Unitarian—a liberal British religious movement until that time—rather than being Congregationalist at all. Morse demanded that the conservative Congregationalist churches separate themselves from the liberal ones. In 1819, the influential liberal minister, William Ellery Channing, responded to Morse’s accusation with a widely publicized sermon titled, “Unitarian Christianity.” The split became finalized with the founding of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. Boston and eastern Massachusetts became increasingly Unitarian. Western Massachusetts—where Stanley Hall would be born a couple of decades later—remained conservative Congregationalist.

Even if the fierce Purtian leaders of an earlier age had gone extinct in Boston, the city continued to be gently but firmly ruled by a cadre of aristocratic families known as the Boston Brahmins: the Adamses and Cabotts, the Delanos and Emersons, the Lodges and Lowells, the Putnams and Quincys, among others. As a result, the city sported little of the chaotic populism that marked life and politics in New York. Even the arrival of the Irish, who flooded into the Boston by the tens of thousands in the late 1840s, was unable to much disrupt the hierarchical order of things (except, perhaps, indirectly, as the nativist Know-Nothings of the middle and lower class Protestant population were swept into power and then out again in the mid-1850s). As one famous bit of doggerel put matters:

Henry Adams was a member of the Brahmin elite: grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, the 6th and 2nd presidents of the United States, respectively. Of Boston religious life during his childhood in the 1850s, he wrote:

It is interesting to note how far a cry this is from the meticulous attention that was paid to the precise character of the spiritual world in the home of Henry James Sr. His oldest son, William, though still young, had already traveled far and wide by the end of the 1850s, and had seen religious observances and practices of many kinds. His religious instinct, had not vanished like Henry Adams’. Although nearly as unorthodox as his father, William James would spend a lifetime exploring, questioning, testing, and refining his religious instinct.

Although Bostonians’ attention to the technicalities of conventional religion might have been softening, the city was still known for having a rather stern moral sensibility. Although the phrase “Banned in Boston”—referring to books and pamphlets that were censored in the city because of their supposedly lewd content—did not become popular until later in the 19th century, the sense of the city maintaining a somewhat more prudish outlook than others on account of its Puritan origins was widespread.

The Boston into which William James arrived in the early 1860s looked very different from the city of today. (See Plate 3 in the color plate section.) This was not just a matter of the lack of skyscrapers and cars and other modern technologies. It was physically far smaller. Originally, Boston sat on the Shawmut Peninsula—a blob of land at the end of a terribly slender long neck; it was only about two city blocks wide in places. The present-day West End, North End, and Fort Hill areas were each small but distinct peninsulas extending from the main blob, separated by coves: Mill Cove and Town Cove, respectively. And there was a third cove, the West Cove, between West End and Beacon Hill (see Plate 3). There were originally a number of high hills on the peninsula. All but Beacon Hill were, over the centuries, leveled and used to fill in the coves.

The greatest and most famous of Boston’s many land reclamation projects was Back Bay. The original bay lay to the west of the neck, and it included not only the area between Boylston Street and the river (the neighborhood now designated “Back Bay”), but also covered much of the area all the way back to present-day Washington Street. All of this was either river or unusable marshland. To the east of the neck was the South Bay, on the other side of which was another peninsula that is, today, a portion of South Boston. The entire area north of present-day 1st St. and W. Broadway was under water.

The Mill cove was dammed and turned into a pond in the 1630s, but not actually filled in until the 1820s. Present-day Causeway St. marks the position of the old dam. The West End was extended and the West Cove filled in mostly during the second quarter of the 19th century. The Massachusetts General Hospital was built on this reclaimed ground. The original hospital building, opened in 1823, sat approximately in the southeast corner of the MGH’s present vast campus and, at that time, it sat hard upon the edge of the Charles River.²¹ It was here in 1846 that the dentist, William Morton, first demonstrated the effectiveness of ether as a surgical anesthetic. Harvard built its medical school directly across from the MGH in 1847. When William James arrived in 1861, the filling out of the West End around MGH was still a project very much in progress.²² Soon after, the flats west of Beacon Hill were expanded as well.

The process of filling in the Back Bay began around 1820, when a dam was built from the Common in the east, along the line that Beacon Street now follows, all the way to present-day Brookline Avenue. Then a second short dam was built from the end of Gravelly Point to the first dam, and the resulting basin between the short dam and the Common was drained. The original intent had not been to fill in the Back Bay, but rather to harness its tidal forces for as many as 81 mills that were to be built on Gravelly Point. The project was expected to bring the city ten thousand new workers and eight million dollars of investment, and making Boston the industrial envy of New York and Philadelphia.²³ As early as the mid-1830s, however, the edges of the old shore began to be extended, creating the ground under the present Public Garden adjoining the Common, and building north to present-day Tremont Street. In addition, railroad lines were built through the basin. It wasn’t until the late 1850s, however, that development began in earnest in the Back Bay.²⁴ Trainload after trainload of gravel was brought from the town of Needham, 12 miles to the southwest, to fill in the more than 600 acres of the Back Bay. The process continued all through the war and was not complete until late in the 1880s. This was the Boston into which William James arrived in 1861; one which was rapidly expanding physically—more than doubling, in fact—the land area that the city had originally possessed in the 17th century.

Although Henry Sr. had opposed his oldest son’s desire to attend college—that “hotbed of corruption”—the Lawrence Scientific School was considered to be a different kind of institution. For one thing, it was separate from Harvard College, where the education, such as it was, had become encrusted with tradition and convention to the point of near-irrelevancy. Charles Eliot, who would be James’ chemistry professor (and later serve as the university’s president for 40 years) described Harvard as having “struck bottom” when he graduated less than a decade before, in 1853.²⁵ “Small and stagnant” is how one of James’ biographers described the Harvard of that era.²⁶ In all fairness, though, the problem was not Harvard’s alone. As Laurence Vesey noted in his celebrated history of the American university, the old American college had been becoming increasingly obsolete since the era of Andrew Jackson. The new university, partially based on European models—less overtly religious, with the addition of sciences, original research, and professional schools—would revive American higher education in the coming decades but, in the 1860s, that process had only barely begun.²⁷

The opening of the Lawrence School in 1847 was one of the first foundation stones to be laid for the more dynamic institution to come, but it would take time. Henry Adams, who graduated from Harvard in 1858, just three years before James entered, said of the place:

But James’ New York friends were not at Harvard. Although he came from an exceedingly wealthy family, he was not of Adams’ “Brahmin” circle.²⁹ James did not “fall” into Harvard by default, as they did. He was a New York boy with extensive experience of Europe who had spent an extended “summer,” of sorts, tucked away in Newport. To enroll at Harvard College would have required him to demonstrate proficiency in Latin and Greek. It also would have committed him to four years of a curriculum dominated by Classics. Instead, he went to Lawrence, which had virtually no entry requirements at the time. Lawrence was ruled, as it had been since opening in 1847, by the world famous Swiss zoologist, Louis Agassiz. Agassiz required that all of one’s courses be taken in a single department of study; no “dabbling” in other branches of science.

Almost immediately upon James’ arrival, he started attending a series of public lectures on natural history that Agassiz was giving in Boston. But natural history was not James’ department. James chose to study chemistry. The reasons remain unclear. Perhaps because it was the most exciting natural science at the time, a number of new elements having recently been discovered. The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, less than two years before James’ arrival at Harvard, might have made zoology an appealing field as well. Agassiz, however—once a student of the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier, and a staunch fixist about species—was adamantly opposed to Darwin from the time of Origin’s publication until his death in 1873. Darwin did have allies at Lawrence, most notably his longtime correspondent Asa Gray, but to study with Gray would have put James in the department of botany. In any case, James’ decision to pursue chemistry placed him under the supervision of the school’s future president, Charles Eliot, then a mere assistant professor. Thus, while millions of America’s young men went off to war, James spent much of the year in the chemistry laboratory and in the merry parlors of leafy Cambridge. Letters home focused mainly on family gossip. One of his cousins, Minnie Temple, cut her hair short, and the entire family was in an uproar thinking she had gone mad, James included.³⁰

In addition to chemistry, James attended lectures on comparative vertebrate anatomy with Jeffries Wyman, perhaps best known as the first man to formally describe the gorilla to Euro-American scientific audiences. Wyman was a deeply religious Unitarian who was never able to fully accept Darwin’s theory of natural selection, though he did embrace a theistic form of evolution. He had been a student of one of Darwin’s most vocal English critics, Richard Owen.³¹

Before the end of his first term at Lawrence, James decided that he would only study chemistry for one year and then, after taking a term off, turn to comparative anatomy with Wyman. After that, he planned to study medicine and then spend several years under the tutelage of Agassiz. It was an eclectic plan, to be sure, but it wasn’t too far from what he actually did.³²

James returned home to Newport for the summer of 1862. When he headed back to Harvard in the fall, his brother Henry came along too, eager to begin law school. William continued in his chemistry courses, despite his earlier plan to stay home and then start working with Wyman. He also attended lectures on physics given at Harvard, along with Aggasiz’s public lecture series on geology. That same fall, however, the next brother in line, Wilky, age 17, enlisted in the army, and the structure of William’s life began to come unraveled.

4. War Intervenes

William’s chemistry teacher, Charles Eliot, completed his five-year appointment at Harvard at the end of 1862 and was not renewed for the following year. William did not re-enroll at Lawrence. Instead, he decided to follow his own “course” of readings: physics, history, philology, theology, ancient philosophy, European literature. At the start of 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation came into force. William and Henry Jr. both applied to teach at a southern school (that was in Northern hands) to educate liberated slaves, but neither ended up going.

In March of 1863 the national military draft went into effect. Just a month later, William’s name appeared on the draft list. His father paid the $300 for a “substitute” so that he could continue his studies. At the start of May, one of William’s and Henry’s cousins who had enlisted, Willy Temple, was killed at Chancellorsville. In mid-May, William’s and Henry’s youngest brother, Bob, enlisted. A week later, Wilky’s regiment shipped out. It was no ordinary outfit: it was the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of a thousand Black soldiers (and 30 White officers) led by the 25-year-old Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.³³ As they marched through the streets of Boston to cheering throngs, William became intensely self-consciousness of staying behind.³⁴

Just six weeks later, in mid-July, discontent with the Draft Act began to spread across cities in the Northeast, especially among the poor, who could not afford to pay for “substitutes.” Opposition was particularly strong in Irish communities, which mostly opposed emancipation for fear that freed black slaves would come north and compete for jobs with the already-impoverished Irish. Lying in the background of Irish resistance was the feeling that emancipation was an English initiative (the English had ended slavery in the Empire 30 years earlier), and almost anything seen as English was opposed by the Irish.³⁵ Desperately poor, they did not have the luxury of taking the long view that discrimination against any racial or ethnic group helped to continue discrimination against them as well.

As described in the previous chapter, the explosion of anti-draft violence was particular brutal and bloody in New York City in July 1863. Related disruptions were seen in Boston as well, but they took on a somewhat different character because of three key differences between New York and Boston. First, although New York had invented and had periodically flirted with Know-Nothingism, the nativist movement had not come to dominate government in New York as it had in Boston and in Massachusetts more broadly in 1855. As a result, the oppression of the Irish had been correspondingly more intense in Boston. Not only had systematic discrimination against the Irish in employment become a central part of the legislative program. In addition, the Know-Nothing state government had passed, in 1855, a law providing for the deportation to England (of all places) all Irish mental patients and paupers in state institutions. It also attempted, but failed, to raise the residency requirement for acquiring US citizenship (and, thereby, the right to voting) from just 5 years to 21 years, a move that would have disenfranchised the Irish for almost another generation. A second important difference between the two cities was that, whereas the Irish were politically powerful in New York, thanks in no small part to the success of Tammany Hall, there was no equivalent organization in Boston and, thus, by contrast with New York, the Irish remained mostly excluded from civic politics until quite late in the century. Third, the Irish and black communities in New York lived side-by-side, sometimes even competing for housing and jobs the same sections of town. Thus there was a great deal of opportunity for friction between them. Their respective gangs fought each other with deadly regularity. In Boston, however, the two neighborhoods were quite separate—the Irish mostly confined to the North End, near the docks, while the black community lived in a small segregated area near Beacon Hill.

The chief result of these three differences was that the Boston Draft Riot of July 14, 1863 was not a race riot, as its equivalent had been in New York. As one historian of Boston put it, it was “a nativist riot in reverse… . They vented their wrath upon the symbols of Yankees oppression visible in their own neighborhood… . [It was] an insurrection by the Irish poor against what they believed was Yankee tyranny and nativism.”³⁶

The Irish crowds, in some cases led by women with their children in tow, scuffled with draft marshals who had come to conscript their husbands and sons into the army. When city police were sent in to protect the marshals, they were attacked mostly with thrown stones and other projectiles. Soon the mobs turned to arming themselves more effectively by looting gun shops and even armories.³⁷ The Republican governor, John Andrew, called in the army to restore order, but the only regiment nearby was the 55th Massachusetts, the second all-Black regiment in the Union army and, as it happens, the very one to which Bob James had been assigned. Governor Andrew’s biographer, writing 40 years after the fact, claimed that the governor immediately grasped that such a unit “could not safely be employed to put down a riot of free, White, American citizens.”³⁸ This must be regarded as something of an anachronism, if not an actual whitewash, considering that the people at issue were despised Irish immigrants, not even considered “White” by many,³⁹ and that the governor in question was a Republican whom they regarded as a key political enemy. Nevertheless, Andrew was astute enough to realize that if there was a way to badly enflame the situation and turn it into a race riot of the kind that New York had seen but a few days earlier, sending in a Black armed force to quash the violence was probably the way to do so.

Instead, he gathered together six companies of (White) state militia, and some other nearby (White) federal troops to quiet the unrest. Bob James and the other White officers of the 55th were among these. They were not a large enough force to gain control of the situation, however. Indeed, Bob James’ later recounted a suspenseful tale of being trapped with a few other soldiers in a room above a gun shop that was surrounded by newly-armed looters.⁴⁰

That evening, with the situation in the North End still out of control, Major Stephen Cabot (a member of one of Boston’s most prominent Brahmin families) marched into town at the head of a column of one hundred additional troops. They immediately moved to reinforce the guard around a gunhouse at which the only two canon in the city were stored. The mob attacked them, attempting to break into the gunhouse. Against gunfire of the soldiers, the crowd, reportedly including many women and children, continued to batter its way in. Ultimately, Cabot ordered one of the canons turned on the crowd and fired, point blank. Then he had it fired again.

The reported death toll was only between six and eight, but it is said that many bodies were carried away in the dark and buried without being reported to the authorities.⁴¹ The crowd around the gunhouse scattered. Rain came later in the evening and, by the morning, the crowds had dispersed. Within a few days, the protest had ended completely. The question of whether the riot made any difference is an interesting one to consider. Certainly there was no official change in the draft policy. It is notable, however, that although Boston’s official draft quota for the next two years was 3,300, only 713 more were drafted.⁴²

Of these near-catastrophic events in Boston’s history, were hear nothing in William James’ correspondence. Indeed, there is a mysterious gap in his letter-writing (or at least in the preservation of his letters) between October 1862 and the fall of 1863. His letters only rarely touched on great events: not the Irish, not slavery, not elections, not the massive land reclamation projects taking place in the city. Even the war only sparked the occasional mention.⁴³ He mostly wrote of recent visits he had received from or paid to relatives and friends. They were often full of quirky parody, word-play, and even the occasionally humorous doodle. He often wrote in French to his sister Alice. To his mother and father, like many students of all eras, he often wrote of the need for money.

In the same month as the Draft Riot (July, 1863), Henry Jr. was drafted into the army. Because he had injured his back helping to fight a fire in Newport a couple of years before, however, he was deemed physically unable to serve. In the middle of that same month, Wilky’s regiment led the attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Nearly half the Union force was killed in the failed assault. Wilky was badly wounded and shipped home to Newport. He spent the summer confined to a bed on the main floor of the house for the rest of the summer. The event changed the war from a distant abstraction to a visible, personal reality; what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. later ominously described as “the blue steel edge of actuality.”⁴⁴

In the fall of 1863, James returned to Harvard, this time studying primarily anatomy with Jeffries Wyman. He began to take an interest in evolution and in Darwin’s theory, at about this time. Along with his growing interest in Darwin was a more general adoption of the language of positivist science, though it is doubtful that James was ever a committed positivist. That would have brought him too directly in conflict with his father’s views. It was more of a youthful trying-out of intellectual roles.

He was also feeling the pressure to make a decision about his future profession although, given his father’s wealth, it was unlikely he was going to fall into poverty should he delay further. He thought about becoming a naturalist, though he had not yet done any serious collecting in the field. His work thus far had been in museums with specimens acquired by others. He felt, however, probably correctly, that such a choice would not provide many options for income. So, he chose to study medicine which, he told his mother, was halfway between the business he needed to earn a living and the science he felt he needed to have a life.⁴⁵

Becoming a physician at that time did not have the high prestige it does today. Harvard medical school had, essentially, no entrance requirements. One attended a set of lecture courses and took an oral examination at the end. If one meant to practice, one would attempt to catch on as an apprentice with an established physician, often at nearby Massachusetts General Hospital. James began his medical education in earnest in January 1864. He seems to have found it intellectually sterile and occasionally downright distasteful. He found “much humbug therein,” but thought that surgery might occasionally do some actual good.⁴⁶

In May, his family left their home in Newport for a new one in Boston. It was in Beacon Hill, then as now, the most exclusive neighborhood in the city. James, who had been living in various rooms around Boston and Cambridge, moved in with his parents, aunt, and sister once again. By the fall of 1864 he had met Charles Eliot Norton, the Boston Brahmin who would soon purchase a country house in Ashfield and discover there the promising local talent named Stanley Hall. Norton was the co-editor (with another “Brahmin,” James Russell Lowell) of one of the most influential magazines in the US, the North American Review. William’s younger brother Henry had published a story there earlier in the year, so William proposed to Norton that he write a review of Lectures on the Elements of Composition by Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog,” as he had come to be known since his “debate” with Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce).⁴⁷

Norton accepted William’s offer and was apparently pleased enough with the result that he had William write another piece on an article by Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection. In that article Wallace claimed that evolution no longer applied to humans on an individual scale, but only at the level of whole communities (what would later be called “group selection”). Societies that protected their weakest members did better in the long run than those that allowed only the strongest to thrive. James expressed general approval of Wallace and disapproval of Herbert Spencer’s “social Darwinism”—the view, roughly, that the poor should be left to their torment without social or government assistance because they were unable to “compete” in the increasingly ruthless modern capitalist environment. James’ article evinced an appreciation of Wallace’s effort to show where Spencer and his followers had gone astray.

5. Brazil and Back

Early in 1865, as the war dragged on, an opportunity came to William to assist on a major naturalist expedition to the Amazon River, organized by none other than the renowned Louis Agassiz. He dropped his medical studies to join the exciting trek. Agassiz was the great opponent of Darwin among American scientists, and the aim of the expedition was to show that fish populations in various parts of the Amazon, and other unconnected river systems, were not related to each other in the ways that Darwin’s theory implied. James was not in agreement with Agassiz on this issue, though it hardly mattered what a 23-year-old undergraduate student with no field experience thought about such things.

Agassiz and his team of 16 left New York by ship at the end of March, 1865. Before they landed in Brazil, three weeks later, the South had surrendered, ending the Civil War, and a conspiracy led by a disgruntled southern actor had attacked the leadership of the US Government, killing Lincoln and wounding his Secretary of State, William Seward (the former Governor of New York, see Chapter 1).

At first, James was miserable. He was violently seasick on the passage. Soon after arriving, he contracted varioloid (a weakened type of smallpox), which laid him up for several weeks. He complained about nearly everything from the bugs to Agassiz’s dealings with the Brazilian emperor, to the prices vendors charged them, to the very dirt itself. He decided almost immediately that he was not cut out for the naturalist business, after all. By the time the team moved north from Rio to the Amazon River, however, James had begun to settle in and eventually became a trusted member of the team, leading some on his own side-expeditions up tributaries of the great waterway. Just before he left, he had an insight that may have foreshadowed his later interest in pragmatism:

Of course, James would, in later years, come to study himself into a fever on these very topics but, under the pragmatic approach, he would strive to understand them precisely in their connection to people’s external circumstances.

The expedition did not meet its primary goal of disproving Darwin’s theory, of course. It did, however, result in the identification of hundreds of new species of fish and, with that, bring forth a new appreciation of the fecundity of freshwater systems. Perhaps more important, James learned something important about the relationship between the accumulation of facts and the broad abstract speculations in which his father typically traded: ”No one sees farther into a generalization,” he observed, “than his own knowledge of details extends.” Although he still considered Agassiz’s conclusions “humbug,” he now saw what he called “the weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz’s mind, owing to the continual presence of this great background of special facts.”⁴⁹

After nine or ten months away—a world away—James arrived back in Boston in January or February of 1866.⁵⁰ In May, his family moved out of the city to Swampscott, Massachusetts, but James remained behind, increasingly interested in philosophy, especially Stoicism. He also began to strike up a deeper friendship with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He had known Holmes, the son of a Harvard Medical professor, before the war, but not well. Homes had joined the Union Army, served three years, and been wounded three times. Holmes wanted to go into law rather than follow the path of his father into medicine. James’ own medical studies were stalling; he said he was “drudging gloomily on.”⁵¹ The two men argued about materialism, determinism, chance, and other philosophical problems. James also attended a series of lectures on the logic of science at the Lowell Institute given by Charles Sanders Peirce, another acquaintance who was the son of the Harvard professor of mathematics and astronomy, Benjamin Peirce.⁵² Of one talk, James said he “c[oul]d not understand a word but rather enjoyed the sensation of listening to [it] for an hour.”⁵³ Entertaining as all this was, it did not solve the central problem that James still faced: what to do with his life.

Late in the year, James’ family moved back, this time taking a house in Cambridge. Everyone in the family seemed to be in crisis: Wilky, now recovered from his war wounds, was spending huge sums on a failing venture to teach emancipated Blacks to farm in Florida; Bob was aimlessly flitting from idea to idea but, more ominously, sinking ever more deeply into the throes of alcoholism; Alice had a mental breakdown, the first of many, and was sent to New York to undergo a fashionable form of Swedish massage then known as the “movement cure.” William himself complained of problems with his eyesight, the aftermath of his sickness in Rio, he thought.⁵⁴ Then he suffered a painful back episode that left him mostly immobile and, eventually, deeply depressed.

6. The European Cure

In his despair, James turned to an escape that his father had resorted to many times: he booked passage to Europe. He left in April 1867 for France. After a brief pause in Paris, he headed to Dresden where there was a sizeable American enclave. At first, his main activity was reading, interspersed with walks in the park. He read French novels for relaxation, but also perused some German philosophy and literature—especially Hegel and Goethe. He traveled to a resort in Bohemia to “take the waters.” He put up a brave face in letters to his mother and sister, saying he was improving. To his father and his friends, however, he confessed that his back was as bad as ever, now joined by intestinal troubles. His despondency had deepened as well, to the point that he sometimes mused about suicide.

It is difficult to know how seriously to take all this. Many of James’ biographers have considered this dark period to constitute the cauldron of profound doubt and self-examination in which the original and refreshing intellect we know today as William James was incubated. From another perspective, however, it can seem like a self-conscious literary trope: the specter of a young man upon whom few adult demands have ever been made and, yet, so wealthy that he can afford to indulge in years of aimless emotional turmoil—O! What shall I do with myself!—fleeing to an extended European retreat to sort himself out. The young men of America’s farms and mines and factories could afford no such luxury.

In some of his letters back home, James began to seriously debate his father on the issues that had excited the senior man’s intellect over 30 years—the spiritual versus the natural, the universal versus the subjective, the overarching generalization versus the mass of particular facts. On each point, the son was gradually lining up closer to the side opposite of his father.

In the fall, James moved to Berlin, where he was able to share rooms with an old Newport friend, Tom Perry. Despite his various physical and psychic infirmities, he managed to embark on a rigorous schedule of university lectures in physiology—as many as eleven per week. Among the professors whose courses he attended was the famed Emil DuBois-Reymond, discoverer of the fundamental mode of activity in the nerves: the action potential. Physiology was among the great scientific successes of the age. The topic had been converted, in the hands of a generation of gifted scientists, many of them German, from a speculative appendage of anatomy into a strict, experimental, laboratory-based science in its own right.

Central to that ascendancy had been the invention and use of new laboratory instruments that enabled researchers not only to measure precisely the duration of various events, but also to stretch the records of instantaneous events, or to compress ones that extended over long time frames, in order to be able see and understand, on a scale perceptible to human eyes, just how they unfolded. The kymograph, for instance, invented by Carl Ludwig in the 1840s, consisted of a rotating cylinder around which was spiraled a wobbly line inscribed by a stylus whose side-to-side movements were sensitive to some physiological process. (Today one is most likely to see a similar device recording seismic activity.) The kymograph was, perhaps, best at recording regular cyclical movements such as breathing and pulse. However, by speeding up the rotation of the cylinder, one could record the details of actions that occur so quickly that they are nearly invisible to the naked eye (such as a frog catching a fly with its tongue). By slowing down the cylinder’s rotation, one could record movements that occur so slowly they are nearly invisible to the naked eye (such as the daily movements of plants). In its day, the kymograph seemed as revolutionary to physiology as the telescope and the microscope had been to astronomy and anatomy.⁵⁵

Around this time, James first mused vaguely about pursuing physiology, especially its connections to psychology, as his primary field of inquiry. In November he wrote, “some measurements have allready [sic] been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness—(in the shape of sense perceptions).”⁵⁶ Here he first mentioned the possibility of traveling to Heidelberg to study with the great physiologist Hermann Helmholtz, who had first measured the speed of nervous transmission, and with “a man named Wundt.” He meant, of course, Wilhelm Wundt, who would go on to found the first Institute for Experimental Psychology, in Leipzig a decade hence.

All of the intellectual stimulation around him in Germany, however, was not sufficient to rid James of his gloom. By the spring of 1868, he felt that he had sunk into a permanent depression. Still, he manage to write a few book reviews for magazines back home, including one of Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. He returned to Dresden, visited the art museums and read literature, both ancient and modern. He mused about the nature of evil and the meaning of life. In addition to returning twice more to the therapeutic baths of Bohemia, James indulged in various other popular (but mostly ineffective) treatments for his continuing back pain including, at one point, blistering.

Generally, James was supportive of political liberalization.⁵⁷ The mixing of different ethnic groups, however, seems to have made him uneasy, particularly in his young adulthood. Ralph Baton Perry, perhaps the most admiring of James’ many sympathetic biographers, phrased the matter delicately: “When James was in Europe he was always keenly interested in the broader aspect of politics, and above all in national traits.”⁵⁸ The ethnic mix of Berlin seems to have been beyond James’ ability to absorb with equanimity. In October, 1867, he wrote to his sister:

It is easy to over-interpret the words of a historical figure that, though perhaps common in their own time, are exceptional and repugnant today, but James’ words here have particular significance in their own context. The Northern German Confederation had constitutionally come into existence only two-and-a-half months before, on July 1, 1867.⁶⁰ As one of its government’s first acts, on July 3, it had emancipated its Jewish citizens (i.e., granted them land ownership rights, entry into professions, and other civil rights). Although Jews had been emancipated in Prussia, of which Berlin was the capital, decades before (in 1812), the new law guaranteed these rights across northern German states, including some that had been resistant to granting such rights earlier. So, for James to have made this particular remark in this place at this time was, for instance, roughly tantamount to making derogatory comments about the physical appearances of African Americans who had succeeded economically in the immediate wake the US Civil Rights Act of the 1964. It thus appears that, for all his cosmopolitanism, simple ethnic prejudice was still among James sentiments at this time, and that it was not limited to the Irish Catholics of America’s cities. That said, it is also important to note that, later in life, James would befriend and support a number of Jewish colleagues and students: Gertrude Stein, Morris Cohen, Boris Sidis, and Horace Kallen, among others. Whether his attitude toward Jews “in general” had changed by that time is not as clear.

One thing that James’ experience in Germany gradually taught him was that, in order to be a working scientist, one must actually conduct experiments (reinforcing the lesson of Brazil, that one must collect specimens in order to be a naturalist). In December 1868, he mentioned visiting Helmholtz and Wundt in Heidelberg again. But it wasn’t just lectures he was after this time. He hoped to work in their laboratories: “I shall hate myself until till I get doing some special work: this reading leads nowhere.”⁶¹ At the end of June 1868, he finally took action, traveling to Heidelberg to gain practical laboratory experience under the tutelage of Helmholtz and Wundt. Helmholtz had a professorship at the university. Wundt, however, who had been an assistant in Helmholtz’s laboratory from 1857 to 1865, had resigned his position to establish his own physiology laboratory in his apartment building. For several years this private facility functioned as his home base: he taught his classes there and conducted his own original research.⁶² Wundt was, however, still a relatively minor figure at this time, not a “great physiologist,” as he is sometimes described. He had not yet won a professorship of his own, though he had published several minor books. These included his Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Tierseele (Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology), published in 1863, but it had not been a successes. His most important book had probably been Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions on the Theory of Sensory Perception), written and published under the supervision of Helmholtz in 1862. His hugely influential psychology textbook, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology), was still six years in the future.

A meeting between the younger Wundt and the younger James might have been an interesting event, but it was not to be. For reasons that are not entirely clear, James never made it to Helmholtz’s lectures and never came face-to-face with Wundt. One biographer surmised that he had failed to obtain the requisite letters of introduction, and that he may have been overwhelmed by his own sense of inadequacy.⁶³ This is an understandable inference, given that James himself wrote of being seized by a “blue despair,” and so he “fled” the city. But that may have been little more than a melodramatic turn of phrase, because he immediately went on to note that, once in Heidelberg, he found that neither Helmholtz nor Wundt would be lecturing that summer. He then went on to disparage Heidelberg’s relative dearth of cultural attractions as a reason for not sticking around until the fall.⁶⁴ So, the Heidelberg fiasco may have been more the result of poor timing coupled with some embarrassment at his failure to plan adequately, as much as a reflection of deeper psychological issues.

One important development in (what would come to be known as) “physiological psychology” of which James may not have been aware at the time was the research the Dutch ophthalmologist, Franz Donders was conducting in Utrecht.⁶⁵ From 1865, Donders had been attempting to measure the duration of simple decisions by comparing the length of time it took people to react to a single stimulus (e.g., a red card), to the length of time it took them to react to only one of two different possible stimuli (e.g., only to the red card, but not to the blue). The difference between these two times he took to be the time it took the person to decide whether the “correct” stimulus had been presented. Exploring various complications of this sort of experimental scheme was central to Wundt’s early work in experimental psychology.

Quitting Heidelberg, James went briefly to Berlin, then back to Dresden. He also seemed to abandon, at least for the moment, his interest in physiology, returning to novels and philosophy. He read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for the first time, as well as a number of commentaries on it. He also came across the work of a lesser philosopher whose ideas would become quite important to him, Charles Renouvier.

By November, James had had enough of Germany. (Stanley Hall would arrive just seven months later.) He returned to the US, high enough in spirits, at least, to feel that he could finally complete his long-delayed medical degree, but wishing that he could somehow make his way into what he called “a scientific life.”⁶⁶ He planned the thesis that was required for his medical degree, discussing his ideas with his friend and recent medical graduate, Henry Pickering Bowditch.⁶⁷ He submitted his finished thesis in May 1869 and took his examination in June.

The final medical examination was an unusual affair, a bit like modern “speed dating” (one of James’ sons called it a mad tea party). Nine professors sat at nine desks representing the nine topics on which each candidate was to be examined. Students entered the room nine at a time, each taking a seat before one of the professors. Then, each professor examined the student before him on the assigned topic until, after ten minutes, a bell was rung. At that point, all the students shifted one desk over to be examined on the next topic, for ten minutes, until the bell was rung once again. And so it went for 90 minutes, until all nine students had been examined, albeit briefly, on each of the nine topics. Then the name of each student was read aloud and each of the professors raised a paddle, white for pass, black for fail. Any student who passed at least five of the nine topics, got an MD and a license to practice.⁶⁸ James passed his exam, but medicine was not really on his mind. Deeper issues, moral issues—the essence of human nature and of human will, in particular—were gnawing at him, and they would set the stage for a personal crisis that has widely been regarded as the private foundation to James’ intellectual career. As he wrote to a friend in March of 1869, just before completing his degree, he had begun to fear,

7. Reforming the College, Reforming America

Nearly everyone knew that something was wrong with the way not only Harvard, but American colleges generally, educated young men. The Classical curriculum had become obsolete, having little to do with the modern, technological, entrepreneurial life that graduates would be likely to lead after leaving school. The medical and law schools were moribund. Even the few science schools—Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia each had one as well as Harvard—were weak. The very year that James graduated, Harvard’s Trustees embarked on a bold experiment. Rather than hiring yet another philosopher or theologian to be president of the college, as was the custom, they appointed a scientist with the express intent of building a new model of modern American collegiate education. The man they selected to do it was none other than Charles William Eliot, William James’ former chemistry professor at Lawrence. Eliot wasn’t just a chemist, though. His father, Samuel Atkins Eliot, had been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the mid-1830s and mayor of Boston from 1837 to 1839. He had also served in the Massachusetts Senate and, briefly, in the US Congress. Perhaps more important than all of these, from 1842 to 1853 he had been the Treasurer of Harvard College. Although he had died in 1862, just a year before his son Charles’ contract was not renewed as a chemistry instructor at the Lawrence Scientific School, Samuel Eliot’s legacy undoubtedly smoothed the way for Charles’ eventual ascension to the presidency.

Charles Eliot was only 35 at the time he took Harvard’s reins, but his appointment was not simply a case nepotism. In the years since he had left Lawrence, back in 1863, he had toured Europe, studying the higher educational systems of several countries there. Early in 1869, Eliot published an article based on his observations titled “The New Education” in Atlantic Monthly. He argued against both the traditional Classical curriculum and against a narrow vocational education, as some wanted. In their place, he promoted a broad education centered on modern disciplines, such as natural science, mathematics, political economy, modern languages, and modern history.⁷⁰ He also rejected scientific education as it had been practiced at Harvard to that point, in which “a young man who has studied nothing but chemistry, or nothing but engineering, and who is densely ignorant of everything else may obtain the sole degree given by the school,—that of a Bachelor of Science.”⁷¹ Instead, Eliot argued, every student, whether in arts or in science, should take courses in a range of topics. Harvard hired Eliot to implement his new model. He added elective courses so that college education would not be so narrow as it had been before. He founded graduate programs. He elevated medicine and law to graduate degrees, so that all students in those schools would have earned a bachelor’s degree before entering.

Most of the other old eastern colleges resisted, holding on to the American tradition that college was mainly for disciplining the mind with ancient languages and mathematics, and for inculcating Christian character with moral philosophy and denominational dogmatics, not for training students in recent scholarly developments. Yale, as had been its role on the American collegiate scene since its very inception, led the conservative refusal most steadfastly. Noah Porter, Yale’s president from 1871, bolstered Christian foundations, ensured that science stay in “its place” outside of the main college curriculum, and blocked the creation of elective courses. The rigidity of Yale’s stance was extraordinary even in its time. In 1880, Eliot wrote to Johns Hopkins president Daniel Coit Gilman that, “The manners and customs of the Yale Faculty are those of a porcupine on the defensive. The other colleges were astonished at first, but now they just laugh.”⁷² Princeton, led since 1868 by the Scotsman James McCosh, fell somewhere between the two, allowing some electives, attempting to broker a compatibilist accord between Protestantism and evolutionary theory, but still holding that the mission of the college was moral edification more than advanced scholarship.

James was ambivalent about the appointment of Eliot to the Harvard presidency. He wrote to his friend Henry Bowditch that Eliot’s “great personal defects, tactlessness, meddlesomeness, and disposition to cherish petty grudges seem pretty universally acknowledged; but his ideas seem good and his economic powers first-rate.”⁷³ Whether one liked Eliot personally or not, his reforms aligned with the new America that was being shaped right before everyone’s eyes by an explosion of new technologies.

The year 1869 was also the year that the transcontinental railroad was completed. Trains, and the telegraph lines that accompanied them, were transforming the American economy and the American way of life like nothing seen before. Rail lines had started to roll out across the landscape immediately after the opening of the Erie Canal, as other cities on the Atlantic seaboard scrambled to prevent New York from becoming, effectively, the only international port in the eastern US. As described before, a group of Baltimore businessmen got off to the fastest start, chartering the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1827, and starting construction in 1828. It would take two-and-a-half decades, but the line did eventually reach all the way to the Ohio River. By that time, the Erie Canal had itself been superseded to some degree by the new rail line that ran from New York to Buffalo, presided over by Erastus Corning, which eventually became known as the New York Central. In 1867, it was bought out by “The Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had gotten his start in transportation back in 1807, ferrying passengers in his own little periauger⁷⁴ across New York Harbor from Manhattan to Staten Island.

The “robber barons” of the major rail companies were primarily interested in carrying commodities in great quantities across the continent—grain, livestock, coal, steel, oil. In short order, though, retailers in a number of urban centers began to realize the potential of rail lines to provide them with something that had never before been possible: a national market. Prior to rail, the so-called “national economy” was more or less the sum total of a number of relatively autonomous local economies, each comprised of a regional urban center and the surrounding farmland and wilderness that supplied it with the raw materials it required to produce a few basic manufactured goods. The country was, as one historian famously put it, “a nation of loosely connected islands.”⁷⁵ Breaking out of that model, the Chicago merchant Aaron Montgomery Ward produced the first major mail order catalog in 1872. As the web of rail expanded, anyone anywhere in the country could, in principle, buy anything made in any city in the country.

This was a retail revolution. With rapidly increasing consumer demand for commercially made products, shipped by train, manufacturing began to take over from farming as the country’s chief economic engine. One business historian has argued that this transformation—the emergence of the first mass consumer culture—drove an increasing preoccupation with personal individuality and subjectivity in late 19th-century America. If so, it may well have also driven the paradoxical twin of self-absorption: anxiety about personal status.⁷⁶ It is not very much of a stretch to suggest that this novel socioeconomic landscape provided extremely fertile ground in which the discipline (and practice) of psychology would grow so rapidly over the next few decades into a pervasive aspect of the American cultural scene.

Eighty years earlier Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had debated what kind of country the newly-born United States would be. Jefferson saw mostly a gauzy image of his present: slave-powered farms run by a wealthy but (putatively) benevolent landed gentry.⁷⁷ Hamilton saw (mainly in his mind’s eye) an urban, industrial future that really began to come into being only after the Civil War. Of course, expanding urban industry required cheap labor nearly as much as the Southern plantations had. Battles over the value and the cost—both monetary and human—of labor did not end with the emancipation of the slaves. With the coming of the factories, these ever-contentious issues simply moved into a new arena.

8. William James Hits Bottom

As he was in so many things, William James was a transitional figure in this revolution. Although he was never really “of” the modern world of technology, mass production, and narrow specialization, because he had been raised in New York City he had experienced its coming into being long before many of his fellow Americans; long before Stanley Hall, for instance.

Immediately after James completed his medical degree, he did little. He spent the summer of 1869 in the Connecticut countryside. He visited and was visited by various cousins. In the fall William moved back into his parents house in Cambridge. Henry Sr.’s latest book had been published, The Secret of Swedenborg. William read it and found it mostly impenetrable, though he dutifully acknowledged to Henry Jr., their father’s “genius.” Charles Sanders Peirce reviewed it anonymously in the North American Review and even he, with his polymathic talents, found it “terribly difficult.” Years later, the novelist William Dean Howells quipped that Henry James “wrote The Secret of Swedenborg and kept it.”⁷⁸

Peirce also pinpointed as clearly and concisely as anyone the real problem that Henry James Sr. faced in being taken seriously as a thinker: “Though this book presents some very interesting and impressive religious views, and the spiritual tone of it is in general eminently healthy, it is altogether out of harmony with the spirit of this age.”⁷⁹ The elder James was still working out problems that had seemed pressing thirty years earlier. In the age of the locomotive and the telegraph, they seemed, at best, quaint and, at worst, simply irrelevant.

In the fall of 1869, William’s relationship with one of his cousins, Minnie Temple—the “mad” one who had cut her hair short a few years before—began to change. Minnie had always been unconventional, abrupt, sometimes antic, but also smart and self-possessed. James had found her unpleasant, a “bad thing.”⁸⁰ In his reviews of books about the position of women in society—John Stuart Mill’s radical The Subjection of Women and Horace Bushnell’s reactionary Women’s Suffrage, the Reform Against Nature—James had argued gently in favor of the need—men’s need—for women to be dependent.⁸¹ Whatever else Minnie was, she was certainly not that. Her uninhibited character had drawn the attention, mostly favorable but also cautious, of several of the young men in James’ circle.

Nevertheless, William and Minnie’s relationship deepened and became more intimate in late 1869 and early 1870. They discussed life, death, religion, and other matters of profound personal belief. It is difficult to know exactly what transpired between them because the documentary record from this time is fragmentary—some journal entries are missing, some letters are partial. Perhaps that is indicative of something in itself, as some have suggested, or perhaps it is just the luck of the archival draw. Whatever the exact character of their newfound bond was, they were knowingly entering a room from which there was only one exit. Minnie was suffering from tuberculosis, and her condition was deteriorating. James had another “dorsal collapse” in January of 1870, “and a moral one.” If humans are “Nature through and through,” as he had written to his friend Ward the year before, then what, if anything, is our “moral” aspect? Are all those things that were thought to elevate humanity above the animals—reason, love, determination, compassion, invention, art, and civilization itself—only an illusion? James consoled himself—perhaps distracted himself from Minnie’s visible decline—by wrestling with the conflicting demands of fate and free will. It was a painful journey for him. He thought he had “about touched bottom” on February 1. Minnie’s condition continued to worsen, though. She died on March 8, 1870. That seems to have been when the “bottom” that James thought he had already “touched,” fell out completely.⁸²

He tumbled into a devastating personal crisis that bore no small resemblance to the “vastation” his father had suffered 26 years before. He suffered “horrible fear of [his] own existence.” He was haunted by,

No act of will, James thought, regardless of how strong or pure, could protect him if a purely materialist determinism governed the world. It wasn’t until late April, after nearly two months of suffering this “horrible dread,” that he is conventionally said to have found some measure of defense against this bleak fatalism in the writings of the French philosopher, Charles Renouvier, who argued that human freedom lay at the core of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. James resolved to believe in free will for one year as a means of extracting himself from his horror.⁸⁴

In no small part because of James’ later contributions to the topic of human will, much has been made of his discovery of Renouvier at this critical point in his life. It is important to note, however, that Renouvier’s volunteerism did not lift James out of his terrible depression. He would struggle with it for two or three more difficult years before he returned to a more equanimous state of mind. Whether it was Renouvier’s philosophy, a gradual distancing from Minnie’s terrible death, or just the spontaneous lifting of an acute depressive episode, no one can say with certainty.

Notes

1 Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

2 Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle. March 1, 1858. In Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville, VA and London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 1992), vol. 4, 14.

3 Letter to one of Henry James’ early teachers, the prominent physicist Joseph Henry, 9 July 1843, cited in Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), 204. Joseph Henry was professor at the Albany Academy from 1826, and at Princeton from 1832. He was the first man to be named Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a position that he held from 1846 until his death in 1878. To be fair to Henry James, in an era when Mesmerism was at the height of its popularity, the idea that science and spirit could illuminate each other was a popular and exciting one. See, e.g., Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Power of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4 See, e.g., John Hall Gladstone, Michael Faraday (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1872), 92.

5 See the letter from Henry James Sr. to his mother, 1860(?) cited in Katherine Weissbourd, Growing Up in the James Family: Henry James Sr., as Son and Father (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1978), 45.

6 Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, July 1, 1856. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 3.

7 Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, March 1, 1858. Ibid., vol. 4, 15.

8 Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, March 1, 1858. Ibid., vol. 4, 12–13. The implicit reference to those whose labor helped to generate his grandfather’s and, in turn, his own wealth is striking.

9 Letter from William James to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, August 12, 1858. Ibid., vol. 4, 19.

10 Letter from William James to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, September 18, 1858. Ibid., vol. 4, 21.

11 Letter from William James to Thomas Sergeant Perry, August 5, 1860. Ibid., vol. 4, 33.

12 Letter from William James to Henry James Sr., August 19, 1860. Ibid., vol. 4, 36–37.

13 The outline of the story will be well known to American readers. The ship, Mayflower, with its 102 religiously separatist “pilgrims” landed in 1620 at the point of land they dubbed Plymouth, some 40 miles south of what is now central Boston. Soon after, Puritan settlements dotted the region.

14 James II had tried something similar with the short-lived Dominion of New England in late 1680s, but it had collapsed soon after the outbreak of the “Glorious Revolution” in 1688.

15 Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, vol. 1 (London, UK: Penguin, 1835/2003), 46.

16 It took some time for the rigid character of the colony to change. As late as 1692, of course, twenty members of Salem, just 20 miles up the coast from Boston, were executed for witchcraft.

17 Some of the more conservative early New England churches had gone so far as to regulate prices and control profit in accord with their understanding of the Bible.

18 Cotton Mather’s father, Increase Mather, had been rector and president of Harvard from the mid-1680s. In point of fact, he was out of the colony during almost all of his term of office but, a stern defender of orthodoxy, he nevertheless feuded mightily with college faculty, whom he viewed as unacceptably lax, theologically. Mather’s opponents forced him out in 1701. At that point, the Mather family turned their hopes toward the school that would soon become Yale. Meanwhile, at Harvard, the noted liberalizer John Leverett was appointed Harvard’s first lay president just seven years after Mather’s fiery departure.

19 That is, they were following the controversial teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) which had been condemned in Switzerland and had led to a profound crisis in Calvinism in Leiden in the early 17th century.

20 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1918), loc. 532 of Kindle edition.

21 In calling the long white colonnaded building “original,” I am not including the “Bullfinch Pavilion” which was built in the 1820s. See Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), Figure 5.10 on p. 116.

22 See Ibid., Figure 5.13 on p. 120.

23 Ibid., 156–57. It is important to recall that this was exactly the time that the building of the Erie Canal was radically altering the economic geography of North America, and many cities on the eastern seaboard were scrambling to challenge New York’s impending supremacy. To the south, in Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad was being organized in response to the Erie Canal as well.

24 See especially the 1858 photograph of the still-undeveloped Back Bay in Seasholes, Gaining Ground, Figure 7.19 on p. 181.

25 Cited in Robert D Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of Modernity (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 41.

26 Ibid.

27 Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 4. There are many studies of the origins and development of higher education in the US. Veysey’s is considered a classic. Another more recent study is John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

28 Adams, Education, 54. As an interesting aside, Adams attended Harvard at the same time as a Southern colonel by the name of Robert E. Lee, whom he described as having “liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked [and] … the Virginian habit of command… . [But] the habit of command was not enough… . No one knew how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school… . The Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves.”

29 Although the Adams family is often considered to have been of the “Botson Brahmins,” the Adams’ regarded themselves as being apart, from Qunicy. As Henry Adams once put the matter, “the only distinctive mark of all the Adamses, since old Sam Adams’ father a hundred and fifty years before, had been their inherited quarrel with State Street,” the symbolic center of Massachusetts’ government and finance. Adams, Education, third-to-last paragraph of chapter 1.

30 Letter from William James to his cousin (and Minnie’s older sister) Katherine Temple Emmet, dated November 1861 by Skrupskelis and Berkeley, eds. of Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 48–50.

31 Owen was responsible for the founding of the Natural History Museum in London, and was the person who coined the term “Dinosauria” to describe the massive extinct animals whose fossils were being uncovered by Mary Anning and others in England and elsewhere.

32 Letter from William James to the James Family, dated November 10, 1861 by Skrupskelis and Berkeley, eds. of Correspondence of William James, vols. 4, 50–52.

33 The story of the Massachusetts 54th was told in the 1989 film Glory.

34 See Richardson, William James, 55.

35 Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 132.

36 Ibid., 134–35.

37 Thomas H. O’Connor’s popular Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: Boston Public Library, 1991) does not mention the Draft Riot. His later book, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1995) mentions it briefly, but claims that there was “no looting of shops, no destruction of property” (p. 90). He cites a study by William F. Hanna (“The Boston Draft Riot,” Civil War History 36 (1990): 262–73) in which it is claimed that “destruction of property was kept to a minimum” (p. 262) but then goes on to describe incidents of lootings in detail. This minimization is hard to believe if one takes seriously Bob James’ eyewitness account of the events (though see below some reasons to doubt it). More important still is Tager’s more recent, more detailed account of the events that day (Boston Riots).

38 Henry G. Pearson, Life of John A. Andrew, Governor of Massachusetts, 1861–1865 (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1904), cited in Tager, Boston Riots, 36.

39 See, e.g., Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

40 Bob James’ story was told in a public address that he gave in Concord MA on March 10, 1896 titled “Three Years’ Service with the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.” Although the 45-page transcript is exceedingly rare, the passage pertaining to the Boston Civil War Riot is published in Jane Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James (Hamdon, CT: Arcon, 1986). Skrupskelis and Berkeley, the editors of The Correspondence of William James (vol. 11, 128 n.), have questioned the veracity of Bob’s story.

41 Tager, Boston Riots, 136–37.

42 Ibid., 138.

43 E.g., He alluded, in letters from December 23 and 25, 1861 to his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry, to the Trent affair, in which a British ship was caught by the US Navy transporting Confederate envoys (Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 60, 64). The matter nearly brought the US to war with England. See Henry Adams, Education, chap. 8 for a detailed description from the perspective of the US ambassador’s son and assistant. One exception to James’ relative silence is his September 30, 1866 letter to Frederick George Bromberg (then in Mobile, AL), which discusses the actions of Andrew Johnson and the implications of the “New Orleans Massacre” of July 30, 1866 in some detail (Correspondence of William James, vol., 143).

44 Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Lewis Einstein dated March 21, 1912. Oliver Wendell Holmes Papers, Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University. Cited in Richardson, William James, 77, from Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991), 155.

45 Letter from William James to Mary Robertson Walsh James, dated by an archivist November 2, 1863. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 86.

46 Letter from William James to Jeannette Barber Gourlay. Ibid., vol. 4, 90.Correspondence, vol. 4, p. 90.

47 Letter from William James to Charles Eliot Norton dated September 3, 1864. Ibid., vol. 4, 92–93. There are many popular myths pertaining to the exchange between Huxley and Wilberforce. See Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors : Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2009). One interesting issue that is often overlooked is that Wilberforce was the son of William Wilberforce, the man who had led the English political fight to end slavery in the Empire some 30 years earlier. It was from this connection, as much as from his clerical garments, that Wilberforce drew his substantial cultural credibility.

48 Letter from William James to Mary Robertson Walsh James dated December 9, 1865. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 132.

49 Letter from William James to Henry James, Sr. dated September 12, 1865. Ibid., vol. 4, 122.

50 There is some confusion about when he returned exactly. In a letter of Dec 9, 1865 he told his mother that he was on the verge of returning, which should have gotten him back in early January (Ibid., vols. 4, 131). In a letter to Frederick George Bromberg, he says that he had gotten home by the 1st of March (Ibid., vols. 4, 142).

51 Letter from William James to Alice James, Dec 12, 1866. Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 148.

52 The Peirce family’s presence at Harvard went back one additional generation to Charles’ paternal grandfather, Benjamin Sr., who had graduated from the school in 1801 and had later gone on to serve as its librarian. He also wrote a history of the Crimson College. There were politicians in Charles’ background as well: Benjamin Sr. had been a Massachusetts State legislator (representing Salem), and Charles’ maternal grandfather, Elijah Hunt Mills, a Federalist, had risen to the office of Speaker of the US House of Representatives in 1820, and then served as US Senator from 1820 to 1826. The Peirce family had deep roots in New England. The first of them, weavers from Norwich, had arrived in Watertown, MA in 1634. See Frederick Clifton Pierce, Peirce Genealogy: Being the Record of the Posterity of John Pers, an Early Inhabitant of Watertown, in New England, Who Came from Norwich, Norfolk County, England; With Notes on the History of Other Families Peirce, Pierce, Pearce, Etc. (Worcester, MA: Chas. Hamilton, 1880).

53 Letter from William James to Alice James, Nov. 14, 1866. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 144.

54 Letter from William James to Frederick George Bromberg, September 30, 1866. Ibid., vol. 4, 142.

55 See, e.g., Merriley Borell, “Instrumentation and the Rise of Modern Physiology,” Science and Technology Studies 5 (1987): 53–62, esp. p. 56.

56 Letter from William James to Thomas Wren Ward, November 7, 1867. Correspondence of William James, vols. 4, 226.

57 See, e.g., James’ letter to Edmund Tweedy of December 18, 1867. Ibid., vols. 4, 242.

58 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James., vol. 1 (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1935), 252.

59 Letter from William James to Alice James. October 17, 1867. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 215. It was not James’ only intolerant remarks about the Jewish people. He once described Jews in Rome as “squatting along the sides of houses just like maggots in a piece of flesh” (cited in Gordon Lyndall, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York, NY: Norton, 1998), 92.

60 The Confederation was one of the main outcomes of the Austro-Prussian War, which had concluded less than a year earlier, in August of 1866.

61 Letter from William James to Henry James, Sr. December 26, 1867. Correspondence of William James, vols. 4, 243.

62 Wolfgang G. Bringmann, Urslua Boss, and Gustav A. Ungerer, “Wundt’s Laboratories,” in A Pictorial History of Psychology, ed. Wolfgang G. Bringmann et al. (Carol Stream, IL: Quintessence, 1997), 126–32.

63 Richardson, William James, 93.

64 Letter from William James to Henry James, Sr., July 3, 1868. Correspondence of William James, vols. 4, 327.

65 Donders does not appear in the index of the 1856–1877 volume (vol. 4) of the Correspondence.

66 Letter from William James to Thomas Wren Ward. October 9, 1868. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 346.

67 Bowditch would go on to become a professor, and eventually Dean, of Harvard Medical School.

68 The description of the examination process follows that outlined by Richardson, William James, 103.

69 Letter from William James to Thomas Wren Ward. March, 1869 [exact date not given]. Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 370–71.

70 In September 1870, he appointed Henry Adams to a professorship in history. A number of Eliot’s early faculty appointments were “head hunted” from other schools as a result of his substantially increasing Harvard professors’ salaries. For instance, F. H. Storer arrived from MIT to take a professorship in Agricultural Chemistry in 1870. Physicist E. C. Pickering also came from MIT, in 1876, to become Director of the Harvard Observatory. Sanskritist C. R. Lanman came from Johns Hopkins in 1880 to head the Department of Indo-Iranian Languages. Classicist F. D. Allen was drawn from Yale in 1880, to become professor of Classical Philology.

71 Charles William Eliot, “The New Education,” Atlantic Monthly, 1869, quotation from 210.

72 Letter from C. W. Eliot to D. C. Gilman dated March 9, 1880. MS 1, Papers of Daniel Coit Gilman, Series 1, Box 13, Folder 44, Johns Hopkins University. Also cited in Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 50.

73 Letter from William James to Henry Pickering Bowditch, May 22, 1869 (the letter was misdated 1868 by James). Correspondence of William James, vol. 4, 379.

74 A two-masted sailing vessel with a shallow draft (often flat bottomed).

75 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1967), 4.

76 Charles R. Morris, Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2005), esp. chap. 6.

77 Although Jefferson was resolutely anti-urban in his 1784 Notes on Virginia, after the near catastrophe of the War of 1812, Jefferson privately conceded that America could not forever remain dependent on the industrial cities of Europe for its manufactured products. If the US were to survive, it would have to reluctantly admit the modern metropolis into its midst. See esp. Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 24–25.

78 Variants of the story appear everywhere, almost none with citations. The original source is a letter from Charles Eliot Norton to Eliot Norton, dated June 11, 1907, published in Sara Norton and Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, eds., The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 2 (Boston, MA: Houhgton Mifflin, 1913), vol. 2, 379. The full passage is: “I [CE Norton] was speaking to him [WD Howells] about Dr. [William] James’ new book [presumably Pragmatism], and said that it was brilliant but not clear. ‘Like his father,’ said Mr. Howells, ‘who wrote The Secret of Swedenborg and kept it.’ ” (My thanks to Nicole Barenbaum who located the source of this story.)

79 “Anonymous Review of The Secret of Swedenborg,” North American Review 110 (1870): 463–68.

80 Cited in Lyndall, Private Life of Henry James, 91.

81 Mentioned in Richardson, William James, 105 and in chap. 15, n.3.

82 The quoted phrases in this paragraph come from James’ diary, and are cited in Ibid., 117.

83 This passage was published by James more than 30 years later in The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, 1902), 160. At that time, he attributed it to an anonymous French “sufferer,” although he later conceded that he was describing a crisis he had experienced as a young man himself (Letter from James to Frank Abauzit, the French translator of Varieties, dated June 1, 1904, reproduced in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 508). The dating remains a matter of some debate, although early 1870 is the common conclusion (based in part on diary entries from April 1870 that indicate the easing of a serious personal crisis. It is also in this passage (especially the clause, “That shape am I”) that David E. Leary found the crucial evidence that James was framing his experience in terms of a formulation derived from the work of the eminent German philosopher of the will, Arthur Schopenhauer. Leary also discovered that James was voraciously (and apparently secretly) reading Schopenhauer’s works at just about the time of his crisis (see “New Insights into William James’s Personal Crisis in the Early 1870s: Part I. Arthur Schopenhauer and the Origin & Nature of the Crisis,” William James Studies 11 (2015): 7).

84 Barrels of ink have been spilt in the attempt to fully capture and correctly interpret the significance of James’ crisis. For a review of this voluminous literature, see Paul J. Croce, “A Mannered Memory and Teachable Moment: William James and the French Correspondent in the Varieties,” William James Studies 4 (2009): 36–69. Many of James’ biographers have cited James’ letter to Renouvier (November 2, 1872, Correspondence of William James, vols. 4, 430–31), but they have, perhaps, sometimes read a little too much into his simple statement that “je puis dire que par elle [votre philosophie] je commence à renaître à la vie morale” [I can say that by it [your philosophy] I am starting to be reborn to the moral life]. In the context of the letter, it seems clear that he means he is taking philosophical questions of morality seriously again, not that he had personally been returned to morality (though to be fair, James was one of those philosophers who tried to “live” philosophy, not just study it in the abstract).

3
William James Comes to Harvard

1. A Second (and Third) European Sojourn; Then to Newport