The New York Review of Books

Granger Collection

Henry James and his brother William, 1902

In the spring of 1870 William James was twenty-eight and at the lowest ebb of what was already a swift-flowing and emotionally tempestuous life. His early years had been spent trailing about Europe in the wake of his brilliant but improvident father Henry Sr., who was busily working his way through one of nineteenth-century America’s greatest inherited fortunes, while writing reams of unreadable, and unread, philosophical and religious maunderings.¹ In London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, young William and his brother Henry, the future novelist, had picked up bits and scraps of an education—precious bits, brilliant scraps—and, back home in America, William had attended Harvard Medical School and secured an MD, a thing far easier of achievement then than nowadays. He had tried his hand at being a painter and failed, had successfully avoided taking an active part in the Civil War—an evasion that haunted him all his life—had accompanied Louis Agassiz’s scientific expedition to Brazil, and had fallen in love with a bevy of girls, including his cousin, Minnie Temple. But Minnie died.²

We do not know enough about James’s inner life at this time to say for certain how profound an effect this loss had on the young man—and he was, even by his own admission, a very young twenty-eight—but in that fateful springtime, within weeks of Minnie’s death, he suffered a devastating emotional collapse that he was to describe years later in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The account, which he attributed to an anonymous French source, is vivid and frightening. Being in a state of depression and uncertainty about his prospects in life, he went one day at twilight into his dressing room

when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic…. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.

After this glimpse into the horror rerum, James writes, “the universe was changed for me altogether” and he was left with “a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.” Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, he concluded by professing to believe that “this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.”

He was not the first in his family to be thus afflicted. Some twenty-six years earlier, in May 1844, when the James family was in residence in Windsor Great Park outside London, Henry James Sr. suffered a similar attack. At the end of a good meal, as he was sitting on contentedly at table after his wife and his two young sons had left, he suddenly became convinced that there was an invisible presence in the dining room with him, “raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.” The effect was terrific: “The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy.”

For Henry Sr., as for his son, the event had a religious cast. Directed by a friend to the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, of which he was to become a lifelong devotee, Henry discovered a name for what he had undergone. A vastation in Swedenborgian terms is a necessary purgative process through which the soul must pass on its way to enlightenment and spiritual rebirth. And indeed James père, leaning on the support of Swedenborg’s ecstatic vision, did find his way to the God of Love whose “great work was wrought not in the minds of individuals here and there, as my theology taught me, but in the very stuff of human nature itself….” It was a lesson that James fils strove valiantly all his life to put into practical effect, with more or less success.

William James is not universally admired. His pupil and friend George Santayana, though lovingly respectful of the master, could be ambivalent in his judgement. A more recent skeptic is Louis Menand,³ who in his fine book on the history of pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, mocks the “man of two minds,” as he dubs James in a chapter heading, for being on the one hand a hopeless ditherer⁴ and on the other “a kind of super-Protestant,” overly concerned with the “cash-value” of experience, who “often spoke of pragmatism, the philosophy he largely created, as the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.”⁵

True, there is a Benjamin Franklin, even a Teddy Roosevelt,⁶ side to James (although he strongly opposed Roosevelt’s imperialism) that at times grates somewhat. He does interrogate this or that philosophical conception by demanding “What is its cash-value, in terms of particular experience?” He is an enthusiast for the Weberian notion of the Protestant work ethic—but then, so was Marx—and he can be squirm- makingly the Great Outdoors, fresh-air-and-exercise man.⁷ Yet whatever heartiness he allowed himself to evince was hard-won, and, as Robert Richardson writes in his introduction to The Heart of William James, a splendid and shrewdly chosen selection from the philosopher’s work, “his self-help strain comes from his conviction that our thoughts have a shaping power over our bodies.”

James knew also the often destructive tendency of our thoughts, and the damage that the mind’s infirmities can inflict upon us. In the chapter from The Varieties of Religious Experience that he calls “The Sick Soul,” which Richardson reprints here, James faces squarely the awfulness of the human predicament: “Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” The Varieties is overall an affirmative and tolerant study of our need for and experience of transcendental states,⁸ but in “The Sick Soul” we have the impression of a man who has been plucked off the primrose path and set down in the inner circle of an earthly hell and forced to witness, white-knuckled and sweating, a parade of life’s most terrible torments. Healthy-mindedness is all very well, he writes, yet even the most fortunate must recognize that their happy state is the result of luck and not much else:

And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, “Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!” Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that!

“Can things whose end is always dust and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require?” James asks, and the question is not rhetorical. There is no doubt, he writes, that healthy-mindedness will not do as a philosophical doctrine, “because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

It is well to stress this blacker seam that runs through all of James’s radiant thought—though for the most part it is hard to discern because so finely stretched and deeply buried—for an awareness of it allows us to trust in the value of his more positive, more pragmatic urgings. Who better to direct us toward the light than one who knows the darkness intimately? As Richardson writes: “The father of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, credits James with the founding insight of that organization—that self-mastery comes only after self-surrender and an admission of hopelessness and helplessness.”

So fresh is William James’s thought and so unbuttoned and irreverent his character that he is always contemporary; it comes as something of a shock, therefore, to recall that he was born as long ago as 1842. He was a late starter, however, and did not publish his first proper book until 1890, when he was forty-eight. But what a book The Principles of Psychology was, and is. Two years after initial publication he brought out a more compact edition, Psychology: Briefer Course,⁹ the form in which the book is mostly read today. From it, Richardson takes the chapter on habit, which he rightly describes as a classic. Here James takes his lead from Sydney Smith, who in his wide-ranging and characteristically witty Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy wrote: “There is no degree of disguise or distortion which human nature may not be made to assume from habit.” Similarly, for James habit is

the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein…. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.

And he closes the paragraph with the true if disenchanted observation that “it is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

Like his near contemporary Nietzsche, with whom he has certain fundamental traits in common, James as a philosopher was a determined anti-systematizer.¹⁰ His turn of mind was firmly democratic, and he delighted in positing everyday examples to illustrate the most abstruse hypotheses.¹¹ “James’s writings,” Richardson writes, “are a standing rebuke to conventional thought, received ideas, professional jargon, classical education,” and it is for this reason, as much as for their insight and depth of focus, that they remain forever fresh. Can there ever have been as entertaining a philosopher as William James?

As Richardson points out, James was fortunate in his family and his teachers, but he was more fortunate still in his friends. These included Chauncey Wright, according to contemporary legend the brainiest man in Cambridge, Massachusetts,¹² the proto-pragmatist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Saunders Peirce, whom James designated as the true founder of pragmatism—though Peirce preferred to call it “pragmaticism,” a word he considered too ugly to be kidnapped by the likes of James or John Dewey, both of whom he thought too lightweight. James had a fondness for all kinds of mavericks and oddities, of whom there was no lack in, for instance, the spiritualist circles in which he moved. One of his most stimulating, if strange, correspondents was the autodidact philosopher and mystic from upstate New York Benjamin Paul Blood. Richardson quotes a splendid passage from Blood’s Essays in Philosophy: