William James enjoyed in his youth what are called advantages: he lived
among cultivated people, travelled, had teachers of various
nationalities. His father was one of those somewhat obscure sages whom
early America produced: mystics of independent mind, hermits in the
desert of business, and heretics in the churches. They were intense
individualists, full of veneration for the free souls of their children,
and convinced that every one should paddle his own canoe, especially on
the high seas. William James accordingly enjoyed a stimulating if
slightly irregular education: he never acquired that reposeful mastery
of particular authors and those safe ways of feeling and judging which
are fostered in great schools and universities. In consequence he showed
an almost physical horror of club sentiment and of the stifling
atmosphere of all officialdom. He had a knack for drawing, and rather
the temperament of the artist; but the unlovely secrets of nature and
the troubles of man preoccupied him, and he chose medicine for his
profession. Instead of practising, however, he turned to teaching
physiology, and from that passed gradually to psychology and philosophy.
In his earlier years he retained some traces of polyglot student days at
Paris, Bonn, Vienna, or Geneva; he slipped sometimes into foreign
phrases, uttered in their full vernacular; and there was an occasional
afterglow of Bohemia about him, in the bright stripe of a shirt or the
exuberance of a tie. On points of art or medicine he retained a
professional touch and an unconscious ease which he hardly acquired in
metaphysics. I suspect he had heartily admired some of his masters in
those other subjects, but had never seen a philosopher whom he would
have cared to resemble. Of course there was nothing of the artist in
William James, as the artist is sometimes conceived in England, nothing
of the æsthete, nothing affected or limp. In person he was short rather
than tall, erect, brisk, bearded, intensely masculine. While he shone in
expression and would have wished his style to be noble if it could also
be strong, he preferred in the end to be spontaneous, and to leave it at
that; he tolerated slang in himself rather than primness. The rough,
homely, picturesque phrase, whatever was graphic and racy, recommended
itself to him; and his conversation outdid his writing in this respect.
He believed in improvisation, even in thought; his lectures were not
minutely prepared. Know your subject thoroughly, he used to say, and
trust to luck for the rest. There was a deep sense of insecurity in him,
a mixture of humility with romanticism: we were likely to be more or
less wrong anyhow, but we might be wholly sincere. One moment should
respect the insight of another, without trying to establish too
regimental a uniformity. If you corrected yourself tartly, how could you
know that the correction was not the worse mistake? All our opinions
were born free and equal, all children of the Lord, and if they were not
consistent that was the Lord’s business, not theirs. In reality, James
was consistent enough, as even Emerson (more extreme in this sort of
irresponsibility) was too. Inspiration has its limits, sometimes very
narrow ones. But James was not consecutive, not insistent; he turned to
a subject afresh, without egotism or pedantry; he dropped his old
points, sometimes very good ones; and he modestly looked for light from
others, who had less light than himself.
His excursions into philosophy were accordingly in the nature of raids,
and it is easy for those who are attracted by one part of his work to
ignore other parts, in themselves perhaps more valuable. I think that in
fact his popularity does not rest on his best achievements. His
popularity rests on three somewhat incidental books, _The Will to
Believe_, _Pragmatism_, and _The Varieties of Religious Experience_,
whereas, as it seems to me, his best achievement is his _Principles of
Psychology_. In this book he surveys, in a way which for him is very
systematic, a subject made to his hand. In its ostensible outlook it is
a treatise like any other, but what distinguishes it is the author’s
gift for evoking vividly the very life of the mind. This is a work of
imagination; and the subject as he conceived it, which is the flux of
immediate experience in men in general, requires imagination to read it
at all. It is a literary subject, like autobiography or psychological
fiction, and can be treated only poetically; and in this sense
Shakespeare is a better psychologist than Locke or Kant. Yet this gift
of imagination is not merely literary; it is not useless in divining the
truths of science, and it is invaluable in throwing off prejudice and
scientific shams. The fresh imagination and vitality of William James
led him to break through many a false convention. He saw that
experience, as we endure it, is not a mosaic of distinct sensations, nor
the expression of separate hostile faculties, such as reason and the
passions, or sense and the categories; it is rather a flow of mental
discourse, like a dream, in which all divisions and units are vague and
shifting, and the whole is continually merging together and drifting
apart. It fades gradually in the rear, like the wake of a ship, and
bites into the future, like the bow cutting the water. For the candid
psychologist, carried bodily on this voyage of discovery, the past is
but a questionable report, and the future wholly indeterminate;
everything is simply what it is experienced as being.
At the same time, psychology is supposed to be a science, a claim which
would tend to confine it to the natural history of man, or the study of
behaviour, as is actually proposed by Auguste Comte and by some of
James’s own disciples, more jejune if more clear‐headed than he. As
matters now stand, however, psychology as a whole is not a science, but
a branch of philosophy; it brings together the literary description of
mental discourse and the scientific description of material life, in
order to consider the relation between them, which is the nexus of human
nature.
What was James’s position on this crucial question? It is impossible to
reply unequivocally. He approached philosophy as mankind originally
approached it, without having a philosophy, and he lent himself to
various hypotheses in various directions. He professed to begin his
study on the assumptions of common sense, that there is a material world
which the animals that live in it are able to perceive and to think
about. He gave a congruous extension to this view in his theory that
emotion is purely bodily sensation, and also in his habit of conceiving
the mind as a total shifting sensibility. To pursue this path, however,
would have led him to admit that nature was automatic and mind simply
cognitive, conclusions from which every instinct in him recoiled. He
preferred to believe that mind and matter had independent energies and
could lend one another a hand, matter operating by motion and mind by
intention. This dramatic, amphibious way of picturing causation is
natural to common sense, and might be defended if it were clearly
defined; but James was insensibly carried away from it by a subtle
implication of his method. This implication was that experience or
mental discourse not only constituted a set of substantive facts, but
the _only_ substantive facts; all else, even that material world which
his psychology had postulated, could be nothing but a verbal or
fantastic symbol for sensations in their experienced order. So that
while nominally the door was kept open to any hypothesis regarding the
conditions of the psychological flux, in truth the question was
prejudged. The hypotheses, which were parts of this psychological flux,
could have no object save other parts of it. That flux itself,
therefore, which he could picture so vividly, was the fundamental
existence. The _sense_ of bounding over the waves, the _sense_ of being
on an adventurous voyage, was the living fact; the rest was dead
reckoning. Where one’s gift is, there will one’s faith be also; and to
this poet appearance was the only reality.
This sentiment, which always lay at the back of his mind, reached
something like formal expression in his latest writings, where he
sketched what he called radical empiricism. The word experience is like
a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings. Here we must no
longer think of its setting, its discoveries, or its march; to treat it
radically we must abstract its immediate objects and reduce it to pure
data. It is obvious (and the sequel has already proved) that experience
so understood would lose its romantic signification, as a personal
adventure or a response to the shocks of fortune. “Experience” would
turn into a cosmic dance of absolute entities created and destroyed _in
vacuo_ according to universal laws, or perhaps by chance. No minds would
gather this experience, and no material agencies would impose it; but
the immediate objects present to any one would simply be parts of the
universal fireworks, continuous with the rest, and all the parts, even
if not present to anybody, would have the same status. Experience would
then not at all resemble what Shakespeare reports or what James himself
had described in his psychology. If it could be experienced as it flows
in its entirety (which is fortunately impracticable), it would be a
perpetual mathematical nightmare. Every whirling atom, every changing
relation, and every incidental perspective would be a part of it. I am
far from wishing to deny for a moment the scientific value of such a
cosmic system, if it can be worked out; physics and mathematics seem to
me to plunge far deeper than literary psychology into the groundwork of
this world; but human experience is the stuff of literary psychology; we
cannot reach the stuff of physics and mathematics except by arresting or
even hypostatising some elements of appearance, and expanding them on an
abstracted and hypothetical plane of their own. Experience, as memory
and literature rehearse it, remains nearer to us than that: it is
something dreamful, passionate, dramatic, and significative.
Certainly this personal human experience, expressible in literature and
in talk, and no cosmic system however profound, was what James knew best
and trusted most. Had he seen the developments of his radical
empiricism, I cannot help thinking he would have marvelled that such
logical mechanisms should have been hatched out of that egg. The
principal problems and aspirations that haunted him all his life long
would lose their meaning in that cosmic atmosphere. The pragmatic nature
of truth, for instance, would never suggest itself in the presence of
pure data; but a romantic mind soaked in agnosticism, conscious of its
own habits and assuming an environment the exact structure of which can
never be observed, may well convince itself that, for experience, truth
is nothing but a happy use of signs—which is indeed the truth of
literature. But if we once accept _any_ system of the universe as
literally true, the value of convenient signs to prepare us for such
experience as is yet absent cannot be called truth: it is plainly
nothing but a necessary inaccuracy. So, too, with the question of the
survival of the human individual after death. For radical empiricism a
human individual is simply a certain cycle or complex of terms, like any
other natural fact; that some echoes of his mind should recur after the
regular chimes have ceased, would have nothing paradoxical about it. A
mathematical world is a good deal like music, with its repetitions and
transpositions, and a little trill, which you might call a person, might
well peep up here and there all over a vast composition. Something of
that sort may be the truth of spiritualism; but it is not what the
spiritualists imagine. Their whole interest lies not in the experiences
they have, but in the interpretation they give to them, assigning them
to troubled spirits in another world; but both another world and a
spirit are notions repugnant to a radical empiricism.
I think it is important to remember, if we are not to misunderstand
William James, that his radical empiricism and pragmatism were in his
own mind only methods; his doctrine, if he may be said to have had one,
was agnosticism. And just because he was an agnostic (feeling
instinctively that beliefs and opinions, if they had any objective
beyond themselves, could never be sure they had attained it), he seemed
in one sense so favourable to credulity. He was not credulous himself,
far from it; he was well aware that the trust he put in people or ideas
might betray him. For that very reason he was respectful and pitiful to
the trustfulness of others. Doubtless they were wrong, but who were we
to say so? In his own person he was ready enough to face the mystery of
things, and whatever the womb of time might bring forth; but until the
curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no
last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks
not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the
play. Who could tell what heavenly influences might not pierce to these
sensitive half‐flayed creatures, which are lost on the thick‐skinned,
the sane, and the duly goggled? We must not suppose, however, that James
meant these contrite and romantic suggestions dogmatically. The
agnostic, as well as the physician and neurologist in him, was never
quite eclipsed. The hope that some new revelation might come from the
lowly and weak could never mean to him what it meant to the early
Christians. For him it was only a right conceded to them to experiment
with their special faiths; he did not expect such faiths to be
discoveries of absolute fact, which everybody else might be constrained
to recognise. If any one had made such a claim, and had seemed to have
some chance of imposing it universally, James would have been the first
to turn against him; not, of course, on the ground that it was
_impossible_ that such an orthodoxy should be true, but with a profound
conviction that it was to be feared and distrusted. No: the degree of
authority and honour to be accorded to various human faiths was a moral
question, not a theoretical one. All faiths were what they were
experienced as being, in their capacity of faiths; these faiths, not
their objects, were the hard facts we must respect. We cannot pass,
except under the illusion of the moment, to anything firmer or on a
deeper level. There was accordingly no sense of security, no joy, in
James’s apology for personal religion. He did not really believe; he
merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you
believed.
It is this underlying agnosticism that explains an incoherence which we
might find in his popular works, where the story and the moral do not
seem to hang together. Professedly they are works of psychological
observation; but the tendency and suasion in them seems to run to
disintegrating the idea of truth, recommending belief without reason,
and encouraging superstition. A psychologist who was not an agnostic
would have indicated, as far as possible, whether the beliefs and
experiences he was describing were instances of delusion or of rare and
fine perception, or in what measure they were a mixture of both. But
James—and this is what gives such romantic warmth to these writings of
his—disclaims all antecedent or superior knowledge, listens to the
testimony of each witness in turn, and only by accident allows us to
feel that he is swayed by the eloquence and vehemence of some of them
rather than of others. This method is modest, generous, and impartial;
but if James intended, as I think he did, to picture the _drama_ of
human belief, with its risks and triumphs, the method was inadequate.
Dramatists never hesitate to assume, and to let the audience perceive,
who is good and who bad, who wise and who foolish, in their pieces;
otherwise their work would be as impotent dramatically as
scientifically. The tragedy and comedy of life lie precisely in the
contrast between the illusions or passions of the characters and their
true condition and fate, hidden from them at first, but evident to the
author and the public. If in our diffidence and scrupulous fairness we
refuse to take this judicial attitude, we shall be led to strange
conclusions. The navigator, for instance, trusting his “experience”
(which here, as in the case of religious people, means his imagination
and his art), insists on believing that the earth is spherical; he has
sailed round it. That is to say, he has seemed to himself to steer
westward and westward, and has seemed to get home again. But how should
he know that home is now where it was before, or that his past and
present impressions of it come from the same, or from any, material
object? How should he know that space is as trim and tri‐dimensional as
the discredited Euclidians used to say it was? If, on the contrary, my
worthy aunt, trusting to her longer and less ambiguous experience of her
garden, insists that the earth is flat, and observes that the theory
that it is round, which is only a theory, is much less often tested and
found useful than her own perception of its flatness, and that moreover
that theory is pedantic, intellectualistic, and a product of academies,
and a rash dogma to impose on mankind for ever and ever, it might seem
that on James’s principle we ought to agree with her. But no; on James’s
real principles we need not agree with her, nor with the navigator
either. Radical empiricism, which is radical agnosticism, delivers us
from so benighted a choice. For the quarrel becomes unmeaning when we
remember that the earth is _both_ flat and round, if it is experienced
as being both. The substantive fact is not a single object on which both
the perception and the theory are expected to converge; the substantive
facts are the theory and the perception themselves. And we may note in
passing that empiricism, when it ceases to value experience as a means
of discovering external things, can give up its ancient prejudice in
favour of sense as against imagination, for imagination and thought are
immediate experiences as much as sensation is: they are therefore, for
absolute empiricism, no less actual ingredients of reality.
In _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ we find the same apologetic
intention running through a vivid account of what seems for the most
part (as James acknowledged) religious disease. Normal religious
experience is hardly described in it. Religious experience, for the
great mass of mankind, consists in simple faith in the truth and benefit
of their religious traditions. But to James something so conventional
and rationalistic seemed hardly experience and hardly religious; he was
thinking only of irruptive visions and feelings as interpreted by the
mystics who had them. These interpretations he ostensibly presents, with
more or less wistful sympathy for what they were worth; but emotionally
he wished to champion them. The religions that had sprung up in America
spontaneously—communistic, hysterical, spiritistic, or medicinal—were
despised by select and superior people. You might inquire into them, as
you might go slumming, but they remained suspect and distasteful. This
picking up of genteel skirts on the part of his acquaintance prompted
William James to roll up his sleeves—not for a knock‐out blow, but for a
thorough clinical demonstration. He would tenderly vivisect the
experiences in question, to show how living they were, though of course
he could not guarantee, more than other surgeons do, that the patient
would survive the operation. An operation that eventually kills may be
technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description
of religion that showed it to be madness might first show how real and
how warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish
understood.
I never observed in William James any personal anxiety or enthusiasm for
any of these dubious tenets. His conception even of such a thing as
free‐will, which he always ardently defended, remained vague; he avoided
defining even what he conceived to be desirable in such matters. But he
wished to protect the weak against the strong, and what he hated beyond
everything was the _non possumus_ of any constituted authority.
Philosophy for him had a Polish constitution; so long as a single vote
was cast against the majority, nothing could pass. The suspense of
judgement which he had imposed on himself as a duty, became almost a
necessity. I think it would have depressed him if he had had to confess
that any important question was finally settled. He would still have
hoped that something might turn up on the other side, and that just as
the scientific hangman was about to despatch the poor convicted
prisoner, an unexpected witness would ride up in hot haste, and prove
him innocent. Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but
empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
In the discourse on “The Energies of Men,” certain physiological marvels
are recorded, as if to suggest that the resources of our minds and
bodies are infinite, or can be infinitely enlarged by divine grace. Yet
James would not, I am sure, have accepted that inference. He would,
under pressure, have drawn in his mystical horns under his scientific
shell; but he was not naturalist enough to feel instinctively that the
wonderful and the natural are all of a piece, and that only our degree
of habituation distinguishes them. A nucleus, which we may poetically
call the soul, certainly lies within us, by which our bodies and minds
are generated and controlled, like an army by a government. In this
nucleus, since nature in a small compass has room for anything, vast
quantities of energy may well be stored up, which may be tapped on
occasion, or which may serve like an electric spark to let loose energy
previously existing in the grosser parts. But the absolute autocracy of
this central power, or its success in imposing extraordinary trials on
its subjects, is not an obvious good. Perhaps, like a democratic
government, the soul is at its best when it merely collects and
coordinates the impulses coming from the senses. The inner man is at
times a tyrant, parasitical, wasteful, and voluptuous. At other times he
is fanatical and mad. When he asks for and obtains violent exertions
from the body, the question often is, as with the exploits of conquerors
and conjurers, whether the impulse to do such prodigious things was not
gratuitous, and the things nugatory. Who would wish to be a mystic?
James himself, who by nature was a spirited rather than a spiritual man,
had no liking for sanctimonious transcendentalists, visionaries, or
ascetics; he hated minds that run thin. But he hastened to correct this
manly impulse, lest it should be unjust, and forced himself to overcome
his repugnance. This was made easier when the unearthly phenomenon had a
healing or saving function in the everyday material world; miracle then
re‐established its ancient identity with medicine, and both of them were
humanised. Even when this union was not attained, James was reconciled
to the miracle‐workers partly by his great charity, and partly by his
hunter’s instinct to follow a scent, for he believed discoveries to be
imminent. Besides, a philosopher who is a teacher of youth is more
concerned to give people a right start than a right conclusion. James
fell in with the hortatory tradition of college sages; he turned his
psychology, whenever he could do so honestly, to purposes of
edification; and his little sermons on habit, on will, on faith, and
this on the latent capacities of men, were fine and stirring, and just
the sermons to preach to the young Christian soldier. He was much less
sceptical in morals than in science. He seems to have felt sure that
certain thoughts and hopes—those familiar to a liberal
Protestantism—were every man’s true friends in life. This assumption
would have been hard to defend if he or those he habitually addressed
had ever questioned it; yet his whole argument for voluntarily
cultivating these beliefs rests on this assumption, that they are
beneficent. Since, whether we will or no, we cannot escape the risk of
error, and must succumb to some human or pathological bias, at least we
might do so gracefully and in the form that would profit us most, by
clinging to those prejudices which help us to lead what we all feel is a
good life. But what is a good life? Had William James, had the people
about him, had modern philosophers anywhere, any notion of that? I
cannot think so. They had much experience of personal goodness, and love
of it; they had standards of character and right conduct; but as to what
might render human existence good, excellent, beautiful, happy, and
worth having as a whole, their notions were utterly thin and barbarous.
They had forgotten the Greeks, or never known them.
This argument accordingly suffers from the same weakness as the similar
argument of Pascal in favour of Catholic orthodoxy. You should force
yourself to believe in it, he said, because if you do so and are right
you win heaven, while if you are wrong you lose nothing. What would
Protestants, Mohammedans, and Hindus say to that? Those alternatives of
Pascal’s are not the sole nor the true alternatives; such a
wager—betting on the improbable because you are offered big odds—is an
unworthy parody of the real choice between wisdom and folly. There is no
heaven to be won in such a spirit, and if there was, a philosopher would
despise it. So William James would have us bet on immortality, or bet on
our power to succeed, because if we win the wager we can live to
congratulate ourselves on our true instinct, while we lose nothing if we
have made a mistake; for unless you have the satisfaction of finding
that you have been right, the dignity of having been right is apparently
nothing. Or if the argument is rather that these beliefs, whether true
or false, make life better in this world, the thing is simply false. To
be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony
with the truth; it is not nearly so safe, not nearly so sweet, and not
nearly so fruitful. These refusals to part with a decayed illusion are
really an infection to the mind. Believe, certainly; we cannot help
believing; but believe rationally, holding what seems certain for
certain, what seems probable for probable, what seems desirable for
desirable, and what seems false for false.
In this matter, as usual, James had a true psychological fact and a
generous instinct behind his confused moral suggestions. It is a
psychological fact that men are influenced in their beliefs by their
will and desires; indeed, I think we can go further and say that in its
essence belief is an expression of impulse, of readiness to act. It is
only peripherally, as our action is gradually adjusted to things, and
our impulses to our possible or necessary action, that our ideas begin
to hug the facts, and to acquire a true, if still a symbolic,
significance. We do not need a will to believe; we only need a will to
study the object in which we are inevitably believing. But James was
thinking less of belief in what we find than of belief in what we hope
for: a belief which is not at all clear and not at all necessary in the
life of mortals. Like most Americans, however, only more lyrically,
James felt the call of the future and the assurance that it could be
made far better, totally other, than the past. The pictures that
religion had painted of heaven or the millennium were not what he
prized, although his Swedenborgian connection might have made him tender
to them, as perhaps it did to familiar spirits. It was the moral succour
offered by religion, its open spaces, the possibility of miracles _in
extremis_, that must be retained. If we recoiled at the thought of being
dupes (which is perhaps what nature intended us to be), were we less
likely to be dupes in disbelieving these sustaining truths than in
believing them? Faith was needed to bring about the reform of faith
itself, as well as all other reforms.
In some cases faith in success could nerve us to bring success about,
and so justify itself by its own operation. This is a thought typical of
James at his worst—a worst in which there is always a good side. Here
again psychological observation is used with the best intentions to
hearten oneself and other people; but the fact observed is not at all
understood, and a moral twist is given to it which (besides being
morally questionable) almost amounts to falsifying the fact itself. Why
does belief that you can jump a ditch help you to jump it? Because it is
a symptom of the fact that you _could_ jump it, that your legs were fit
and that the ditch was two yards wide and not twenty. A rapid and just
appreciation of these facts has given you your confidence, or at least
has made it reasonable, manly, and prophetic; otherwise you would have
been a fool and got a ducking for it. Assurance is contemptible and
fatal unless it is self‐knowledge. If you had been rattled you might
have failed, because that would have been a symptom of the fact that you
were out of gear; you would have been afraid because you trembled, as
James at his best proclaimed. You would never have quailed if your
system had been reacting smoothly to its opportunities, any more than
you would totter and see double if you were not intoxicated. Fear is a
sensation of actual nervousness and disarray, and confidence a sensation
of actual readiness; they are not disembodied feelings, existing for no
reason, the devil Funk and the angel Courage, one or the other of whom
may come down arbitrarily into your body, and revolutionise it. That is
childish mythology, which survives innocently enough as a figure of
speech, until a philosopher is found to take that figure of speech
seriously. Nor is the moral suggestion here less unsound. What is good
is not the presumption of power, but the possession of it: a clear head,
aware of its resources, not a fuddled optimism, calling up spirits from
the vasty deep. Courage is not a virtue, said Socrates, unless it is
also wisdom. Could anything be truer both of courage in doing and of
courage in believing? But it takes tenacity, it takes _reasonable_
courage, to stick to scientific insights such as this of Socrates or
that of James about the emotions; it is easier to lapse into the
traditional manner, to search natural philosophy for miracles and moral
lessons, and in morals proper, in the reasoned expression of preference,
to splash about without a philosophy.
William James shared the passions of liberalism. He belonged to the
left, which, as they say in Spain, is the side of the heart, as the
right is that of the liver; at any rate there was much blood and no gall
in his philosophy. He was one of those elder Americans still disquieted
by the ghost of tyranny, social and ecclesiastical. Even the beauties of
the past troubled him; he had a puritan feeling that they were tainted.
They had been cruel and frivolous, and must have suppressed far better
things. But what, we may ask, might these better things be? It may do
for a revolutionary politician to say: “I may not know what I
want—except office—but I know what I don’t want”; it will never do for a
philosopher. Aversions and fears imply principles of preference, goods
acknowledged; and it is the philosopher’s business to make these goods
explicit. Liberty is not an art, liberty must be used to bring some
natural art to fruition. Shall it be simply eating and drinking and
wondering what will happen next? If there is some deep and settled need
in the heart of man, to give direction to his efforts, what else should
a philosopher do but discover and announce what that need is?
There is a sense in which James was not a philosopher at all. He once
said to me: “What a curse philosophy would be if we couldn’t forget all
about it!” In other words, philosophy was not to him what it has been to
so many, a consolation and sanctuary in a life which would have been
unsatisfying without it. It would be incongruous, therefore, to expect
of him that he should build a philosophy like an edifice to go and live
in for good. Philosophy to him was rather like a maze in which he
happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was the
way out. In the presence of theories of any sort he was attentive,
puzzled, suspicious, with a certain inner prompting to disregard them.
He lived all his life among them, as a child lives among grown‐up
people; what a relief to turn from those stolid giants, with their
prohibitions and exactions and tiresome talk, to another real child or a
nice animal! Of course grown‐up people are useful, and so James
considered that theories might be; but in themselves, to live with, they
were rather in the way, and at bottom our natural enemies. It was well
to challenge one or another of them when you got a chance; perhaps that
challenge might break some spell, transform the strange landscape, and
simplify life. A theory while you were creating or using it was like a
story you were telling yourself or a game you were playing; it was a
warm, self‐justifying thing then; but when the glow of creation or
expectation was over, a theory was a phantom, like a ghost, or like the
minds of other people. To all other people, even to ghosts, William
James was the soul of courtesy; and he was civil to most theories as
well, as to more or less interesting strangers that invaded him. Nobody
ever recognised more heartily the chance that others had of being right,
and the right they had to be different. Yet when it came to
understanding what they meant, whether they were theories or persons,
his intuition outran his patience; he made some brilliant
impressionistic sketch in his fancy and called it by their name. This
sketch was as often flattered as distorted, and he was at times the dupe
of his desire to be appreciative and give the devil his due; he was too
impulsive for exact sympathy; too subjective, too romantic, to be just.
Love is very penetrating, but it penetrates to possibilities rather than
to facts. The logic of opinions, as well as the exact opinions
themselves, were not things James saw easily, or traced with pleasure.
He liked to take things one by one, rather than to put two and two
together. He was a mystic, a mystic in love with life. He was comparable
to Rousseau and to Walt Whitman; he expressed a generous and tender
sensibility, rebelling against sophistication, and preferring daily
sights and sounds, and a vague but indomitable faith in fortune, to any
settled intellectual tradition calling itself science or philosophy.
A prophet is not without honour save in his own country; and until the
return wave of James’s reputation reached America from Europe, his
pupils and friends were hardly aware that he was such a distinguished
man. Everybody liked him, and delighted in him for his generous,
gullible nature and brilliant sallies. He was a sort of Irishman among
the Brahmins, and seemed hardly imposing enough for a great man. They
laughed at his erratic views and his undisguised limitations. Of course
a conscientious professor ought to know everything he professes to know,
but then, they thought, a dignified professor ought to seem to know
everything. The precise theologians and panoplied idealists, who exist
even in America, shook their heads. What sound philosophy, said they to
themselves, could be expected from an irresponsible doctor, who was not
even a college graduate, a crude empiricist, and vivisector of frogs? On
the other hand, the solid men of business were not entirely reassured
concerning a teacher of youth who seemed to have no system in
particular—the ignorant rather demand that the learned should have a
system in store, to be applied at a pinch; and they could not quite
swallow a private gentleman who dabbled in hypnotism, frequented
mediums, didn’t talk like a book, and didn’t write like a book, except
like one of his own. Even his pupils, attached as they invariably were
to his person, felt some doubts about the profundity of one who was so
very natural, and who after some interruption during a lecture—and he
said life was a series of interruptions—would slap his forehead and ask
the man in the front row “What _was_ I talking about?” Perhaps in the
first years of his teaching he felt a little in the professor’s chair as
a military man might feel when obliged to read the prayers at a funeral.
He probably conceived what he said more deeply than a more scholastic
mind might have conceived it; yet he would have been more comfortable if
some one else had said it for him. He liked to open the window, and look
out for a moment. I think he was glad when the bell rang, and he could
be himself again until the next day. But in the midst of this routine of
the class‐room the spirit would sometimes come upon him, and, leaning
his head on his hand, he would let fall golden words, picturesque, fresh
from the heart, full of the knowledge of good and evil. Incidentally
there would crop up some humorous characterisation, some candid
confession of doubt or of instinctive preference, some pungent scrap of
learning; radicalisms plunging sometimes into the sub‐soil of all human
philosophies; and, on occasion, thoughts of simple wisdom and wistful
piety, the most unfeigned and manly that anybody ever had.