William James - The Letters of William James, Vol. 2

When James returned from Europe, he was fifty-two years old. If he had been another man, he might have settled down to the intensive cultivation of the field in which he had already achieved renown and influence. He would then have spent the rest of his life in working out special problems in psychology, in deducing a few theories, in making particular applications of his conclusions, in administering a growing laboratory, in surrounding himself with assistants and disciples—in weeding and gathering where he had tilled. But the fact was that the publication of his two books on psychology operated for him as a welcome release from the subject.

He had no illusion of finality about what he had written. 1 1 "It seems to me that psychology is like physics before Galileo's time—not a single elementary law yet caught a glimpse of. A great chance for some future psychologue to make a greater name than Newton's; but who then will read the books of this generation? Not many, I trow. Meanwhile they must be written." To James Sully, July 8, 1890. But he would have said that whatever original contribution he was capable of making to psychology had already been made; that he must pass on and leave addition and revision to others. He gradually disencumbered himself of responsibility for teaching the subject in the College. The laboratory had already been placed under Professor Münsterberg's charge. For one year, during which Münsterberg returned to Germany, James was compelled to direct its conduct; but he let it be known that he would resign his professorship rather than concern himself with it indefinitely.

Readers of this book will have seen that the centre of his interest had always been religious and philosophical. To be sure, the currents by which science was being carried forward during the sixties and seventies had supported him in his distrust of conclusions based largely on introspection and a priori reasoning. As early as 1865 he had said, apropos of Agassiz, "No one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends." In the spirit of that remark he had spent years on brain-physiology, on the theory of the emotions, on the feeling of effort in mental processes, in studying the measurements and exact experiments by means of which the science of the mind was being brought into quickening relation with the physical and biological sciences. But all the while he had been driven on by a curiosity that embraced ulterior problems. In half of the field of his consciousness questions had been stirring which now held his attention completely. Does consciousness really exist? Could a radically empirical conception of the universe be formulated? What is knowledge? What truth? Where is freedom? and where is there room for faith? Metaphysical problems haunted his mind; discussions that ran in strictly psychological channels bored him. He called psychology "a nasty little subject," according to Professor Palmer, and added, "all one cares to know lies outside." He would not consider spending time on a revised edition of his textbook (the "Briefer Course") except for a bribe that was too great ever to be urged upon him. As time went on, he became more and more irritated at being addressed or referred to as a "psychologist." In June, 1903, when he became aware that Harvard was intending to confer an honorary degree on him, he went about for days before Commencement in a half-serious state of dread lest, at the fatal moment, he should hear President Eliot's voice naming him "Psychologist, psychical researcher, willer-to-believe, religious experiencer." He could not say whether the impossible last epithets would be less to his taste than "psychologist."

Only along the borderland between normal and pathological mental states, and particularly in the region of "religious experience," did he continue to collect psychological data and to explore them.

The new subjects which he offered at Harvard during the nineties are indicative of the directions in which his mind was moving. In the first winter after his return he gave a course on Cosmology, which he had never taught before and which he described in the department announcement as "a study of the fundamental conceptions of natural science with especial reference to the theories of evolution and materialism," and for the first time announced that his graduate "seminar" would be wholly devoted to questions in mental pathology "embracing a review of the principal forms of abnormal or exceptional mental life." In 1895 the second half of his psychological seminar was announced as "a discussion of certain theoretic problems, as Consciousness, Knowledge, Self, the relations of Mind and Body." In 1896 he offered a course on the philosophy of Kant for the first time. In 1898 the announcement of his "elective" on Metaphysics explained that the class would consider "the unity or pluralism of the world ground, and its knowability or unknowability; realism and idealism, freedom, teleology and theism." 2 2 President Eliot, in a memorandum already referred to (vol. 1, p. 32, note), calls attention to these courses and remarks: "These frequent changes were highly characteristic of James's whole career as a teacher. He changed topics, textbooks and methods frequently, thus utilizing his own wide range of reading and interest and his own progress in philosophy, and experimenting from year to year on the mutual contacts and relations with his students." James continued to be titular Professor of Psychology until 1897, just as he had been nominally Assistant Professor of Physiology for several years during which the original and important part of his teaching was psychological. His title never indicated exactly what he was teaching.

But there is another aspect of the nineties which must be touched upon. After getting back "to harness" in 1893 James took up, not only his full college duties, but an amount of outside lecturing such as he had never done before. In so doing he overburdened himself and postponed the attainment of his true purpose; but the temptation to accept the requests which now poured in on him was made irresistible by practical considerations. He not only repeated some of his Harvard courses at Radcliffe College, and gave instruction in the Harvard Summer School in addition to the regular work of the term; but delivered lectures at teachers' meetings and before other special audiences in places as far from Cambridge as Colorado and California. A number of the papers that are included in "The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy" (1897) and "Talks to Teachers and Students on Some of Life's Ideals" (1897) were thus prepared as lectures. Some of them were read many times before they were published. When he stopped for a rest in 1899, he was exhausted to the verge of a formidable break-down.

Even a glance at this period tempts one to wonder whether this record would not have been richer if it had been different. Might-have-beens can never be measured or verified; and yet sometimes it cannot be doubted that possibilities never realized were actual possibilities once. By 1893 James was inwardly eager, as has already been said, to devote all his thought and working time to metaphysical and religious questions. More than that—he had already conceived the important terms of his own Welt-anschauung . "The Will to Believe" was written by 1896. In the preface to the "Talks to Teachers" he said of the essay called "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "it connects itself with a definite view of the World and our Moral relations to the same.