The Letters of William James Volume I Part 10

VI

1869-1872

_Invalidism in Cambridge_

THE return to Cambridge from Germany in November, 1868, marked the beginning of four outwardly uneventful years. James spent them under his father's roof. His family and intimate friends were usually close at hand; the stream of his correspondence shrank to almost nothing. The few letters that have been preserved do incomplete justice to this period, but can, fortunately, be supplemented by other doc.u.ments.

James obtained his medical degree easily enough in June, 1869; but he had no thought of engaging in the practice of medicine. He wanted to go on with physiology; but he was not strong enough to work in a laboratory. Condemned to sedentary occupations, and without any definite responsibilities, he seemed, to his own jaundiced vision, to be declining into a desultory and profitless idleness.

In this he was hardly fair to himself or to the conditions. It is true that he had no remunerative occupation, and that he could look forward to no well-defined professional career for which he could be preparing and training himself. He was, also, handicapped by the fact that sometimes he could not use his eyes for more than two hours a day. On the other hand, he would probably not have been happy in any professional harness into which he could then have fitted, and was really more fortunate in having leisure to read and discuss and fill note-books forced upon him between his twenty-seventh and thirty-first years. Such leisure has been the unattained goal of many another man with a mind not one tenth so curious and speculative as his; and few men who have attained it have made as good use of their free time as James made of the years 1869 to 1872.

His eyes were weak, to be sure, and his letters usually bewail his inability to use them more. But, skipping as he had trained himself to, and s.n.a.t.c.hing at every opportunity, he somehow got over a great deal of reading in neurology, physiology of the nervous system, and psychology.

He was not confined to the books that were on the shelves of the Quincy Street house, but could borrow from the excellent Harvard and Boston libraries without inconvenience. At times, when he was able to read for several hours a day, he used, as he put it, "to keep himself from using his mind too much" by turning to non-professional literature in German, French, and English. One letter to his brother (June 1, 1869) affords material for reflection upon the range and power of a.s.similation of a mind which could seek such relaxation. "I have," he writes in this letter, "been reading for recreation, since you left, a good many German books: Steffens and C. P. Moritz's autobiographies, some lyric poetry, W. Humboldt's letters, Schmidt's history of German literature, etc., which have brought to a head the slowly maturing feeling of German culture.... Reading of the revival, or rather the birth, of German literature--Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Jacobi, Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling, [the]

Schlegels, Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a number of others--puts one into a real cla.s.sical period. These men were all interesting as men, each standing as a type or representative of a certain way of taking life, and beginning at the bottom--taking nothing for granted. In England, the only parallel I can think of is Coleridge, and in France, Rousseau and Diderot. If the heroes and heroines of all of Ste.-Beuve's gossip had had a tenth part of the _significance_ of these and their male and female friends, bad readers like myself would never think of growing impatient with him as an old debauchee." A diary entry made by his sister Alice, a few years later says: "In old days, when [William's] eyes were bad, and I used to begin to tell him something which I thought of interest from whatever book I might be reading ... he would invariably say, 'I glanced into that book yesterday and read that.'"[44]

He had already formed the habit of making marginal notes, of writing down summaries of his reading, and of formulating his ideas on paper--the admirable practice, in short, of confiding in note-books and addressing himself freely to the waste-basket. For instance: "In 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how almost everyone who speculated about brain processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his 'Time and s.p.a.ce'), Maudsley, Lockhart, Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality."[45]

He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alphabetized blank-books which used to be sold under the name of "Todd's Index Rerum"

during the sixties, and which were devised to facilitate indexing and reference. He continued to make entries in these books until 1890, and perhaps later. He also filled copy-books and pocket note-books, of which a few mutilated but interesting fragments remain. In these he sometimes copied out quotations, sometimes noted comments on his reading, sometimes tried to clothe an idea of his own in precise words.

Occasionally he made diary-like entries that show how familiar a companion he was making of the note-book. He was already at his ease in the practice of the Baconian maxim that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

A few book-notices or reviews did reach the public. Seven are listed under the years 1868 to 1872 in Professor R. B. Perry's "List of Published Writings." Although the matter of these reviews is seldom of present-day interest, the curious reader will find sentences and paragraphs in them that are prophetic of pa.s.sages in James's later writings, and will observe that he already commanded a style that expressed the color and quality of his thought.[46]

Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and 1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others.

The problem of the moral const.i.tution of things, the question of man's relation to the Universe,--whether significant or impotent and meaningless,--these had clearly come home to him as more than questions of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit that the pa.s.sage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fict.i.tious French correspondent, who was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given.

They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious Experience."

"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight, to procure some article that was there; 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, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coa.r.s.e gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. 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. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a ma.s.s of quivering fear.

After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings pa.s.sed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing.... I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that, if I had not clung to scripture-texts like _The eternal G.o.d is my refuge_, etc., _Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden_, etc., _I am the Resurrection and the Life_, etc., I think I should have grown really insane."

The date of this experience cannot and need not be fixed exactly. It was undoubtedly later than the Berlin winter and after the return to Cambridge. Perhaps it was during the winter of 1869-70, for one of the note-books contains an entry dated April 30, 1870, in which James's resolution and self-confidence appear to be rea.s.serting themselves. This entry must be quoted too. It is not only illuminating with respect to 1870, but suggests parts of the "Psychology" and of the philosophic essays that later gave comfort and courage to unnumbered readers.

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will--"the sustaining of a thought _because I choose to_ when I might have other thoughts"--need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will a.s.sume for the present--until next year--that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative _Grublei_[48] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the _form_ of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action--and consequently acc.u.mulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. _Principiis obsta_--Today has furnished the exceptionally pa.s.sionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in _Anschauungen_,[49] but in acc.u.mulated _acts_ of thought lies salvation. _Pa.s.ser outre._ Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, _can't_ be optimistic--but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing _resistance_ of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in][50] doing and suffering and creating."

The next letter was written from Cambridge during the winter following the return from Germany, and while James was completing the work necessary to ent.i.tle him to a medical degree.[51] The reader will recognize "the firm of B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to Bowditch in the letter of December 12, 1867.

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 24, 1869_.

MY DEAR HENRY,--I am in receipt of two letters from yez (dates forgotten) wherein you speak of having received my money and paid my bills and of Fleury's book. You're a gentleman in all respects. You said nothing about whether the pounds when reduced back to francs and Thalers made exactly the original sum from which the pounds were calculated. If it was but five centimes under and you have concealed it, I shall brand you as a villain where'er I go. So out with the truth. Do I still owe you anything?...

I have just been quit by Chas. S. Peirce, with whom I have been talking about a couple of articles in the St. Louis "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" by him, which I have just read. They are exceedingly bold, subtle and incomprehensible, and I can't say that his vocal elucidations helped me a great deal to their understanding, but they nevertheless interest me strangely. The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the observatory for good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of professorships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe,"

orthodox men. He has had good reason, I know, to feel a little discouraged about the prospect, but I think he ought to hang on, as a German would do, till he grows gray....

I saw Wyman a few weeks ago. He said his Indian collecting, etc., took up all his working time now. Do you keep your room above the freezing point or can't the thing be done? Have you made any bosom friends among French students, or do you find the superficial accidents of language and breeding to hold you wider apart than the deep force of your common humanity can draw you together? It's deuced discouraging to find how this is almost certain to be the case.

The older I grow, the more important does it seem to me for the interest of science and of the sick, and of the firm of B. & J., that you should take charge of a big state lunatic asylum. Think of the interesting cases, and of the autopsies! And if you once took firm root, say at Somerville, I should feel a.s.sured of a refuge in my old and dest.i.tute days, for you certainly would not be treacherous enough to spurn me from the door when I presented myself--on the pretext that I was only shamming dementia. Think of the matter seriously.

I read a little while ago Chambers's "Clinical Lectures," which are exceedingly interesting and able. The lectures on indigestion in the volume are worth, in quality, ten such books as that Guipon I left in Paris, though more limited in subject. I have been trying to get "Hilton on Rest and Pain," which you recommended, from the Athenaeum, but, _more librorum_, when you want 'em, it keeps "out." ...

I hope this letter is _decousue_ enough for you. What is a man to write when a reef is being taken in his existence, and absence from thought and life is all he aspires to. Better times will come, though, and with them better letters. Good-bye! Ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr._

[_Winter of 1868-69._]

Gents!--entry-thieves--chevaliers d'industrie--well-dressed swindlers--confidence men--wolves in sheep's clothing--a.s.ses in lion's skin--gentlemanly pickpockets--beware! The hand of the law is already on your throats and waits but a wink to be tightened. All the resources of the immensely powerful Corporation of Harvard University have been set in motion, and concealment of your miserable selves or of the almost equally miserable (though not _as such_ miserable) goloshes which you stole from our entry on Sunday night is as impossible as would be the concealment of the State House. The motive of your precipitate departure from the house became immediately evident to the remaining guests. But they resolved to _ignore_ the matter provided the overshoes were replaced within a week; if not, no _considerations whatever_ will prevent Messrs. Gurney & Perry[52] from proceeding to treat you with the utmost severity of the law. It is high time that some of these genteel adventurers should be made an example of, and your offence just comes in time to make the cup of public and private forbearance overflow. My father and self have pledged our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to see the thing through with Gurney and Perry, as the credit of our house is involved and we might ourselves have been losers, not only from you but from the aforesaid G. & P., who have been heard to go about openly declaring that "if they had known the party was going to be _that_ kind of an affair, d--d if they would not have started off earlier themselves with some of those aristocratic James overcoats, hats, gloves and canes!"

So let me as a friend advise you to send the swag back. No questions will be asked--Mum's the word.

WM. JAMES.

_To Thomas W. Ward._

_March_ [?], 1869.

...I had great movings of my bowels toward thee lately--the distant, cynical isolation in which we live with our heart's best brothers sometimes comes over me with a deep bitterness, and I had a little while ago an experience of life which woke up the spiritual monad within me as has not happened more than once or twice before in my life. "Malgre la vue des miseres ou nous vivons et qui nous tiennent par la gorge," there is an inextinguishable spark which will, when we least expect it, flash out and reveal the existence, at least, of something real--of reason at the bottom of things. I can't tell you how it was now. I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy.[53] I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are _en rapport_ with reason.--How to conceive it? Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything.--It is not that we are all nature _but_ some point which is reason, but that all is nature _and_ all is reason too. We shall see, d.a.m.n it, we shall see!...

[W. J.]