The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 · William James
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 documents. * * * * * 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 snatching 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 assimilation 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, Schelling, [the] Schlegels, Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a number of others--puts one into a real classical 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 Space'), 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]
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 constitution 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 passage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fictitious 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 coarse 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 mass 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 passed 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 God 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 reasserting 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 assume 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 _Grüblei_[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 accumulate 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 passionate 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 accumulated _acts_ of thought lies salvation. _Passer 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."
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.