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

can well remember the first meeting of the course in psychology in 1890, in a ground-floor room of the old Lawrence Scientific School. He took a considerable part of the hour by reading extracts from Henry Sidgwick's Lecture against Lecturing, proceeding to explain that we should use as a textbook his own 'Principles of Psychology,' appearing for the first time that very week from the press, and should spend the hours in conference, in which we should discuss and ask questions, on both sides. So during the year's course we read the two volumes through, with some amount of running commentary and controversy. There were four or five men of previous psychological training in a class of (I think) between twenty and thirty, two of whom were disposed to take up cudgels for the British associational psychology and were particularly troubled by the repeated doctrine of the 'Principles' that a state of consciousness had no parts or elements, but was one indivisible fact. He bore questions that really were criticisms with inexhaustible patience and what I may call (the subject invites the word often) human attention; invited written questions as well, and would often return them with a reply penciled on the back when he thought the discussion too special in interest to be pursued before the class. Moreover, he bore with us with never a sign of impatience if we lingered after class, and even walked up Kirkland Street with him on his way home. Yet he was really not argumentative, not inclined to dialectic or pertinacious debate of any sort. It must always have required an effort of self-control to put up with it. He almost never, even in private conversation, contended for his own opinion. He had a way of often falling back on the language of perception, insight, sensibility, vision of possibilities. I recall how on one occasion after class, as I parted with him at the gate of the Memorial Hall triangle, his last words were something like these: 'Well, Miller, that theory's not a warm reality to me yet—still a cold conception'; and the charm of the comradely smile with which he said it! The disinclination to formal logical system and the more prolonged purely intellectual analyses was felt by some men as a lack in his classroom work, though they recognized that these analyses were present in the 'Psychology.' On the other hand, the very tendency to feel ideas lent a kind of emotional or æsthetic color which deepened the interest.

      "In the course of the year he asked the men each to write some word of suggestion, if he were so inclined, for improvement in the method with which the course was conducted; and, if I remember rightly, there were not a few respectful suggestions that too much time was allowed to the few wrangling disputants. In a pretty full and varied experience of lecture-rooms at home and abroad I cannot recall another where the class was asked to criticize the methods of the lecturer.

      "Another class of twelve or fourteen, in the same year, on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, met in one of the 'tower rooms' of Sever Hall, sitting around a table. Here we had to do mostly with pure metaphysics. And more striking still was the prominence of humanity and sensibility in his way of taking philosophic problems. I can see him now, sitting at the head of that heavy table of light-colored oak near the bow-window that formed the end of the room. My brother, a visitor at Cambridge, dropping in for an hour and seeing him with his vigorous air, bronzed and sanguine complexion, and brown tweeds, said, 'He looks more like a sportsman than a professor.' I think that the sporting men in college always felt a certain affinity to themselves on one side in the freshness and manhood that distinguished him in mind, appearance, and diction. It was, by the way, in this latter course that I first heard some of the philosophic phrases now identified with him. There was a great deal about the monist and pluralist views of the universe. The world of the monist was described as a 'block-universe' and the monist himself as 'wallowing in a sense of unbridled unity,' or something of the sort. He always wanted the men to write one or two 'theses' in the course of the year and to get to work early on them. He made a great deal of bibliography. He would say, 'I am no man for editions and references, no exact bibliographer.' But none the less he would put upon the blackboard full lists of books, English, French, German, and Italian, on our subject. His own reading was immense and systematic. No one has ever done justice to it, partly because he spoke with unaffected modesty of that side of his equipment.

      "Of course this knowledge came to the foreground in his 'seminar.' In my second year I was with him in one of these for both terms, the first half-year studying the psychology of pleasure and pain, and the second, mental pathology. Here each of us undertook a special topic, the reading for which was suggested by him. The students were an interesting group, including Professor Santayana, then an instructor, Dr. Herbert Nichols, Messrs. Mezes (now President of the City College, New York), Pierce (late Professor at Smith College), Angell (Professor of Psychology at Chicago, and now President of the Carnegie Corporation), Bakewell (Professor at Yale), and Alfred Hodder (who became instructor at Bryn Mawr College, then abandoned academic life for literature and politics). In this seminar I was deeply impressed by his judicious and often judicial quality. His range of intellectual experience, his profound cultivation in literature, in science and in art (has there been in our generation a more cultivated man?), his absolutely unfettered and untrammeled mind, ready to do sympathetic justice to the most unaccredited, audacious, or despised hypotheses, yet always keeping his own sense of proportion and the balance of evidence—merely to know these qualities, as we sat about that council-board, was to receive, so far as we were capable of absorbing it, in a heightened sense of the good old adjective, 'liberal' education. Of all the services he did us in this seminar perhaps the greatest was his running commentary on the students' reports on such authors as Lombroso and Nordau, and all theories of degeneracy and morbid human types. His thought was that there is no sharp line to be drawn between 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' minds, that all have something of both. Once when we were returning from two insane asylums which he had arranged for the class to visit, and at one of which we had seen a dangerous, almost naked maniac, I remember his saying, 'President Eliot might not like to admit that there is no sharp line between himself and the men we have just seen, but it is true.' He would emphasize that people who had great nervous burdens to carry, hereditary perhaps, could order their lives fruitfully and perhaps derive some gain from their 'degenerate' sensitiveness, whatever it might be. The doctrine is set forth with regard to religion in an early chapter of his 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' but for us it was applied to life at large.

      "In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a vigor, a freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met on the way, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on the way to my class in trepidation!'

      "Professor Royce's style of exposition was continuous, even, unfailing, composed. Professor James was more conversational, varied, broken, at times struggling for expression—in spite of what has been mentioned as his mastery of words. This was natural, for the one was deeply and comfortably installed in a theory (to be sure a great theory), and the other was peering out in quest of something greater which he did not distinctly see. James's method gave us in the classroom more of his own exploration and aperçu. We felt his mind at work.

      "Royce in lecturing sat immovable. James would rise with a peculiar suddenness and make bold and rapid strokes for a diagram on the black-board—I can remember his abstracted air as he wrestled with some idea, standing by his chair with one foot upon it, elbow on knee, hand to chin. A friend has described a scene at a little class that, in a still earlier year, met in James's own study. In the effort to illustrate he brought out a black-board. He stood it on a chair and in various other positions, but could not at once write upon it, hold it steady, and keep it in the class's vision. Entirely bent on what he was doing, his efforts resulted at last in his standing it on the floor while he lay down at full length, holding it with one hand, drawing with the other, and continuing the flow of his commentary. I can myself remember how, after one of his lectures on Pragmatism in the Horace Mann Auditorium in New York, being assailed with questions by people who came up to the edge of the platform, he ended by sitting on that edge himself, all in his frock-coat as he was, his feet hanging down, with his usual complete absorption in the subject, and the look of human and mellow consideration which distinguished him at such moments, meeting the thoughts of the inquirers, whose attention also was entirely riveted. If this suggests a lack of dignity, it misleads, for dignity never forsook him, such was the inherent strength of tone and bearing. In one respect