terms of ancestry, history, and upbringing; as is signally illustrated in the James family itself by the divergent development of William and Henry, though both were brought up together by the same father, rather unkindly described by Prof. Santayana as

'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.'

But has not James himself taught us that genius is never deducible from its environment? It springs from so incalculable a confluence of qualities that no one can predict it or take the credit for it; it has to be accepted as a gift of the gods.† James, moreover, has left no history of his spiritual struggles and of the development of his opinions, having, as he says in one of his remarkable and revealing letters to T. W. Ward, soon learnt to consume his own smoke (Letters,' 1, p. 77). These letters are the more important because, during what were probably his most formative years (1869–73), when James was wrestling with a bad spell of physical and mental depression and 'having it out' with the universe, he was living at home in the circle of his Cambridge intimates, and so had little occasion to put his soul on paper.

Nevertheless there remain a few precious traces of the spiritual struggle by which he reached the bracing, moralising atmosphere of his later Weltanschauung. James was clearly not one of the happy, healthy-minded, simple souls, once-born,' impervious to doubt, insensitive to the lacrima rerum, who go on from strength to strength, to finish up flatly in the undrained swamp of spiritual stagnation. He had been a 'sick soul' in his day; as his friend Flournoy revealed, and these 'Letters' confirm (1, p. 145); he had portrayed himself, camouflaged as a 'French correspondent,' in the vivid descrip

* 'Character and Opinion in the United States,' p. 64. James's own beautiful letter to his father, on receiving the news of his last illness, should be compared (1, p. 218).

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† 'Principles of Psychology,' II, ch. 28; Will to Believe,' p. 216 f.

tion of The Varieties' (p. 160). Of his wanderings in the City of Dreadful Night there is no further record; but their fruits preserved James's thought from the insipidities of a callous optimism. We recognise them in the tonic bite' of passages like these:

'The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilisation is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.''

*

or when he tells Benjamin Paul Blood, the 'pluralistic mystic,' to whom he devoted the last article he wrote: I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide,' † and confesses to T. W. Ward that 'all last winter, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment.' ‡

He

James's spiritual troubles were not merely due to bad health and doubts about his professional career. was simultaneously going through an acute religious crisis and considering, not which philosophic theory formulated best the absolute truth about reality, but whether he could think the world such that life in it was endurable. The nature of his crisis, and the means by which he emerged from it, come out best from the following documents-the letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junr. (Letters,' I, p. 82), his contemporary memorandum (1870) proclaiming, after reading Renouvier, that his first act of free will shall be to believe in free will' (ibid. 1, 147), his father's letter to his brother Henry (ibid. 1, 169) (1873), the criticism of Herbert Spencer's definition of mind (Essays and Reviews,' p. 43 f.) published in 1878, and lastly chapters 5, 21, and 28 of 'The Principles of Psychology' (1890).

A comparison of these documents shows, I think, that the essential trouble with James, as with so many of his generation, was the withering of the spiritual values, of God, freedom, and immortality, under the devastating onset of Naturalism. Nowadays some have learnt,

* In the Hibbert Journal' for July, 1910.
† 'Letters,' II, p. 39.

Ibid. 1, p. 129.

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from James as much as from any one, that the situation is by no means desperate, while many, it is to be feared, have grown used to their spiritual losses, and no longer view them tragically. But at that time Naturalism seemed to bear down all opposition with the irresistible might of science, and to leave nothing standing but the meaningless évolutions of matter determined by a mindless mechanism. This view of the world had received an imposing systematic form in the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, whose vogue was even greater in America than in England. Against it James's soul revolted. But instead of defying it by a mere refusal to believe himself an automaton,' or evading it by an equivocal idealism,' which saved the phraseology of spirituality while secretly betraying its cause, James set himself to fight it on its own ground. He began by dividing his enemies, and boldly appealed to Darwin to confute Spencer. He had the acuteness to perceive that Spencerism was essentially 'pre-Darwinian,' and had not really assimilated the method of biology and the implications it had for the theory of the mind's place in nature. Now biological method has no use for the fictions of an inactive, inefficacious mind that merely contemplates' the mechanical routine of happenings without power to intervene or to direct its course. Mr H. V. Knox has excellently shown,* James had seen (as Spencer had not) that biological method implies that mind must have survival-value. It cannot, therefore, be the impotent superfluity to which intellectualistic 'contemplation' reduces it. It must have efficacy, and make a real difference in the course of events. An intelligent and living being is not merely an automatic victim of natural selection.

As

But what is the difference it makes? Simply this, that it is not merely selected, but itself selects. It is active and reacts upon external stimulation, in order to live. That is, it reacts selectively and teleologically, and its ends are determined by the goods it aims at. That it should have a mind at all, and that its mind should function as it does, become intelligible only when we recognise that mind is selective and purposive, through

* The Philosophy of William James,' ch. II.

and through. Its so-called 'cognitive' operations are just as subservient to its vital purposes, just as biologically useful, as any of its other acts. So James concludes:

'I must still contend that the phenomenon of subjective "interest," as soon as the animal consciously realises the latter, appears upon the scene as an absolutely new factor. The knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action-action which to a great extent transforms the world -help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences, or meant, at most, survival. We know so little about the ultimate nature of things, or of ourselves, that it would be sheer folly dogmatically to say that an ideal rational order may not be real' ('Essays and Reviews,' pp. 65, 67).

་

The rest of James's philosophic career was spent in the working out of this programme, though, owing to circumstances beyond his control, he was not, alas, able to complete it. But it is the clue to his 'pragmatism,' a vile and 'unlucky' (11, p. 295) word, which he lamentably adopted from his friend, the queer being,' Charles S. Peirce, whose lectures he could not understand a word of' (1, p. 80), and whose papers he found 'bold, subtle, and incomprehensible' (1, p. 149). He admitted (in letters to me) that 'I dislike "pragmatism," but it seems to have the international right of way,' and that ""Humanism which did not at first much " speak" to me, I now see to be just right'; but nevertheless he chivalrously stuck to 'pragmatism'; because his opponents, seeing what a

* Letters,' II, p. 191. The rest of the description is unfortunately suppressed. Only ignorance of Greek can explain the prevalent philosophic delusion that the word somehow connoted 'practicalism,' and involved 'subjective idealism'; etymologically it should mean a testing of ideas' by things. However, it was not ugly enough for Peirce's taste, and he subsequently substituted 'pragmaticism' for his own brand.

bad word it was, gladly took it up. For the rest he gave the chief credit of his conversion to Renouvier, whose recalcitrance to determinism had kept him in countenance at the turning-point, and whose 'pluralism' had shattered for him the hideous burden of the 'block universe.'

But it was James's nature to confess to more obligations than he owed, and to expand and expound the doctrines he took over, until they became little more than pegs for his own. There is little doubt that his answer to Naturalism was substantially his own achievement. And it is the only sound answer that has ever been devised. It will continue to appeal to all who really feel the pressure of religious problems, in a way that neither theological dogmatism, nor the verbal dialectics of à priori metaphysics, nor mere emotional revolt, can emulate. Its only effective rival is mysticism; for this too assumes a personalist attitude towards reality.

F. C. S. SCHILLER.