Kitabı oku: «The Letters of William James, Vol. 1», sayfa 13
To Charles Renouvier
CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 2, 1872.
MONSIEUR,—Je viens d'apprendre par votre "Science de la Morale," que l'ouvrage de M. Lequier, auquel vous faites renvoi dans votre deuxième Essai de Critique, n'a jamais été mis en vente. Ceci explique l'insuccès avec lequel j'ai pendant longtemps tâché de me le procurer par la voie de la librairie.
Serait-ce trop vous demander, s'il vous restait encore des exemplaires, de m'en envoyer un, que je présenterais, après l'avoir lu, en votre nom, à la bibliothèque Universitaire de cette ville?
Si l'édition est déjà épuisée, ne vous mettez pas en peine de me répondre, et que le vif intérêt que je prends à vos idées serve d'excuse à ma demande. Je ne peux pas laisser échapper cette occasion de vous dire toute l'admiration et la reconnaissance que m'ont inspirée la lecture de vos Essais (sauf le 3me, que je n'ai pas encore lu). Grâce à vous, je possède pour la première fois une conception intelligible et raisonnable de la Liberté. Je m'y suis rangé à peu près. Sur d'autres points de votre philosophie il me reste encore des doutes, mais je puis dire que par elle je commence à renaître à la vie morale; et croyez, monsieur, que ce n'est pas une petite chose!
Chez nous, c'est la philosophie de Mill, Bain, et Spencer qui emporte tout à présent devant lui. Elle fait d'excellents travaux en psychologie, mais au point de vue pratique elle est déterministe et matérialiste, et déjà je crois aperçevoir en Angleterre les symptomes d'une renaissance de la pensée religieuse. Votre philosophie par son côté phénoméniste semble très propre à frapper les ésprits élevés dans l'école empirique anglaise, et je ne doute pas dès qu'elle sera un peu mieux connue en Angleterre et dans ce pays, qu'elle n'ait un assez grand retentissement. Elle paraît faire son chemin lentement; mais je suis convaincu que chaque année nous rapprochera du jour où elle sera reconnue de tous comme étant la plus forte tentative philosophique que le siècle ait vue naître en France, et qu'elle comptera toujours comme un des grands jalons dans l'histoire de la speculation. Dès que ma santé (depuis quelques années très mauvaise) me permet un travail intellectuel un peu sérieux, je me propose d'en faire une étude plus approfondie et plus critique, et d'en donner un compte-rendu dans une de nos revues. Si donc, monsieur, il se trouve un exemplaire encore disponible de la "Rech[erche] d'une première Verité," j'oserai vous prier de l'envoyer à l'adresse de la libraire ci-incluse, en écrivant mon nom sur la couverture. M. Galette soldera tous les frais, s'il s'en trouve.
Veuillez encore une fois, cher monsieur, croire aux sentiments d'admiration et de haut respect avec lesquels je suis votre très obéissant serviteur,
WILLIAM JAMES.
VII
1872-1878
First Years of Teaching
IN 1872 President Eliot wished to provide instruction in physiology and hygiene for the Harvard undergraduates, and looked about him for instructors. He had formed an impression of James ten years before which, as he said, "was later to become useful to Harvard University," and in the interval he had known him as a Cambridge neighbor and had been aware of the direction his interests had taken. He proposed that James and Dr. Thomas Dwight—a young anatomist who was also to become an eminent teacher—should share in the new undertaking. In August, 1872, the College appointed James "Instructor in Physiology," to conduct three exercises a week "during half of the ensuing academic year." Thus began a service in the University which was to be almost continuously active and engrossing until 1907.
The fact that James began by teaching anatomy and physiology, passed thence to psychology, and last to philosophy, has been wrongly cited as if his interest in each successive subject of his college work had been the fruit of his experience in teaching the preceding subject. This inference from the mere sequence of events will appear strange to attentive readers of what has gone before. Indeed, if the fact that James devoted a good share of his time to physiology in the seventies calls for remark at all, it should be noted that his subject, from soon after the beginning, was really physiological psychology, and that—more interesting than anything else in this connection—one may discern a patient surrender to limitations imposed by the state of his health on the one hand, and on the other a sound sense of the value of physiology to psychological investigations and so to philosophy, as both underlying the sequence of events in his teaching. Whatever may have been the succession of his college "courses," psychology and philosophy were never divorced from each other in his thought or in his writings. Thus it is interesting to find, that at the very moment of his engagement to teach physiology,—at a date intermediate between the appointment and the commencement of the course in fact,—he wrote to his brother, "If I were well enough, now would be my chance to strike at Harvard College, for Peterson has just resigned his sub-professorship of philosophy, and I know of no very formidable opponent. But it's impossible. I keep up a small daily pegging at my physiology, whose duties don't begin till January, and which I shall find easy, I think."
He had needed definite duties and responsibilities and more or less recognized his need; so he undertook to teach a subject which, though congenial and interesting, lay distinctly off the path of his deepest inclination.
The first three fragments that follow refer to his preparation for the plunge into teaching. The course on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology was given by Dwight and James under the general head of Natural History and was an "elective" open to Juniors and Seniors. "As the course was experimental and a part of the new expansion of the Elective System," writes President Eliot, "the President and the Faculty were interested in the fact that the new course under these two young instructors attracted 28 Juniors and 25 Seniors."
To Henry James
SCARBORO, Aug. 24, 1872.
The appointment to teach physiology is a perfect God-send to me just now, an external motive to work, which yet does not strain me—a dealing with men instead of my own mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late and which it will certainly do me good to drop for a year....
CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 24, 1872.
I go into the Medical School nearly every morning to hear Bowditch lecture, or paddle round in his laboratory. It is a noble thing for one's spirits to have some responsible work to do. I enjoy my revived physiological reading greatly, and have in a corporeal sense been better for the past four or five weeks than I have been at all since you left....
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 13, 1873.
This morning arose, went to Brewer's to get two partridges to garnish our cod-fish dinner. Bought at Richardson's an "Appleton's Journal" containing part of "Bressant," a novel by Julian Hawthorne, to send Bob Temple. At 10.30 arrived your letter of January 26th, which was a very pleasant continuation of your Aufenthalt in Rome. At 12.30, after reading an hour in Flint's "Physiology," I went to town, paid a bill of Randidge's, looked into the Athenæum reading-room, got one dozen raw oysters at Higgins's saloon in Court Street, came out again, thermometer having risen to near thawing point, dozed half an hour before the fire, and am now writing this to you.
I am enjoying a two weeks' respite from tuition, the boys being condemned to pass examinations, in which I luckily take no part at present. I find the work very interesting and stimulating. It presents two problems, the intellectual one—how best to state your matter to them; and the practical one—how to govern them, stir them up, not bore them, yet make them work, etc. I should think it not unpleasant as a permanent thing. The authority is at first rather flattering to one. So far, I seem to have succeeded in interesting them, for they are admirably attentive, and I hear expressions of satisfaction on their part. Whether it will go on next year can't at this hour, for many reasons, be decided. I have done almost absolutely no visiting this winter, and seen hardly anyone or heard anything till last week, when a sort of frenzy took possession of me and I went to a symphony concert and thrice to the theatre. A most lovely English actress, young, innocent, refined, has been playing Juliet, which play I enjoyed most intensely, though it was at the Boston Theatre and her support almost as poor as it could have been. Neilson is she hight. I ne'er heard of her before. A rival American beauty has been playing a stinking thing of Sardou's ("Agnes") at the Globe, which disgusted me with cleverness. Her name is Miss Ethel, and she is a ladylike but depressing phenomenon, all made up of nerves and American insubstantiality. I have read hardly anything of late, some of the immortal Wordsworth's "Excursion" having been the best. I have simply shaken hands with Gray since his engagement, and have only seen Holmes twice this winter. I fear he is at last feeling the effects of his overwork....
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 6, 1873.
I have been cut out all this winter from the men with whom I used to gossip on generalities, Holmes, Putnam, Peirce, Shaler, John Gray and, last not least, yourself. I rather hanker after it, Bowditch being almost the only man I have seen anything of this winter, and that at his laboratory.... Child and I have struck up quite an intimacy.... T. S. Perry is my only surviving crony. He dines pretty regular once a week here.... Ever your affectionate
W. J.
The next letter, although not from William James, will help to fill out the picture.
Henry James, Senior, to Henry James
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 18, 1873.
[William] gets on greatly with his teaching; his students—fifty-seven of them—are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he will have next year a still larger number by his fame. He came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and after walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriacal"—he used that word, though perhaps less in substance than form—"and now with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the difference between death and life."
He had a great effusion. I was afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but more than anything else, his having given up the notion that all mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of the fact of the change, I never had been more delighted than by hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips. He has been shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I have known him before....
James's first Harvard appointment had been for one year only. In the spring of 1873 the question of its renewal on somewhat different terms came up. President Eliot informed him that the College wished some one man to give the instruction which he and Dr. Dwight had shared between them, and offered him the whole course, including the anatomy.
It cost him "some perplexity to make the decision." He thought he saw that such an instructorship "might easily grow into a permanent biological appointment, to succeed Wyman, perhaps." At first he resolved "to fight it out on the line of mental science," feeling that "with such arrears of lost time behind [him] and such curtailed power of work," he could no longer "afford to make so considerable an expedition into the field of anatomy." But when he then considered himself as a possible future teacher of philosophy, he was overwhelmed by a feeling which he recorded on a page of his diary: "Philosophical activity as a business is not normal for most men, and not for me.... To make the form of all possible thought the prevailing matter of one's thought breeds hypochondria. Of course my deepest interest will, as ever, lie with the most general problems. But … my strongest moral and intellectual craving is for some stable reality to lean upon.... That gets reality for us in which we place our responsibility, and the concrete facts in which a biologist's responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant mood is on him; and a basis too upon which he can passively float and tide over times of weakness and depression, trusting all the while blindly in the beneficence of nature's forces, and the return of higher opportunities." Accordingly he determined to give himself to biology, reporting to his brother Henry, who was at that time in Europe, "I am not a strong enough man to choose the other and nobler lot in life, but I can in a less penetrating way work out a philosophy in the midst of the other duties...."
As the summer went on, he still had misgivings that he would not be strong enough to prepare and conduct the laboratory demonstrations necessary for a large class in comparative anatomy and physiology. He saw that his first year of teaching had been "of great moral service to him," but thought that in other ways the strain and fatigue had been a brake upon the rate of his wished-for improvement. He therefore made up his mind to postpone the instructorship for a year and go abroad once more.
These hesitations, and a few months in Europe, marked the end of the period of morbid depression through which the reader has been following him. He returned to America eager for work.
Meanwhile parts of four letters written while he was abroad may be given.
To his Family
ON BOARD S.S. SPAIN, Oct. 17, 1873.
DEAREST FAMILY,—I begin my Queenstown letter now because the first section of the voyage seems to be closing. The delicious warm stern wind, cloudy sky and smooth sea which we have had, unlike anything I remember on the Atlantic, threatens to change into something less agreeable, for the wind is fresh ahead, and the waves all capped with white and the vessel begins to roll more and more. Hitherto she has not rolled an inch, and all our days have been spent on deck, and I have enjoyed less sickness than ever before; though I must say I loathe the element. I am confirmed in my preference for big boats, and shall probably try one of the Inman line when I return, as this, sweet Alice, is rather Cunardy as to its table and sitting accommodations. Miss K– and her two friends sit opposite me at meals and seem to ply a good knife and fork. The other passengers are inoffensive and quiet, with the exception of my roommate, who is a fine fellow, and a lovely young missionary going to the Gabun coast to convert the niggers—a fearful waste of herself, one is tempted to think. There are eleven missionaries on board, and a young lady who is traveling with a party of them and confided to me yesterday that she dreaded it was her doom to become one too. My chum is a graduate of Bowdoin College, going to study two years in Europe on money which he made during his vacations by peddling quack medicines of his own concoction, and cutting corns. He has supported himself four years in this way, and abgesehen from the swindle of his life in vacation time, is an honor to his native land, without prejudices and full of animal spirits, wit and intelligence. We wash in the same basin. He has never tasted spirituous liquor. I am also intimate with a French commercial traveler, incredibly ignorant, but extremely good-natured and gentlemanly. I have now determined to stick to the missionary as close as possible. She is twenty-four years old and very beautiful. I finished the "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" yesterday. A perfectly beautiful book, beside which "Good-bye, Sweetheart," which I have begun, tastes coarse.
Good-bye. I hope a storm won't arise, but if it does, I'm glad enough to be in such an extraordinarily steady ship. I pity you at home without me, and long to pat the rich, creamy throat of little sister. (Expression derived from "Goodbye, Sweetheart.")
Friday Morn.
Ach! I thought yesterday was Friday, but found in the evening that it was only Thursday. No matter, six days are now past. As I predicted, the sea grew pretty big before sundown and the ship has been skipping about all night like a lively kitten. But her motion is delightfully easy, and no one, so far as I can see, has been sick. I never was better in my life than yesterday made me. Nevertheless, little Sister, in looking at the black waves with their skin of silver lace I have regretted saying that safety was a minor consideration with me. I doubt in my heart that even comfort is to be preferred to danger. The sea looks too indigestible—the all-digesting sea! I threw away "Goodbye, Sweetheart" at the 40th page and have begun the "Tour of the World in Eighty Days," a much better book. I am sorry that the little beauty's care for her Bro.'s comfort did not go so far as to provide him with a needle-and-thread-book, etc. True sympathy divines wants; and a sister who could not foresee that in three days her bro. should be driven to borrowing Miss K–'s needle-book to sew on his buttons cannot be said to be in very close magnetic relations with him. I lurched about the deck arm in arm with the young missionary yestreen. I told her that, if I were a missionary, instead of going to the most unhealthy part of Africa, I would choose, say, Paris for a field. She, all unconscious of the subtle humor of my remark, said, "Oh, yes! there are fearful numbers of heathen there!" I have just rolled out of bed and into my clothes, and write this in my stateroom, but can stand no longer its aromatic air and hasten to say good-bye and mount to the deck.... Good-bye, good-bye. Ever your loving
W. J.
On landing, James proceeded to Florence, to join his brother Henry for a winter in Italy.
To his Sister
FLORENCE, Oct. 29 [1873].12 midnight.
BELOVED SWEETLINGTON,—At this solemn hour I can't go to sleep without remembering thee and thy beauty. I have just arrived from an eleven-hours ride from Turin, pouring rain all the way. Ditto yesterday during my twenty-two-hours ride from Paris. The Angel sleeps in number 39 hard by, all unwitting that I, the Demon (or perhaps you have already begun in your talks to distinguish me from him as the Archangel), am here at last. I wouldn't for worlds disturb this his last independent slumber.
Not having seen the sun but for three days (on board ship) since the eleventh, the natural gloom of my disposition and circumstances has been much aggravated. And I had in London and Paris a pretty melancholy time. I stayed but two days and one night in the latter place, which, according to the law of opposition that rules your opinions and mine, seemed to me a very tedious place. Its Haussmanization has produced a terribly monotonous-looking city—no expression of having grown, in any of the quarters I visited, and I did not have time to bring to the surface what power I may possess of sympathizing with the French way of being and doing. The awful thin and slow dinner in the tremendously imperial dining-room of the Hôtel du Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglementation of everything visible, contrasted with the volcanic situation of things at the present moment, all a-kinder turned my plain Yankee stomach, which has not yet recovered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Théâtre Français and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splendidly represented. Altogether I don't care if I never go to Paris again. London "impressed" me twelve times as much. Today in Italy my spirits have riz. The draggle-tailed physiognomy of the railway stations on the way here, the beautifully good-natured easy-going expression on the faces of the railway officials, the charming dialogue I have just had with the aged but angelic chambermaid whose phrases I managed to understand the sense of as a whole without recognizing any particular words—together with the consciousness of having for a time come to my journey's end and of the certainty of breakfasting tomorrow with the Angel, all let me go to bed with a light heart; hoping that yours is as much so, beloved Alice and all....
