Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The first William James, the philosopher’s grandfather, was a dry goods millionaire who, but for John Jacob Astor, would have been the richest man in New York state.³⁴ His son Henry liked the bottle too much and was disinherited on William’s death, but contested the will, and won. According to Richard Hofstadter, William James was the first great beneficiary of the scientific education then emerging in the United States during the 1860s and 1870s (and considered later in this chapter). A wag suggested that he was a better writer than his brother Henry, who was a better psychologist. Like Wendell Holmes, William James was sceptical of certitude. One of his favourite phrases was ‘Damn the Absolute!’³⁵ Instead of a formal education, he had travelled across Europe with his family, and although he had never stayed long at any particular school, this travelling gave him experience

. (Somewhere he picked up the ability to draw, too.³⁶) He did finally settle on a career, in science, at Harvard in 1861 and formed part of the circle around Louis Agassiz, the discoverer of the Ice Age and at the time one of the most vociferous critics of Charles Darwin, who based his opposition, he insisted, on science.³⁷

After his early successes, Agassiz’ fortunes had taken a turn for the worse when he lost a quantity of money on a publishing venture. The offer of a lecture series in America promised a way out and indeed, in Boston he was a great success (the Saturday Club was often referred to as Agassiz’ Club). At the time he was in Boston, Harvard was in the process of setting up its school of science (see below, this chapter), and a special chair was founded for him.³⁸

It was Agassiz’ battle with Darwin that interested James the most and, says one of his biographers, it was the example of the Swiss that decided him to become a scientist.³⁹ Agassiz, a deist, described Darwin’s theory as ‘a mistake’; he disputed its facts and considered it ‘mischievous’ rather than serious science.⁴⁰

James wasn’t so sure. He was particularly sceptical of Agassiz’ dogmatism whereas he thought evolutionary theory sparked all sorts of fresh ideas and, what he liked most, revealed biology as acting on very practical, even pragmatic, principles. Natural selection, for James, was a beautiful idea because it was so simple and down-to-earth, with adaptation being no more than a way to address practical problems wherever they occurred.⁴¹ Life, James liked to say, is to be judged by consequences

.⁴²

In 1867, after his spell at Harvard, James went to Germany. In the nineteenth century some nine thousand Americans visited Germany to study in the universities there, which, as we have seen, were organised along the lines of the various disciplines, rather than as places to teach priests, doctors and lawyers. James went to study with the leading experimental psychologist of the day, Wilhelm Wundt, who had set up the first psychological laboratory, at Leipzig. Wundt’s speciality – physiological psychology, or ‘psychophysics’ – was then regarded as the most likely area to produce advances. The basic assumption of physiological psychology was that all mind (conscious) processes are linked with brain processes, that every conscious thought or action has an organic, physical basis. One of the effects of this was that experimentation had replaced introspection as the primary means of investigation. In this so-called New Psychology, feelings and thoughts were understood as the result of ‘brain secretions’, organic changes which would in time yield to experimental manipulation. James was disappointed by the New Psychology, and by Wundt, who is little read now (and in fact it has now emerged that Wundt himself was drifting away from a rigid experimental approach to psychology).⁴³ Wundt’s chief legacy is that he improved the standing of psychology thanks to his experimental approach. This improved standing of psychology rubbed off on James.

If Wundt’s influence turned out to be incidental, that of the Peirces was much more consequential. Like the Wendell Holmeses and the Jameses, the Peirces were a formidable father-and-son team. Benjamin Peirce may well have been the first world-class mathematician the United States produced (the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton thought that Peirce was ‘the most massive intellect with which I have ever come into close contact’) and he too was one of the eleven founding members of the Saturday Club.⁴⁴