Profound Cultivation

Another student, Dickinson Miller, recalls a seminar in metaphysics with of intellectual experience, his profound cultivation in literature, in science and in art ..., 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 the 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.... In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, 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 day, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on the way to my class in trepidation!'"

James was not always bright and sparkling in class, and not every student found him stimulating. As R.B. Perry remarks, he would occasionally dismiss his class because he had forgotten his notes, or otherwise felt unequal to the occasion. A student adds: "Sometimes, Dr. James would put his hands to his head and say, 'I can't think to-day. We had better not go on with the class,' and he would dismiss us." Some students, especially those concentrating in the natural sciences, found him "loquacious, vague and obscure." Most people who shared his philosophical curiosity also recognized these weaknesses, but viewed them as inevitable concomitants of his greatness. To many, the uneven lecture style of James suggested a man "muddle-headed" philosophizing to the "simple-mindedness" of the neat, clean reductionists.

James possessed an extraordinary talent for ferreting out values and an equally prodigious capacity for gaining and maintaining a grasp upon them. It was this gift, as well as his flashes of brilliance, that made him memorable as a teacher. Yet the reluctance to sacrifice anything of worth for the sake of a total system produced contradictions and paradoxes.

Even though James gave primacy to pure, raw values, he did not disparage consistency as an ideal. On occasion critics have accused him of advocating belief in whatever seems most pleasant at a given moment. James considered this accusation an "impudent slander" involving a fundamental misunderstanding of pragmatism. He visualized himself, in fact, as pent in "between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him."

Harvard Pragmatism

When it is espoused by hustlers of the market place, pragmatism often sounds like a mixture of common sense and opportunism. Indeed, inasmuch as it advocates belief in propositions that provide satisfaction, it is the age-old philosophy of the common man. The opportunist who cares not a white either for ethics or selfconsistency might be termed a "soft" to get into trouble. The "hard" pragmatist seeks to avoid the eventual plight of his less scrupulous comrade by two tactics. First, he looks upon life as a constant quest for new and higher values. Secondly, he remains ever flexible, ever ready to adjust his ideas in order that the new values may be incorporated into a coherent world scheme.

Though James excelled in the hunt for values, he was less successful at attaining coherency. This failure caused him considerable anguish. It was primarily a personal trait against which he struggled and not a necessary consequence of his philosophic doctrine. One the contrary, James felt that the formal doctrine--over the long run--contained a theory of truth as rigorous as that of any positivist. But, in addition to the demand for rigor, it stresses man's freedom and ultimate moral responsibility. If it were not for his optimism, one might call James an existentialist. And the optimistic style did not come easily. With it James sought to encourage, to cure and rejuvenate--none other so much as himself.

(This is the first in a series of articles on William James, the psychologist and philosopher for whom the new behavioral sciences building will be named.