William James

Days of lecturers wearing tails are over. I think when Mr. Hall started they sold in. I had a friend old friend who told me that she had heard him lecture 60 years ago in West LA in a tent an enormous tent and he started about ten in the morning. And she said after supper after everyone had eaten he was still lecturing. A glass of water and pitcher and everything and he went on and on in great unbroken eloquence. So any lecturer at PRS who gets any idea that he's done anything has to wait in line for several lifetimes to get up to par around here is very high. Very high indeed.

We have with William James a real first class mind, probably the greatest mind since Thomas Jefferson in this particular course and he's very very hard to approach significantly. Universities have habitually left people like William James out of the curriculum. You just you hear about them in a footnote and that's about it. And that's because the nexus of his thought is so penetrating and comprehensive that were those thoughts to be taken and worked into the ideational patterns that usually obtain there they would very quickly dissolve most of the so-called structures that obtain for thinking. James as many of you know was the brother of Henry James the great American novelist who we haven't had time to get to yet. I guess I should tell you a little of his life. And I wanted to put something up here.

Both Henry and William James were brought up in a free flow form of ideas. Their father was really somebody. We have one of Henry James Sr.’s books here in the PRS library. It's called The Nature of Evil and it was published in New York in 1855. And Mr. Hall’s had this here I see for quite a long time in the library. He bought it quite a long time ago. But one basic idea maybe that would help you one that I've given up here before. That is to say if we are concerned with learning as a progression of stages leading on to some kind of a conclusive level of attainment. Which we will then call the idea not so much Plato's ideas but an idea that we have a conception of something. This is a form of development in thought which was inadequate for Henry James Sr. and became inadequate for both of his sons. They rather work on a whole different notion and eventually as William James would have it thought is like a stream of consciousness. That indeed has the most particular Items within it. But that all of these particulars taken in terms of a perceptual rather than a conceptual experience yields only a furthering of the stream. And no conception, no idea, no finality. And so it's difficult to handle an individual for whom maturity meant an increasing ability to express himself in an unending kind of a fashion. And so that's the problem we come up to with William James.

I think I should start with his father Henry James Sr. Financially independent. I think he had about $10,000 a year income. This was in the middle 19th century. Very very sufficient. He had a crisis religious spiritual crisis in his life which was repeated by his son William at age 20 in which Henry Sr. experienced utter devastation and visions of complete horror to himself all out of the thin air on one fine afternoon with no apparent cause whatsoever. After searching for several years for a way just to live with himself just to keep down these tremendous bouts of anxiety and tension Henry James Sr. discovered a book on Swedenborg the great religious leader Emanuel Swedenborg and became convinced that Swedenborg was a natural visionary and had had a similar set of experiences and he adopted the Swedenborgian point of view but not religion. In fact he subscribed for quite a long time to the Swedenborg Journal and finally wrote a letter cancelling his subscription when he said it was too bad that the followers of Swedenborg had made an institution out of him completely missing the significance of the man's experience. It's sort of a paradigm for what would happen to William James because of the wealth of Henry Sr. because of his international cosmopolitan and character. He was at home in Europe as he was in the United States.

The James children, there were five altogether, one daughter. The James children grew up going back and forth between the United States and Europe constantly I think several dozen times. William James in his life went across the Atlantic Ocean so there's almost no sense in keeping track. He was just constantly all his life for 68 years traveling back and forth. His young childhood and education were bits and pieces of quality and excellence strung together by the continuous experience of his father's open mobile mind. He was educated a little bit in New York a little bit in New England a little bit in Geneva a little bit in London. Paris. Et cetera. Et cetera. So that if you can imagine an image James's childhood was like a bunch of glittering exotic well crafted beads of experience all from different areas all of different colors and shapes and strung together on the necklace strand of the dinnertime conversations mainly of his father and his brothers. And his father particularly was fond of the idea that supper or dinner should go on for several hours and that this opportunity one should speak openly about any and everything under the sun. And they did this constantly throughout their lives so that William and Henry especially being the oldest children. William the oldest of all were constantly absorbing this facility with language which when they were young was precocious and as they grew to manhood became stupendous really.

The command of the English language by the James brothers is something really to behold. In fact late in his life when James would deliver a series of lectures at Oxford and he laid into Hegel who had great command of the German language it was with his great command of the English language that he was able to specify exactly what he didn't like in very very well wrought convoluted phrases. This command of expression this colorful hodgepodge of background. The dependence upon his father for continuity in his intellectual life began to produce in William James a kind of a psychophysical concavity which as he grew to manhood became rather fragile. Whenever he thought about it so that he became rather sickly at various moments in his life prone to long bouts of depression or physical psychophysical ailments and these would hound him for most of his life. Then there would be periods when the opposite would be true and he would feel himself just a joyous part of life. He was assigned as a youngster when they finally decided that they were going to locate themselves in the Boston area. He decided that - he was about a teenager at this time - that he needed more of an exposure outside of the Atlantic civilization that he had been exposed to. So he signed on to an expedition that was leaving for South America for Brazil under the famed professor Louis Agassiz who was going to go to the Amazon River for at least six months perhaps a year perhaps longer to collect specimens for Harvard University.

James and several other sons of distinguished families signed on board and when they got to Rio de Janeiro James had one of his bouts with illness and it very quickly manifested into something which was diagnosed as either a severe type of measles or possibly smallpox or possibly something else. We've heard of cases with Wilhelm Reich and Nikos Kazantzakis of that strange medieval malady Saint's disease where the body is covered with sores and lesions until a break in this deep unconscious polarity is made at any rate for about three months. James the young James was kept in seclusion in Rio and then as he began to recover he was making arrangements to go back home. He suddenly found that he had this tremendous élan, this desire to see the Amazon. And so for the next five months he spent going further and further up the Amazon with this expedition and for many long weeks he and maybe one native would go off by themselves on some river that had never been explored collecting examples and bringing them back to the boat so that this tremendous exertion of physical vitality followed this period of sickliness in Rio. And of course James became sunburnt and ruddy exposed to all kinds of vicissitudes and diseases none of which touched him harmed him stopped him and after five months of this he was ready to take the samples back to Harvard.

So one wonders about this seesawing vitality of William James. And in fact he himself began to wonder about this and later in life would write a small book. And we have a copy here someplace called On Vital Reserves just a very small little book. And the first part is called The Energies of Men. And the second little part in here is The Gospel of Relaxation. And in fact the only article that ever appeared in press on William James is on this little book On Vital Reserves in 1954. Henry Drake wrote an essay on this and it's very interesting to read. The book itself is a wonderful little metronome on the personality and insight into it. On William James when he returned from this Amazon expedition his world much enlarged he began to wonder what his particular purpose in life could be. And in this vacillation he began to penetrate deeper and deeper into his own qualities as a person. When suddenly as he explains in his own writing in the spring of 1870.

“Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there when suddenly there fell upon me without warning just as if it came out of the darkness a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum a black haired youth with greenish skin entirely idiotic who used to sit all day on one of the benches or rather shelves against the wall with his knees drawn up against his chin and the coarse grey undershirt which was his only garment drawn over them enclosing the entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely nonhuman.”

You can see what an archetypal image of transcendental horror his mind had presented to himself.

“This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other that shape me. I felt potentially nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate. If the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him there was such a horror of him and such a perception of my own momentary discrepancy from him that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I have never known before and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation and although the immediate feelings passed away the experiences made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded but for months I was unable to go alone into the dark.”

So he found himself in the early spring of 1870 subject to this kind of a condition. He had been brought up to put absolutely no faith and any kind of a conceptual system any kind of a religious resolve but rather to have confidence in the ability of one's own personal flow and the specificity of observing the actual facts around him the actual conditions and that out of this he would be able to create an understanding a net of capacity with which to carry on for himself. So he began to read a page at a time when he could stand it. Finally a few pages at a time. He began to think whenever he could spare a few moments. And finally through the spring and through the summer of 1870 he began to piece together for himself a little bit of a chance for an insight. It was then that he ran across a book that had a phrase about free will. The book by a Frenchman Renouvier. And James suddenly had this thought occur to him that his first act of free will would be to believe that he had free will. That since there was nothing forbidding him ideational or conceptually from holding and having this position he would assume it and would go on as if it were absolutely true. And why not. And so he wrote out in his diary “my act today my first act of free will is to assert that I have it.”

And he went on from there and began building day by day and month by month a series of confirmations for himself which began to add up to a pattern of life or a pattern that allowed life to go on for himself in this condition. Some years pass and a family friend became appointed as the president of Harvard University. Eliot. And Professor Eliot having known the young James boy since he was very very small having seen him grow up knew the parents and so forth decided that he would like to have this intelligent young man on his staff and there was a position open in the physiology department. Now at that time at Harvard in the early 1870s Harvard was not the Harvard that we understand today. You could for instance buy an MA degree for $5 upon application. Now Eliot changed that. And one then had to stay a year and pay a little bit more and then receive the MA degree. The conditions have attenuated somewhat beyond that I understand from colleagues. James was unsure that he could hold himself together long enough as a personality to deliver the lectures but he became interested in the possibility so he accepted the assignment. And so on a part time basis he began to offer this course on physiology and its relationship to psychology at Harvard University and as the course went on he began to recover a little bit. And in fact he found that he rather enjoyed the ability to have this camaraderie with the students. James was always a wonderful wonderful teacher. He was always ready to go over to anyone and spend infinite time to help them to understand his great kindly personality his excellent use of language. And when he forgot about his lurch into the horrible unknown he was as personable as anybody could be. So after a couple of years it became apparent that James could indeed teach for a living and his income began to go up and pretty soon he was making about $1,200 a year and was promised $2,000 for the next year an adequate income at that time. It was then that his father over dinner one night said to him that he had met on that day William's future wife at a social get together. And of course James very interested in this phenomenon and he asked about her. And Henry Sr. said well you'll have to go over and see for yourself son. These are matters which your own hands will have to take care of. So he observed a short rather brightly styled young lady named Alice Gibbons who was a teacher and who had a very forthright stance as a human being and they began to see each other. And indeed within a year or so they were married and James’ salary went up and suddenly he found himself with a wife and a job and a position. And it began to occur to him that in some mysterious way he never liked to use the word mystical. Although in Mr. Hall's great lecture on William James 30 years ago he styled William James as a mystic. He was just he was a scientific mystic. He absolutely was the mystic of the early scientific age. He didn't want to style himself that way but he began to note in his letters and his diaries what a peculiar capacity he seemed to have for life and for doing things. And in fact soon after he was married he was approached by President Eliot of Harvard to fill a position in the philosophy department. In fact he could have the chairmanship if he wanted. Well James said I really can't go that far and he turned the position down. But he did accept a position moving a little bit over from physiology to psychology. And then because Eliot being President of Harvard and was pulling all sorts of strings and building a great university and a faculty, decided that his young bright protégé in the psychology department needed to have some heft behind him. So he contacted a publisher to contact him to write a book on psychology. And James found himself committed and he supposed that he could have the book finished in a couple of years. And so he began to work on what was to become The Principles of Psychology. It took 12 years to write. And when it was published of course it made James instantly a household word and made him the great professor of psychology.

As he worked on The Principles of Psychology he began to find that the task set out for him was like an epic structure in which he would have to take himself and his perceptions and his capacities to understand throughout the entire structure of man's possibility. He assumed that this assignment to write this book on psychology was not just merely an academic chance to write a textbook but rather was a focus for his entire life and that this was an opportunity for him then to scan the entirety of the known universe as far as he could see it as an individual and in fact The Principles of Psychology - this is the first volume. The two volumes together were about 1200 pages. He had to reduce it down to one volume which was called Psychology: The Briefer Course which became the textbook for psychology for several generations. It was translated into all the major languages incidentally and became a textbook around the world for quite a long time. It’s still in print from Dover Paperbacks and is still read today. But it's interesting that in The Principles of Psychology he begins with the scope of psychology then goes immediately to the functions of the brain and gives in about 70 or 80 pages everything that was known physiologically about the brain so that he commences from an empirical beginning that it is the structure of physical reality as we know it as we can inspect it with our senses with our perception. That's the foundation and the horizon of what we can know that there are no abstract principles brought into play no metaphysical axioms no philosophic stances. Whatever is to emerge will emerge out of the natural experienceable perceptual continuum. And so after the brain we have then a whole section on general conditions of brain activity. Then we have a long beautiful chapter on habit and habit patterns. And what was interesting for him at this point in The Principles of Psychology and in his life habit is the reoccurrence of the brain synapses taking an impulse along a certain path again and again and again. But for him it was interesting to note. Why is it that in the first instance that that path should occur at all? He held that in abeyance and then went into the automaton theory then the mind stuff theory. And throughout that middling section of the first volume began to review all of the theories that were current and dismissing them dissolving them in this wonderful analytical capacity which he had. Then a chapter The Methods and Snares of Psychology and the Relations of Minds to Other Things.

And then after several hundred pages of this physiologically based analysis James had a chapter called The Stream of Thought. And this of course caused consternation in 1890 when it was published. He had a few years before in 1884 written an article in which he had used the phrase stream of thought but this was really the first time that it would appear in print as a formulation. And in fact it was interesting because it was just almost in the same year just a few months before unknown to James that in France that Henri Bergson came out with the notion that consciousness is a stream flow and that when we are habitually addicted to conceiving of the mind as a series of boxes of events and so forth encased by an absolute block universe that we forever exile ourselves from reality. James on the other hand if we can give a short phrase he would have hated giving short pithy phrases to encapsulate anything. All experience is real and whatever is real may be experienced. And that experience is continuous. And the consciousness which develops it has a personal tone and has a pure tone. And the pure consciousness is of an indefinite almost unlimited extent transpersonal. But the experiential personal element comes into close congruous contact and a continuous flow basis so that by the time James came to the stream of thought he began to write in this style. We now begin our study of the mind from within. That is the previous several hundred pages giving a physiological basis was looking at what we can find when we actually observe what we have physiologically.

Now we look inside. Most books start with sensations as the simplest mental facts and proceed synthetically constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness from our natal day is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions that nevertheless contain flaws. The bad consequences develop themselves later on and are irremediable being woven through the whole texture of a work. The first fact for us then as psychologists is that thinking of some sort goes on. This is distinct of course philosophically from Descartes's famous “I think therefore I am” which is a static hypothesis of being. James the first fact is that thinking of some sort goes on and on and on and on. That there is a continuum which is experiential which is noticeable which is in fact personal. Thought tends to personal form its meaning. We know so long as no one asks us to define it but then give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of all philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the next chapter here. A preliminary word will suffice. And of course after The Stream of Thought this long wonderful chapter comes The Consciousness of Self. He writes “My thought belongs with my other thoughts and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought which is nobody's thought. We have no means of ascertaining for we have no experience of. Its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses minds cells concrete particular eyes and use each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought ever comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own absolute insulation. Irreducible pluralism is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought. But my thought. Every thought being owned.”

And he went on from this in the next chapter to talk about The Empirical Self. And you have to realize that in 1890 this is a very difficult expression to bring across. And of course he was misunderstood all the way along the line and we'll see how he made adjustments to that. He wrote “The empirical self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me but it is clear that what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as if we feel and act about ourselves our children. The work of our hands may be as dear to us as our bodies are and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked and so forth. We see that we are therefore a fluctuating situation and its widest possible self. However a man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his not only his body and his psychic powers but all of the extensions out into the so-called material world the so-called real world.”

Well if consciousness is a stream and flow. And if the fluctuating self extends out into this world of perceptual experience the line between individuals begins to blur very very quickly. And we haven't time to go into further ramifications in The Principles of Psychology but James began at this time to be contacted by a lot of writers on psychic matters. In fact F. W. H. Myers president of the Society for Psychic Phenomena in London nominated William James as the president. William's wife Alice began to hold seances in the James home on Harvard's campus at this time. And James of course found himself absolutely astounded that he was appealed to and criticized by varying groups of people who seem to cancel each other out. He was called a materialist by some people an absolute psychic by others and he found that as the book became more and more famous and better and better read that the reviews and the receptions of it were so desperate that it was almost impossible for him to settle on any particular stance.

And so he decided for himself that as he usually did that he would take a trip and visit his brother. Incidentally his brother as he was writing The Principles of Psychology, Henry James was writing the great Portrait of a Lady. One of the great psychological novels in the English language. And when they got to London the James brothers as they talked to each other openly all their lives had this interesting kind of an interplay between them. Both of them having written enormously complicated works trying to express their notions about the world and oddly enough although Henry James appreciated William's writing William felt that Henry's writing was way off. He said there are far too many molecules of expression. Why not be a little more direct? I know you can write simply and beautifully. You've done it all your life. But Henry was after something else. Of course when I guess I will skip over all the reviews. I had some reviews here. The Principles of Psychology. But I think we'll we'll skip over that. He was… As far as he was concerned having written The Principles of Psychology he was finished with psychology. His attention began to go to more philosophic matters and in fact on reviewing the response to The Principles of Psychology he became more and more interested into the forms of thought and the responses in his time to traditional learning and education and he began to accept opportunities to lecture in various places more and more.

He journeyed in the early 1900s to give the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 and they were reprinted as The Varieties of Religious Experience. It went through some 25 printings. In the first 20 years of its existence the varieties of religious experience began to present James really as a philosopher of civilization more than any other appellation in the varieties. He began with several introductory lectures and then very quickly came to a lecture called The Reality of the Unseen and at the beginning of that he states right away and you can see a move up ten years away from The Principles of Psychology.

“The more concrete objects of most men's religion the deities whom they worship are known to them only in idea. In addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as his holiness his justice his mercy his absoluteness. Infinity the various mysteries of the redemptive process the operation of the sacraments. We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful audition or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected and abundantly verify the expectation as we shall also see to influence the behavior subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.”

And then he went on to express that evidently as a universal perception among men humankind we act as if the unseen realities were true. And of course it began to occur to him more and more that he and his own experience had had exactly these kinds of affirmations. For one his early positing of free will existing because he would just assert that it did and that would be his first act of free will. The reality of the unseen chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Very very great eye opener. And in it of course he began to quote Emerson quite extensively and the chapter following it the lecture following it The Religion of Healthy Mindedness. He took Walt Whitman as the great example of someone who seemed to express an ever expanding comprehension of the universe that every aspect which would in normal polarities be considered negative in Whitman were transmuted and made to join in this expansiveness and he calls this The Religion of Healthy Mindedness. And Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order and he expressed these in the first person not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them but vicariously for all men so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words and ends by persuading the reader that “men and women life and death and all things are divinely good.” So this was natural religion.

His next chapter in lecture was on the Sixth Soul in which he brought in the problem of evil. How does evil come to exist? If God is good does it not point out to a natural dilemma? And in fact this became a subject for James's deepest probing. A few years later the question is that as long as good and evil are held as logically related but definitionally differentiated concepts one either has to get rid of God or get rid of logic that it's an unsolvable conundrum. And he will come back to this in a few years and we will too. The next lecture was on The Divided Self. A very very famous one that influenced Jung quite a bit. And it was at this time a little bit later 1909 that Freud and Jung were visiting the United States and met James. And you have to understand at this time James was the great psychologist. He was the professor emeritus. He was had to had 35 years at Harvard had written many wonderful books. Had read French and German since he was a child had known appears in A and won't and all these people from their laboratories some 40 years before. It wasn't like James the American hanger-on meeting the great European minds. It was rather the other way around. James was really the recognized authority in the world at that time.

His chapter on The Divided Self. His lecture was followed by conversion and it took two lectures in order to talk about conversion because he felt that this was the most important aspect in religion. Well after The Varieties of Religious Experience came out and The Principles of Psychology had been out, a small book called Talks to Teachers and Life's Ideals had come out, James found himself increasingly the focus of worldwide fame. He was asked to deliver a lecture series several places and at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1906 he was going to prepare a series of lectures and he chose as a general title Pragmatism. And on the title page A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. He actually began to prepare these lectures very early in 1906 as a preparation. He accepted a professorship for six months at Stanford University. He would be there from January to May of 1906 and he would be paid the sum of $1,000 a month which was a tremendous amount of money and he'd be given the free run of Stanford University. While he was at Stanford he was increasingly aware of the fact that he had become a worldwide spokesman and that he had upon himself the mantle the aegis of that intelligence for whom the entire world was by now an audience. And he delivered a series of great lectures there.

One of them I think I should mention to you because it has become influential time and time again. In fact when I worked with the Gandhi Peace Foundation in the late 60s we reprinted this essay of William James along with Albert Camus, Neither Victims nor Executioners, and made sure that copies were sent around the world to the major libraries and made sure that copies were available. James delivered a lecture called The Moral Equivalent of War and it was delivered on the campus of Stanford in late March 1906. And I think in this you begin to get a little bit of the wonderful ethical character of William James. Just half a page or so just to give you the flavor. Then we'll get on to Pragmatism.

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics or the vicissitudes of trade. There was something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions North and South what about the Civil War and so forth and they will all tell you that this was a great moment in history.”

And then he goes on to say ask them all. Would you want us to do it all over again? No one would agree to it. So with this fleeting vision of a past glory habitually haunts man's imagination mainly because he's trapped in conceptual ideas that manipulate him as if he were a puppet and has no way to break free even when he realizes his dilemma. Unless he has a method which frees him and brings him back. So he writes,

“Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. All the glories of war, the Iliad the Aeneid all of the great Epics. The Napoleonic victories for France etc. etc.. Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. We inherit the warlike type and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales. If there had been tribes of any other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us.”

And then he goes on to say that in fact peace as a term is indissolubly linked to war even for its definition and that “the habits of peace are but the preparations for war.” And thus we are frozen in a continuous tandem of polarities that the ideational conceptual mind constantly foist upon us through our experience and in fact through our education because our educational forms and structures have nothing in them but these conceptual structures. And we almost like obedient animals seem to follow the old paths of the mind again and again and again even to our own oblivion.

He writes that, “the only way that we will ever break out of the pattern of war,” which by the 20th century this is 1906 had become epidemic. And of course everyone could foresee at that time that the world was again maneuvering itself into a very dangerous situation as it was. He said, “the only way was to dissolve totally these old habit patterns that we cannot displace them. They're like handcuffs that have been tattooed to our skin so that they don't exist as something separate from us. But we have to learn to use those instruments in a new way so as not to follow the old habits to oblivion and that the moral equivalent of war was to find a patterning for human beings to shift their glory and their triumph away from killing, away from possessing, away from conceiving reality as static. Possessing all elements which could be had and no one else can have into new forms.”

And he wrote it here. And then we'll take a little break and we'll come back to this that “when the contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere advertisement push adulteration underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack yard he steps on a higher social plane into an atmosphere of service and cooperation of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate.”

Et cetera. Et etc.. So he says that war has become the habitual synthesizer. Emulation. “Here at least men are not flung out of employment as a general.” Etc. etc.. He says that “war has become a ritual sense of bringing people together and we have to especially understand that we must make creative from scratch new social forms of synthesis other than war. That once we have a process, a method of experience which will free us, once we can be individuals we have a notion of crystallizing consciousness. We still have an attempt to remain an actuality but not in this beautiful conception.” And now we have to make a decision. We're going to try to have other things on your plate that you will find the message of Christ interesting enough to keep going even though he never finished the lecture series and can preach later and praise him and shattered. Thank him for all his brilliance and thank him for all kinds of 20 years.

He was praised by the 70% of Jews and devastation and openness and courage that came with the it's great to actually see that this is really happening. What a great lesson for all of us to see the transformation of the church. Well this is great. So some of the changes which might be of interest. William James on Psychical Research is available on the PRS library and Selected Papers on Philosophy is available down there. And I think we have The Will to Believe in Human Immortality in a paperback down there. And there are several others that are there. A real good study The Philosophy of William James by his friend Flournoy. Very hard to find a chain obtain the PRS library hands. This is in case 18 which is philosophy. So there are quite a few items here.

James of course has not yet been assessed. He simply hasn't been seen yet. And I'll show you several interesting features about James's thought. Part of the reason that he hasn't been seen yet is that we still haven't had a comprehensive civilization yet within which to see its own pioneers. William James is very much a pioneer of the direction in which the 20th century has taken. But unfortunately most college courses leave out the beginnings and they just give you a second echelon or third rate or fourth hand developments and they don't tell you where these come from. And so you think, “oh well it must have been this way all the time. Psychology is thus and so, and sociology is thus and so, and philosophy and so forth.” And when you get to probing in well where did these people get their education and where did they get their education and finally you come back that there are seminal individuals not so very long ago who made these disciplines happen. And William James is one of those minds who made psychology. And then he remade a philosophic method which we’ll notice now that the closest resemblance to it is the classical Buddhist logic taught at Nalanda University a thousand years ago that some 20 years after James died a Russian translated a very abstruse philosophic work by Dharmakirti the Nyayabindu the short treatise on logic. And it's interesting to note that with Dharmakirti and Dignaga the great logicians of classical Buddhist India we have minds that see the world in the very same way that William James saw the world only they had an unbroken tradition of some 1500 years of meditative experience to work on. And James had very little that he could count on other than his own experience for a long time.

After coming back from San Francisco from Stanford he worked on his Lowell Institute Lectures. He delivered these lectures many times after this. They perform the duty of a watershed in the sense that it was the first time that an American born philosopher became a worldwide philosophic movement. And several years later when James was in Italy he was surprised to find in Rome a flourishing school of philosophy and philosophers who had adopted him as their guru, if you want, and used his method and used his books. And he was absolutely overcome by the ways in which truthful influences managed to permeate the entire world. And he at that time said that in his letters that he formally gave up the whole idea of professors and universities and courses and credits and all this. He said we have to have a wide open world of human experience and this is the only form of learning that we can now have. And he said it actually works because I have seen it myself as early as the 19 aughts in Pragmatism. He writes “I wish to speak of the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? Are we fated or free? Are we material or spiritual? Here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its retrospective practical consequences.”

What happens, in a sense it's like Jung's saying that in an analysis one asks for what purpose is this manifestation? Where does it go? Here it is manifesting for what purpose? For what ends? Similar here. Try to interpret each notion by tracing its retrospective practical consequences and practical. Here comes from the Greek word pragmatic action, practical. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced then the alternatives mean practically the same thing and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other as being right.

This principle he says was first stated by his friend Charles Sanders Peirce in the 1870s. Peirce was a very radical thinker very brusque person individually was never offered a chair of philosophy because he was always a very difficult person to get along with. James very quietly supported Peirce in indirect ways for most of his adult life. It was just something that he did. He considered the man a genius so he made sure that money is funneled into the Peirce household and he had a source of income. James writes that “pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude but it represents it as it seems to me both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency from verbal solutions from bad a priori reasons from fixed principles or closed systems and pretended absolutes or origins. He turns forever away from that towards concreteness and adequacy towards fact towards action. That means the empiricist temper and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature as against dogma artificiality and the pretence of finality and truth. True but it does not stand for any special result ever. It is a method only but the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I call the temperament of philosophy.”

Teachers of the ultra rationalistic type would be frozen out much as the courier type is frozen out in republics. Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic. And you know what a great part in magic is in words. If you have a name or a formula or incantation of someone you can control the spirit, the genie or whatever that power might be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits and having their names he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. God, matter, reason, the absolute energy are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You're at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out each word, find its practical value, set it at work within the stream of your experience, and move on so that the pragmatic method rarely if ever yields solutions results ends and never leads to absolutes always increases the field of inquiry. Always puts on to a better level of comprehension the flow of inquiry. It appears less as a solution than as a program for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments not answers to enigmas in which we can rest. Pragmatism stiffens all our theories limbers them up and sets each one at work.

And so in Pragmatism then he says we have no dogmas and no doctrines except the method itself and this is a way of proceeding. Well the very first beginning Dharmakirti was a very famous logician. His first sentence “all successful human action is preceded by right knowledge therefore this knowledge will be investigated.” And he goes on to show that the process of this method of inquiry and investigation leads increasingly to a refinement and a making of transparent the natural conditions which are the true context and actual environment for this process of logical inquiry. And that as we become acclimated committed to its vicissitudes we become less and less inclined to accept some kind of external conceptualizing hierarchical structure and more into a flow of ever widening comprehension and interrelatedness that in fact consciousness begins to attain to that state without the con the sheer isness as James once wrote. Searching for a word to express what he was getting at that there is a primordial quality of reality which is perceptually available.

And as Mr. Hall said in his lecture, James in a way showed that if we stop pursuing some idea to grasp we begin to honestly employ the method of true inquiry. We find ourselves absorbed in that process and finally absorbed into a reality which is comprehensive and we no longer need to posit for ourselves some specific differentiated object other than ourselves. We become the method. We become that process of flow and it and its expansiveness and its healthy mindedness becomes a general real condition all by itself without us saying that it is absolute. This development in James's thought began to work its way. And as James began to become quite an elderly individual in his late 60s he was asked again and again to lecture at various universities around the world and he accepted a lectureship at Oxford in the last year of his life as it turned out, to give the Hibbert Lectures and he considered it one of the most important series that he would give. And he knew that he was close to the end. In fact the year before when he had met Freud, Freud related an interesting little incident. He was walking with William James down one of the corridors of one of these great universities. And James gave him his briefcase and said “please go on without me I have an attack of angina and it'll take me a few moments to collect myself.” And that he just stopped and Freud said he walked away. He's on and looked back and it was filled with admiration for the personal courage of William James. Not to create any trouble for anyone to be overly concerned about him or take them out of the flow of their own life process and experience. When he'd recovered himself enough he joined them. He delivered this great series of lectures and it's hardly ever been read or taken a look at really. It's what was called A Pluralistic Universe. In French the title was The Philosophy of Experience and Harvard finally reprinted it after some 60 years, five years ago and I was able to get a copy that way. In The Pluralistic Universe, in this series of lectures, the mature old James takes to task the giants and the person on whose shoulders he presents as having given us the largest dose of conceptualizing habit was the great German philosopher Hegel who had lectured in the early 19th century to fantastic crowds and whose interpreters late in the 19th century began to represent the so-called English Hegelians in various universities and so forth. Lecture three Pluralistic Universe, Hegel and His Method. James writing at age 68.

“Directly or indirectly that strange and powerful genius Hegel has done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than all other influences put together. I must talk a little about him before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments for the absolute. In no philosopher is the fact that a philosopher's vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different things more palpably evident than in Hegel.”

And of course for James they should be congruent. There should be no difference whatsoever. Why? Because there is no absolute. There is no goal. There is the honest application of a universal methodology which yields this transparency of self. On the other hand the vision in his case was that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears. By taking it up as a moment quote ‘moment unto itself’. “This vision was so intense in Hegel and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the midst of it was so weighty that the impression he made has never been effaced once dilated to the scale of the master's eye. The disciples sight could not contract to any lesser prospect. The technique which Hegel used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method. But here his fortune has been quite contrary. Hardly a recent disciple has felt this particular application of the method to be satisfactory. Many have let them drop symbolic of what might someday prove possible of execution but having no literal cogency or value now. Yet these very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can never pass away.”

The case is curious and worthy of our study. Later on he will bring Hegel and his method, the quest for the absolute through a logical construct methodology to task and in conclusions he brought it back again. “No matter what the content of the universe may be if you only allow that it is many everywhere and always that nothing real escapes from having an environment so far from defeating its rationality as the absolutist so unanimously pretend you leave it in possession of the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds. Your relations with it intellectual, emotional, and active remain fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands. It would be a pity if the word rationality were allowed to give us trouble here. It is one of those eulogistic words that both sides claim for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as a system of irrationality. But like most of the words which people use eulogistic only the word rational carries too many many meanings. The most objective one is that of the older logic classical syllogistic logic. The connection between two things is rational when you can infer one from the other. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal. In other words you can do that only when they have a quality in common. But this kind of rationality is just that logic of identity which all disciples of Hegel find insufficient. They supersede it. The logic of the syllogism by a higher rationality of negation and contradiction and make the notion vague again. Then you get the aesthetic or teleological kinds of rationality saying that whatever fits in any way whatever is beautiful or good whatever is purposive or gratify his desire is rational in so far and so forth. Then again according to Hegel whatever is real is rational.”

He had brought this up again and again in the lecture series and in the middle of it I found the best statement of it. The lecture called The Compounding of Consciousness. And so I leave this for the last in this train of thought.

“Let us leave out the soul then and confront what I have just called the residual dilemma. Can we on the one hand give up the logic of identity? Can we on the other believe human experience to be fundamentally irrational? Neither is easy yet it would seem that we must do one or the other. Few philosophers have had the frankness to admit the necessity of choosing between the horns offered. Reality must be rational they have said and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree somehow. Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the dialectic process.”

Bradley is an English philosopher who was contemporaneous with James. Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality incarnate. But what must be and can be is he says, “there must and can be relief from that irrationality and the absolute must already have got the relief in secret ways of its own. Impossible for us to guess at. We of course get no relief.” So Bradley's is a rather ascetic doctrine and he goes on from this and then writes and spoke at Oxford 1909. Well then “What must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic fairly squarely and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life. But that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality, just what it is. I can perhaps suggest to you a little later. Reality. Life experience. Concreteness. Immediacy. Use what word you like, exceeds any logic, overflows and surrounds it. If you like to employ words you logistically as most men do and so encourage confusion. You may say that reality obeys a higher logic or it enjoys a higher rationality but I think that even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than to commingle meanings. So I prefer bluntly to call reality. If not irrationality then at least non-rational in its constitution. And by reality I here mean reality when things happen all temporal reality without exception.”

And so James at the close of his intellectual and academic life suffering terribly from a heart ailment, a decaying heart that was giving him angina pains quite severely, finished these lectures and just barely made it back across the Atlantic Ocean to a farm retreat which he owned in northern New Hampshire. And in August of 1910 James died. He was attended by a large mass of persons all of the living relatives that could assemble were there for the occasion. And I think maybe a word here from one of his biographers. “The death of William James was important news throughout the United States and Europe. Of course the Boston newspapers gave generous space to the event. In the evening transcripts published a series of evaluations of the man and his work. One of these of a man wrote I am almost tempted to describe his death as the removal of the greatest of contemporary Americans. Certainly no other of his time exercised such an international influence as William James did.”

And of course from Europe from Paris from Berlin from London. All of Geneva. All of the centers that had known him. Rome. All the eulogies came in. James's work was the first indication that we had in intelligence of that whole new generation of nuclear physics that was soon to come up. And we find nuclear physicists today talking very much in the same way that William James would have talked about nature and reality and process and flow. He was just before the tremendous Cubist Cubist explosion in art. He was just before the 20th century really blossomed into its own. And like a great intellectual pioneer who had really been the first in his capacity in our civilization to try out a certain well-known path in Asia, he had very few contemporaries who were able to understand him at the time. And so it is oddly enough that only in the last few years have there begun to be studies of William James in terms of what James himself actually had accomplished and wrote.

One of the best, John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James, came out just a few years ago. Wild of course a great professor of philosophy at Harvard and able to show how the existential phenomenological schools of philosophy of merely Ponti Husserl and Heidegger and so forth all owe a lot of their insight and intelligence and language and process to James's pioneering efforts. The influence of James and people like Jung and Freud of course hasn't been explored yet but he really was probably the greatest American mind since Thomas Jefferson and his capacity not only to explore new paths for our civilization but to be able to leave behind him as Mr. Hall said stepping stones which other people can follow.

I think I'll close with what Mr. Hall closed with in 1949 when he lectured on the Mysticism of Henry James. So we are pressing forward in an effort to grasp the unknown only to find in the end that it absorbs us. “We will never be able to take a hold of it and say I possess it. In the end it takes hold of us and absorbs us by saying nothing. And in the silence at the end we have a final proof as if the Zen priests have always so well pointed out. In this pattern we see a large picture of the mystical experience and it seems to me that it more or less ties together the dreams of the dreamers who have gone before and that it is why the experience of the great mystics plus the personal experience of individual growth shows us a way shows us a course and not only reveals this but holds out the promise of its fulfillment so that in the end the mystic and the mystical experience itself are one in this unity. There is the end of the search the end of the quest and the end of the endless piling up of these sequences of thought units. We could take much much more time to the consideration of all this but it seems that it gives us a little vision of a large manor and for little stepping stones to that vision we are appropriately grateful to William James.”

Next week we have a great friend of William James, Henry Adams. And James and Adams, the last two years of James's life, entered into a great correspondence. James was wonderfully pleased to receive Adams’ great book on Mont-Saint-Michel and he saw in it what Adams had done for American history and wrote his great assent saying that this of all the books that I have read of our time will probably be singled out as a classic if we have generations to understand what it is all about.

Henry Adams of course the fourth generation of the Adams family. And his great vision was that the United States in 1900 was at a crossroads and that we needed to have a revision as some psychologists in our time put it. A revisioning of our past in order to catch us up with the fantastic advances we had made in spiritual insight in this country by 1900. So to prepare for himself he wrote a great history of the United States. In the terms of Jefferson and Madison the history of the United States. Just in that period. And then realized that the fulcrum lay even farther back. And so he took Chartres Cathedral and the great Mont-Saint-Michel organization construct and so forth to make his point even more definite. So we'll have Henry Adams next week and we'll see where this American genius at the turn of the century really took hold of the problems. The shame is that American universities never taught our own culture. They were instead consigned to the dusty shelves of has-beens as if history all of a sudden had passed them by and they were no longer useful. And so three generations later we find out that in fact the information, the insights that we need are there on our own shelves just a little higher up than we thought.

We will look at Adams next week.