Biography
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6. The Second Vocational Turn: Science, Illness
In the Fall of 1861, William James entered the Lawrence Scientific School to study first chemistry, then anatomy and biology. There William's study under Jeffries Wyman was most influential. Wyman accepted evolutionary theory and taught the basic theory to the young William (William entered Lawrence only two years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species). Evolutionary theory from then on became a central influence in William's work in physiology, psychology, and philosophy.
William became fully immersed in the kind of formal study he craved; however, even this did not thwart a nagging despair that loomed constantly over the young man. It was clear even to his teachers that, as his chemistry professor Charles Eliot put it, "his work was much interfered by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined to be a delicacy of nervous constitution."
Coupled with this decline of mental stability were financial concerns of his parents that motivated a new direction. In 1864, upon the urging of Wyman, William entered Harvard Medical School. Rather than contiguous, uninterrupted study in medicine however, William followed the charismatic biologist Louis Agassiz to Brazil in 1865 for an extended expedition. Though he enjoyed the country and its people, William was thoroughly uninterested in the activities of a biologist, and he was clearly in stark disagreement with Agassiz's placement of biology under the care of divine revelation. In a letter home he even mentions that such work had made him certain that philosophy should be his true pursuit.[5] Furthermore, during the trip William came down with a form of smallpox that hospitalized him and left him temporarily blinded. Along with mental troubles, physical illness and vision problems would recur throughout the remainder of his life.
The recurrence of illness is evidenced within a year of his return from Brazil in 1866, and regularly for six years beyond, William spent five of them battling illness, alternating between affliction and convalescence. The symptoms were depression, irritability, back pain, as well as gastric disruption. Again, like his father, such critical times called for changes in scenery. Seeking a respite for his depression, a balm for his aching back, and an opportunity to learn the German language better, William set out in the spring of 1867 for Dresden, but there he found no relief from his pain and anguish.
It was during this time that he began to turn critical attention to his father's work, and in so doing repudiated his father's belief that complete subjugation of the self to God was the only path to true moral and spiritual peace. If we are to achieve anything we might call "moral," William argued, we must do so through our own efforts. "Everything we know and are is through men," he stated in a letter of 1868. "We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However mean a man may be, man is the best we know."[6]
This potency of human power would persist not only in William's writings but in his life as well. However, no amount of will power was yet able to turn the tide of depression, and he wrote his father from Berlin that "the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention."[7] This would not be the last consideration of suicide William would utter, but clinging to his faith in the power of human effort kept him from succumbing to such thoughts.
During his years in Europe, William took the time to study even in the midst of depression. Of particular interest to his later work was a brief time spent in Heidelberg studying physiology under Hermann von Helmholtz and psychology with Wilhelm Wundt. While these contacts were disappointingly underdeveloped for William, the influence of Helmholtz and Wundt was decisive in his approach to physiology – an approach that evolved quickly into experimental psychology resulting in the first academic recognition of the latter field at Harvard during the 1870s and, later, William's own seminal two-volume work The Principles of Psychology. Such results, however, were still years off, and though the germination process had begun, William had yet to light upon its importance to his career direction. Instead, he decided that the "vagabond life" was not for him and in the fall of 1868 he moved back to the United States.
[5] See Skrupskelis K, Berkekey EM (eds). 1992. The correspondence of William James. Volume 1: William and Henry, 1861-1884. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. p 8.
[6] See McDermott JJ, Skrupskelis K, Berkekey EM (eds). 1995. The correspondence of William James. Volume 4: 1856-1877. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. p 249.
[7] See ibid, p 194.
Source: Talisse RB, Hester DM. 2004. Lives in transition: experiencing James. In On James, chap 1. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing. pp. 5-7. [Adapted by permission of the authors.]
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