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CHAPTER XV

WILLIAM JAMES

WILLIAM JAMES was one of three or four important American men of letters of his generation; and it is as man of letters and human being, not as technical philosopher, that we shall discuss him here. To be sure, the professional and the literary aspects of this multitudinously gifted man are not to be completely separated. So far as a maker of books is identified with a limited subject, he must be judged by the standards special to that subject; and James was a philosopher; he wrote little outside metaphysics and psychology; not to discuss him as philosopher would be to neglect his chief importance. But when a writer by virtue of his personality stands forth from the technicalities of his subject and captures imaginations that are not wont to dwell in the special field where he labours, he becomes a man of letters. And the man of letters survives after the philosopher has been tucked away in museums, universities and other preservative institutions.

It is sometimes the case that the lesser philosopher is the greater man of letters, or that the untechnical aspects or portions of a philosopher's work most broadly secure his immortality. Schopenhauer compels admiration from florid optimists and from idle readers of literature who care nothing

for his fundamental theories; whereas Kant, assumed to be a greater philosopher than Schopenhauer, exhausted every resource of human thought and the German language to discourage people from reading him. It is certainly not Plato's metaphysics, but the portrait of Socrates, the poetic, fanciful talk of the master and the young men, which outlive the centuries. If the Absolute should open its thin lips and declare all James's philosophy null and void, James would march prospering just the same, overriding with his cavalry charges of living illustration all the inhibitions of philosophy or any creature thereof.

"It is high time," he says, "to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy." He used not little but much. audie

which he ascribes to Fechner and which he says professorial philosophers usually lack. Systems die, but vision is imperishable. Poets speak with still living voices long after their private beliefs and religions have become dead issues. Transcendentalism is deader than Marley's ghost, but Emerson is not dead. "Pragmatism" may become a dead issue. But the great expounder of it has embedded its principles in vital matter, less ephemeral, less transitory than the stuff of many famous books of philosophy. Every theory, every article of faith which James declared, grew out of the soil of life and was fostered by the most opulent and incandescent imagination among Americans of the generation that is now at three-score years and ten. There is only one other of William James's stature and originality - Mark Twain, Even the fine novelists, Mr.

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Howells and Mr. Henry James, are not the human equals of those two.

In all departments of life which he touched William James was a liberator, a champion of human rights and the privileges of the spirit, a redeemer of his age from stupidity and commonplaceness and intellectual tyranny. He was of the few who reclaimed the arid desert which American literature had been since the passing of their fathers' generation. He redeemed philosophy from rigid and jejune abstraction, made it alive for living people, and tried to make living people alive to philosophy. He was one of a small band who redeemed the "humanistic" departments of Harvard Uni

Xversity from the sterility and impotence into which they

had fallen during the past twenty-five years. The teacher, the philosopher, the man of letters - does he seem to shine the more brilliantly in all three capacities because he had so little competition in his immediate environment? - because great teachers do not as a rule live in university communities, because philosophers do not live in the midst of life, and men of letters contemporary with James almost unanimously refused to be born in these United States?

He was a great teacher in a university where (a dozen years ago, surely) great teachers were few. In the nonscientific departments there was Norton, a survival from a generation that read literature and knew not Ph. D's. There was also one teacher of literature whose merited popularity with his students vainly clamoured in administrative ears for official recognition, which is even now incompletely accorded. And there was the department of philosophy.

These were the only men who produced anything like literature, who could do that which they presumed to teach. In his "Talks to Teachers" James says with mild irony that all we need to do now is to impregnate our organized education with geniuses; he well knew that genius or even a conspicuous talent is the most serious disqualification with which a man can be burdened if he wishes to teach in an American school. In his sketch of Thomas Davidson, who might have added lustre to Harvard had the authorities willed to receive him into the faculty, James protests against the disposition of university officials to reject men of ability in favour of routine professors. The reason, of course, is that routine professors are already in charge and they cannot endure the rivalry of first-rate intellects. The sections of the Harvard faculty which deal with art and letters, those departments which should have a great civilizing influence, which should inspire young men with poetry and beauty and feed their imaginations, have all been benighted in routine, save only the department of philosophy, Palmer, Royce, Santayana and James. It alone is impregnated with genius; its members write significant books. To a small group of men, and to James especially, is due the spiritual salvation of Harvard (or as much of Harvard as the faculty constitutes) during an administration which was hostile to a good deal that is important in education, an administration the more discouraging because so servilely praised. A true disciple of James should hasten to add that Harvard has not been guilty of any unique individual stupidity, for our master tells us that "most human institutions, by the purely

technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view."

James's "Talks to Teachers" is one of those rare manuals of advice whose precepts the counsellor himself put into practice. He treated his pupils as human beings. He assumed them to be intelligent gentlemen, and by this assumption - it illustrates one of the principles of his psychology - he helped them to be so. Their views and interests were to him not juvenile inferiorities to which gowned wisdom graciously condescended; they were equal democratic human stuff, valuable to the man who sat on the other side of the desk, for he was a real philosopher of the race of Socrates. "In a subject like philosophy," he says, "it is really fatal to lose connection with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop tradition only." He talked to his classes as man to man, urbane,

Xgracious, witty, and withal vastly learned. He unrolled

his wisdom without pretension, and without the wrong kind of reservation; to use his own words, he forgot scruples, took the brake off his heart, and let his tongue wag.

The writer remembers one little accident that resulted from his off-hand liberal way of talking philosophy. The subject was a volume of metaphysical theology, a wise but rather dull book, in which the author had mingled together his traditional deity and an abstraction as shapeless as a cloud, and less substantial, consisting of the Babu words of philosophy. In the thicket of words some of us were resignedly losing ourselves and we expected to be lost throughout