the course. But after a lecture or two of preliminaries the thicket became alive, vistas opened, not toward the Absolute to which the book was driving, but to all manner of lighted clearings and glades of intelligence. The discourses were unmethodical, colloquial, yet the method of a mind that had already thought out most of the things discussed in the book soon became evident. The papery attributes of the figment in the text-book were peeled off one after another and thrown into the waste-basket. One day, with his delightful mixture of alertness and nonchalance, James was reducing a word to its meanings, trying to find the heart of it by pulling away some of its connotations. There was no heart in it. One student, who had not quite followed the game and still mistook the faceless abstraction for the god of his fathers, grew aghast at the process of verbal denudation and cried out, "But I do not see how that takes away my God." Professor James paused for a puzzled moment and then replied, "It doesn't. Your God stands on his own hind legs." Then he pursued the idea, often found in his books, that the metaphysical Absolute is like an anatomist's manikin. It can be taken apart and put together; it may be a useful diagram of a living being, but it is itself dead. Since he permitted himself such homely metaphors (indeed, 9 he took pleasure in a slang trope, politely apologizing for its vulgarity), one may say that his philosophy stands on its own hind legs. And he left standing room for other men's convictions. He respected what stands alone, and was suspicious of artificial props. Exuberant foe of all ghostly abstractions and of reasons that smack of intellectual dishonesty, he deferred humbly to the faiths and feelings of men. He was a learner at the feet of life and in that attitude he kept his students. But to represent him so (the words are at fault) savours of a sort of pious solemnity quite foreign to his spirit of animated discursive inquiry. Most often he took his students on holiday explorations, and in the midst of an intellectual picnic he turned poet and prophet and spoke with an eloquence which no man less than a genius can approach. When his discourses take shape in print they retain their colloquial informality and gain heightened power from compression and rearrangement. His "Psychology," however solid a text-book it may be, is really a series of literary essays. If the chapter on Habit were bound in a volume of Stevenson or Emerson, it might surprise us there, but it would not be inharmonious with its surroundings. Other philosophers talk of previous philosophers and of such ancient literature as has become respectable and dignified. James refers abundantly to modern poets and essayists, Whitman, Richard Jefferies, Edward Carpenter, Swinburne, Tennyson, Tolstoy, James Thomson, Thackeray, Chesterton and H. G. Wells. Some psychologists throw life into rigid cold shadows cast by an artificial light; James views the world in the sunlight of nature which overflows and streams beyond the shadow-casting facts. His "Varieties of Religious Experience" is an anthology of poetry and biography, a study not of theologies, but of human beings; there is something capaciously tolerant about the book, as if the mind that made it were large enough to understand and value any sort of man, even though candour Much of James's work is a war of words - that is, a war of life against words. For this task no man was ever better fitted. They who would "nip" Pragmatism "in the bud" (an operation which one critic regards as the present duty of philosophy) must choose sharp, hard weapons lest the assaulting edges be nicked on the steel they encounter. James outstrips all his rivals in his power over language, language professional and colloquial, diurnal and traditional. If there be reason in the old idea that clarity of statement is proof of truth, he is unassailably true. He has defined himself in his account of Bergson. "If anything can make hard things easy to follow it is a style like Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an American reviewer lately called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a flexibility of verbal resource that fol 9 seduces lows the thought without crease or wrinkle, as elastic under- James, too, is straightforward, rapid, luminous; moreover, he has a humour rare in philosophers, a whimsical, wayward style of sliding round venerable monuments of superstition, a variety and adaptability not only to his argumentative purpose, but to the moods of human beings. The expositor writes at his subject; the man of letters writes at living persons. James strikes like a poet at the middle of your nature and discovers, what only the man of sympathy can give you courage to feel, that the avenues of approach to your centre of intelligence are populous with ideas. No doubt his eloquence is a consolation to his opponents, who will take refuge in the inhuman notion that true wisdom is dull and that beauty is meretricious. But James has himself swept away the classroom fallacy that stupidity of expression is a warrant of philosophic profundity. His chapter on Hegel in "A Pluralistic Universe" is a declaration of independence, one article of which relates to the question of style. "There seems something grotesque and saugrenu in the pretension of a style so disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds to be the authentic mothertongue of reason." James is a master of words, and his mastery has fitted him to clear away some towering structures that forbade a free passage to the open country. He has pierced many frowning champions and found them, like the formidable knight of Arthurian legend, to hold but a weak boy inside the shining accoutrement. He knew the core and fringes of terms and was not to be deceived by the fallacies involved in them. He delighted to shake a philosophic word and make it give up its meaning or give up the ghost. Too many words, he thought, gave up nothing but ghosts. He liked to strip a phrase of its ancestral respectability, to wipe off its satellitious splendours, send it into a fight with life, and see it come back bruised and faint. He enjoyed pulling a formulated solemnity from its precarious one-sided attachment to a metaphysical edifice and then scrutinizing the fragments. But he was destructive only in the interests of clarity and honesty. The superficial mistook his dexterity and lightness of heart for frivolity. His ready metaphor about the "cash value" of an idea has even been so far debased by a foreign critic as to be used in proof of the commercialism of America! As he cries, "Oh, for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence!" James destroyed sanctified verbalisms because he distrusted the impositions of mere words. His main interest was not words, but life. To the ordinary inquisitive mind philosophy is a region of spectres and vapours; it is not full of substantial things. James strides out of the misty bog to the shining uplands of human life. He knew the world. He was a man of sound information, a biologist, a reader of contemporary writings and contemporary events. When he spoke of political and moral problems it was not from an academic twilight, but from the highway where he walked with other men. |