Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [91]
He wrote with a fluency, informality, and intimacy that no other psychologist of his time, certainly no German, would have dreamed of using. Of the differing codes governing the several social selves of a man he said, “You must not lie in general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn.”6 To illustrate the difficulty of paying attention to a subject one dislikes he offered this case (probably himself):
One snatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter how trivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of the matter at hand. I know a person, for example, who will poke the fire, pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up the newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation,—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests. Anything but that! 7
He sometimes salted his serious writing with humorous stories and jokes. Describing how Helmholtz and Wundt felt about a psychologist who had recently misapplied their principle of unconscious inference, he wrote, “It would be natural [for them] to feel towards him as the sailor in the story felt towards the horse who got his foot into the stirrup,—‘If you’re going to get on, I must get off.’ ”8
And he could be wonderfully sensitive and empathetic. He visited Helen Keller when she was a young girl and brought her a gift he thought she could particularly appreciate, and which in fact she never forgot—an ostrich feather.
No wonder the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead summed him up as “that adorable genius, William James.”
Born in New York City in 1842, William James was a child of privilege and by all odds should have become a playboy or, at best, a dilettante.9
His Scotch-Irish grandfather, who had come from Ireland, was a shrewd, hardworking businessman and a promoter of the Erie Canal who amassed several million dollars. In consequence, his son Henry (William’s father) had no need to work. Henry went to divinity school for two years, but found its stern Presbyterian doctrines repugnant and quit; he continued, however, to be concerned with religious and philosophic questions all his life. At thirty-three, he had an acute emotional crisis. After dinner, while idly staring at the fire, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a nameless fear—“a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause,”10 he later said—that lasted for only ten seconds but left him badly shaken and prey to recurring anxiety for two years. Physicians, trips, and other distractions were no help, but at last he found relief in the philosophy of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who himself had suffered just such anxiety attacks.
After regaining his health, Henry devoted himself in part to writing works of theology and social reform (he styled himself “a philosopher and seeker of truth”), and in part to the education of his children. Dissatisfied with American schools, he alternately took his family— William James was the eldest of five children—to Europe to broaden their education and experience, and brought them back to their house on Washington Square in New York to keep in touch with their own culture.
As a result, William James attended schools in the United States, England, France, Switzerland, and Germany, and was also privately tutored; became familiar with the major museums and galleries in every city the family visited; acquired fluency in five languages; met, listened to, and talked to such frequenters of the James household as Thoreau, Emerson, Greeley, Hawthorne,