Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [93]
Finally, like his father, he was freed from his depression by reading— not Swedenborg but an essay on free will by Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher. As James wrote in his diary:
[I] see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.13
His will to believe in free will worked; he slowly began to recover, although all his life his health remained fragile and he continued to have minor bouts of depression. He spent the next two years reading widely in physiological and philosophical psychology and regaining his mental health. In 1872, nearing thirty, he was still financially dependent on his father and had no plans for his future when Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, a neighbor—the James family had been living in Cambridge for some time—invited him to teach physiology at Harvard. He accepted, and remained there for the next thirty-five years.
But not as a professor of physiology. Within three years he began offering courses in physiological psychology and performing demonstrations for students in his little laboratory in Lawrence Hall. He continued to read omnivorously, forming his own lofty conception of psychology, and during the next three years presented some of his ideas so brilliantly in articles and book reviews that the publisher Henry Holt offered him a contract for a textbook of the new scientific psychology. James signed, apologizing that he would need two years. He took twelve, completing the task in 1890, but he produced a work that was successful far beyond the publisher’s hopes.
The year James began the book, 1878, was a landmark in another way. At thirty-six, he married. Despite his belief in free will, he seems to have been something less than a free agent in his choice of mate. Two years earlier his father had come home from a meeting of the Radical Club in Boston and announced that he had met William’s future wife, Alice Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher and accomplished pianist. Although William dragged his feet about meeting her, once he did so the die was cast. After a prolonged courtship, Alice became his dutiful, strong wife and helpmeet, mother of his five children, amanuensis, and lifelong intellectual companion. She appreciated his genius and understood his emotional needs and temperamental volatility, and despite many a spell of tension and many a battle, particularly before William’s long trips—he needed periods of apartness—they were a devoted and loving couple.
Once he was married, James’s remaining nervous and physical symptoms diminished; although his health was always imperfect, he went at life with a zest and energy he had never shown before. He was at last an independent man with his own identity, home, and income, free to pursue his own goals. Two years later Harvard recognized his special interests and abilities by making him an assistant professor of philosophy (his larger view of psychology fit more comfortably in that department than in the department of physiology), and in 1889 changed his title, finally, to professor of psychology.
Founding Father
There were no professors of psychology in American universities before James began teaching the subject in 1875. The only forms of psychology then taught in the United States were phrenology and Scottish mental philosophy, an offshoot of associationism used chiefly as a defense of revealed religion. James himself had never taken a course in the New Psychology because none was available; as he once jested, “The first