The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [14]
And he worried too about the larger effect of such prejudice on the way people viewed science itself. “Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States today live as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences.”
If scientists did not afford some respect to the beliefs of the lay public, James warned, there was little reason for the public to respect the pronouncements of science.
BY THE TIME William James was thirteen years old, he had attended almost a dozen different New York schools. By 1857, the year Harvard took on the Davenports, the James family had been back in Europe for two years. Their father had decided on the more sophisticated, “sensuous” advantages of a European education. He took the family to Switzerland, but didn’t like the schools there either. Then London. Then France, where they moved five times in the next two years. Then back across the Atlantic to Newport, Rhode Island. They stayed three months before moving back to Switzerland. There William studied painting, and Henry was sent to a polytechnic school. Then Germany for a year. Then back to Newport.
It was gypsy traveling and scattershot education, and every one of the James children considered it destructive. Henry James Jr. deliberately omitted two of the moves from his adult autobiography to make the family appear more normal. Alice grew to be an unstable and bitter woman. “If I had had any education,” she wondered once, “would I be more or less of a fool than I am?”
In 1861 William enrolled at Harvard. The university would serve as his first real anchor, mooring him against the erratic winds of home life and the wilder storm blowing across the country, the bloody howl of the Civil War. He’d intended to become a soldier, signing up at the age of nineteen as a volunteer with the Newport Artillery Company, making himself available for state militia recruitment. Almost until that day, Henry Sr. had refused to consider allowing his eldest son to leave home for university. Now he told William to start immediately. He wanted Henry Jr. there as well. His two younger sons he encouraged off to war the following year, making it obvious, as he would throughout their lives, that he treasured his older sons far more. “I’ve had a firm grip upon the coat tails of my Willy and Harry, who both vituperate me beyond measure because I won’t let them go” to fight, James Sr. wrote to a friend.
The war—and their father’s response to it—would leave a legacy of bitterness in the James family, echoing the lingering damage across the country. The older brothers long harbored guilt, and the younger ones a sense of rejection. It was years later, toward the end of the nineteenth century, before it was clear that William James had made his peace with himself and his kin. In a speech honoring the Civil War dead, he praised the individuals, the soldiers like his brothers, but not the war itself. Nations, James said simply, are not saved by wars. They are saved, he said, by “acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties—by people knowing true men when they see them, preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.