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  • Lessons from James’s Debate with Clifford: How Not to Philosophize
  • Rose Ann Christian (bio)

In his magisterial account of William James’s “thought and character,” Ralph Barton Perry quotes from a revealing correspondence between James and L. T. Hobhouse. At issue is the accuracy of Hobhouse’s characterization, in an article just published, of James’s position in “The Will to Believe.” Not only has Hobhouse misrepresented his view, James complains, he has argued for a purportedly alternative doctrine that is in fact the position he himself advocates. You “substitute a travesty” for my position, he writes, “for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text.” You present “a beautiful duplicate of my thesis,” he further objects, “in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my own” (James’s emphasis). While both men say “identically the same thing” in their respective essays, he continues, each approaches the issues at stake from his own “polemical point of view.” Hobhouse is sensitive to the “dangers” that attend the “faith-attitude,” whereas James underscores “more the right to run the risk.”1

James proceeds to observe more generally that “in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object.” Hobhouse’s bogey is superstition, he submits, whereas his is “dessication.” Elaborating, he writes, “In my essay the evil shape was a vision of ‘Science’ in the form of abstraction, priggishness, and sawdust lording it over all,” a vision he attributes to such “champions of science” as Clifford and Huxley, among others, who would veto faith. In this context, he writes not only of Hobhouse but also of himself, “each for his contrast effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical propriety.” In this lukewarm exoneration of Hobhouse, James thus owns up to his own interpretative practice—in “The Will to Believe,” no less.2

There is more than a little irony in this bit of correspondence, as readers familiar with the James-Clifford debate will appreciate. Indeed, it is tempting to imagine Clifford writing to James about “The Will to Believe” along the lines of James’s letter to Hobhouse, complaining that an important part of his analysis [End Page 159] in “The Ethics of Belief” “has been duplicated in the guise of an alternative to it.” James does not simply ignore Clifford’s observation that “there are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief.”3 By substituting “right to believe” what “tempt[s] our will” for “duty to act on probabilities,” he makes this particular line of analysis central to his own argument.4

Not only does James in this instance neglect “exegetical proprieties”; in his account of Clifford’s position he maligns his character. Having asserted in the course of his argument that the two equally valid epistemic imperatives, pursue truth and avoid error, are not equivalent, James accuses Clifford of opting for the latter. In so doing, he “merely shows his own preponderant horror of becoming a dupe”—a “fear he slavishly obeys,” James maintains. In this unflattering diagnosis of the “passion” informing Clifford’s alleged epistemic policy and supposed practice, James’s misrepresentation of his opponent goes considerably beyond that which he lays at the doorstep of Hobhouse.5 This is no insignificant matter, in part because the argument with which “The Will to Believe” culminates hinges on a choice between passivity indicative of indecision if not cowardice and action motivated by courage. But more than this, given James’s tendency to treat temperament as a key determinate of philosophical position and to assess such positions in terms of their consequences for action, it would seem incumbent on him to report conduct accurately and to get temperament right.

If James takes liberties in “The Will to Believe” with the text of “The Ethics of Belief” and in his portrayal of its...

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