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William James Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London : Constable and Co. Ltd.; Toronto: McLeod, 1920, 64–96. Volume eleven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. Character and Opinion in the United States was one of three books that together marked, in Santayana’s words, his “emancipation from official control and professional pretensions. . . . all was now a voluntary study, a satirical survey, a free reconsideration . . . . My official career had happily come to an end” ( PP, 414). This significant book included as Chapter III the present selection on William James (1842–1910), who, in addition to being a giant in American intellectual life, was Santayana’s teacher and then colleague at Harvard. At the time of James’ death, ten years before the publication of this book, Santayana wrote to a friend, “I have hardly had the time, or the freedom of mind, to think his life and work over, and sum it up to myself—not even the part he has played in my own growth and career. I owe him more than I perhaps realize: he was all kindness, but of the sort, curiously enough, that excludes sympathy. It was a motherly sort of kindness for a humanity of his own fancy and creation. He never knew me” ( LGS, 2:19–20). William James enjoyed in his youth what are called advantages: he lived among cultivated people, travelled, had teachers of various nationalities. His father was one of those somewhat obscure sages whom early America produced: mystics of independent mind, hermits in the desert of business, and heretics in the churches. They were intense individualists, full of veneration for the free souls of their children, and convinced that every one should paddle his own canoe, especially on the high seas. William James accordingly enjoyed a stimulating if slightly irregular education: he never acquired that reposeful mastery of particular authors and those safe ways of feeling and judging which are fostered in great schools and universities. In consequence he showed an almost physical horror of club sentiment and of the stifling atmosphere of all officialdom. He had a knack for drawing, and rather the temperament of the artist; but the unlovely secrets of nature and the troubles of man preoccupied him, and he chose medicine for his profession. Instead of practising, however, he turned to teaching physiology, and from that passed gradually to psychology and philosophy. In his earlier years he retained some traces of polyglot student days at Paris, Bonn, Vienna, or Geneva; he slipped sometimes into foreign phrases, uttered in their full vernacular; and there was an occasional afterglow of Bohemia about him, in the bright stripe of a shirt or the exuberance of a tie. On points of art or medicine he retained a professional touch and an unconscious ease which he hardly acquired in metaphysics. I suspect he had heartily admired some of his masters in those other subjects, but had never seen a philosopher whom 585 William James he would have cared to resemble. Of course there was nothing of the artist in William James, as the artist is sometimes conceived in England, nothing of the æsthete, nothing affected or limp. In person he was short rather than tall, erect, brisk, bearded, intensely masculine. While he shone in expression and would have wished his style to be noble if it could also be strong, he preferred in the end to be spontaneous, and to leave it at that; he tolerated slang in himself rather than primness. The rough, homely, picturesque phrase, whatever was graphic and racy, recommended itself to him; and his conversation outdid his writing in this respect. He believed in improvisation, even in thought; his lectures were not minutely prepared. Know your subject thoroughly, he used to say, and trust to luck for the rest. There was a deep sense of insecurity in him, a mixture of humility with romanticism: we were likely to be more or less wrong anyhow, but we might be wholly sincere. One moment should respect the insight of another, without trying to establish too regimental a uniformity. If you corrected yourself tartly, how could you know that the correction was not the worse mistake? All our opinions were born free and equal, all children of the Lord, and if they were not consistent that was the Lord’s business, not theirs. In reality, James was...

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