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14. Summer’s End
- University of Nebraska Press
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(*) '* Summer’s End _dZ[Y[cX[h'/&-X_bbo, who showed promise as an artist and who had returned from Paris, painted his mother several hours a day while she sat with her eternal sewing.1 He represents her as beautifully serene, even though her duties still entailed considerable exasperation. Both Aleck and William were sick during the winter of '/&., Aleck with tonsillitis and William with grippe. They were housebound and keeping one another company after Alice left for Montreal.2 Peggy, too, became ill. That spring Alice left suddenly for Philadelphia when she learned her daughter was in the infirmary with colitis, returning in time to sail for England with William in the ?l[hd_W.3 They rented the Chocorua house, planning to spend nearly six months abroad. Frederick Schiller, an advocate of pragmatism, had invited William to give the '/&. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, a Unitarian school in Oxford but at the time not part of Oxford University. They arrived in Liverpool on )& April. From there they took the train to Chester, going next to Leamington for a day, finally reaching Oxford on ) May.4 Alice’s days were filled with social engagements and sightseeing in the beautiful spring countryside, which was cold at first. While William took a great deal of medication, he was able to give his talks; hundreds came to hear him, with many others turned away. (** ikcc[h¼i[dZ These lectures, titled “On the Present Situation in Philosophy” and later published in '/&/ as 7FbkhWb_ij_YKd_l[hi[, considered the reigning Oxford school of philosophy, absolutism, and attempted to refute it in favor of William’s own loosely defined “radical empiricism.” He asserted that the absolutist “logic of identity,” used to argue for a universal monism wherein everything was subsumed under an idealistic absolute, was ultimately untenable. While absolutism could lead to a sense of peace and harmony that might be desirable for humans, its supposedly rational premises did not hold up under closer examination. William also examined Hegel’s dialectical method, concluding that his conception of negation had great use in reconciling worldly empirical contradictions, but his insistence on one incontrovertible eternal truth made him dogmatic and absolutist.5 William proposed that philosophers consider Gustav Fechner instead of Hegel.6 Fechner, through a process of analogical reasoning, postulated a higher, totalized consciousness that might be called “God.” Our individual consciousness eventually becomes part of more inclusive forms of consciousness. William then critiqued intellectualism: its logic does not allow us to understand reality, which is nonrational. After a prolonged struggle, he found his own antidote to intellectualism in the ideas of French mathematician and philosopher Henri Bergson.7 Bergson believed that intellectual knowledge was inadequate to explain reality; we must return to the experiential world to arrive at an understanding of the world. We must abandon logos as the way to truth, William counsels. William briefly proposed radical empiricism as a way of understanding an ever-changing reality: our conceptual systems are fixed, but his method considers experience as continuous and overlapping. Further, he suggested that our subconscious mind might be at the margin of another central self, a sort of finite superhuman consciousness. The existence of split personalities , mediums, automatic writing, and so on suggests that there may be a superior consciousness available to us, as Fechner theorized. In the end, William posited an incomplete, pluralistic universe. William was feted throughout Oxford. Since women were excluded from certain events, occasionally Alice was left to her own devices. While William lunched one day, she read Edward Edwards’s J^[B_\[e\HWb[_]^ in her room, munching on a Bath bun. She recommended the book to [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:39 GMT) ikcc[h¼i[dZ (*+ her mother and also told her of the lovely walk she had taken along river footpaths to the Bertrand Russells’ home in Bagley.8 By now Alice’s and William’s lives were completely intertwined. She helped him keep track of social engagements by writing them in his diary, he then crossing out some of her entries and she his, in effect overwriting one another. On ( June she wrote, “Tea at Westbury with Miss Marsett *.)&.” Next to this entry William noted, “revoked.”9 In June, the lectures over, the Jameses removed to the Swan Inn in Bibury, Gloucestershire, where their rooms needed a coal fire to offset the gray, cold, rainy weather. The inn itself sat beside a fishing stream. Bibury was the loveliest place...