William James and the Art of Popular Statement

Chapter Three. Talking to Teachers

73 chapter three Talking to Teachers x B y the end of the 1870s, William James had realized how much he enjoyed discussing science and society with the American people. In fact, in February 1879, a few months after completing his first series of lectures at the Lowell Institute, he wrote to Augustus Lowell about giving another course of lectures there. Hoping to address “the Theory of Evolution as applied to Mind,” James proposed talks that would be “expository and critical of recent speculations in mental evolution , especially Mr. Spencer’s. They will contain a considerable amount of entirely original material, and . . . their tendency will be decidedly ‘conservative.’”1 Even though James would end up not delivering the lectures , the fact that he wanted to speak about evolution in a “decidedly ‘conservative’” manner signaled his ongoing desire to mediate between “old” and “new” systems of knowledge. His goal would likely have been to help his listeners understand that they remained in control of their lives. 74 Chapter Three Whatever James may have said at the Lowell Institute in 1879, perhaps it was best that he did not deliver the lectures, considering that his hands were already full with a project that would change his career and, in the process, change the study of psychology in America. In June 1878, James had received a letter from publisher Henry Holt inquiring whether he would be interested in writing a psychology textbook for Holt’s American Science series. James was interested, but told Holt he would need two full years to complete the manuscript. “I am a little staggered by the length of time which you think it would take to write the Psychology,” Holt replied. “This delay, however, does not incline me to seek any other author in preference to yourself.”2 The book, James’s first, would become the revolutionary Principles of Psychology, and it would take twelve years, not two years, to complete. From 1878 to 1890, James would labor to describe the progress and future of modern psychology. When finally in print, the book established him as one of the most original and insightful psychologists—indeed, scientists —in the nation. Newspapers began referring to him as “the eminent psychologist of Harvard,” “the brilliant writer on psychological subjects,” and someone who possessed “the rare power of presenting the most abstract ideas in a vivid pictorial form.”3 In classrooms across the country, professors and students explored the many scientific vistas offered by “Big James,” as Principles was nicknamed because of its length—over 1,300 pages spread across two volumes. When James published a condensed version of the book a couple years later, titled Psychology: Briefer Course, it was given the nickname “Little Jimmy” to distinguish it from “Big James.” Both “Big James” and “Little Jimmy” were triumphs, defining the study of psychology in America for decades to come. In 1917, one of James’s intellectual rivals praised Principles as “a declaration of independence, defining the boundary lines of a new science with unapproachable genius.”4 In 1969, a group of prominent psychologists insisted that, “without question,” Principles was “the most literate, the most provocative , and at the same time the most intelligible book on psychology that has ever appeared in English or in any other language.”5 As these psychologists recognized, Principles was as much a literary achievement as an academic one. To readers and reviewers alike, the book seemed to represent what intellectual discourse could be, even in the culture of professionalism. William Dean Howells praised the “charming spirit, the delightful manner, and the flavorous and characteristic style” of James’s prose. The work, said Howells, contains “passages Talking to Teachers 75 which may be read aloud to the tenderest female, so lightly and agreeably are some of the most difficult problems of the soul handled in them.”6 George Santayana called Principles a “rich and living” book “in which a generous nature breaks out at every point, and the perennial problems of the human mind are discussed so modestly, so solidly, with such a deep and pathetic sincerity.”7 James himself knew it was a significant accomplishment. The year 1890, he told his brother Henry, with the usual immodesty that characterized their correspondence, “will be known as the great epochal year in American literature” because of three groundbreaking works: Henry’s The Tragic Muse, Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, and his own Principles...