Young William James Thinking by Paul J. Croce (review)

In his previous examination of James's life and thought, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Paul Croce offered a perceptive intellectual history of mid-nineteenth-century America, the world into which James was born in 1842. Focusing on the scientific and spiritual beliefs held by his father, the advent and controversy over Darwinian theory that roiled American culture, the scientific enthusiasms of James's friends Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce, and the teachings of Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray, Croce contextualized James's emergence as a thinker skeptical of claims of certainty either in matters of religion or science.

Croce returns to this context, this time attentively examining James's responses, with the aim of connecting "the young and mature James to show relations between the less refined expressions of early thought and his more famous theorizing" (21). He contends that most biographical studies of James's early years focus more on emotional issues than his intellectual life, and create a gulf between the young man beset by problems and the mature thinker. Croce argues persuasively against this view. Rather than presenting James's development chronologically, Croce revisits his formative years, between the late 1850s and 1878, when James began to publish, teach, and hone his professional identity. Rather than offering a linear narrative, he creates a palimpsest from four thematic chapters focused on James's scientific education: his encounter with medicine both as medical student and patient; his interest in ancient Greek art and Roman philosophy; and the psychological, emotional, vocational, and philosophical challenges he faced as he moved into adulthood. There is some inevitable repetition as Croce returns to the same dates and places—here is James in Dresden in 1867, looking at Greek casts at the Zinger museum; here he is in Dresden again, in the next chapter, this time gazing at young ladies from his apartment window. Nevertheless, Croce succeeds in creating a rich, fresh portrait of James questing: "a budding philosopher embarking on the first steps toward his lifelong commitment to capture concreteness, conciliate differences, and find the relation of immaterial and material dimensions of life" (25).

Croce's examination yields the same conclusion that he put forth in his earlier book: that James was suspicious of scientific materialism and "was impatient with fixed and idealistic abstractions"; that his "personal will to order was in the making—an order not adopted, but adaptive" (245). He rejected "purely materialistic readings of nature," instead "recognizing the significance of volition and other apparently immaterial elements of experience" (260). The man whom Croce portrays is essentially the same man who emerges from many other studies, but Croce underscores the consistency of James's perceptions and interests, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of where James the psychologist, pluralist, and pragmatist came from.

Croce asserts that James did not reject his scientific training in favor of philosophy, but rather came to critique scientific certainty, but not method, which informed his later work in psychology and psychical research. He neither rejected nor left science behind, but carried scientific approach to other fields, in which he was always attentive to "wild facts" that had the potential to stir up certainty (272). Croce contrasts James's medical training--which at Harvard, influenced by European trends, was becoming increasingly scientific--with his experience of sectarian medicine, such as hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and homeopathy, with which James—and his family—sought to ameliorate their recurrent complaints of back and digestive problems, muscle and nerve weakness. James's study of chemistry, anatomy, and physiology steeped him in scientific materialism, while at the same time unorthodox alternative medicine, which attended to the whole person rather than a single symptom, acknowledged the connection of body and mind, and aimed to strengthen the patient's vital force in order to help patients harness their own healing powers. If these were "romantic impulses...