CUSHING STROUT
William James and the Tradition of American
Public Philosophers
T
H E ROLE OF PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER
in America is conspicuously
absent today, but it has
been
recurringly present in our past.
William james's colleague josiah
Royce
pointed out that there
have
been
three American philosophers who have
been
inventively orig–
inal and also representative of
"some
stage in the spiritual
life
of our
people": Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William
James. Edwards was not only original in the formulation of his Puritan
theology but he a lso "gave
voice
to
some
of the central motives and
interests of our colonial religious
life"
and was the recognized intellec–
tual leader of the revival movement known as the Great Awakening in
the 173os.
In the early nineteenth century Emerson, having given up his pastor–
ship at a Unitarian church, was making a new career for himself on the
lecture circuit, speaking eloquently on behalf of the new world of Amer–
ica and addressing
some
of its cultura l, religious, and social issues.
When Emerson spoke in
New
York in
1842,
one member of the audi–
ence
was Henry
James,
Sr. His son William had
been
born only two
months earlier, and his father invited Emerson to his house where the
lecturer was taken upstairs to admire the first-born son.
It
was appro–
priate that William James should have
been
asked in
1903
to speak at
Concord about Emerson at a centenary ceremony where james saluted
him as an artist of "spiritual seeing and reporting" who had sounded "a
bugle blast" on behalf of "the sovereignty of the living individual."
Royce
pointed out that
James
as a philosopher had a
more
extended
range of influence in Europe than either Edwards or Emerson, who were
both known and respected across the Atlantic.
Royce
noted that james
belonged to the second stage of evolutionary thought, widening and
deepening it, rather than polemicizing about it; and he played a "com–
manding part" in the "psychologica l movement" of the
late
nineteenth
century, one that in its wider sense was connected with "a ll the modern
forms of nationalism, of internationalism, of socialism, and of individu–
alism." james sought to link up his philosophical
role
with the problems
