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PARTISAN REVIEW
"When I get home I'm going to study philosophy all my days." Instead
he continued his medical studies, and became increasingly depressed
and even suicidal. Once he was overwhelmed by a panic fear that but
for the grace of God he might become like a passively withdrawn, idi–
otic, and epileptic patient whom he had seen in an asylum. The son
needed to find some essential room for the idea and exercise of his free–
dom of the will. He had found help not only in the French philosopher
Renouvier but also in Wordsworth's poetry.
It
is not hard to see why the
poet was pertinent to him. As Meyer Abrams has pointed out in
Nat–
ural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(1971),
Wordsworth's most important poetry was a form of "creative
autobiography" that "turns on a crisis which involves the question of
the meaning of the author's life and the purpose of his suffering" and
"is resolved by the author's discovery of his literary identity and voca–
tion and the attendant need to give up worldly involvement for artistic
detachment.... " (John Stuart Mill, to whom James would dedicate
Pragmatism,
also found help in recovering from his own depression by
reading Wordsworth's poetry.)
In
his Edinburgh lectures the son wanted to pay tribute to his father's
blazing conviction that religion was real, while maintaining at the same
time his own modern psychological and philosophical thinking. There
was a Jamesian moment, as it were, because he was undogmatic, not a
church member, not a promoter of any sect. He had impressive scientific
credentials as the author of
The Principles of Psychology,
the first
important American work in that field; and yet he was extraordinarily
willing to pay close and respectful attention to those who had had reli–
gious experiences, however bizarre they might seem to nonbelievers.
Audiences were charmed that he spoke and wrote with an artist's feel–
ing for concrete and vivid imagery and with an Irish wit. One of his col–
leagues at Harvard spoke vividly of James's style as "wallowing," that
is, moving through his material "as the whale does through the sea,
twisting and turning at his pleasure, tossing up foam for mere sport, and
plunging or rising as the fancy strikes. James always wallowed." He was
well versed in addressing large audiences, having spent a week at Chau–
tauqua with its thousands of good people, comprising, he said, a sort of
"middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot,
without a tear."
It
made him long for the "big outside worldly wilder–
ness with all its sins and sufferings."
In
his lectures on religious experience, James drew on a democrati–
cally wide spectrum of material from saints, philosophers, artists, and
ordinary people. The scope of his believers included Protestants,
