CUSHING STROUT
437
the world as one unit of a bsol ute fact." It was this monistic tendency
that he found to be a major fault in his father's theology, in Emerson's
transcendentalism, and in Josiah Royce's version of Absolute Idealism in
which the totality of everything is "present at once to the eternal divine
consciousness as a single whole." There's an amusing photograph of
Royce and James in
1903
sitting on a New Hampshire wall. When
James heard his daughter's camera click, he cried, "Royce, you're being
photographed! Look out! I say Damn the Absolute!" For James a finite
God had the advantage of fitting "the ordinary moralistic state of
mind" that makes "the salvation of the world conditional upon the suc–
cess with which each unit does its part."
James late in life wrote "A Suggestion about Mysticism," but what is
remarkable about it is not its religious but its psychological content. It
is a report on a disturbing dream that he had in which he seemed to
belong to "three different dream systems at once," none of them con–
nected to the other, or to his waking life. He felt desperately lost, and
the dream gave him "a new pity towards persons passing into demen–
tia." As the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson has suggested, the dream
would seem to have uncovered not a supernatural realm but a reliving
in fantasy of James's youthful acute identity confusion, reappearing as
he struggled with the conflict in old age (in Erikson's terms) between
"hopes for a higher integrity" and "terminal despair."
Actually, James's most mystical experience had to do with his
response to nature, which was always an important part of his life, espe–
cially camping, hiking, and climbing in the Adirondacks. In Keene Val–
ley he was part owner of Putnam's Camp, named for his friend James
Jackson Putnam, a pioneer in American psychotherapy, who became a
convert to Freudian psychoanalysis after he met Freud in
1909
at Clark
University. James was in Panther Gorge when he was working on the
Edinburgh lectures, and in the moonlight before a fire his experience
became "a regular
Walpurgis Nacht
with the Gods of all the nature–
mythologies" meeting in his breast with "the moral Gods of the inner
life.... " These two kinds of Gods had nothing in common, he felt, and
this idea made him feel that "the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch
ahead."
For him this state of special alertness was full of "every sort of patri–
otic suggestiveness" and was connected to his wife, his friend the youth–
ful Pauline Goldmark, his children, and his brother Henry-all
fermenting within him, along with "the problem of the Edinburgh lec–
tures." The experience seems to ha ve been more aesthetic than religious,
for he said it made him understand "what a poet is." As his friend John
