Memories and Studies

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MEMORIES AND STUDIES

by

WILLIAM JAMES

Longmans, Green, and Co.
Fourth Avenue and 30th Street, New York
London, Bombay, and Calcutta
1911

Copyright, 1911, by Henry James Jr.
All Rights Reserved

PREFATORY NOTE

Professor William James formed the intention
shortly before his death of republishing a number
of popular addresses and essays under the title
which this book now bears; but unfortunately he
found no opportunity to attend to any detail of the
book himself, or to leave definite instructions for
others. I believe, however, that I have departed
in no substantial degree from my father's idea,
except perhaps by including two or three short
pieces which were first addressed to special
occasions or audiences and which now seem clearly
worthy of republication in their original form,
although he might not have been willing to reprint
them himself without the recastings to which he was
ever most attentive when preparing for new readers.
Everything in this volume has already appeared in
print in magazines or otherwise, and definite
acknowledgements are hereinafter made in the
appropriate places. Comparison with the original texts
will disclose slight variations in a few passages, and
it is therefore proper to explain that in these
passages the present text follows emendations of the
original which have survived in the author's own
handwriting.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

CONTENTS

I. LOUIS AGASSIZ
II. ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD
III. ROBERT GOULD SHAW
IV. FRANCIS BOOTT
V. THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE
VI. HERBERT SPENCER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
VII. FREDERICK MYERS' SERVICES TO PSYCHOLOGY
VIII. FINAL IMPRESSIONS OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER
IX. ON SOME MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE EARTHQUAKE
X. THE ENERGIES OF MEN
XI. THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR
XII. REMARKS AT THE PEACE BANQUET
XIII. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED
XIV. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
THE PH. D. OCTOPUS
THE TRUE HARVARD
STANFORD'S IDEAL DESTINY
XV. A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC

I

LOUIS AGASSIZ[1]

It would be unnatural to have such an assemblage as this meet in the
Museum and Faculty Room of this University and yet have no public word
spoken in honor of a name which must be silently present to the minds
of all our visitors.

At some near future day, it is to be hoped some one of you who is well
acquainted with Agassiz's scientific career will discourse here
concerning it,--I could not now, even if I would, speak to you of that
of which you have far more intimate knowledge than I. On this social
occasion it has seemed that what Agassiz stood for in the way of
character and influence is the more fitting thing to commemorate, and
to that agreeable task I have been called. He made an impression that
was unrivalled. He left a sort of popular myth--the Agassiz legend, as
one might say--behind him in the air about us; and life comes kindlier
to all of us, we get more recognition from the world, because we call
ourselves naturalists,--and that was the class to which he also
belonged.

The secret of such an extraordinarily effective influence lay in the
equally extraordinary mixture of the animal and social gifts, the
intellectual powers, and the desires and passions of the man. From his
boyhood, he looked on the world as if it and he were made for each
other, and on the vast diversity of living things as if he were there
with authority to take mental possession of them all. His habit of
collecting began in childhood, and during his long life knew no bounds
save those that separate the things of Nature from those of human art.
Already in his student years, in spite of the most stringent poverty,
his whole scheme of existence was that of one predestined to greatness,
who takes that fact for granted, and stands forth immediately as a
scientific leader of men.

His passion for knowing living things was combined with a rapidity of
observation, and a capacity to recognize them again and remember
everything about them, which all his life it seemed an easy triumph and
delight for him to exercise, and which never allowed him to waste a
moment in doubts about the commensurability of his powers with his
tasks. If ever a person lived by faith, he did. When a boy of twenty,
with an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, he
maintained an artist attached to his employ, a custom which never
afterwards was departed from,--except when he maintained two or three.
He lectured from the very outset to all those who would hear him. "I
feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his
father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his
costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from
whence the payment might be expected to come.

At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty-five and thirty he
enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars)
he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum,
managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries,
and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment
of his own employed with the work that he put forth. Fishes, fossil
and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his
hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation,
recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,
one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim
at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature.
His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest
biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an
impulse to natural history.

Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago
disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his
confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans. The only
particular resource he was assured of was one course of Lowell
Lectures. But of one general resource he always was assured, having
always counted on it and never found it to fail,--and that was the good
will of every fellow-creature in whose presence he could find an
opportunity to describe his aims. His belief in these was so intense
and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the
furtherance of them to be a duty binding also upon them. _Velle non
discitur_, as Seneca says:--Strength of desire must be born with a man,
it can't be taught. And Agassiz came before one with such enthusiasm
glowing in his countenance,--such a persuasion radiating from his
person that his projects were the sole things really fit to interest
man as man,--that he was absolutely irresistible. He came, in Byron's
words, with victory beaming from his breast, and every one went down
before him, some yielding him money, some time, some specimens, and
some labor, but all contributing their applause and their godspeed.
And so, living among us from month to month and from year to year, with
no relation to prudence except his pertinacious violation of all her
usual laws, he on the whole achieved the compass of his desires,
studied the geology and fauna of a continent, trained a generation of
zoologists, founded one of the chief museums of the world, gave a new
impulse to scientific education in America, and died the idol of the
public, as well as of his circle of immediate pupils and friends.

The secret of it all was, that while his scientific ideals were an
integral part of his being, something that he never forgot or laid
aside, so that wherever he went he came forward as "the Professor," and
talked "shop" to every person, young or old, great or little, learned
or unlearned, with whom he was thrown, he was at the same time so
commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring, so responsive and
expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and of his own, that
every one said immediately, "Here is no musty savant, but a man, a
great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and
sin." He elevated the popular notion of what a student of Nature could
be. Since Benjamin Franklin, we had never had among us a person of
more popularly impressive type. He did not wait for students to come
to him; he made inquiry for promising youthful collectors, and when he
heard of one, he wrote, inviting and urging him to come. Thus there is
hardly one now of the American naturalists of my generation whom
Agassiz did not train. Nay, more; he said to every one that a year or
two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would give the
best training for any kind of mental work. Sometimes he was amusingly
_naif_ in this regard, as when he offered to put his whole Museum at
the disposition of the Emperor of Brazil if he would but come and labor
there. And I well remember how certain officials of the Brazilian
empire smiled at the cordiality with which he pressed upon them a
similar invitation. But it had a great effect. Natural history must
indeed be a godlike pursuit, if such a man as this can so adore it,
people said; and the very definition and meaning of the word naturalist
underwent a favorable alteration in the common mind.

Certain sayings of Agassiz's, as the famous one that he "had no time
for making money," and his habit of naming his occupation simply as
that of "teacher," have caught the public fancy, and are permanent
benefactions. We all enjoy more consideration for the fact that he
manifested himself here thus before us in his day.

He was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not
backward, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable. I
had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer
expedition to Brazil. I well remember at night, as we all swung in our
hammocks in the fairy-like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that
throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream
on either side, how he turned and whispered, "James, are you awake?"
and continued, "_I_ cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of
these glorious plans." The plans contemplated following the Amazon to
its headwaters, and penetrating the Andes in Peru. And yet, when he
arrived at the Peruvian frontier and learned that that country had
broken into revolution, that his letters to officials would be useless,
and that that part of the project must be given up, although he was
indeed bitterly chagrined and excited for part of an hour, when the
hour had passed over it seemed as if he had quite forgotten the
disappointment, so enthusiastically was he occupied already with the
new scheme substituted by his active mind.

Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt
and decisive,--all the more so that it struck people's imagination by
its very excess. The good old way of committing printed abstractions
to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered
at his hands. There is probably no public school teacher now in New
England who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in
a room full of turtle shells, or lobster shells, or oyster shells,
without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had
discovered all the truths which the objects contained. Some found the
truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found
them. Those who found them were already made into naturalists
thereby--the failures were blotted from the book of honor and of life.
"Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for
yourself!"--these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he
went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric. The extreme rigor of
his devotion to this concrete method of learning was the natural
consequence of his own peculiar type of intellect, in which the
capacity for abstraction and causal reasoning and tracing chains of
consequences from hypotheses was so much less developed than the genius
for acquaintance with vast volumes of detail, and for seizing upon
analogies and relations of the more proximate and concrete kind. While
on the Thayer expedition, I remember that I often put questions to him
about the facts of our new tropical habitat, but I doubt if he ever
answered one of these questions of mine outright. He always said:
"There, you see you have a definite problem; go and look and find the
answer for yourself." His severity in this line was a living rebuke to
all abstractionists and would-be biological philosophers. More than
once have I heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from Faust:

"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie.
Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum."

The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could
bring him facts. To see facts, not to argue or _raisonniren_, was what
life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the
ratiocinating type of mind. "Mr. Blank, you are _totally_ uneducated!"
I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering
theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition
that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was
addressed. "Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young
man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then,
what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used
to be a very bright young man!'" Happy is the conceited youth who at
the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as
this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend. We cannot all
escape from being abstractionists. I myself, for instance, have never
been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me
the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in
the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able
to forget it. Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite
design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer
to the divine type of thinking.

Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling,
and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard
the most sympathetic possible environment. In the fifty years that
have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated
into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal
elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately
concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the
stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be. But
the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day,
from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in
Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all
our analytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and
simpler way of looking at Nature. Meanwhile as we look back upon
Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the
work seem young and fresh once more. May we all, and especially may
those younger members of our association who never knew him, give a
grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which
he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to
elevate and define.

[1] Words spoken at the reception of the American Society of
Naturalists by the President and Fellows of Harvard College at
Cambridge, December 30, 1896. Printed in _Science_, N. S. V. 285.

II

ADDRESS AT THE EMERSON CENTENARY IN CONCORD[1]

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are
ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy
in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so
slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode
of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we
gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of
us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into
the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase
suggestive of his singularity--happy are those whose singularity gives
a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a
diminution and abridgment.

An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all
Concord to-day, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his
neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more
abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the
notion of a spirit indescribably precious. The form that so lately
moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields
and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but the soul's note,
the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the
times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over
future generations.

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even
more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious
combination. Rarely has a man so accurately known the limits of his
genius or so unfailingly kept within them. "Stand by your order," he
used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression
one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own personal type and
mission. The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the
perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of the reporter in
worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we
have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow,
a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols
to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic
phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone,
consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning
for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good
Spirit will give me.

This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he
said, is insatiate for expression, and truth has to be clad in the
right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with
Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They
form a chemical combination--thoughts which would be trivial expressed
otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he
married them. The style is the man, it has been said; the man
Emerson's mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in
one word, we have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose medium
was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.

This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor
of his life. It was to shield this duty from invasion and distraction
that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle
himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which,
however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and
not for him. Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and
fingerings in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and
poisoning," and took to long free walks and saunterings instead,
without apology. "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their
"worker"--all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped
him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it
appealed to him, found him firm: "God must govern his own world, and
knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which
has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than
those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of
man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me." This in
reply to the possible questions of his own conscience. To hot-blooded
moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the
limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote
and unavailable; but we, who can see things in more liberal
perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results. The faultless
tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly
asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to
other theorists and artists the world over.

The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best
summed up in his own verses:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man!"

Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of
the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses
itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its
eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal
to ourselves. "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of
sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God;
in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong."

If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that
there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought
not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand. "If
John was perfect, why are you and I alive?" Emerson writes; "As long as
any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own."
This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is
perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The
hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his
temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason
of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world
is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of
what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. "Each one of us can
bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be
himself one of the children of the light." "Trust thyself, every heart
vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education
when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when
he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which it was given him to till."

The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty
of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation,
and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as
the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality,
the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and
obliterate for present issues. "If anyone would lay an axe to your
tree with a text from 1 John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say
to him," Emerson wrote, "'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.' Let
him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient,
and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your
Creator." "Cleave ever to God," he insisted, "against the name of
God;"--and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his
total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his
brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an
iconoclast and desecrator.

Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the
vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being,
is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our
youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their
own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his
appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances
the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, as
by being great and spreading when he is great. "I love and honor
Epaminondas," said Emerson, "but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I
hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by
saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good
when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if
he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace,
if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all
modes of love and fortitude." "The fact that I am here certainly shows
me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the
post?"

The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more
happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he
develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims
itself. "Hide your thoughts!--hide the sun and moon. They publish
themselves to the universe. They will speak through you though you
were dumb. They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your
face. . . . Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while
and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary. . . .
What a man _is_ engraves itself upon him in letters of light.
Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession
in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the
grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression.
Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His
vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek,
pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head,
and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king. If you would not
be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the
drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.--How can
a man be concealed? How can he be concealed?"

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