"It is no surprise to hear that James was influenced by Emerson. James has the same optative ebullience, the same metaphorical panache, the same bedrock faith in the individual. Nor is it surprising that John Stuart Mill would be a long-standing influence on James. Utilitarianism was stepfather to pragmatism and to its concern with results, with “fruits not roots.” No active thinker in the mid- to late nineteenth century could easily escape the shadows cast by Emerson and Mill. But almost everyone except William James escaped the influence of Benjamin Paul Blood, whose pamphlet The Anaesthetic Revelation James read and reviewed a few months after the Emerson party in Concord.18 Blood was a writer of letters to newspapers. Ten years older than James, he was a nonacademic, a philosopher, a mystic, and, it would turn out, a pluralist to boot. Blood had been born in 1832 in Amsterdam, New York, just west of Schenectady. He went to Union College, then returned home to the “large brick house on the south side of the Mohawk as you enter Amsterdam from the East.”19 Blood had heard or read Henry James Sr., and he credited him as “the first to impress me with the presence of that transcendent [quality] we call genius.” Blood was, delightfully, much more than a metaphysician. Interested in machinery, he had patented a “swathing reaper.” He had been a gambler, making and losing, he told James, “bar’ls” of money. He had been a “fancy gymnast” and had fought “some heavy fights—notably one of forty minutes with Ed. Mullett, whom I left senseless.” “I have worn out many styles,” he wrote James years later, “and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contented with myself.” If Blood sounded like Whitman, he looked like a cross between Poe and Nietzsche. He sent James a photo of himself at age twenty-eight, taken when he had just “lifted by a chain on my right shoulder and around my right arm 1160 lbs.” “I never could value things at others’ rates,” Blood wrote James, “never was respectable or conforming . . . The chaff blows off, the grain remains and I could borrow the city treasury if I wanted the money.”20 In 1875 this Paul Bunyan of Amsterdam, New York, sent William James a pamphlet announcing the discovery of “a mystical substitute for the answer which philosophy seeks, [an] ontological intuition, beyond the power of words to tell of, which one experiences while taking nitrous oxide gas and other anaesthetics.”21 Blood located the moment of insight not in the instant of “going under,” not in the swirling down the ever-accelerating, ever-darkening red whirlpool one remembers from a childhood tonsillectomy, but in the moment of “recall from anaesthetic stupor to sensible observation, or ‘coming-to,’ in which the genius of being is revealed” (Blood’s italics). The awakening moment, with its “primeval prestige” and “all but appalling solemnity,” solved the world’s mystery. “This world,” Blood wrote and James quoted, “is no more that alien terror which was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.”22 Perhaps Blood’s prose stirred memories for James of the gulls at the mouth of the Amazon. At any rate, he compared the state Blood described to “Nirwana” and to what was suggested by the old proverb In vino Veritas. “Ontological emotion, however stumbled on, has something authoritative for the individual who feels it,” James wrote, adding, “The duty of the intellect toward it is not suppression but interpretation.” James did not think that laughing gas was necessarily the best way of getting at the revelation in question. “What blunts the mind and weakens the will,” he wrote, “is no full channel for truth.” He preferred, he was careful to say, “the intoxication of moral volition.”23 The essence of it for Blood was the discovery that “fulness of life . . . forestalls the need of philosophy,” that life itself is a “sufficiency, to which . . . a wonder or fear of why it is sufficient cannot pertain, and could be attributed to it only as an impossible disease or lack.” This repose in the sufficiency of life, the rejection of the fundamental lack or dearth, is at the opposite pole from the core convictions of William’s father, whose best prose is a hectic poetry of dearth. “The secret of Being,” as James summarized Blood, “is not in the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet and overlooked by knowledge.”24 James was attracted to Blood’s energy, his forceful reasoning, his idiosyncratic boldness, his unconventional defense of an altered mental state. He also liked Blood’s conclusion, and he especially admired his writing. Blood was, said James, “a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue.”25 Blood talked about “pounding and punching the chaos into the logos,” and his writing swoops and soars in a sort of blind onward rapture. “And does not pluralism have in it its own negation,” Blood wrote James in 1897, “as the many (per se) must afford a specimen of the one. The world has long believed in limited space (subjective), unity of intelligence, community, a home, a heaven, a duty, an order, a chance for fame that is known of all, not a world, but the world, under control—all facts and possibilities known and realized—imperial peace.” Who could resist a man who talked like that? “You have the greatest gift of superior gab since Shakespeare,” a delighted William James wrote Blood.26 James’s interest in people like Blood—figures from the intellectual underworld—exasperated his professional colleagues even as it moved them, sometimes, to admiration. James’s judgment, said one, was “corrupted by kindness.” George Santayana, first a student of James, then a colleague and rival, and finally a eulogist, said James “kept his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . He thought, with his usual modesty, that any of these might have something to teach him . . . Thus,” Santayana concluded, “William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.”27"
"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/2DxCCsB
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