The pluralism of James, his indeterminism, his relentless opposition to absolutes and dogmatisms, all had their source in this basic idea of individuality that underlay all of William James's thinking. There is nothing new in this statement and I do not suppose anyone would question it. What the volumes before us have taught me in addition to this fact is how acutely and deeply this idea bears the impress of his father's character and thought.
To one who has not taken into account William James's profound, unremitting and sincere sense of the ultimate nature and value of individuality, the philosophy of James will always remain a closed book. In some of his later writings, James said that the proper title for his essay called "The Will to Believe" was "The Right to Believe"—a right that existed in certain cases, namely, those momentous in issue and where objective evidence is inconclusive. To my mind this "right to believe" was an expression of James's sense of the indefeasible worth of individuality and its right to its own expression. Many sayings of James's that are superficially capable of interpretation as mere concessions of a compromising (if not a time-serving) sort to the ideas of others have their root, I am sure, in this same sense of the ultimate right of individuals to be themselves and to have their own ideas—provided only they are sincere. If he sometimes overstepped the mark, it was because he tended to impute to others the same sincerity that marked his own beliefs. He was always saying in effect, "How can I claim a right to my own ideas unless I grant the same right to others?"
If I may introduce a personal recollection in this connection, I recall the enthusiasm with which James greeted an essay in which Schiller developed the idea that an Absolute might be the culminating climax toward which things tend. My own enthusiasm being somewhat less, James added: "Oh, I don't myself need the conception of an Absolute at the end any more than at the beginning, but there are many who can't get along without the Absolute in some form." This remark suggests that quality which laid James open to accusations that are completely removed from his life and character. But James himself had achieved, along with an acute and penetrating insight into intellectual sham and pretense when they are elaborately formulated, the kind of spiritual innocence which his father thought the ultimate goal, in connection with his feeling for the rights of others.
I may seem to have got away from the volumes that are my nominal subject; in a way I have. But volumes of sixteen hundred pages that record a full and vivid career lived in a richness of context most of us can only dream about, elude conventional literary notice in any case. Anyone who reads these volumes with the spiritual continuity of father and son in mind will see clearly many things that otherwise may escape him. The grandfather, "William of Albany" had no misgivings with respect to forming the character and beliefs and dictating the conduct of his children. The father, Henry Sr., found himself in complete revolt. He wrote: "Accordingly as you inconsiderably shorten the period of infantile innocence and ignorance in the child, you weaken his chances of a future manly character." The positive statement of what is said negatively here is, "Liberty . . . consists in the inalienable right of every man to believe according to the unbribed inspiration of his heart, and to act according to the unperverted dictates of his own understanding." Anyone who has a responsive sense of the meaning of these words and who reads the sayings and doings of William James in their light, will, I am confident, better understand William's philosophical formulations. He will also understand better his depressions and uncertainties (in a body less vigorous and less assertively sure of itself than was his father's), will appreciate his sympathetic and often, in retrospect, unduly intense response to writings that gave back to him some of his own ideas; and will realize that something more than ill health is behind what his sister meant when she called him a "blob of mercury, unable to stick to anything for the sake of sticking." Temperamental and cultivated responsiveness to whatever seemed genuine in the ideas of others is not favorable to systematized logical continuity. But it will, unless I am vastly mistaken, give his work an enduring vitality denied to philosophic writings whose chief claim is a logical consistency. What seems a lack of conclusiveness in James is due to what James shares with life itself—its many-sidedness.
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