William James at Stanford

Abstract

On January 1, 1906, William James closeted in the compartment of a Santa Fe Railway train, making his way to the Pacific Coast. A few days before, he had left Cambridge, Massachusetts, eagerly anticipating the trip west and a five-month stay at Stanford University. It not his first trip to the West?he had visited eight years earlier?but would be his longest stay; and he to be much more than a visitor this time. In fact, he to take a position as acting head of Stanford's Philosophy Department, a role that reflected both his own reputation and the precarious state of academic life at the fourteen year-old university. Shortly after his arrival at Stanford, James turned sixty-four. He was, in 1906, the foremost philoso pher and psychologist in America?It James first and no second, said his former student, John Dewey. His Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience had established him as an inno vator who creating, almost single-handedly, an original American philosophy. That philosophy celebrated pluralism and pragmatism, two terms that James made household words in the intellec tual households of America. James, however, not content with speaking only to academics. His articles in popular journals and his frequent lectures brought his ideas, ren dered easily intelligible by lively anecdotes and wit, to a wide audience. For James, being a popularizer a laudable talent; he looked for that talent in his colleagues and in those students he recom mended for teaching positions. Unless they could convey their ideas to those outside of the erudite circles of philosophers, what good were they? Now James on leave from Harvard, where he had taught, in one capacity or another, for more than three decades, and where his students included Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann. His students hailed him as a modern man for the modern world, vigorous (strenuous a favorite adjective of the day) and eager for new experiences. To be educated, for him, said one of his students, was to keep the mind in action, not to fit oneself into a frame.1 His teaching style as refreshing for his students as were his ideas. Unlike other profes sors, who stood at a lectern and read from their notes, James often preferred to sit on his desk or even to lie on the floor if necessary. He forth right, colloquial, even?said his colleague George Santayana, ever sensitive to lapses in elegance ?racy. His very presence an inspiration. Is life worth living? Gertrude Stein asked. Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Prof. James.2 This great mind, as she referred to him in her notebooks, able to respond to her own originality and her need for personal and intellectual liberation. He encour aged her never to anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual. Compli cate your life as much as you please, he told her, it has got to simplify.3 Joyously confronting the complexities of the twentieth century, James managed to formulate a vision of life that not threatened by change, impermanence, or indeterminacy. Rare among his contemporaries, he managed to make a fertile tran sition from the nineteenth century's penchant for wholeness and stability to the twentieth-century world of unpredictability and rapid change. He