William James · Chapter 1

The Cosmopolitan Invalid

From the Amazon River Basin to the Diary Wager of 1870

Canvas stretchers, charcoal sticks, and half-scraped oil studies lined the second-floor studio of painter William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, during the winter of 1860. Standing at an easel beside the young John La Farge was eighteen-year-old William James. He was the eldest son of the wealthy, erratic Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. For nearly two decades, the elder James had dragged William, his younger brother Henry, and their sister Alice back and forth across the Atlantic. The family moved constantly between New York, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva, pulling the children out of one school after another so they would never harden into narrow intellectual habits. When William asked to become a painter, his father feared that a settled trade would ruin the boy's spiritual spontaneity. He nonetheless permitted a one-year trial in Hunt's Newport atelier. Twelve months alongside La Farge convinced William that he had a sharp eye for posture and musculature, yet lacked the gift required to make first-rate art.

Abandoning the easel in autumn 1861, James enrolled at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School to study chemistry and comparative anatomy. He entered Harvard Medical School three years later in 1864. In April 1865, hungry for physical action outside Boston lecture halls, the young medical student sailed to Brazil as a volunteer collector on Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz's Thayer Expedition. Shortly after landing in Rio de Janeiro, James contracted hemorrhagic smallpox. The infection blistered his face and temporarily blinded both eyes. Once his sight cleared, he spent eight grueling months paddling dugout canoes up the Rio Solimões and the Rio Negro in equatorial heat. He netted and pickled thousands of Amazonian fish species in alcohol barrels for Agassiz's museum while privately rejecting his mentor's anti-Darwinian creationism.

James returned to Boston in 1866 with ruined digestion, chronic insomnia, and severe lower-back spasms that forced him to lie flat in darkened rooms. He completed his Harvard M.D. in June 1869, though he never practiced clinical medicine for a single day. Instead, during the winter of 1869–1870, the newly minted physician sank into a paralyzing depression triggered by the mechanistic determinism of nineteenth-century physiology. If every human thought and movement was strictly fixed by prior molecular collisions in the brain, then moral struggle and personal agency were delusions. Sitting alone at twilight in his parents' house at 20 Quincy Street in Cambridge, James was suddenly ambushed by a clinical memory. He recalled a catatonic epileptic inmate he had seen inside a European asylum—a youth with greenish skin sitting on a bench with his knees drawn against his chin, motionless as a carved Egyptian idol. For months afterward, James could not walk into the dark alone without fearing he might collapse into that exact biological fate.

The exit from that paralysis arrived on April 30, 1870. James spent the afternoon reading the Second Essay of the French neocritical philosopher Charles Renouvier. Renouvier defined free will not as an uncaused miracle that breaks physical law, but as the capacity to sustain a representation in attention when rival representations compete for focus. Taking up his pen, James recorded a methodological turning point in his small leather diary:

Three years after his April 1870 diary entry, Harvard President Charles William Eliot hired the recovering invalid to teach comparative anatomy and physiology at $600 a year. That appointment launched a thirty-four-year career that produced both American experimental psychology and pragmatic philosophy.