The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/Portable William James
Portable William James
Habit, by William James. New York: Henry Holt & Company. 50 cents net.
AN intelligent publisher would no more think of snatching thirty or forty pages out of Spinoza's Ethics, and binding them separately than he would think of turning a few propositions from Euclid into a gift-book. Treated so, the great severe unifiers would make dreary reading. Nor as wholes do they often get their message across to the average man. Suppose he does follow them a little way. What happens? He feels as if he were being towed further and further from concrete lands, as if he were nearing no coast, not even a dangerous. In nine cases out of ten he cuts the hawser and makes for home.
But suppose he reads on to the end of some philosophic system, not without a real effort to master it? He is left dissatisfied, suspicious. He accuses philosophers of reducing all things to law by coolly overlooking large tracts of the irreducible. Would the particular philosophy he has been grappling with be very different, he asks, if its maker had spent his life shut up in a box?
William James, being in achievement and at heart no unifier, no system-maker, has written many chapters which can usefully be reprinted each by itself. Almost any chapter illustrates his insight into details. Almost any chapter persuades us that here is a philosopher who shares not only such philosophic doubts and worries as we happen to have, but also a great many of our other interests. And the more chapters we read the stronger grows this persuasion.
He did not spend his days remote in a box. All his life he lay exposed to the sights and sounds and smells of reality, sensitive to them, endlessly curious about them. His books read as if they had passed much of his time in the open, much of it in human companionship. Not only does he deliver his message like a man of this world. It was out of this world, with its strangeness and miscellaneousness, that he got the raw material of all but the supernatural bits of his message. His books are crammed with insight into the parts of this miscellaneousness.
Nobody is more alive to the value of a superlative memory, nobody more convinced that it is a necessary part of a certain kind of great man's equipage easier, who never bids us undervalue the goods we cannot hope for.
Nobody is more alive to the value of a superlative memory, nobody more convinced that it is a necessary part of a certain kind of great man's equipment. Yet he is of a certain kind of great man's equipment. Yet he is not afraid to tell you that the natural retentiveness of your memory is something you cannot better, no matter how hard you try. He would tell you so, such is the perfection of his candor, even if the bad news made you despair.
But he does not happen to think the news very bad. Although a man's general retentiveness "is a physiological quality, given once for all with his organization, and which he can never hope to change," he can make his memory a more serviceable instrument by "elaborating the associates of each of the several things to be remembered."
Besides, William James has known efficient workers whose memories were never very good tools, just as he has known efficient workers who had little power of voluntary attention. They did not lose heart. You need not lose heart. There is something which can make you efficient in spite of your untrustworthy memory and your wandering mind, and that something is passion for your work. If you keep passionately pegging away you will wake up one morning and find yourself among the experts at your kind of job.
Be brave, he tells you, though you lack all the gifts, the desirable and admirable gifts, which flower into intellectual greatness. But what if you lack all others as well? What if you are absolutely instead of relatively a duffer? Still you need not despair. Still it pays to be brave. The whole moral world remains open, where victories are won by men and women who have no mental force worth mentioning. Into each of us each of us can put, if he chooses, an indomitable something. And most of us can choose.
Open William James almost anywhere and before long your feet will be on just a moral trail as the one we have been following. Your guide never tries to deceive you. Here and there he stops you, bids you look at things you must renounce, never depreciates the worth or dims the glory of what you are renouncing, teaches you, on the contrary, to rate it higher than you did before, and in whatever predicament he leaves you does not leave you forlorn. Courage is in your heart, courage that grows and flourishes and puts forth fruit in due season.
Nor are you, to tell the truth, alone with courage. William James is with you. The words he chooses, and the cadence of his sentences, so like the cadence of good talk, quickly bring you into this presence and keep you there. You see and hear a real man, a real American, lucid, tolerant, eager, inventive, surprising, who dares to endure, to do and to believe His mind is always touching the real world, and sheds light at every point of contact. The real world is penetrated at a thousand and one places by his mind, yet the perceiving and interpreting mind leaves reality undeformed and lifelike.
No more high-hearted, no more solidly nourished apology for courage has been written in our day. The virtue of William James's books is to make us brave. Their defect, in case the reader be a shade less happily suggestible than the average man, is to make us wonder. Even if the world were not what it is, but so irrationally bad that courage would be useless, would not William James have sought to make us as brave as he would still have been, in spite of everything, himself?