William James and Homeopathy
William James 1842 - 1910 was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism.
He was the son of Henry James Snr, the brother of novelist Henry James Jnr and the sister of diarist Alice James. He was also a supporter of homeopathy.
This time, however, instead of visiting a mind-cure practitioner, James put himself into the hands of one Dr. James Taylor, a homeopathic physician…
Henry James Snr consulted homeopaths himself:
The physician, a homeopath by the name of Ahlborn (?Emily Ahlborn 1866 - 1883 or ?Emil Bernhardt Ahlborn), took the position that the seventy-one-year-old patient could live a year longer if he wanted to …
Henry James Snr counselled his friend James John Garth Wilkinson to come over to America and convert to homeopathy, and James John Garth Wilkinson became a ‘pastoral psychiatrist’ to the James family. Indeed in 1825, Henry James Snr’s third son was named Garth Wilkinson James, which shows the regard with which this homeopath was held by the James family.
Henry James Snr began to be interested in Swedenborgianism around 1841, when he read some articles in London’s Monthly Magazine on the subject by James John Garth Wilkinson, who would become one of Henry James Snr’s closest friends.
In his quest, he met and befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, but did not find much satisfaction in Emerson’s thought. Emerson introduced Henry James Snr to Thomas Carlyle. But it was in the work of Swedenborg that Henry James Snr found a spiritual home.
In May 1844, while living in Windsor in England, Henry James Snr was sitting alone one evening at the family dinner table after the meal, gazing at the fire, when he had the defining spiritual experience of his life, which he would come to interpret as a Swedenborgian “vastation,” a stage in the process of spiritual regeneration.
This experience was an apprehension of, in his own words,
“a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.”
Henry James Snr’s “vastation” initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through the thorough exploration of the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist, religious visionary and teacher, and mystic.
Henry James Snr became convinced that, as he put it,
“the curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd abominable opinionativeness it engenders.”
He remained attached to Swedenborg’s thought for the rest of life, and never traveled without carrying Swedenborg’s works with him. Henry James Snr returned to the United States in 1845 and began a lifetime of lecturing about his spiritual discoveries. He devoted his mornings to writing, and published a number of discursive, rather repetitive volumes devoted to the exposition of his thought.
Henry James Snr became interested in the late 1840s in former members of Brook Farm, the experiment in communal living at Roxbury, Massachusetts that lasted from 1841 to 1847, and in Fourierism, the school of utopian socialism that grew out of the thought of French social philosopher Charles Fourier and which was a major influence in the last several years of Brook Farm. Henry James Snr was interested in utopianism as a stepping stone to the spiritual life.
Henry James Snr was a stern critic of the “gross materiality” of American society, and found in Fourier’s thought a useful critique. He held most of the leading writers of his day in low regard, with the possible exception of Walt Whitman, though he met and cultivated many of them, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and William Makepeace Thackeray.
Henry James Snr was an advocate of many social reforms, including the abolition of slavery and the liberalization of divorce…. He participated actively in the lives of his children, whose education he had done so much to shape….
William James wrote a letter to his father, but he unfortunately died before he could read it:
“In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present will soon fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure.
“All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere, & that our strivings will combine.
“What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating, so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence. Good night my sacred old Father. If I don’t see you again—Farewell! a blessed farewell!”
In 1872, William James wrote to his mother that he was sending her a homeopathic remedy, hydrastis, as a cure for her constipation.
In the Principles of Psychology 1890, William James wrote:
To his own consciousness he is not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds….
A man’s fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor, are names for one of his social selves. The particular social self of a man called his honor is usually the result of one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is his image in the eyes of his own ’set,’ which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life.
Thus a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible with his honor. A soldier’s honor requires him to fight or to die under circumstances where another man can apologize or run away with no stain upon his social self. A judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relations perfectly honorable to persons in private life.
Nothing is commoner than to hear people discriminate between their different selves of this sort: “As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you no mercy; as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him;” etc., etc. What may be called ‘club-opinion’ is one of the very strongest forces in life. The thief must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other debts in the world.
The code of honor of fashionable society has throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one of our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn: these are examples of what is meant….
In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the ‘Self of selves,’ when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.
I do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware.
If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked….
In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, intermediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a collection of activities physiologically in no essential way different from the overt acts themselves.
If we divide all possible physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the nuclear self would be the adjustments collectively considered; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far as it was active, would be the executions.
But both adjustments and executions would obey the reflex type. Both would be the result of sensorial and ideational processes discharging either into each other within the brain, or into muscles and other parts outside.
The peculiarity of the adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few in number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluctuations in the rest of the mind’s content, and entirely unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things, and actions before consciousness.
These characters would naturally keep us from introspectively paying much attention to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes, strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness contained, even with the other constituents of the ‘Self,’ material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be.
They are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything arouses them; for objects which have no other effects will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis close.
It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back.
These primary reactions are like the opening or the closing of the door. In the midst of psychic change they are the permanent core of turnings-towards and trunings-from, of yieldings and arrests, which naturally seem central and interior in comparison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they occur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, quite unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me.
It would not be surprising, then, if we were to feel them as the birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts, or if they came to appear as what we called a while back the ’sanctuary within the citadel’ of our personal life….
Speculations like this traverse common-sense; and not only do they traverse common sense (which in philosophy is no insuperable objection) but they contradict the fundamental assumption of every philosophic school.
Spiritualists, transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in us a continual direct perception of the thinking activity in the concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, they vie with each other in the cordiality of their recognition of our thoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticism cannot touch….
In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the remote and potential, between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and advantage of the latter.
One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for the sake of one’s general health; one must abandon the dollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to come; one must make an enemy of his present interlocutor if thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle; one must go without learning and grace, and wit, the better to compass one’s soul’s salvation.
Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious life.
When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club, and ’set’; when, as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a ‘regular practitioner,’ homoeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now.
The ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote: it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.
Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be.
This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the ‘Great Companion.’
We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should.
But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that ’science’ may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect.
The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world…
With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritualist and transcendentalist solutions must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own psychological one, and discussed impartially.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day.
The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
William James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Gustav Jung.
William James was influenced by Swedenborgianism:
Swedenborgian ideas were also influential among the Concord Transcendentalists and had a direct influence on William James.
In 1818 the first Swedenborg Society in Boston was started by Thomas Worcester and Sampson Reed, fellow Divinity School mates of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Sampson Reed’s Growth of the Mind (1826) a Swedenborgian tract, was the model Ralph Waldo Emerson used for his first book, Nature (1836). Ralph Waldo Emerson sent a copy of Reed’s book to Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Carlyle in turn became friendly with James John Garth Wilkinson, a surgeon and also a translator of Swedenborg’s pre-theological writings.
William James was a founder member of the American Society for Psychical Research and he was a member of the Metaphysical Club, which ‘provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come‘.
When he was thirteen, William James witnessed trance mediums first hand at the home of Dr. James John Garth Wilkinson doing automatic writing.
Later James would use automatic writing as an experimental tool in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. When he was 25, James published a review of Sargent’s Planchette: The despair of science, and then went on to pioneer in the field of psychical research as a corrective to rampant scientism, becoming also a champion of the powerful phenomenological effects of belief.
At the same time that William James was involved in these early philosophical endeavors, he had established his own independent relationship to his father’s friend James John Garth Wilkinson.
If the relation between the elder James and James John Garth Wilkinson was based on their mutual interest in Swedenborg, it may be stated that the basis of the relationship between James John Garth Wilkinson and William James was their mutual interest in mental healing.
James John Garth Wilkinson had helped the English medical doctors Elliotson and Braid introduce hypnotism into English medicine in the late 1830s; he studied the automatic writing of mediums in his home in 1855, the year that the James family lived next door as neighbors; he had turned to the practice of homeopathic medicine during that time at the suggestion of Henry James Sr.
James John Garth Wilkinson’s methods for the homeopathic treatment of insanity were linked to a stream of consciousness technique he had developed for the speaking, writing, and drawing of literary subjects; and we know that James John Garth Wilkinson’s unpublished manuscript on a case of hysterical fasting in a young girl was one of the most highly prized pieces in William James’s personal library.
James John Garth Wilkinson and William James also shared a mutual contempt for the arrogance of orthodox medical men concerning their claim to have superior ability over the mental healers in caring for the mentally ill.
William James’s interest in mental healing may have been at the very heart of his world view, a fact quite overlooked by all his distinguished biographers.
William James was the first to introduce the work of the French psychopathologist Pierre Janet into the American psychological literature in 1890; in 1894 he was the first American to recognize the importance of Joseph Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s studies on hysteria, first published in 1893; and his graduate course at Harvard in mental pathology during the 1890s inspired such students as E. E. Southard, Boris Sidis, Mary Whiton Calkins, Gertrude Stein, and James Rowland Angell.
Soon after the 1890s James’s attention turned away from abnormal psychology, and he became quite busy distorting Peirce’s original idea of pragmatism into a philosophy of action, of ends, and of results.
This variation on Swedenborg’s doctrine of use, inherited through Henry James Sr, modified by James John Garth Wilkinson’s views on mental healing, and interpreted through Peirce’s philosophy, was to have a profound effect on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century development of a uniquely American functional psychology.
William James was ‘a champion of alternative approaches to healing. He challenged his professional colleagues not to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those phenomena‘.
In William James’s lecture of 1897 titled “The Will to Believe,” William James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing.
Although this doctrine is often seen as a way for William James to justify religious beliefs, his philosophy of pragmatism allows him to use the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis’ truth.
Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in God and prove its existence by what the belief brings to one’s life.
- The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
- In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain “over-beliefs” in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.
The investigation of mystical experience was constant throughout the life of William James, leading him to experiment with chloral hydrate (1870), amyl nitrite (1875), nitrous oxide (1882), and even peyote (1896).
William James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel. He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such.
William James claimed to have found a white crow and to believe in spiritualism:
Any discussion of James’s spiritualistic bent must begin with Mrs. Piper. James (1890) wrote that he first met her in the Autumn of 1885, and Mrs. Piper’s description of how they met is particularly illuminating.
“My maid of all work told a friend who was a servant in the household of Professor William James, of Harvard, that I went into ‘queer sleeps,’ in which I said many ’strange things.’ Professor James recognized that I was what is called a psychic, and took steps to make my acquaintance”
If this was true there would have been an obvious conduit from the James household to Mrs. Piper, and her trance state revelations about the James family, which so impressed James, would have had a more mundane source than the spirit world.
Mrs. Piper’s daughter, Alta Piper, told a somewhat different story.
Her grandparents had a maid whose sister worked in a Boston home frequently visited by James’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbens (Alta Piper spelled it Gibbins).Hearing, through this channel, marvelous tales about Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Gibbens requested and received a sitting that so impressed her that she arranged a sitting for her daughter, James’s wife, “the results of which appeared equally, if not more, surprising than her own”.
James’s (1890) version of how he met Mrs. Piper generally supports her daughter’s description, although he made no mention of the role played by the housekeepers.
When he was told of Mrs. Piper’s powers he went with his wife, “to get a direct personal impression”. Whatever the specific connection between the servants,
“It is thus possible that Mrs. Piper’s knowledge of the James family was acquired from the gossip of servants and that the whole mystery rests on the failure of the people upstairs to realize that servants [downstairs] also have ears”.
In his The Principles of Psychology–a two-volume publication that is arguably the most famous book in academic psychology–James (1890) quoted a lengthy autobiographical description of the remarkable output produced during automatic writing by a former member of Congress.
The man insists that the writer was not himself, nor his unconscious, but some other intelligence using his mind.
What is James’s response to this? He accepts it, commenting that he himself is persuaded “by abundant acquaintance with the trances of one medium that the ‘control’ may be altogether different from any possible waking self of the person.
In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain departed French doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquainted with facts about the circumstances, and the living and dead relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the medium never met before, and of whom she has never heard the names” (Vol. 1,396).
James goes on to observe that he is giving his opinion, “unsupported by the evidence,” not to persuade anyone to his viewpoint, but rather because he believes “that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology” (396).
Those unfamiliar with James’s adventures into mysticism could not know that the medium he refers to in his famous book is Mrs. Piper and her control is Phinuit (a spirit intermediary for other spirits), who claimed that in his earthly existence he was a French physician, although he couldn’t speak French.
James rationalized this by suggesting that Phinuit was a fictitious person; that is, a real spirit who lied about the nature of his earthly identity (James 1890).
Henry James Jnr was and exponent of trans-Atlantic literature and:
Henry James Jnr lived most of his life in England where he moved in illustrious circles:
Henry James Jnr was vigorously social during his years in London, and his friends included three prime ministers, successive American ambassadors, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the commander-in-chief of the British armed forces.
Many of his more intimate friends were members of an artistic circle of young men later identified with Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book… Biographers and critics have identified Henrik Ibsen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honore de Balzac, and Ivan Turgenev as important influences… and Hendrik Christian Andersen… James John Garth Wilkinson was also a close family friend.
Alice James suffered severely from mental health problems throughout her life and she died prematurely at the age of 43. Alice James is known primarily for the posthumously published diary she kept in the last years of her life.
Garth Wilkinson James (nickname Wilky) and his brother 
Robertson James:
Wilky was staunchly committed to the abolitionist cause–he and his brother Robertson (Bob) had been students of an associate of John Brown shortly after the attack on Harper’s Ferry, and Wilky and Bob were classmates of Brown’s daughters.
Wilky became an adjutant in Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black regiment in the state.
On July 18, the regiment was decimated leading a fateful attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, and Wilky was wounded in the side and foot.
Brought home by a friend’s father, Wilky lay on a stretcher in the entrance of the house, too ill to be moved. His father wrote to a friend that
“Poor Wilky cries aloud for his friends gone and missing, and I could hardly have supposed he might be educated so suddenly up to serious manhood altogether as he appears to have been.”
His brother William James sketched him, mouth gaping, cheeks sunken, looking more dead than alive.Wilky did recover, though. He returned to his regiment and was present at Fort Sumter, when on February 20, 1865, the Stars and Stripes were raised again.
“It was without exception the proudest moment of my life,” he wrote his sister.
The youngest James son, Bob, also was an officer in a black regiment, the 55th Massachusetts.
After the war, Wilky and Bob tried to further the cause of civil rights by running a plantation in Florida for free blacks. Unfortunately, the venture failed. The war turned out to be their only hour of glory, the only time when they outshown their brilliant older brothers.
The James Family Archive is here.
Sue :: Mar.20.2008 :: American History :: No Comments »