![]() ![]() This order is very nearly accidental and gives no adequate indication of James's development. After a period of illness and retirement, he began teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard in 1873, psychology in 1875, and philosophy in 1879. James returned to Cambridge in November 1868 and received his medical degree in June 1869. His first professional literary effort, a revision of Herman Grimm's Un überwindliche M ächte, published in the Nation (Vol. While little formal study of physiology proved to be possible, James read widely and thoughtfully. In 1867 ill health and the desire to study experimental physiology led James to Europe, to Germany in particular. This was the first serious manifestation of that constitutional failure which was to recur throughout James's life, imposing upon it a pattern of interrupted work and of periodic flights to Europe which were always, at least in part, searches for health. In Brazil he contracted smallpox and suffered from sensitivity of the eyes. While at medical school James joined Agassiz as an assistant on the Thayer expedition to Brazil during 1865/1866. ![]() His medical studies, although fruitful, were attenuated and sporadic. In 1864, James transferred to the medical school, though without the intention of ever practicing medicine. 14) and of acquaintance with empirical facts as against abstraction. From Wyman he learned the importance of evolution from Agassiz, an appreciation of "the world's concrete fulness" (William James, Memories and Studies, p. Eliot, later in the department of comparative anatomy and physiology under Jeffries Wyman and Louis Agassiz. In 1861, James entered the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, studying first in the chemistry department under Charles W. The lesson at Newport permanently discouraged James's pursuit of an artistic vocation, but throughout his scientific and philosophical career he retained the artist's eye, his predilection for concrete sensuous detail, and his concern for style. This experiment convinced James that he lacked the ability to be anything more than a mediocre artist, than which there was, he thought, nothing worse. It was nevertheless arranged that James should begin study with William M. The elder James was not anxious for his son to become a painter, thereby prematurely cutting himself off from the rest of life's possibilities any definite vocation, according to the father, was sadly "narrowing" (ibid., p. In spite of his continuing enthusiasm and talent for scientific inquiry, James's interest in painting became so strong by 1860 that he resolved to spend a trial period learning to paint. During this European sojourn James's interest was divided between natural science and art, especially painting. There, as his father said, he and his brother were able "to absorb French and German and get a better sensuous education than they are likely to get here" ( Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, p. From 1855 to 1860 James (often in the company of his younger brother Henry) attended schools in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. Formal education took place irregularly in various private establishments. James's primary education took place at his father's table its main constituents were the spirited discourse that the family held on every topic and the example of the parents, loving and unworldly. ![]() The thought and sympathies of these transcendentalists and romantic humanitarians of the New England tradition never seemed to James the ultimate answers to his own philosophical and personal problems, but they dealt with genuine issues that he did not evade in his later work. There was no straitlaced dogmatism in the James household, and William James was free to accept or reject the ideas of his father and his father's friends. Even more important was the rather extraordinary respect that the elder James lavished upon the youthful spontaneities of his children each, he thought, must go his own way and become that most valuable of creatures, himself. and Ralph Waldo Emerson all stimulated free intellectual growth. James's early environment was propitious his father's enthusiastic and unconventional scholarship, his personal and unorthodox religion, his literary association with men like Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. James had three brothers and a sister one of them, the novelist Henry James, achieved equal fame. James's paternal grandfather and namesake was an Irishman of Calvinist persuasion who immigrated to the United States in 1798 and became very rich through felicitous investment in the Erie Canal. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, was born in New York City to Mary Robertson Walsh James and Henry James Sr., the eccentric Swedenborgian theologian. ![]()
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