Understanding Forwards

Michael Wood

• BuyWilliam James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert Richardson
  Mariner, 622 pp, £15.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 0 618 43325 4

‘He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher C.S. Peirce said something similar about the grown man. ‘He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents.’ Josiah Royce, a life-long friend and Harvard colleague of William James, with whom he agreed philosophically scarcely ever, offered a fine parody of the pragmatism so closely associated with his companion’s name. The pragmatist takes the witness stand and says: ‘I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me future experience.’ No swearing, no truth, and a firm bet on what hasn’t happened yet. Many of the virtues as well as the limitations of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture.