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Lessons from James’s Debate with Clifford: How Not to Philosophize

In his magisterial account of William James’s “thought and character,” Ralph Barton Perry quotes from a revealing correspondence between James and L. T. Hobhouse. At issue is the accuracy of Hobhouse’s characterization, in an article just published, of James’s position in “The Will to Believe.” Not only has Hobhouse misrepresented his view, James complains, he has argued for a purportedly alternative doctrine that is in fact the position he himself advocates. You “substitute a travesty” for my position, he writes, “for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text.” You present “a beautiful duplicate of my thesis,” he further objects, “in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my own” (James’s emphasis). While both men say “identically the same thing” in their respective essays, he continues, each approaches the issues at stake from his own “polemical point of view.” Hobhouse is sensitive to the “dangers” that attend the “faith-attitude,” whereas James underscores “more the right to run the risk.” 1 James proceeds to observe more generally that “in these matters each man writes from out of a field of consciousness of which the bogey in the background is the chief object.” Hobhouse’s bogey is superstition, he submits, whereas his is “dessication.” Elaborating, he writes, “In my essay the evil shape was a vision of ‘Science’ in the form of abstraction, priggishness, and sawdust lording it over all,” a vision he attributes to such “champions of science” as Clifford and Huxley, among others, who would veto faith. In this context, he writes not only of Hobhouse but also of himself, “each for his contrast effect, clutches at any text that can be used to represent the enemy, regardless of exegetical propriety.” In this lukewarm exoneration of Hobhouse, James thus owns up to his own interpretative practice—in “The Will to Believe,” no less. 2 There is more than a little irony in this bit of correspondence, as readers familiar with the James-Clifford debate will appreciate. Indeed, it is tempting to imagine Clifford writing to James about “The Will to Believe” along the lines of James’s letter to Hobhouse, complaining that an important part of his analysis