Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The gradual assimilation of European ideas into an American context has been chronicled both by Richard Hofstadter and, more recently and more fully, by Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard, by means of biographical accounts of a small number of nineteenth-century individuals, all New Englanders, who knew each other and who between them invented what we may call the characteristically American tradition of modern thought, the American mind. The first part of this chapter relies heavily on Menand’s work.3 The specialities of these few individuals included philosophy, jurisprudence, psychology, biology, geology, mathematics, economics and religion. In particular we are talking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Benjamin and Charles Peirce, Louis Agassiz and John Dewey.

  ‘These people had highly distinctive personalities, and they did not always agree with one another, but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world …Their ideas changed the way Americans thought–and continue to think–about education, democracy, liberty, justice and tolerance. As a consequence, they changed the way Americans live–the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves…We can say that what these thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea–an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools–like forks and knives and microchips–that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves…And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability…They taught a kind of scepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialised, mass-market society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have become attenuated…There is also, though, implicit in what they wrote, a recognition of the limits of what thought can do in the struggle to increase human happiness.’4 Along the way we shall be concerned with the creation of some major intellectual centres in America–the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Chicagoand JohnsHopkins, and of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  One founding father of this American tradition was Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior. He was well-connected, numbering the Cabots, the Quincys and the Jacksons–old, landowning families–among his friends; but he was himself a professor who had studied medicine in Paris. It was Holmes Sr who invented the term ‘Boston Brahmin’, to include those who were both well-born and scholars at the same time. It was Holmes Sr, in his guise as a doctor, who discovered the causes of puerperal (childbed) fever, demonstrating conclusively that the disease was transmitted from childbirth to childbirth by doctors themselves. This hardly made him popular among his medical colleagues, but it was an important advance in the development of the germ theory of disease and antisepsis.5 His academic career culminated as dean of Harvard Medical School, though he became just as widely known for being what many people regarded as the greatest talker they had ever heard, and for his role in founding the Metaphysical Club, also known as the ‘Saturday Club’, where literary matters were discussed over dinner and whose other members included Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton. Holmes also helped establish the Atlantic Monthly; he himself conceived the title to reflect the link between the New World and the Old.6

  The other founding father of the American intellectual tradition was Emerson. Holmes Sr and he were good friends, mutual influences on one another. Holmes Sr was in the audience when Emerson gave his famous Phi Beta Kappa address on ‘The American Scholar’ at Harvard in 1837. This address was the first of several in which Emerson declared a literary independence for America, urging his fellow citizens to a writing style all their own, away from the familiarities of Europe (although among his ‘great men’ there were no Americans). A year later, in a no less notorious speech, to Harvard Divinity School, Emerson reported how he had been ‘bored to distraction’ by a sermon, and had contrasted its artificiality to the wild snow storm then raging outside the church. This (plus many other musings) had caused him, he said, to renounce his belief in a supernatural Jesus, and organised Christianity, in favour of a more personal revelation. Partly as a result of this, Harvard–then a Calvinist institution–turned its back on Emerson for thirty years.7 Holmes Sr, however, remained true to his friend. Above all, he shared Emerson’s belief in an American literature, which is why he was so involved in the Atlantic Monthly.8

  Holmes Junior was as impressed with Emerson as his father had been. As a freshman at Harvard in 1858, he said many years later, Emerson ‘set me on fire’. But Holmes Jr was not in exactly the same mould as his father. Though Holmes Sr had been an abolitionist on religious grounds, he never had much direct involvement with blacks. Holmes Jr, on the other hand, felt the situation rather more keenly. He found The Pickwick Papers distasteful because of its treatment of West Indians and he likewise detested minstrel shows–they were, he said, ‘demeaning’.9 He agreed with Emerson, that a scientific world view did not preclude a moral life, or that it was possible to live in a better relation with one’s fellow men outside organised religion than within it.

  Holding such views, the Civil War, when it broke out in 1861, provided him with an opportunity to do something practical. True to his word, Holmes accepted a commission ‘in a spirit of moral obligation’.10 His very first engagement, the battle of Ball’s Bluff, on21 October that year, was far from being a success: 1,700 Union soldiers made the advance across the river, but less than half returned. Holmes took a bullet near the heart, the first of three injuries he was to suffer in the war and these wounds, as Menand observes, shaped him. (His handwriting in his letters was less than perfect, he told correspondents, because he had to lie flat on his back.)11 Subsequently, although he might recount his fighting exploits from time to time, he never read histories of the Civil War.12 He knew what he knew and he had no need and no wish to revisit the horror. The Civil War was fought with modern weapons and pre-modern tactics. The close-order infantry charge was designed for use against the musket, a gun with a range of about eighty yards. Nineteenth-century rifles had a range of 400 yards. This accounts for the terrible carnage of the Civil War, which is still the war in which most American lives have been lost and why it had such an effect on Holmes and others.13

  Amid the carnage, he learned one thing that was to remain with him all his life. It was a distrust of absolutes and certainty, a conviction that ‘certitude leads to violence’.14 He looked about him and observed that, although the abolitionists in 1850 appeared to many Northerners as subversives, by the end of the war ‘they were patriots’. He concluded from this that ‘There is no one way that life must be.’15 This guided him and formed him into the wise judge that he became. This wisdom emerged in his great book The Common Law,16 which began life as the Lowell Lectures at Harvard University, all twelve given before a full house, where he spoke without notes.17

  His biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe says Holmes was the first lawyer, English or American, to subject the common law to the analysis of a philosopher and the explanation of an historian.18 The philosophical brilliance of Holmes was to see that the law has no one overriding aim or idea. (This was the idea he brought from the disaster of the Civil War.)19 That it had evolved pragmatically.20 Every case, in terms of facts at least, is unique. When it reaches court, it is swept up in what Menand calls a ‘vortex’ of intentions, assumptions and beliefs. There is, for example, the intention to find the solution that is just in this case. At the same time, there is an intention to arrive at a verdict that is consistent with analogous cases in the past. There is also the intention to arrive at a verdict that will be most beneficial to society as a whole–the result that will deter others.21 Then there are a number of less pressing aims, which also impinge on a verdict, some of which, Holm
es conceded, are unvoiced. These may include a wish to redistribute costs from parties who can’t afford them (often victims) to parties who can (often manufacturers or insurance companies). ‘However over this whole weather pattern–all of which is in motion, so to speak, before any case ever arises–is a single meta-imperative: not to let it appear as though any one of these lesser imperatives has decided the case at the blatant expense of the others. A result that seems just intuitively but is admittedly incompatible with legal precedent is taboo; the court does not want to seem to excuse reckless behaviour (like operating a railroad too close to a heavily populated area), but it does not want to raise too high a liability barrier to activities society wants to encourage (like building railroads).’22

  Holmes’ genius was to face the fact that there are no hard-and-fast distinctions in any of these areas. This was made plain in a sentence that became famous, near the opening of The Common Law, where he said ‘The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.’23 He thought it was his job to speak harsh truths, not give way to historical legends.24 His argument was that, for the most part, common law judges make up their minds first and come up with ‘a plausible account’ of how they got there afterwards. He even allowed that there were ‘unconscious’ influences on a judge, an early and interesting use of the word.25 Holmes wasn’t saying that judges are wayward, random or even idiosyncratic in their pronouncements. He just wasn’t sure that experience is reducible to general abstractions, even though human beings spend so much time trying to do just that. ‘All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,’ he wrote in 1899, ‘but all the use of life is in specific solutions–which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.’26 He then built on this idea of experience to arrive at his most important contribution to civil law–his invention of the ‘reasonable man’. Holmes thought that the point of experience is that it is ‘collective and consensual’, social not psychological. This goes to the heart of modern liability theory and is one of the main points where the law treats the question: how are we to live together? In the classic case, as Menand puts it, someone is injured as a result of what someone else does, giving rise to the question: what brings about civil liability? Traditionally, three arguments are brought to bear on this. One, it is enough to prove causation. All citizens act on their own responsibility; therefore they are liable for any costs their actions incur, whether they could have foreseen the consequences or not. This is ‘strict liability’. Two, a citizen is liable for injuries he or she intended but not for those never contemplated. Legally this is called mens rea–the doctrine of ‘the guilty mind’. Third, there is the argument of negligence: even if a citizen, in acting in a particular way, never anticipated the possibility of injury to anyone, that person is liable anyway, if the action were careless or imprudent.27

  Holmes’ contribution in this area was to replace the traditional legal terms ‘guilt’ and ‘fault’ with words like ‘carelessness’ and ‘recklessness’.28 He thought that by doing this, it would help make clear what we mean by behaviour that counts as reckless or careless. The main question, as he saw it, was to identify what was and what wasn’t the ‘permissible by-product’ of any activity. His answer, he said, was ‘experience’, and his achievement was to define this ‘experience’.29 What he meant by it, in this context, he said, is that of ‘an intelligent and prudent member of the community’. Law, he said, was not a ‘brooding omniscience in the sky’; it had to operate according to the precepts of an ‘average’ member of society, best exemplified by a jury.30 ‘When men live in society,’ Holmes insisted, ‘a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities…is necessary to general welfare.’ Thus it was the ‘reasonable man’, his beliefs and conduct, that governed Holmes’ understanding of liability. Now this is, as Menand also points out, a statistical fiction and the ‘legal cousin’ of Adolphe Quetelet’s homme moyen. ‘The “reasonable man” knows, because “experience” tells him, that a given behaviour in a given circumstance–say, taking target practice in a populated area–carries the risk of injuring another person.’31

  Holmes also said at one point that a judge ‘should not have a politics’. Yet he himself was in favour of capitalists, as risk takers and wealth generators, and there were those who thought that his arguments actually moved the law away from the theory of strict liability towards that of negligence, which made it easier for big businesses to escape their ‘duty’ to workers and customers. ‘Nevertheless, in his theory of torts, Holmes did what Darwin did in his theory of evolution by chance variation and Maxwell did in his kinetic theory of gases: he applied to his own special field the great nineteenth-century discovery that the indeterminacy of individual behaviour can be regularised by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.’32 This was a crucial step forward in the democratisation of law.

  Experience, so important to Oliver Wendell Holmes in the realm of the law, would prove no less invaluable to his colleague from the Saturday Club, the philosopher and psychologist William James. Despite his impeccably Welsh name, James was in fact of Irish stock.33

  The first William James, the philosopher’s grandfather, was a dry goods millionaire who, but for John Jacob Astor, would have been the richest man in New York state.34 His son Henry liked the bottle too much and was disinherited on William’s death, but contested the will, and won. According to Richard Hofstadter, William James was the first great beneficiary of the scientific education then emerging in the United States during the 1860s and 1870s (and considered later in this chapter). A wag suggested that he was a better writer than his brother Henry, who was a better psychologist. Like Wendell Holmes, William James was sceptical of certitude. One of his favourite phrases was ‘Damn the Absolute!’35 Instead of a formal education, he had travelled across Europe with his family, and although he had never stayed long at any particular school, this travelling gave him experience. (Somewhere he picked up the ability to draw, too.36) He did finally settle on a career, in science, at Harvard in 1861 and formed part of the circle around Louis Agassiz, the discoverer of the Ice Age and at the time one of the most vociferous critics of Charles Darwin, who based his opposition, he insisted, on science.37 After his early successes, Agassiz’ fortunes had taken a turn for the worse when he lost a quantity of money on a publishing venture. The offer of a lecture series in America promised a way out and indeed, in Boston he was a great success (the Saturday Club was often referred to as Agassiz’ Club). At the time he was in Boston, Harvard was in the process of setting up its school of science (see below, this chapter), and a special chair was founded for him.38

  It was Agassiz’ battle with Darwin that interested James the most and, says one of his biographers, it was the example of the Swiss that decided him to become a scientist.39 Agassiz, a deist, described Darwin’s theory as ‘a mistake’; he disputed its facts and considered it ‘mischievous’ rather than serious science.40 James wasn’t so sure. He was particularly sceptical of Agassiz’ dogmatism whereas he thought evolutionary theory sparked all sorts of fresh ideas and, what he liked most, revealed biology as acting on very practical, even pragmatic, principles. Natural selection, for James, was a beautiful idea because it was so simple and down-to-earth, with adaptation being no more than a way to address practical problems wherever they occurred.41 Life, James liked to say, is to be judged by consequences.42

  In 1867, after his spell at Harvard, James went to Germany. In the nineteenth century some nine thousand Americans visited Germany to study in the universities there, which, as we have seen, were organised along the lines of the various disciplines, rather than as places to teach priests, doctors and lawyers. James went to study with the leading experimental psychologist of the day, Wilhelm Wundt, who had set up the first psychological laboratory, at Leipzig. Wundt’s speciality–physiological psychology, or ‘psychophysics’–was then re
garded as the most likely area to produce advances. The basic assumption of physiological psychology was that all mind (conscious) processes are linked with brain processes, that every conscious thought or action has an organic, physical basis. One of the effects of this was that experimentation had replaced introspection as the primary means of investigation. In this so-called New Psychology, feelings and thoughts were understood as the result of ‘brain secretions’, organic changes which would in time yield to experimental manipulation. James was disappointed by the New Psychology, and by Wundt, who is little read now (and in fact it has now emerged that Wundt himself was drifting away from a rigid experimental approach to psychology).43 Wundt’s chief legacy is that he improved the standing of psychology thanks to his experimental approach. This improved standing of psychology rubbed off on James.

  If Wundt’s influence turned out to be incidental, that of the Peirces was much more consequential. Like the Wendell Holmeses and the Jameses, the Peirces were a formidable father-and-son team. Benjamin Peirce may well have been the first world-class mathematician the United States produced (the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton thought that Peirce was ‘the most massive intellect with which I have ever come into close contact’) and he too was one of the eleven founding members of the Saturday Club.44

  His son Charles was equally impressive. A prodigy who wrote a history of chemistry when he was eleven and had his own laboratory at twelve, he could write with both hands at the same time. No wonder, perhaps, that he was bored at Harvard, drank too much, and graduated seventy-ninth in his class of ninety.45 That was the low point. Later, he built on his father’s work and, between them, they conceived the philosophy of pragmatism, which was grounded in mathematics. ‘It is not easy to define pragmatism: the Italian Papini observed that pragmatism was less a philosophy than a method of doing without one.’46 In the first place, Benjamin Peirce became fascinated by the theories and calculations of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Karl Friedrich Gauss (covered in Chapter 32), in particular their ideas about probability.47 Probability, or the laws of error, had a profound impact on the nineteenth century because of the apparent paradox that the accidental fluctuations that make phenomena deviate from their ‘normal’ laws, are themselves bound by a (statistical) law. The fact that this law applied even to human beings pointed many towards determinism.48