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Near the close of his exceptional intellectual biography of William James, Robert D. Richardson pauses briefly to sing the praises of the great man. The occasion for his encomium happens to be a letter that James wrote, only months before he died, to Henry Adams, the curmudgeonly historian who was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents.
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James had just finished reading Adams' "Letter to American Teachers of History," a 125-page lamentation over the implications for the study of history of Lord Kelvin's second law of thermodynamics. The dyspeptic Adams read the physics of entropy directly into the philosophy of history, and as he peered into the future, he spied not Al Gore's global warming fires but Lord Kelvin's "terminal ice." Adams envisioned "the last tribe" of humankind dying of hunger in the cold, camping at the equator, "on the shores of the last sea in the rays of a pale sun which will henceforward illumine an earth that is only a wandering tomb, turning around a useless light and a barren heat."
We can only imagine what a typical history teacher might have made of such a letter a century ago, but we know for certain that James didn't think much of it. Although he was dying of heart disease, he rallied sufficiently, in Richardson's words, "to rise in protest against the urbane and learned pessimism of his friend Adams's book-length funk." The philosopher told the historian he had forgotten a crucial fact about history, which is that all that matters is what men and women do with the powers they have. A dinosaur's brain may have "as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man's," James wrote, but it can do little more than unlock that creature's muscles, whereas the human brain, "by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral etc. and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short make history." So it is, that "the 'second law' is wholly irrelevant to 'history.' "
However irrelevant the "second law" might be to history, it had a special pertinence for William James as he wrote to Adams, for death had planted a viselike grip upon his life, and his vital energy seemed to be leaking away by the day. A year earlier, when he and Sigmund Freud had met at a conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, the aged philosopher could not keep pace on a short walk with the younger psychoanalyst. "James stopped suddenly," Freud reported, "handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up" as soon as he had recovered from an attack of angina. Only months later, James was so short of breath that he could barely speak as he introduced a distinguished guest lecturer at Harvard. The situation proved to be so dire that William's wife wrote a terse summary of his condition and that of his brother Henry: "William cannot walk and Henry cannot smile."
Nevertheless, here was William James, stymied in speech and walking at a crawl but still able to muster the energy needed to confront the state of entropy head on. "It is impossible, after reading James for any length of time, to refrain from using italics oneself," Richardson concludes:
But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!
