James suffered from depression from his teenage years on, his impulsion toward suicide a visceral reaction to the ancient idea, one pointedly expressed by Ecclesiastes, that “all is vanity”: individuals are always snuffed out before they can make a genuine or lasting mark. For Peirce, a consummate scientist, considering one’s self-destruction was cooler, calmer: a reflective activity brought on by a nagging sense that defined Peirce’s later years that he was of little value to his wife and to society. As he wrote to James in 1905, it is “[my] duty not to allow myself to be a burden upon everybody, even if I have not already become so. It is my duty to get out, to make away with myself. I have considered the question maturely.” More generally, Peirce’s frequent breakdowns coincided with the mounting evidence that he was absolutely alone in the cosmos. Whereas James balked at the idea that single individuals could not effectively exercise their free will, Peirce carefully thought through the meaninglessness of a life lived in perfect isolation.
The existential crises of James and Peirce were grounded in two of the enduring concerns of classical American pragmatism and drove them to concentrate on seemingly disparate, but actually adjacent, concepts: the efficacy of individual freedom and the possibility of genuine communion. They also expressed two different facets of human experience; they embody, in turn, passion and reflectiveness in the face of uncertainty. Their world was not a stable, closed system created by a rational god but an evolving, contingent, precarious temporary home for human animals to make with their neighbors. It was shot through with the risk of real loss. But it was also the home of possibility, a site of making and doing. This was the universe of the pragmatists. The trick was to learn to walk on unstable ground, freely, with others.
It is easy to understand how James acquired his preoccupation with freedom and free will. He was the intellectual godson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a close friend of his father, Henry James Sr. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” delivered in 1832, was regarded, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, as “America’s intellectual Declaration of Independence.” The American Revolution may have secured political freedom, but intellectual and personal freedom was another matter entirely, and Emerson argued that it was high time for his fellow Americans to stand on their own philosophical feet. There was a buoyancy and hopefulness during this time in New England, inspired by belief that freedom could be achieved in more than name only. William James, however, was not born in the midst of this triumphant spirit, but reached intellectual maturity after the Civil War, a conflict that not only shook the nation’s long-standing beliefs in absolutes and transcendent values—as Louis Menand argues in The Metaphysical Club—but also, and perhaps more important for James, cast serious doubt on Emerson’s belief in the power of an individual’s creative spirit.