The Letters of William James, Vol. 1James, William
General
The Letters of William James, Vol. 1
James, William
Intellectuals -- United States; James, William, 1842-1910; Philosophers -- United States; Psychologists -- United States
William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly
indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's
oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was
sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have
been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to
remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the
family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He
was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the
next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the
important points are clear. The family, including by this time three
younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal
aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In
London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort
that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the
Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous
instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry
attended the _Collège_ through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the
_Collège de Boulogne_, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday,
was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that
it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at
Newport, there was another European migration--this time to Geneva for
the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as
the present University was still called. He subsequently described
himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little
ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to
Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of
the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an
excellent familiarity with French--such, in conventional terms, was the
net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the
deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a
few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian,
and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.
[Illustration: William James at eighteen.
From a Daguerreotype.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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