Buddhist Romanticism

the sciences that would further explore the unity of all sciences in pursuit of
knowledge about how the World Soul was bringing about its purpose in
the universe, both as a whole and in its minutest operations.
By James’ time, though, Schelling’s program had become discredited. It
had inspired some useful research in the field of electricity, but more often
than not it had directed its followers down lines of inquiry that had proven
fruitless. The most productive research in the early 19th century had either
ignored Schelling’s program or had been devoted to debunking it. As a
result, science had progressed by ignoring larger theories of universal
purpose and focusing instead on discovering mechanical laws of physical
and chemical behavior.
In this way, the mechanistic model of the universe had again become
ascendant, the biological model had been discarded, and the various
sciences had gone their separate ways. In astronomy, Herschel’s biological
analogy for the development of stars and galaxies was pushed aside. The
dominant view came to be that complex systems could grow and decay
without our having to assume that they formed organic unities or that they
were driven by a teleological purpose. This view came to govern not only
astronomy, but also geology.
In biology, research had taken a different tack. Charles Darwin’s work
had convinced many if not all biologists that the theory of the evolution of
life had a sound empirical basis. And although the philosophical
implications of Darwin’s work could be interpreted in many different
directions, the young James focused on the means by which living beings
evolved, noting that natural selection through accidents of environment
and genetic mutation was a blind process. This seemed to imply no
overriding direction or design to life at all. Life evolved, but not with a
purpose. Evolution was nothing more than an accident of mechanical laws
—an idea that exacerbated James’ sense of fatalism.
In other words, he was back in the mechanistic universe inhabited by
Kant, Schiller, and Fichte. His solution to this dilemma—the solution that
got him out of his depression and into a productive career—bears
comparison with theirs. In fact, it was through reading the essays of a
French Neo-Kantian, Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), that James came to the
insight that started him on his road to recovery. Renouvier had argued for
the possibility of free will based on an internal psychological observation,
which James noted with excitement in his diary: “the sustaining of a
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