Aug
William James, the famous American philosopher and psychologist, was nothing if not perspicacious. On one occasion, however, James discovered within himself an alarming moral blindness. The scion of an elite family whose childhood environs included New York City, Geneva and Paris, James was traveling in the mountainous countryside of North Carolina where, in the years just prior to the turn of the century, ordinary folks eked out a scant living from the land. Smaller trees had been razed and centuries-old giants girdled. Charred stumps, dead trees left standing and scattered clumps of Indian corn had taken the place of lush foliage. Crude log cabins littered the bare landscape. The author of the monumental “Principles of Psychology” instinctively shrank from what he saw. To James, the settlement was “a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty.”