In those great dawning days of increased academic independence, another member of the faculty at Harvard who did not discourage daring and originality was the immortal William James. Wood took his course in psychology, and carried into that field also a violent curiosity and a tendency toward independent research. One of the requirements in James’s course was that each student should write a thesis on some chosen subject. Wood, who disliked rhetorical and dialectic writing and who had barely passed in his course in English composition, cast about for a way to avoid the necessity. It so happened that James at the time was conducting his celebrated “American Census on Hallucinations” and was being swamped with returns to the questionnaires with which he had flooded the country by mail. The census was designed to throw light on what percentage of people “had visions,” “heard voices,” had premonitions which came true or other unusual psychic experiences. More than fifteen hundred answers had already come in, and he was staggered by the accumulating mass of material which piled up awaiting inspection and analysis. Young Wood was offered — or wangled — the job of collating this instead of doing his thesis. Despite the hard work involved, this was peaches and cream for Wood, who is congenitally possessed with a violent and inordinate curiosity.
This was in Wood’s sophomore year, 1888. A good proportion of the hallucinatory responses, of course, were from religious fanatics, while a scattering few were from “dopes.” He has remembered all these years a rather sweet one that came from a dear old lady in Pennsylvania.
My dear Professor James,
I often have dreams and visions that have an interpretational meaning, and am a sincere believer that God reveals himself to us now in visions, as he did in the days of Abram and the prophets — but such persons must be pure in heart, thought, and word, and be a total abstainer from tea, coffee, and other stimulants.
Very truly yours,
Mrs. J. Cunningham.
As all who have read Varieties of Religious Experience will recall, William James was outspokenly interested in what he termed “the anaesthetic revelation”, to wit, the type of visions and hallucinations produced under ether and dentist’s gas or by the use of vision-stimulating drugs. Some of the answers dealt with this phase of the subject, and this may partly explain the fact that the young sophomore presently conceived the bright idea of trying a shot at it himself. He had read of the strange illusions produced by hashish, and asked Professor James one day if there was any danger in it. James, who was an M. D. as well as a psychologist, measured his words and replied, perhaps with a smile:
“As a professor in this university, I can hardly give my official sanction to what you seem to be proposing. But as a doctor of medicine, I see no objection to stating that so far as I know there is no recorded case of death from an overdose of cannabis indica, nor is there any evidence for believing that one dose would be habit forming.”
So Rob secured and swallowed in due course a suitable quantity of the horrific oriental drug which is supposed to derive its common name from the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins. He had read, and correctly, that smoking it, even to excess, produced no actual hallucinations, but merely acted as a narcotic stimulant, as does the sniffing of cocaine.
Wood had dosed himself thoroughly, and had a long series of hallucinations, “some horrible, some glorious, magnificent, some filled with the awful grandeur of space and eternity.” I am happy to report that he also turned into a fox. Next day he wrote an account of his adventure. Here’s the part about the fox, and about a terrific two-headed doll full of pointed prophecy and symbolism:
I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw — nothing….
Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images [referred to earlier] appeared again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll, with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top.
It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the adornments of the body[3].
He had written his account at the request of Professor James, who included it in his Principles of Psychology. In the meantime, Rob had submitted a version of it to the New York Sunday Herald, entitled,
KINGDOM OF THE DREAM
AN ACCOUNT OF THE HASHISH PHANTASIA AS EXPERIENCED BY A NOVICE
It was published in full, September 23, 1888, but he was enraged, and justly so I think, because they ran it simply as a “letter to the editor,” and didn’t pay him a penny for it. He wrote to complain and got a specious letter signed by the great James Gordon Bennett in person, saying that since the communication had been addressed to the “editor” it had been published as a letter, and that it was not the custom of the Herald to pay for things so used.
I doubt that Bennett had read the piece. I don’t think he’d have overlooked the headline possibilities of the fox — Harvard Man Changes into Fox.
Shaler was the only one who gave Robert Wood, Senior, encouragement as to his son’s future when a flood of bad marks brought the doctor to Cambridge to inquire personally among the teachers why his boy was doing so poorly. There were two sides to it, of course. Wood felt, not only at Harvard, but later throughout his studies at Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Berlin, that individual initiative was generally frowned on by professors. In the field of ideas, Wood is an arrogant, at times an impatient, man, and I think he must have been at times an impatient, arrogant youth. I’m not sure he feels that anybody ever contributed very much to him as a scientist. To him the professors might or might not be useful associates in helping to carry out some idea, but he always felt that when ideas clashed, they might be the ones who were wrong. To most of the professors, naturally, he was — like the sheep in the Methodist hymn - “a wandering fox who would not be controlled.”
A good deal of light is cast on this by parts of his own notes covering the period, from which I now quote.
To be able to remove a condition in Greek and Roman History by getting a passing mark in Dr. Whiting’s course on Color Photography looked to me like robbing a child’s bank. I was very poor in the prescribed modern language courses, not realizing that a speaking knowledge of French might add much to one’s enjoyment of Parisian cafe life later on. Nor was I good in mathematics; in fact, I was very bad, both in algebra and trigonometry, which struck me as a fearful bore, as no hint was ever given, as far as I can remember, of what possible use you could ever make of sines, cosines, and tangents of angles. Curiously enough I had stood at the head of the class in plane geometry at Mr. Nichols’s school. I really enjoyed working out the original theorems, and I can’t remember ever having failed to get the solution, though some problems kept me up pretty late at night. There was another boy in the class who was tops in everything, and I worked hard to beat him in geometry, for I was rotten in most everything else. I remember that I worked out what Mr. Nichols accepted as an original solution of the pons asinorum of Euclid. The boy who was tops in everything never amounted to anything, however.