William James's colleague saved Wonder Woman's life

Really, kinda. G.H. Palmer brought James to Harvard and taught young William Marston, whose suicidal impulse was checked by philosophy.

Here's a story I'd like to see on the big screen. But thanks to the negative buzz around WW 1984, I've discovered Jill Lepore's compelling account of the real story behind "Diana Prince"...

"What checked Marston’s hand as he held the vial [of poison acid] was the study of existence itself. There was one course he loved: Philosophy A: Ancient Philosophy. It was taught by George Herbert Palmer, the frail, weak-eyed, sixty-nine-year-old Alford Professor of Philosophy and chairman of Harvard’s Philosophy Department. Palmer had thin, long white hair, bushy black eyebrows, blue eyes, and a walrus mustache. He lived at 11 Quincy Street, where he pined for his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College, an advocate for female education, and a suffragist. She’d died in 1902. He refused to stop mourning her. “To leave the dead wholly dead is rude,” he pointed out, quite reasonably.14 Early in his career, Palmer had made a luminous translation of the Odyssey—its aim, he said, was to reveal “that the story, unlike a bare record of fact, is throughout, like poetry, illuminated with an underglow of joy”—but his chief contribution to the advancement of philosophy was having convinced William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana to join what became known as “the Great Department”: Harvard’s faculty of philosophy.15 The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, “the ability to put myself in another’s place, think his thoughts, and state strongly his convictions even when they are not my own.” He “lectured in blank verse and made Greek hedonism a vital, living thing,” Marston said.16 In the fall of 1911, Philosophy A began with a history of philosophy itself. “According to Aristotle,” Palmer told his class, as Marston sat, rapt, “the rise of philosophy has three influential causes: freedom, leisure, and wonder.” For weeks, he raved about the Greeks: they, to Palmer, were geniuses of dialectics and rhetoric. After Thanksgiving, he lectured on Plato’s Republic; by December, he was expounding on how man was “a rational being in a sensuous physical body,” underscoring, as he often did, that by “man,” he meant men and women both. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. “Girls are also human beings,” he told them, “a point often overlooked!!”17 The equality of women was chief among Palmer’s intellectual and political commitments, and it was a way, too, that he remembered his wife. George Herbert Palmer, who saved Marston’s life, was faculty sponsor of the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage."

"The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore https://a.co/hJ0TTzx