James, William

WORKS BY JAMES

WORKS ABOUT JAMES

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

William James (1842–1910), American philosopher and psychologist, secured a permanent place in the history of psychology with the publication of The Principles of Psychology (1890), a two-volume treatise that quickly became a basic text. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a pioneering study of the psychology of religion, also became a classic. James possessed a vivacity of style that earned him a broad audience both in America and Europe. His outlook was pluralistic, and his remarkable openness to new experience led him to champion many an academically disreputable subject. More often than not, though, subsequent developments have justified his tolerance.

In his later years James devoted most of his attention to philosophy. His works of that period, which propound a pragmatic conception of truth, may at first seem of merely tangential interest to the social scientist. Yet, in fact, they provide an inchoate system for his earlier psychological writings. Near the end of his career James proposed the doctrine of radical empiricism, which contained a new point of view regarding the mind–body problem. Curiously, this often neglected philosophical theory, together with the pragmatic approach to meaning and truth, may eventually prove more important for social science than his text in psychology.

The household in which William James grew up contained three other exceptionally gifted individuals. Henry James, the father, produced a sizable corpus of writings on religious topics. Popularly regarded as an eccentric, he was a beloved friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. William’s brother, Henry, acquired fame as a novelist. His sister Alice, though, was perhaps the most talented member of the family; her literary contributions, unfortunately, were meager, for she suffered throughout her life from a particularly severe form of the neurasthenia that also afflicted her brothers.

Henry James the elder discouraged his sons from making any premature decisions regarding their vocations. The atmosphere of the household was broadly educative, although William James later complained of a lack of formal precollege schooling. Moreover, three times during his childhood he had the opportunity to travel for prolonged periods in Europe. He attended school and was tutored in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany.

At the age of 18, James decided to pursue a career in painting. He had painted since early childhood, and his skill and interest had long been recognized. The results of experimental lessons with a professional artist, however, were unambiguous: he soon realized not only that his talent was less than his standards demanded but also that his desire to paint was far from insatiable. Having rejected a career as an artist, he seldom looked back. His subsequent work always bore the marks of acute sensory perception and aesthetic imagination, but he consistently subordinated his artistic flair to his moral and metaphysical concerns.

James’s university education was marked by doubts about his eventual career and interruptions caused by poor health. When he entered Harvard in 1861, he had decided to become a scientist. After three years as an undergraduate, he convinced himself that he was best suited, not for science in any strict sense, but rather for the broad scientific concerns of medicine. Doubts continued to assail him, however, during his first term at Harvard Medical School.

In March 1865, James interrupted his studies to embark on a field trip to Brazil. Louis Agassiz, the great biologist, led the expedition, and for one year the group investigated the flora and fauna of South America. Returning to Boston in March 1866, James immediately resumed his work at medical school, but the following spring he was again compelled by physical illness and depression to leave Harvard. He departed for Europe and remained there 19 months, eventually receiving his M.D. degree in the spring of 1869.

James’s poor health was to plague him for nearly six years. His condition made prolonged work in a laboratory unendurable. Having become interested in experimental physiology, he selected Germany as the place for convalescing. Physically, James “took the cure” at the baths of Teplitz. Academically, he sought it in Dresden, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he studied under Emil Du BoisReymond and Hermann von Helmholtz. His spiritual malaise was alleviated at moments by “a sort of inward serenity and joy in living, derived from reading Goethe and Schiller” (quoted in Perry 1935, vol. 1, p. 273).

The years from 1869 to 1872 were to be his worst. A sense of moral impotence constantly tormented him; thoughts of suicide never wholly departed from his mind. On February 1, 1870, James recorded in his diary: “Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it? I will give the latter alternative a fair trial. Who knows but the moral interest may become developed” (Perry 1935, vol. 1, p. 322). One of James’s most troubling problems was that of determinism and free will. On April 30, 1870, he recorded :

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of [Charles Bernard] Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will —“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. (Perry 1935, vol. 1, p. 323)

In Renouvier, James had found comfort, if not an immediate cure for his doubts. Slowly he regained enthusiasm for life in general and for intellectual life in particular. Two events of the 1870s contributed greatly to his recovery. James started teaching at Harvard, and in 1878 he married Alice Howe Gibbens. He viewed the offer of employment from Harvard as a “godsend,” welcoming the stabilizing influence of a regular vocation. His first appointment was to an instructorship in physiology, but from the outset he refused to treat physiology, psychology, and philosophy as distinct and separate disciplines. In his lectures, as in his writings, he sought a synthesis of insights and factual contributions from each of the fields.

By correspondence with his European contemporaries James enhanced the intellectual reputation of the United States even more, perhaps, than through his widely acclaimed lectures in Britain and on the Continent. Such men as Hawthorne, Poe, and Emerson had, of course, attracted the attention of Europeans in an earlier era. But no American developed the close ties with English and Continental thinkers that James’s articulateness and extraordinary friendliness so naturally created. As a mere sample of his friends one might mention Bergson, Ernst Mach, Renouvier, F. H. Bradley, Giovanni Papini, Kipling, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and Carl Stumpf. James’s Letters have, accordingly, received considerable attention as a guide to the era. At Harvard, James influenced many of his students and younger colleagues. Prominent among this group were Josiah Royce, Gertrude Stein, George Santayana, Hugo Münsterberg, and G. Stanley Hall.

Contributions to psychology. James began the first chapters of The Principles of Psychology during the weeks following his marriage. In 1890, 12 years later, he finally completed the book. The work was both a grand summation of previous developments and a portent of the paths psychology would take in the twentieth century. James anticipated most of the major psychological movements of the succeeding seventy years; in many instances a direct line of influence is traceable. He did not achieve this remarkable breadth of coverage without some sacrifice. Not all of his ideas are operationally verifiable, nor did he present them in a rigorously systematic fashion.

Functional psychology. In its basic assumptions concerning the mind The Principles opposed the elementalism of the then current German psychology. James decried the practice of chopping consciousness into “single ideas” with which the investigator could not hope to have immediate acquaintance. Chains, trains, or other compoundings of bits seemed to him inadequate as models. Consciousness is nothing jointed, he argued; it flows. Thus, he preferred such metaphors as “river” or “stream.” Every conscious state, he claimed, is a function of the entire psychophysical context. Mind is cumulative, and experience produces alterations in its structure. The psychophysical context must necessarily change over time, precluding exact recurrence. This denial that a mental state can ever recur in a form identical with a past state anticipated one thesis of gestalt psychology.

For James selectivity was an essential characteristic of consciousness. Only a small portion of the potentially effective stimuli enter into a person’s awareness [seeAttention]. James argued that the choice is made purposively and that the criterion of choice is the relevance of the stimuli to various goals. This concept of relevance is a manifestation of James’s functionalism, anticipating the Würzburg theory of set and determining tendency. It was Darwin’s profound influence upon James that made the utility of consciousness a fundamental issue in his work. James went so far as to speculate that consciousness evolved to regulate a nervous system that had grown too complex to govern itself.

To the functionalist, psychology is the study of mental operations rather than of mental elements. Habit for James was the structural unit of mental life. The acquisition of a habit consisted in developing a new pathway of discharge in the brain [seeLearningarticle onneurophysiological aspects]. James considered habit the great conservative agent of society. He felt that most personal habits, such as vocalization, pronunciation, gesture, and gait, are fixed by the age of 20. The period between 20 and 30, on the other hand, appeared to him as the critical one for the formation of intellectual and professional habits.

James recognized the implications of his theory for the teaching profession. His Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) exerted a strong influence upon pedagogical thinkers and contributed to the rapid development of educational psychology in the United States. James emphasized interest and action; he regarded the child as a behaving organism for whom the major task is the formation of sound habits. Transfer of training in memorizing struck him as unlikely. Consequently, he opposed the justification of mechanical drill in one field as a technique for improving retentiveness in another. This rejection of rote memorization had a sharp impact upon American educators. But perhaps more important, as a precursor of the progressive movement, was James’s underlying attitude. He sought to persuade teachers to “conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be” ([1899] 1946, p. x).

Theory of emotions. Perhaps the most famous of James’s specific doctrines is the James–Lange theory of the emotions. Basically, it asserts that an emotion results from the feeling of certain bodily changes that themselves follow directly from a given stimulus [seeEmotion]. This, of course, is an inversion of the common-sense explanation; James argued that we feel sorry because we cry and afraid because we tremble, not vice versa. The nervous system makes various reflex adjustments to emotional stimuli, leading automatically to bodily changes. Our perception of these changes, mostly in the skeletal muscles and viscera, we call an emotion. This theory was greeted with heavy criticism at its initial presentation, and James modified it several times. Although it has been discredited in its extreme form, the theory served to generate much useful research.

The theory is important historically for its behavior-based approach to the emotions: it makes awareness depend upon response. With this doctrine, as elsewhere in The Principles, James achieved a bold anticipation of behaviorism. And, like his behavioristic successors, he recognized the value of controlled, replicable experiments. James himself, however, did not seek detailed experimental corroboration for his theories. Although he was instrumental in establishing one of the first psychology laboratories in the world, he quickly be-came bored with experimental work. Eventually he recruited Münsterberg from Germany to supervise experimentation at Harvard.

Theory of the self. James’s chapter on the self in The Principles stands as one of the classics of psychological literature. In depth, breadth, and in-sight it has few rivals. For several decades after its publication, psychologists took little interest in the self; and although some commentators have attributed the avoidance to the prevailing behavioristic temper, others speculate that no one felt that he could add to the Jamesian treatment of the concept. James began with the distinction between the I, the self as knower or pure ego, and the Me, the self as known or empirical ego. In its widest possible sense, he claimed, a man’s Me is the sum total of everything that he can designate mine. The material Me accordingly includes the body, the attire, the immediate family, and property [seeIdentity, psychosocial; Self concept].

The second constituent of the Me, the social Me, anticipates modern role theory and, in a sense, the theory of object relations. “Properly speaking,” James wrote, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” ([1890] 1962, vol. 1, p. 294). He added, however, that since these various individuals can be divided into groups, a man may be said to have as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of people about whose opinion he cares. James’s conception of the different social selves involved in an individual’s interpersonal relations led him to emphasize the conflicts among the individual’s social selves. In contemporary social science this individual-oriented model of conflict is useful as a counterweight to sociological conceptions of role and role conflict.

The third constituent of the Me, the spiritual Me, designates the entire collection of a person’s states of consciousness and psychic faculties. James distinguished between this aggregation, which he took as an array of concrete entities, and the complementary self as I. The I functions as an agent— a knower rather than merely a collection of things known. The significance of this distinction becomes fully clear, however, only in the context of James’s philosophical work.

Philosophical work . When James took over the concept of pragmatism and made it famous, he scrupulously gave credit to his friend Charles Sanders Peirce for the notion[seePeirce]. The term “pragmatism” derives from the Greek word for action. In 1878, Peirce had introduced the word into philosophy in an article entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” In discussing pragmatism, he had argued that beliefs are really rules for acting and that the meaning of having a belief can only be discovered by assessing its consequences for action. Yet Peirce felt that James had so greatly changed the term’s meaning that he soon rechristened his own philosophical method “pragmaticism.” This word, he remarked, is so ugly that it should be eternally safe from “kidnappers.”

Differences of temperament among philosophers greatly interested James. Indeed, he viewed pragmatism as a method for mediating between contradictory philosophical styles. The history of philosophy, he believed, can be seen as an interminable battle between the “tender-minded” and the “tough-minded” types of thinker Of the numerous Jamesian dichotomies, this is the most famous ([1907] 1949, pp. 9–20):

To James, a man’s attitudes in philosophy owe their origin to the balance in him of “two cravings.” The first is the sentiment of rationality, the passion for simplicity and labor-saving theoretical formulations (tender–mindedness). The second, called the passion for distinguishing, stresses loyalty to the facts of perception and to principles of clarity and precision (tough-mindedness). James asserted that no system of philosophy can have a chance of universal acceptance if it neglects either craving or if it greatly subordinates one to the other. By referring to sentiment, James brought the individual philosopher’s needs into the field of criticism. Like the psychoanalyst, he demanded that an individual’s behavior and beliefs be scrutinized within the context of his total life history.

James insisted that we specify what concrete difference the truth or falsity of an idea will make to anyone’s life. This theory of truth is contextualist: the final test of an idea’s validity is its coherence with the rest of one’s experience. The rationalist asserts that ideas are true if they agree with the facts. James accepted this proposition too, but he questioned its fruitfulness. What are the “facts,” he asked, with which the ideas agree? Does not our conception of what constitutes the facts in a situation change as our understanding increases? James vigorously condemned both the assumption that truth is an inert, static relation between fact and idea and the doctrine that true ideas merely copy reality. “Truth happens to an idea,” he said ([1907] 1949, p. 201). Validation is a process—a gradual elucidation of interrelationships and consequences. To the extent that these consequences are desirable, or useful, or good, the idea may be considered valid.

By baldly inserting words like “good” and “desirable” into his descriptions, James sought to stress that true ideas serve as indispensable instruments for effective action. Indeed, he remarked that the quest for truth could hardly stand in such high esteem if truth were not worthwhile, desirable— good for something. A belief is “true” if its consequences—taken in their totality—are good, and the belief must therefore be judged in its total context, as coherent or incoherent with the rest of reality. Of course, James recognized the practical impossibility of assessing all the consequences of a belief; that is why for him verification seemed necessarily a perpetually ongoing process.

James fought against the acceptance of custom and established routine when he felt it restricted the possibilities for satisfaction—for value—in direct personal experience. His theory of truth is, in the widest sense, moral, for it rests ultimately on the proposition that the only legitimate purpose of belief and action is the maximization of good. Thus, the pragmatic principle of verification seemed to James a commandment requiring total commitment and not, as some critics have alleged, a license for selfishness and opportunism.

Radical empiricism. Toward the end of his life James developed the doctrine of “radical empiricism.” He came to regard it as more fundamental and more important than pragmatism. Although he viewed radical empiricism as logically independent of pragmatism, he considered the establishment of a pragmatic theory of truth to be of prime importance for achieving the general acceptance of radical empiricism.

It is for its theory of relations that James’s doctrine receives the title “radical”: relations have the same status in his scheme of reality as do entities. An on-top-of relation (e.g., of a book to a table) is as real for James as the book and the table. With his theory of relations, James argued, the undue stress upon disjunction in classical empiricism has been corrected. Rationalists, of course, have traditionally employed trans-experiential concepts to provide the unity and coherence that the empiricist world picture lacked. James adamantly rejected such concepts, claiming that they permit the dogmatic affirmation of all manner of nonsense. In contrast to both rationalism and empiricism, radical empiricism represents the world as a collection, some parts of which are disjunctively and others conjunctively related. This hanging together, or concatenated union, bears little resemblance to the “each in all and all in each” form of union characteristic of monistic rationalism.

James’s radical-empiricist orientation enabled him to approach the mind–body problem in an original and highly suggestive way. The question “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (1904), the title of one of his essays, receives an ironic, negative answer. James really was denying that the word “consciousness” stands for an entity. As his initial supposition, James stated simply that there is one primal material in the world, of which everything is composed. He called it “pure experience.” If this is granted, one can readily explain knowing as “a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter” ([1904] 1912, p. 4). One of the terms of the relation becomes the knower, while the other becomes the object known. Thus, this scheme of presentation rejects the doctrine of the ultimate duality of experience. In one context a portion of pure experience plays the part of the knower. But with another set of associates it can act as a thing known, an objective content.

The present, as an instantaneous field, constituted “pure experience” for James. “It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that” ([1904] 1912, p. 23). For persons who argue that they apprehend the immediate present as “consciousness” (the experience of distinct self) and who claim to feel the free flow of thought within them as sharply distinct from objective reality, James had a surprising answer. He declared that the sense of such a person’s thinking, when carefully examined, turned out to consist chiefly of the perception of the regular rhythm of his breathing. James implied that the self is therefore not an ultimate given but a secondary construct.

In the course of his argument James consigned many respectable terms such as “mental,” “physical,” “subjective,” “objective,” and even “self,” to a derived or secondary status. But a place must be found for such entities elsewhere in a system. It is here that James the pragmatist furnished great aid to James the radical empiricist. For pragmatists, the “reality” of secondary concepts depends upon their capacity to satisfy—to put us on more satisfactory terms with our immediate experience. Unless an “abstraction” fulfills this intensely personal function it is not worthy of acceptance. Each individual by a process of continuous selection and rejection builds from the “blooming, buzzing con-fusion” of immediate experience his own distinctive Weltanschauung. The criterion of its reality is its total utility for his life.

“Varieties of Religious Experience.” Characteristically individualistic in his religious interests, James disregarded institutions and focused his attention upon personal religious experience [seeReligion]. His major work in this field was The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally delivered as the Gifford lectures of 1901–1902 at Edinburgh. In the introduction to The Varieties he admitted that the incidence of abnormal psychical conditions among religious leaders had been high. He even granted that the “pathological” aspects of their personalities had contributed greatly to their prestige and authority. Nonetheless, James insisted that the prevalence of such traits and tendencies does not constitute a refutation of their teachings: “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”

Just as James divided thinkers into the tough-minded and the tender-minded, he categorized religious believers as healthy-minded or sick-souled. Sick-souledness, he wrote, appears to encompass a wider range of experience.

The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. .. . It breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. ([1902] 1963, p. 163).

Regeneration by the conversion experience, James felt, is what enables the sick-souled individual to escape from the dark night of his soul. The theory of subconscious mental processes, which had recently been proposed, appealed to him as highly useful for understanding the sudden shifts in character that often attend conversion experiences. A person with a strongly developed, intrusive subliminal region, James argued, will have a proclivity for hallucinations, obsessive ideas, and automatic actions that seem unaccountable by ordinary experience. As illustrations he cited the phenomenon of posthypnotic suggestion and the findings of Freud, Pierre Janet, and Morton Prince on hysteria. Although James regarded this research as marking the most important advance in psychology during his lifetime, he refused to employ it merely to “explain away” conversion.

From personal experimentation with nitrous oxide James received what he emphatically believed to be a form of mystical experience. Trances and other exceptional mental states occupied his attention for many years. The so-called rational consciousness, he felt, is only one special kind of consciousness, “whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different” ([1902] 1963, p. 388). Though one can live an entire lifetime without knowing about these forms, James wrote, the proper drug or other stimulus will promptly make them accessible.

For James a basic concern was always the whole personality in its functional relationship with its environment. In The Varieties he therefore presented many individual case histories. Nothing bears truer witness to his compassion and tolerance than these skillfully rendered descriptions. And nothing provides a better indication of the ultimate aim of his inquiry: transcendence of one’s own limitations through familiarity with the entire spectrum of human experience.

Views on war . James’s now famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) gained the approval of pacifists and military men alike. In this widely circulated article he did not hesitate to praise the martial ideals of hardihood, daring, and discipline. But he deplored the brutality of war and strove to develop methods for sublimating the urge to fight. One proposal recommended the conscription of youth for work on land development and reclamation projects.

Interest in psychical research . Probably James’s most persistent “cause” was his effort to make psychic research scientifically respectable [seeParapsychology]. He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research for two years and maintained his membership from 1884 until his death. Despite a remarkable ability to scent out quacks and frauds, James never lost his conviction that some of the bizarre phenomena were genuine. Scientists who rejected the data because they failed to conform to prevailing psychological theories lost his professional respect. James’s own commitments to empiricism would not permit the discounting of raw data simply to preserve established ideas. More-over, research—including studies of faith healers —appealed to him on humanitarian grounds. Every possible technique for alleviating suffering deserved investigation, he felt, no matter how un-scientific or cranky the claimant.

It is James’s perpetual concern with improving the lot of the individual human being that makes him so apt a symbol of American social thought in his era. He denounced not only the attempts of idealists to explain away evil but also the gloomy pessimism of such philosophers as Schopenhauer. For James, meliorism was the only tenable position. Too sensitive not to be acutely aware of social injustice, he nevertheless remained ever uncynical, convinced that sustained, intelligent effort would produce improvement.

As James’s work in psychology cleared the way for behaviorism, so his pragmatism, interpreted in a narrow manner and applied to scientific methodology, facilitated the emergence of logical positivism and operationalism. Hard-headed respect for facts and suspicion of rationalistic theorizing in the grand style unquestionably represent one strain in his thought. But he was a nonconformist and clever strategist. Thus, in an era that has witnessed the triumph of rigorous experimentalism, James would surely have directed his polemical skills toward other goals. Individualism, pluralism, and the importance of immediate experience would undoubtedly have received prime stress.

James’s high tolerance for ambiguity and his desire to mediate between intellectually opposing temperaments have led to charges of contradiction and betrayal by both sides. Yet constant striving for balance struck him as necessary for the achievement of his fundamental objective: the improvement of the quality of experience of the individual human being. This paramount aim, this humanistic orientation, determined his thinking in meta-physics as well as in religion, in epistemology as on social problems. James was above all a humanitarian and only secondarily a psychologist, philosopher, and gifted man of letters.

William D. Phelan, Jr.

[See alsoEmotion; Identity, psychosocial; Religion; Self concept. Other relevant material may be found in the biographies ofCohen; Cooley; Dewey; Hall; Holt; Janet; Meyer; Münster-berg; Park; Tltchener.]

WORKS BY JAMES

(1879–1907) 1948 Essays in Pragmatism. Edited with an introduction by Alburey Castell. New York: Hafner. → A paperback edition of several of James’s most important essays.

(1884–1906) 1912 Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans.

(1890) 1962 The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Smith.

(1892) 1948 Psychology: The Briefer Course. Cleveland,

Ohio: World. → Gordon Allport edited a paperback version, published in 1961 by Harper.

(1896–1910) 1911 Memories and Studies. New York Longmans.

(1897) 1956 The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality. New York: Dover.

(1899) 1946 Talks to Teachers on Psychology. New edition with an introduction by John Dewey and William H. Kilpatrick. New York: Holt.

(1902) 1963 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. Enlarged edition with appendices and introduction by Joseph Ratner. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books.

(1904) 1912 Does “Consciousness” Exist? Pages 1–38 in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans.

(1907) 1949 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans. → A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Washington Square Press.

1909 A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans.

(1910) 1911 The Moral Equivalent of War. Pages 265–296 in William James, Memories and Studies. New York: Longmans.

(1911) 1928 Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Longmans.

The Letters of William James. Edited by Henry James, Jr. 2 vols. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920.

William James on Psychical Research. Compiled and edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. New York: Viking, 1960.

WORKS ABOUT JAMES

James, Henry 1913 A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner.

James, Henry 1914 Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Scribner.

Perry, Ralph B. 1920 Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James. New York: Longmans.

Perry, Ralph B. 1935 The Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together With His Published

Writings. 2 vols. Boston: Little. → Volume 1: Inheritance and Vocation. Volume 2: Philosophy and Psychology.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boring, Edwin G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton.

Dewey, John 1934 Art as Experience. New York: Putnam. → A paperback edition was published in 1959.

Moore, E. C. 1961 American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Peirce, Charles S. (1878) 1955 How to Make Our Ideas Clear. Pages 23–41 in Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Selected and edited with an introduction by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover.

Wiener, Philip P. 1949 Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

JAMES, WILLIAM

(b. New York, New York, 11 January 1842; d. Chocorua, New Hampshire, 26 August 1910),

psychology, philosophy. For the original article on James see DSB, vol. 7.

James is widely known as the father of American psychology, and he is fondly remembered as a public intellectual with the clarity and insight to create usable popularizations of complex academic and scientific work. His major professional contribution to psychology was to remind his fellows in the field of the worlds of mind and behavior that lie beyond the grasp of even the most elegant theories. His chief philosophical contribution was his unblinking attention to the concreteness of experience in psychological events and feelings, religious beliefs, scientific inquiry, and the philosophy of empiricism itself. Although he had often been dismissed as a mere popularizer in the decades after his death in 1910, recent work on James has stimulated a steadily growing appreciation for his substantial contributions. Clarity has been no vice as he helped to shape humanistic orientations, process thinking, and phenomenology in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies. In fact, in the early twenty-first century there is wide recognition of his transdisciplinary significance for his pioneering critique of overreliance on scientific authority, for his anticipations of neuroscience, for his rhetorical gifts, for his spirituality, and for his prophetic warnings about a culture dominated by corporate institutions and commodified values.

Background and Upbringing . William James’s upbringing, in the household of a Swedenborgian radical and in the context of growing scientific authority in the middle-to-late nineteenth century, shaped his life, temperament, and work. He taught, wrote, and lectured on the borderland of science and religion, gravitating toward mediation of these fields, with all their kindred associations, in his psychology, philosophy, and religious thought.

Because the spirituality of his father, the elder Henry James (to distinguish him from his second son, the novelist), included endorsement of the empirical spirituality of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century mystic popular in Romantic cultural circles, the religious training that the oldest son, William, received was open to the study of nature. By age nineteen, with his father’s encouragement, he went to the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, where he met a brand of science shaped by the professional demands for rigorous empiricism. He studied chemistry, anatomy, and physiology before transferring to the Harvard Medical School; this succession of studies reflected his temperamental ambivalence and contributed to his vocational indecision. These and related troubles with depression, eye and back ailments, philosophical uncertainty, and hesitancy to marry—precisely because he dreaded passing on his troubles to a next generation— plunged him into a period of indecision and personal crisis, which prolonged his formative years and postponed the beginning of his working life.

Crisis and Construction of Worldview . James is perhaps as famous for this period of crisis as for his mature theories, in part because many of those ideas first began to emerge in his youthful drama of pain and recovery. The very paths he took while struggling in his youth showed not only the first stirrings of his mature ideas, but also their roots in the scientific and religious commitments of his early adulthood. While he found it difficult to accept his father’s ideas directly, he gravitated toward theories and cultural experiences that, similarly, expressed the immaterial factors of life (including spirituality and consciousness) within the natural world rather than in orthodox references to incomprehensible factors or another world. In particular, he was attracted to the pre-Christian ancients, sectarian medicine, humanistic psychology, and voluntaristic philosophy. Just as Henry Sr. approached nature “as if it had some life in it” (in William’s words), so the son, now on a professional path in his thirties, inquired into the experiences of the natural world and human nature, noticing the role of immaterial factors to

complement the emerging understanding of nature in terms of physics and chemistry as assumed by most modern professional science (Correspondence, vol. 4, p. 227). William endorsed the work of modern science, benefiting deeply from the latest research in his own profession, most notably in his landmark Principles of Psychology (1890). However, he maintained an impulse to pull his profession toward a “program of the future of science” that would be less wedded to a materialistic philosophy, such as the automaton theory of consciousness, which he noticed to be a frequent accompaniment of professional science but an unnecessary stowaway on the path of inquiry. He offered wry praise for the scientific enthusiasm of his times as “a temporarily useful excentricity” (1902, p. 395).

A Psychology of Philosophizing . Despite materialist and positivist enthusiasms for Darwinism swiftly spreading in influence from the 1860s, when James first studied science, he noticed its hypothetical and probabilistic qualities. This type of thinking shaped his theory of “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), in which he proposed that the motivation to philosophize stemmed from the craving for explanatory sufficiency in clarity or simplicity that shaped human thinking in general, even in science.

Openness to experience unconstrained by the abstractions of theory—whether scientific, philosophical, or religious—took his work out of the mainstream profession of scientific psychology and into philosophical and religious studies. He was also concerned about the overreliance on experimental method in the psychological laboratory. In Pragmatism (1907) he emphasized the usefulness of theories as instruments of inquiry, but he also insisted that we should not confuse these directional tools for the whole forest of experience. In “The Will to Believe” (1895) he proposed that when evaluating a belief—in science or religion—it is more important to pursue the prospective possibilities in experience itself rather than remain in fear of crossing abstract boundaries of prior theory formation. This essay, and his many accompanying “essays in popular philosophy,” never called for rejection of scientific inquiry, but for a continuation of its methods into religion and other spheres conventionally segregated from science. He even called his research into Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) a “science of religions” with which he explored personal religious experiences that generally underlie institutional structures; finding evidence of “the more” in human psychology, he proposed that it served as the basis for orthodox religious affiliations. Toward the end of his life, James called his emphasis on pure experience unadorned by abstraction “radical empiricism,” and his essays in elaboration of this philosophy were collected posthumously.

James was not particularly concerned with the specialized discourses of psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and science studies that today claim pieces of his corpus. He contributed to each of these fields as they now stand, but his own personal and intellectual motivations were more broadly based. Of course, he lived in a time when educational institutions were only beginning to specialize; in fact, he remarked that the first lecture he ever heard in psychology was his own. In addition, the very indecisiveness that troubled him, and that has encouraged much of the psychological scrutiny of James himself, actually contributed to his appetite to work in all these fields. He knew the pain of choice, and its necessity when selecting paths forward, but he was also attentive to the tyranny of choices that ruled out other important factors in life, hence his insistence on recognizing the “ever not quite” factors in our knowledge of all fields.

Meliorism, a Hope in the Making . His hopes were hard won, and this lent his philosophy an authentic and experience-chastened quality that catapulted his work onto a public stage, where he became popular beyond the appeal of most academics. Perhaps his most alluring mediation was between pessimism and optimism. Why endorse an outlook that is explicitly against one’s own good? Yet at the same time, how turn away from the truly tragic and burdensome facts of life? His answer was to adopt neither, but instead to endorse what he called “meliorism,” the commitment to hoping and working for the best. This gritty buoyancy is at the heart of James’s commitment and a reason for the enduring appeal of his words even decades after his death in 1910. Characteristically, he was scientific enough to doubt the orthodox claims for an afterlife, but he was religious enough to notice their power to motivate and their plausibility in the depths of “psychic experiences.” Besides, after decades of committed search into the natural world and human psyche, and with a sharp sense that human experience involved both bodily and mental factors, he faced death with the wistful realization that “I’m just getting fit to live” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 214).

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY JAMES

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longman, Green, 1902.

The Works of William James. Edited by Fredson Bowers and

Frederick H. Burkhardt. 19 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–1988. There are many editions of James’s writings; this collection and the Correspondence below are the most authoritative. Works includes all of James’s published books and collections of many of his unpublished notes, lectures, and essays thoroughly annotated and contextualized.

The Correspondence of William James. Edited by Ignas K.

Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004. A collection of correspondence to and from James, including 70 percent of the 9,300 known letters that he wrote in his lifetime, with the remaining calendared for ease of reference.

OTHER SOURCES

Bjork, Daniel. William James: The Center of His Vision. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Provides a detailed account of James’s life, especially in his relations with his wife, Alice Howe Gibbens James, and emphasizes William James’s exuberant, distinctive genius in dealing with knotty psychological and philosophical questions.

Cotkin, George. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. A historical account of the cultural and political position of James, especially in his adult life.

Croce, Paul Jerome. Science and Religion in the Era of William James. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995 (Vol. 1) and forthcoming (Vol. 2). Sets James in his personal and cultural contexts and emphasizes the intermingling of mind and body in his work.

Donnelly, Margaret E., ed. Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992. A collection of essays by psychologists in evaluation of the meaning and legacy of James’s psychological theories, written from the perspective of pluralism, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, and history and with attention to theories of the self, emotions, clinical work, free will, and parapsychology.

Feinstein, Howard M. Becoming William James. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1984. A psychobiography that evaluates the young man in relation to family dynamics.

Levinson, Henry Samuel. The Religious Investigations of William James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

A religious studies evaluation of his development of a science of religions.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. A highly readable narrative synthesis of recent scholarship on James in relation to other founders of pragmatism—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey—and in the context of countless stories of American social and cultural history.

Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Covers much more thought than life, with an emphasis on his philosophical psychology.

Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Presents James’s philosophical development toward a postmodern view of the constructed character of knowledge.

Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1999. Offers a biographical overview with more attention to social context and personal issues than to theory formation.

Taylor, Eugene. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Challenges the conventions in the history of psychology that James abandoned psychology after 1890 with evidence that his experimental psychopathology was directed toward an alternative psychology.

Townsend, Kim. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. New York: Norton, 1996. Examines James’s ambivalence in terms of gender and finds the popular philosopher both subject to a strong and brittle masculinity and intelligently rising above it.

Paul Jerome Croce

William James

The American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) is considered America's major philosopher and one of the great psychologists of all times.

Member of an illustrious family which included his younger brother, the novelist Henry James, William James was born in New York and reared there and in Europe by adoring parents. The family went repeatedly for long and intimate visits to the great cultural centers of England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. William's cosmopolitanism went deep; when in Europe he always felt eager to be home again, and when in America he was homesick for Europe.

James's Education

James was equally interested in art (he almost became a painter), in literature, in philosophy, and in science (he made a visit as a field naturalist under Louis Agassiz to the Amazon and achieved broad science training and a medical degree at Harvard in 1869). In these same years he was studying philosophy and physiology, notably in Germany, where he attended lectures and saw the laboratory work of such great leaders as Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolf Virchow. But James was also drawn very vigorously into the pioneering intellectual adventures of the America of the mid-19th century, notably its new religious movement.

As an ardent evolutionist, William James saw many ways in which the mind could be fruitfully regarded as the organ of primary adaptation to the environment, in a full Darwinian sense, and how all its functions—whether cognitive, emotional, or impulsive—could be viewed in evolutionary terms. This conception drew him to a philosophy which later he was to call pragmatism; it constitutes one of the major bridges between his psychology and his philosophy.

Despite his eager and strenuous ways, as shown in his mountain rambles with his brother Henry, James was not strong, and in the 1860s and early 1870s he was subject to ill health, which included much depression and doubt of his own worth. During this period, however, he read the French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier on the problem of the freedom of the will and came suddenly and firmly to the conviction that he could, by his own act of free will, make himself a well man. His own life and the testimony of the family bear out the profundity of this experience.

James's appointment to a junior teaching position at Harvard in 1872 set him on a new professional track. He was to teach anatomy and physiology to undergraduate students, and he soon set up a small psychological laboratory, emphasizing the fact that it was not a classical "mental philosophy" that he was to teach but a physiological and experimental science. It is plain from his letters to his brother that he was already thinking of himself as committed to the new laboratory approach to psychology. This does not, however, mean that he was willing to relinquish any of his other manifold interests. He was soon publishing original and brilliant articles in the professional journals of psychology and philosophy. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.

Principles of Psychology

Also in 1878 James began writing a comprehensive treatise and textbook, Principles of Psychology, the two volumes of which, intended for 1880, finally appeared in 1890. This extraordinary treatise brought him worldwide response and has continued everywhere to be regarded as one of the few great comprehensive treatises that modern psychology has produced.

Five of the chapters are worthy of special note: (1) The chapter dealing with "habit," considered as a prime factor so deeply organized within one as to make each one the creature of a system of inbuilt ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. (2) "Emotion," the subjective or inner aspect of the "coarser" organic physiological responses to stress situations, such as fear and rage, with a place also provided for the subtler emotions, entering into the intellectual and esthetic life. (3) The "consciousness of self," the various ways in which one knows one's self and the aspects of one's own individuality that are most precious to one. (4) The "stream of thought," the complex, dynamic, ever-changing world of subjectivity in which there is no firmly fixed invariant part, no unalterable unit, except that each person is always aware that it is his own continuous past, present, and anticipated future. (5) The "will." The very long and rich chapter on the will provides for many "types of decision" and for the experience of effort when "we ourselves incline the beam." An empirical psychology must accept as a reality the experience of making an effortful decision; this leaves the ultimate philosophical question of the nature of such freedom as a problem beyond the scope of scientific psychology as such.

James's treatment indeed is embedded in the context of a lifetime preoccupation with the nature of freedom. James recurred to this problem in other writings again and again. In his lecture "The Will to Believe," he argued that spontaneous and free decisions may initiate a new path through life, and the will does, in fact, implement beliefs; the "will to believe," instead of being intellectually disreputable, may engender beliefs which are creative. He made clear the basic differentiation to be made between "hard determinism," or fatalism, and "soft determinism," in which persons are part of the causal texture of reality, products of real forces, and in turn forces which create new realities. Soft determinism is still determinism, but it gives the freedom to act in terms of what one is. This is still to be distinguished from the kind of freedom represented by a belief in undetermined action.

Not only was the Principles of Psychology universally acclaimed, but James, as teacher, dynamically taught a generation concerned with psychology and its relation to life. The playwright and poet Gertrude Stein, for example, was a Radcliffe-Harvard student of James, who put the notion of the "stream of thought" or "stream of consciousness" to work in American letters. Many of his lectures, both at Harvard and elsewhere, became landmarks of the era of social confrontation, notably "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he pleaded for warlike intensities in devotion to nonwar like social struggles.

During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, James was plainly moving away from the new "experimental psychology" of the university laboratories to the world of personal, subjective, philosophically challenging problems, such as the perennial problem of whether there is really any truth independent of the working principles which are known to be effective in one's own action (pragmatism). These questions were being raised in new form by many, notably Charles Peirce, and James himself offered the term pragmatism as "a new name for some old ways of thinking." During the last years of his life he was constantly asked to explain and develop pragmatism, and it became a major American way of thinking.

Lectures on Philosophy

Very great indeed was the impact of James's extraordinary lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901 under the title "The Varieties of Religious Experience." This is regarded by many as the first great, insightful application of psychology to the study of the religious life. Insisting that the religious experience of "individual men in their solitude" must be studied independently of medical preconceptions, he distinguished between the "religion of healthymindedness" and the "sick soul." James showed how a wider and deeper range of sensitivity, often shown by the sick soul, may lead to meaningful experiences of deep change or conversion and to states of ecstasy and self-renewal.

The concluding lectures were given to the psychology of mystical experience as represented in the mystical tradition of such men as Plotinus and of modern men, Eastern and Western, who were speaking and writing of "cosmic consciousness." To James it appeared that the message of mystical experience, the "windows" into experience which it offered, could well be absolute and compelling for the individual, though, of course, not compelling to the outside observer or analyst who has not had such experiences. Here he stressed the importance of many "altered states of consciousness." (He himself studied nitrous oxide intoxication and was keenly interested in the new drug experiences of the day as well as in a variety of trance and hypnotic states: a person's present mode of consciousness is only one from among many "states of consciousness that exist.")

James strongly supported "mental healing." He went to the Boston State House to protest the attempt of many physicians to require non medical practitioners to take a type of medical examination as a qualification for practice; he insisted that no one can really tell by what means the sick are healed. He had himself, shortly before that time, sought help from a "healer" and remained entirely empirical regarding the question of gains in health due to unorthodox sources.

Psychical Research

In the same empirical spirit James pursued throughout his life many types of psychological phenomena rejected by official science, such as apparitions, hauntings, and spiritualist trance mediumship. In 1884 he discovered Mrs. L. E. Piper, who, in the sittings given to his wife and his wife's mother, had referred to information which they were positive Piper could not have acquired through any normal channel. In his own sittings, equally convincing evidence was given, and many of James's professional friends, both in the United States and in Britain, had similar experiences which entirely convinced them of the reality of her powers, which, at the very least, included telepathy from distant persons. He took the initiative in organizing an American counterpart to the Society for Psychical Research, which had just been launched in London in 1882. He made firsthand studies of the powers of other clairvoyants whose work was drawn to his attention. In a much-quoted essay, "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished," he asserted that telepathy, as represented by Piper's experiences, constituted a true breakthrough into a world of vast scientific importance. Her powers pointed to a new kind of reality. Regarding the spiritualist conviction that survival of death was established through such research, he remained uncertain.

James was also profoundly impressed by the current French studies of "subconscious ideas." Pierre Janet, for example, had apparently shown that in deep hypnotic trance a man may act upon ideas which have been planted in his mind, though he is plainly not conscious at the time. He gave much attention likewise to dreaming, to hypnotic consciousness, and to multiple personality. He felt that Sigmund Freud was one of those to whom the future belonged. In his last years his emphasis was not on rounding out a system of ideas but in gaining new varieties of experience. His expression "radical empiricism" is his fortunate summary of a whole approach to life. He was empirical in the sense of looking always for the quality of immediate experience and remaining loyal to this first reality, as against the abstractions which seek an "absolute," an approach characteristic of much of the German, British, and American philosophy of his era. He was radical in the sense that he wanted to find the very roots of reality in the nature of experience itself. Faith healing, psychical research, and the stream of consciousness were all to be embraced for the same reason: they offered realities which were incapable of being rationally ruled out of their right to exist. So, too, the "pluralistic universe" of which he wrote in the last years, when pragmatism was everywhere being discussed, was a loosely articulated collection of separate parts, each aspect of which must be respected although a philosophically unified system cannot be created from it.

Further Reading

James's correspondence was edited by his son, Henry James, The Letters of William James (1920). Robert C. LeClair edited The Letters of William James and Theodore Flournoy (1966). The two indispensable works for studying James are Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (2 vols., 1935), and Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (1967). Also useful are Edward C. Moore, William James (1965), and Bernard P. Brennan, William James (1968). For a discussion of William, his brother Henry, and his father Henry, Sr., see C. Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses: A Family of Minds (1932).

Additional Sources

Bjork, Daniel W., The compromised scientist: William James in the Development of American psychology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Bjork, Daniel W., William James: the center of his vision, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Feinstein, Howard M., Becoming William James, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Lewis, R. W. B. (Richard Warrington Baldwin), The Jameses: a family narrative, New York: Anchor Books, 1993.

Weissbourd, Katherine, Growing up in the James family: Henry James, Sr., as son and father, Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985.

William James remembered, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. □

James, William

(b. New York, N. Y., 11 January 1842; d. Chocorua, New Hampshire, 26 August 1910)

psychology, philosophy.

James was the first of five children of Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James, Sr.; their second was the novelist Henry James. Although he studied with tutors and in schools in the United States and throughout Europe, James may most properly be said to have received his early education at the family dinner table. The elder Henry James was a man of private means who had turned to travel and Swedenborgianism as perhaps the ultimate result of a childhood accident by which he had lost a leg. Having found the consolations of intellect and philosophy, he encouraged his children in critical investigation and discussion; it is probably significant that William James’s first published book (1885) was his edition of The Literary Remains of Henry James, a work which rises above mere filial piety in containing, in the introduction, an early statement of some of his own religious views. The Remains themselves show their author to have been something rather more than the usual nineteenth-century American religious crank, and certainly his sons seem to have benefited from his tutelage.

James’s first ambition was to become an artist, and in 1860 the entire family relocated from Paris to the United States, so that he could study painting with William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island. John La Farge, a fellow student, noticed his talent, but James soon changed his mind about his vocation and took up the study of chemistry, enrolling in the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard in 1861. At Lawrence, James attended Agassiz’s lectures, which led him from chemistry into the biological sciences. In 1864 he entered the Harvard Medical School, which he left in April 1865 to join Agassiz on an expedition up the Amazon. It was not a happy journey. James found that he had no skill as a field naturalist—indeed, he recorded that he hated collecting—and he became ill. He resumed his medical studies in 1866, but discontinued them again shortly thereafter because of lingering poor health. The following year he went to Germany to take a course of water cures and to study the physiology of the nervous system. He returned after two years, still sick, but able to take the M.D. from Harvard in 1869.

James never practiced medicine. The three years immediately following the award of his degree he remained at home, too unwell for regular employment, reading, writing occasional literary reviews, and apparently undergoing the shattering spiritual experience that he later described in “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience. His recovery came in part through his reading of the Essais de critique generale of Charles Renouvier, from which he formulated the belief in volitional free will that shook him from his moral lethargy. By 1873 he was well enough to accept enthusiastically an appointment as instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard, where he was subsequently assistant professor of physiology (1876), assistant professor of philosophy (1880), and professor of philosophy (1885).

In 1878 James married Alice Howe Gibbens, of Cambridge; the four of their five children who lived past infancy were brought up in the Jamesian tradition of travel, familial affection, and abstract discussion. In the same year he contracted to write a textbook of psychology, to be brought out in two years’ time. The book was published only in 1890, but it was definitive—The Principles of Psychology.

The intent of the Principles was descriptive and antimetaphysical; it marks one of the earliest attempts to treat psychology as a natural science James conceived of the mind as being subject to both Darwinian evolutionary principles and to acts of the will. Consciousness exists for practical results, and its characteristics are conditioned by such result; it flows—“the stream of consciousness” is one of James’s many felicitous phrases—and the perception of a fact is represented as a brief halt in the flow. An innovation is James’s recognition of the significance of transitive as well as substantive processes; he includes the fringe areas of though, dimly if at all perceived, as “the free water of consciousness.” He further treated of the will, defining it as the relation of the mind to concepts, or attention, and described pathological states of mind, drawing on the work of the European psychologists Charcot, Janet, and Binet. (That James was working along the same lines as European scientists is further shown by the James- Lange theory of the physiological bases of the emotions, formulated at about this time, independently and almost simultaneously, by James and the Danish physiologist C. G. Lange.) The Principle was an immediate success, and an abridgment of the original two-volume work, the Briefer Course, was published in 1892.

James’s next book, The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (1897), contains his dedication to C. S. Peirce,“To whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.”The first four essays are concerned with what James called“the legitimacy of religious faith,” while others take up determinism, the moral life, great men (including a discussion of their place in Darwinian theory), individuality, Hegel, and paychic research (James was a member of an association for that purpose).To these religious arguments he added, in 1898, the Ingersoll lecture, given at Harvard, Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, in which he held the compatibility of immortality with “our present mundane consciousness” None of these essays gives any sort of metaphysical formula; all suggest cheerfully that belief is probably not a bad thing.

In the summer of 1898 James sustained an irreparable heart lesion while on a strenuous hike in the New Hampshire mountains. He continued to philosophize and write, however: Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals was published in 1899, while 1902 saw the publication of his major work of descriptive psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, being the Gifford lectures on natural religion delivered at the University of Edinburgh. In the Varieties, James approached the religious impulse in man largely through individual documents, presenting a full panoply of its forms. In a postscript he posited the necessity of such pluralism, and set out a brief statement of the pragmatic value of religion. Although the book contains no notable synthesis, its wit and style give it a special place in American letters.

In 1906 James lectured at Stanford University for a half term (a tenure that was cut short by the San Francisco earthquake, which largely destroyed the campus). In 1907 he gave the Lowell Institute lectures, choosing as his subject“Pragmatism,”the theory with which his name is most closely linked. These lectures gave a system to ideas apparent in all of his previously published work and were themselves published in 1907 as Pragmatism:A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. James gave credit for the invention of pragmatism as an entity to Peirce, although it may more accurately ne said to have grown out of their association in the Metaphysical Club that they had founded in Cambridge in the 1870‘s. James extended Peirce’ notion of pragmatism and, indeed, refashioned it. Peirce was concerned with practical results as an empirical tool; James moved them into the moral realm of the good and the true. Thus, he was able to define good as the plurality of practical results beneficial to conduct and could state that a theory is true insofar as it “works”(thereby leaving his own theory open to the ready criticism that it is self-justifying). He insisted that the same flexibility must be granted to metaphysics. Such extensions would seem to have appalled Peirce, but James’s book became startlingly popular and influential in the United States, perhaps because of its essential Americanness.

James resigned from all teaching duties at Harvard in 1907. In 1908 he gave the Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, which were collected as A Pluralist Universe (1909).These, in effect, develop the idea of a multiplicity of standards of truth and rationality that is suggested in the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience. He died at his summer house in New Hampshire, leaving incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy, which work nevertheless contains some important which work never-theless contains some important formulations of his ideas, in particular those regarding perception. Another especially significant work, the essay“Does Consciousness Exist?, “was also published posthu-mously. In it, James speculates on a single primal material, which he calls “pure experience.”.The essay was published in Essays in Radical Empiricism, a term James had invented and used in the preface of The Will to Believe

James is buried in Cambridge Cemetery, next to his novelist brother Henry—with whom his lifelong relationship had been complex, mutually and advantageously critical, affectionate, and epistolary—and near his novelist friend William Dean Howells.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Ralph Bartoy, Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James (New York, 1920), lists more than 300 items and may be considered definitive. See also his son Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols.(Boston, 1920); and F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry, and Alice James (New York, 1947), passim.

II. Secondary Literature. Charming personal recollections may be found in the autobiographical sketches of Henry James, A Samll Boy and Others (New York, 1913); and Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, 1914). Although a good short treatment, especially of James as a teacher, is Lloyd Morris, William James. The Message of a Modern Mind (New York-London, 1950), the best formal biography remains Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols.(Boston, 1935).

For a brief general discussion of pragmatism, its beginnings, its influence, and James’s part in it, see Philip P. Wiener, “Pragmatism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1973), which includes a useful bibliography.

Sarah Ferrell

JAMES, WILLIAM 1842-1910

Philosopher and psychologist

Crisis

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life," William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He was recalling a time that was evidently a turning point in his young life, a period of crisis in 1869 and 1870 that led him to seriously contemplate suicide but ultimately helped him articulate a defining theme and one of the legacies of his work. Twenty-eight years old at the time, James had finished his medical degree at Harvard in June 1868 but had yet to settle into a direction for the course of his life. This personal confrontation with nihilistic despair gave rise to what he would later call the "will to believe." In his diary of April 1870, James described what would be for him the philosophy that kept him alive and working: "I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power." The crisis passed. James had pushed himself to act, and the result would be astonishing.

Education

He was born into one of the most original and intellectually gifted families of the nineteenth century. His brother, Henry, would become a great novelist, one who would set the standards for what the art of thenovel could become. His father, Henry James Sr., was, William wrote in an 1865 letter, "the wisest of all men whom I know." The elder James was a man of deep religious conviction and liberal idealism. He believed in human experience and in society and held that the value of a man's life was in his participation in the world. His books included Society—The Redeemed Form of Man(1879) and Social Significance of Our Institutions (1861). Henry James Sr.'s religious beliefs represented an eclectic mix of various nineteenth-century currents, including the occult and spiritualist teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The result of these beliefs for his children was a strange mixture of formal schooling, rootlessness, and worldly experience as an education. William James's education was characterized by drift, from New York to Geneva to England to Paris to Boulogne to Bonn, where he saw the best of European art and society while receiving private tutoring as well as formal training at several schools. At the age of eighteen he returned to Newport, Rhode Island, where a course of life for this budding genius was to be chosen.

Decisions

He chose painting. In the fall of 1860 he began studying under the tutelage of William M. Hunt. He quit a year later, convinced that great art was beyond him. The choice then was to pursue his other passion—science—and in 1861 James entered the Lawrence Scientific School, a part of Harvard University. He concentrated on chemistry, anatomy, and physiology for three years before entering the Harvard Medical School in 1864. He interrupted his studies a year later for a nine-month stint with the Thayer expedition, which, under the leadership of Louis Agassiz, collected zoological specimens in the Amazon basin. He interrupted his studies a second time in April 1867 to travel to Germany, in part for his failing health but also out of indecision. He read voraciously in Germany, took cures in Divonne and Teplitz, and returned to Harvard in 1868. He finished his medical degree the following spring but then slipped into his crisis period, though he continued his wide reading and philosophical explorations.

Teacher

With his crisis passed and his will to believe reinvigorating him, James began teaching physiology at Harvard College in the fall of 1872. He would remain with the university for his entire career, though not with physiology. The course of his teaching career illustrated not only the depth of James's abilities but also the breadth. He taught comparative physiology and then began exploring the psychological implications of physiology. After teaching a course on the "Philosophy of Evolution," he advanced to become an assistant professor of philosophy (1880) and a chaired professor of that discipline in 1885. He had meanwhile begun what is considered the first American laboratory of psychology in 1876 and in time became a full professor of psychology (1889). He remained remarkably open to new ideas and explored them himself in essays published through the 1880s in Mind and Critique Philosophique. Throughout the 1880s James built his reputation and cultivated professional friendships. He met Europeans such as Charles Renouvier, whose Traité de Psychologie Rationelle (1912) had profoundly influenced him as a young man. Among others of his circle of friends and acquaintances were Ernest Mach, Carl Stumpf, Shadworth Hodgson, George Croom Robertson, James Sully, Leslie Stephen, Frederick Pollock, Henry Sidgwick, and Théodore Flournoy, who became one of his most intimate friends. The decade of writing, teaching, and travel culminated with James's first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), a book that was to have a profound impact on the intellectual climate of the day.

Writer

Capturing the state and position of psychology at the time of its publication, The Principles of Psychology was in a sense a declaration of independence for the young "science" of psychology. James's arguments, augmented by his experience in physiology and clinical psychology, pulled psychology away from the field of philosophy, declaring it to be a subject unto itself. James's style also set the book apart. Comprehensible to nonprofessionals since he had dared to be humorous and to use plain language, James's book was a popular as well as a professional success for the forty-eight-year-old author. The final twenty years of his life would be remarkably productive, as though his accumulation of experience, ideas, and practice reached critical mass in 1890 and exploded into a flurry of activity. A briefer version of The Principles of Psychology appeared in 1892 and became the most widely used text on the subject. In 1899 his Talks to Teachers on Psychology appeared, giving rise to the subject of educational psychology.

Philosopher

In the meantime James had also published an important book on a different subject. The Will to Believe and Other Essays On Popular Philosophy had appeared in 1897. The Will to Believe was the culmination of James's philosophical explorations during the previous two decades and remains the most concise expression of his philosophical worldview. Essays such as "The Sentiment of Rationality," "The Will to Believe," and "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" reveal James's engagement with the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce. In defining both truth and morals in the terms of propositions to be proved or disproved by experience, James was aligning himself not only with a new school in philosophical thought but with a method of intellectual inquiry that was to gain wide application in other scientific and educational arenas. In James most of the nineteenth century's major currents of thought coalesced and found expression in a way that suggested fruitful intellectual endeavors ahead. His own endeavors would run the gamut from neurological psychology to psychical research. Clearly, for James, nothing in the world of human experience was closed to inquiry. Few who followed him could match his intellectual versatility.

Lecturer

The final decade of James's life, the first in the twentieth century, was spent in traveling, lecturing, writing, and also fighting to recover from sporadic ill health. In 1901 and 1902, having recovered from another bout with illness, he presented the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh, which became The Varieties of Religious Experience, among James's most popular books. Many people found that James's work strengthened or affirmed their religious faith, despite its scientific approach. The key to this success was James's pragmatic willingness to allow for the limited truth of any religious belief that had a positive effect on the life of the believer. In 1906 James visited Stanford University as a guest lecturer, giving a series of talks that was published posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). Later that year he lectured at the Lowell Institute in Boston, lectures that were published in 1907 as Pragmatism, which remains the definitive popular statement of that movement's principles. James had meanwhile become an outspoken critic of what he saw as a growing American imperialism. The Spanish-American War and America's involvement in the Philip-pines led him to complain that America had betrayed its original ideals for the sake of "bigness and greatness." In 1907 James retired from Harvard. The following year he gave a series of lectures in Oxford that would become A Pluralistic Universe (1909). He was elected to the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, along with being given many honorary degrees. He died on 26 August 1910 in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He had, forty years before, convinced himself that life was worth living. He lived it as few in American intellectual history ever have.

Sources:

Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1967);

John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (New York: Modern Library, 1967).

James, William 1842-1910

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY

JAMES AND PRAGMATISM

JAMES’S LONG-TERM SIGNIFICANCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, and died in Chocurua, New Hampshire, on August 26, 1910. He was one of the most important and influential American thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and is particularly known for his contributions to the growth of psychology as a scientific field of study and to the school of philosophy known as pragmatism.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY

James came from a distinguished family. His father, Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), was a philosopher and author in his own right and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). His younger brother, Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), became a highly regarded novelist and literary figure. In his early years William James experienced a crisis in deciding on a career. He briefly studied art and painting but was convinced by his father to pursue scientific studies instead. While attending Harvard Medical School in the mid-1860s, James spent a year traveling and studying in Germany, and it was during this time that he was exposed to the research being done in that country on the relationship between physiology and psychology, a direction that would lay the groundwork for the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline.

After returning to Harvard and completing his medical degree, James joined the Harvard faculty in the early 1870s. He served first as an instructor of anatomy and physiology, and then in 1875 began offering a course in psychology based on the ideas he had encountered in Germany. In the same year he established at Boylston Hall one of the first experimental laboratories for psychological research. Among his important early contributions to the field of psychology was his formulation, simultaneous with that of the Danish psychologist Carl Lange (1834–1900), of the James-Lange theory of emotion, which argues that emotion follows, rather than precedes, physiological stimulus. He continued to focus on the study of psychology throughout the 1880s and in 1890 published his great, two-volume work The Principles of Psychology. The work, which had taken him twelve years to write, gained him an international reputation and stands as a landmark in the development of psychology as a scientific field of study.

JAMES AND PRAGMATISM

James’s approach to psychology was based on what he later called (in the preface to The Will to Believe, 1897) “radical empiricism.” In this view, human consciousness resembles a flowing stream of undifferentiated objects or data out of which the mind selects specific items, by virtue of personal interest or need, on which to focus its attention. This theory of the mind, and especially its epistemological implications, led James increasingly to the study of philosophy, in which he first offered courses at Harvard in the 1880s, and in particular to the philosophical ideas of pragmatism.

During his earliest days as a teacher at Harvard, James had been part of a group known as the Metaphysical Club that included among its members Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), considered to be the founder of pragmatic philosophy. After the publication of Principles of Psychology in 1890, as James turned more to the investigation of philosophical and epistemological questions in his work, Peirce’s ideas influenced his direction. The root assumption of pragmatic epistemology is that theoretical ideas ought to be judged in terms of their practical consequences—if some real benefit accrues from holding a particular idea, then it is valuable; if there is no discernable benefit, it can be discarded. In this view, truth should never be viewed as wholly complete or absolute, because one must be prepared to adjust it to accommodate new information and new understandings.

Although James’s best-known discussion of pragmatism appears in the essay collection Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), an earlier collection, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), also offers a good expression of his thought. As these titles suggest, James was by no means strictly an academic philosopher but instead sought to make his ideas accessible to a general audience. To this end his essays, often written originally as public lectures, are both interesting and highly readable, and he demonstrates a particular skill in using examples drawn from everyday life. In one of his best known short essays, “What Pragmatism Means” (in Pragmatism ), he begins with a story about a group of individuals on a camping trip arguing over the position of a squirrel on a tree and then uses this incident as a way to discuss the pragmatic approach to truth. James also felt strongly that philosophy ought to address the significant social and moral issues of the times. In his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” based on a talk he gave at Stanford University in 1906, James argued for a form of organized national service that anticipated the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as well as later programs such as VISTA and AmeriCorps.

Pragmatism is sometimes seen as a philosophy that destroys any hope of discovering absolute truth and that leads, through its emphasis on “usefulness” as a primary criterion for establishing truth, to moral relativism. James to some degree anticipated these concerns in his work. Pragmatic epistemology, in his view, remains open to the introduction of new information, especially information resulting from new scientific discoveries, and his application of pragmatic principles to the questions of ethics and even to religion led him to hold highly traditional views on both. In essays such as “The Will to Believe” and “Reflex Action and Theism” (in The Will to Believe ) and “Pragmatism and Religion” (in Pragmatism ) he set forth the reasons for believing in a theistic God. In fact the study of religion was a matter of considerable importance to James, and his wide-ranging study of religious experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), made a significant contribution to the study of comparative religion.

JAMES’S LONG-TERM SIGNIFICANCE

James’s ideas were extremely significant. They influenced a generation of thinkers who followed him, most notably the great philosopher-educator John Dewey (1859–1952), and they played a role in forming the underlying mind-set—of social experimentation and reform—that characterized the Progressive (1900–1917) and New Deal (1933–1939) periods in U.S. history.

SEE ALSO Emotion; Empiricism; Epistemology; Functionalism; National Service Programs; New Deal, The; Philosophy; Pragmatism; Progressive Movement; Psychology; Religion; Stream of Consciousness; Theory of Mind

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt.

James, William. 1897. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green.

James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library.

James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green.

SECONDARY WORKS

Cotkin, George. 1990. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Crunden, Robert M. 1994. From Anti-Social Darwinism to Pragmatism, 1865–1917. In A Brief History of American Culture, vol. 8, 144–158. New York: Paragon House.

Donnelly, Margaret E., ed. 1992. Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. 1997. The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Simon, Linda. 1998. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Scott Wright

James, William (1842–1910), psychologist, philosopher, religious thinker.William James was born in New York City, the first of five children. His paternal grandfather, also named William James, had emigrated from Ireland and settled in Albany, New York, where he amassed a fortune in business, real estate, and railroads. As the son of a romantic and spiritually minded father, Henry James Sr., and Mary James, and a close observer of science in the Darwinian Era, James came of age imbibing two major forces of nineteenth‐century intellectual life: the urge to make religion personally vital and the expanding role of science.

Though deeply influenced by his father's belief that the natural world harbored hints of deeper levels of reality, James could not accept the particulars of his father's faith, which included convictions shaped by the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the French utopian thinker Charles Fourier. He developed flexibility of mind during his early education with an idiosyncratic range of tutors, schools, and European trips. His intelligent and energetic siblings, including the diarist Alice James (1848–1892) and the novelist Henry James, were his schoolmates and traveling companions.

In this intellectually stimulating setting, which included fluency in French and German and vigorous philosophical debate, the father discouraged specialization. William, however, decided to become a painter, and in 1860 the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, so he could study with William Morris Hunt. After one year, however, prompted by his father's quest for spiritual meaning in science, he enrolled at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. He was briefly attracted to the ideas of young scientific enthusiasts who treated the evolutionary theory propounded by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) as the symbolic centerpiece of their rejection of traditional religion and assertion of the professional authority of science.

Drawn to scientific naturalism, James rejected the anti‐Darwinian idealism of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, while at the same time accompanying Agassiz on a natural‐history expedition to Brazil in 1865–1866. James studied physiological psychology in Germany in 1867–1868 and in 1869 received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Anticipating a dilemma of the early twentieth‐century middle class, James with his excellent education had no clear vocation. He was also deeply troubled by the antireligious and amoral implications of materialistic and deterministic science. His inability to decide on a career or to choose among competing scientific and religious certainties led to a severe personal crisis in 1869–1871. His resolution of this crisis occurred gradually through the 1870s. In 1872, he was appointed an instructor in physiology and psychology at Harvard, where, in 1876, he established America's first psychological laboratory. Philosophically, he decided to accept the vitality of free will as formulated by the French neo‐Kantian Charles Renouvier and the British psychologist Alexander Bain. His personal life gained stability in 1878 when he married Alice Howe Gibbens; they had five children, of whom four survived infancy.

James's discussions with the intensely logical and scientifically well‐versed Charles Peirce, in an informal Cambridge group known as the Metaphysical Club, contributed to his new outlook. Under Peirce's influence, James grasped the hypothetical and probabilistic elements underlying many claims for scientific authority—including Darwinism. The example of Darwin and the philosophy of Peirce reinforced James's impulses to adhere to the freedom of the will and to doubt dogma and determinism in his mediation of religion and science.

James's mature theories reflect his hard‐won embrace of uncertainty and his integration of the religious and scientific elements in his education. His long‐popular textbook The Principles of Psychology (1890) reflected an empirical and scientific viewpoint, collecting recent developments in the new science of psychology, but his emphasis on the active mind and on moral behavior, as well as his introspective methods and tentative conclusions, distanced the text from deterministic science.

True to his impatient and energetic mind, James's books were mostly collections of smaller pieces, often delivered as lectures, for which he became increasingly popular. The essays gathered in The Will to Believe (1897) recognize the role of science but assert the need for voluntary beliefs in situations empirically ambiguous or elusive. His Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience, treat the subliminal realms of human consciousness as windows to religious experiences. The essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), seminally influential on modern process philosophy and philosophical psychology, grew from James's desire to evaluate empirically a wide range of human experience—including religious and psychic experiences—beyond the artificially simplified empiricism of professional scientific investigation. The Hibbert Lectures that became A Pluralistic Universe (1909) argue for looking at the multiplicity of the world's empirical parts without losing the sense of purpose derived from religious worldviews.

James is perhaps most famous for his theory of pragmatism, developed in discussions with Peirce, first expressed in the 1898 lecture Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results and given wide currency in his Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). While often challenging conventional philosophical wisdom, he moved furthest outside the mainstream in his scientific curiosity for and experimentation in paranormal experiences. During and after the Spanish‐American War, he provided forceful leadership of the anti‐imperialist movement.

Through his life and work, William James bridged religion and science as well as nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century culture.
See also Dewey, John; Evolution, Theory of; Philosophy; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Ralph Barton Perry , The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols., 1935.
Howard Feinstein , Becoming William James, 1984.
Gerald Myers , William James: His Life and Thought, 1986.
George Cotkin , William James, Public Philosopher, 1990.
Paul Jerome Croce , Science and Religion in the Era of William James, vol. 1, Eclipse of Certainty, 1995.
Eugene Taylor , William James on Exceptional Mental States, 1996.

Paul Jerome Croce

James, William (1842–1910), son of Henry James, Sr., was born in New York City, and spent his boyhood, with his brother Henry and two other brothers, in private study in Europe and at Newport. In 1860–61 he tested one of his apparent aptitudes by studying painting under W. M. Hunt at Newport, but abandoned this career to study at Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard (1861–64), and then at Harvard Medical School, which he left to accompany Agassiz on an expedition to collect zoological specimens in Brazil (1865–66). After another year in the Medical School, and a year abroad, he received his M.D. (1869). Physical weakness and a nervous condition that prevented his entering practice or laboratory research caused a period of pessimistic self‐doubt, which ended in 1870, partly owing to his reading of Renouvier, whose psychological theories convinced him of the possibility of moral freedom. His long career of teaching at Harvard began in 1872, when he became an instructor in physiology. This work led him into problems of psychology and philosophy, and he soon became interested in the hypotheses of Darwin and Spencer, in 1879 commencing a course on “The Philosophy of Evolution.” He had already transferred his instruction to the department of philosophy, and in 1876 had inaugurated a pioneering laboratory of psychology.

From the year of his marriage (1878) until 1890, James's chief occupation outside of his teaching was the writing of The Principles of Psychology (1890; abridged as a school text, 1892). This “positivistic” treatise, carefully documenting contemporary psychological knowledge and embodying its author's discoveries and hypotheses, remains a classic text, although somewhat superseded by later investigations, which it helped to inspire. Among the chapters previously published in periodicals is What Is an Emotion? (Mind, 1884), first stating the so‐called James‐Lange theory, which suggests that emotions do not cause behavior, but are, rather, collateral results of the same bodily reactions.

James's many trips to Europe and close association with leading continental psychologists and philosophers influenced his entry into the wider realm of philosophic problems. During the '80s and '90s, he was also active in the Society for Psychical Research, increasing the prestige of this organization and reinforcing his own impartial speculative attitude. Other activities demonstrating his altruistic idealism and championing of truth regardless of its source included opposing legislative discrimination against Christian Scientists and Spiritualists, campaigning against the Spanish‐American War and other imperialist policies of the U.S., advocacy of temperance though not of prohibition, and criticism of the Dreyfus case. At the same time he was publishing many lectures and articles on philosophic subjects, and in 1897 issued The Will To Believe, a collection of essays defining his position as a “radical empiricist” and asserting the right to accept metaphysical hypotheses on grounds beyond the possibility of experimental proof. A lecture tour in 1896, made to spread these and similar ideas among influential audiences, resulted in the publication of Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899), while another phase of his interest in human values appears in Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), defending the possibility of life after death.

James's international reputation was further strengthened by his appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh (1901–2). There he delivered the two series of lectures printed in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), in which he considers religion as an area of psychological facts and treats it, in his brilliant expositional style, from the points of view of science and common sense. He indicates the practical values of religious belief in terms of action and of happiness, and concludes with a statement of his personal dualistic belief.

As early as 1898, while lecturing at the University of California, James had used the term and concept of “pragmatism,” adopted from C.S. Peirce, to express his philosophic attitude. During the intervening years, he continued to develop this concept of the mind and its relation to action, and in Pragmatism (1907) he defined and amplified this eminently modern philosophic position, according to which an idea has meaning only in relation to its consequences in the world of feeling and action. This pragmatism, differing from that of Peirce, immediately won followers, including John Dewey, but also precipitated attacks, which were answered by James in The Meaning of Truth (1909). He had retired from Harvard (1907), but during his last years continued to write and to lecture, and was honored as the foremost American philosopher of his time.

His late and posthumous publications include The Energies of Men (1907) and The Moral Equivalent of War (1910), expressing his abhorrence of warfare and proposing a substitute, the conscription of youth for projects of manual labor in order to secure discipline and liberate the martial impulses; A Pluralistic Universe (1909), defining his metaphysical tenets, in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1908; Some Problems of Philosophy. A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (1911), edited by H.M. Kallen; Memories and Studies (1911), edited by his brother Henry; Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), edited by R.B. Perry; The Letters of William James (2 vols., 1920), edited by his son Henry; and Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), edited by Perry. A scholarly edition of his Works was published (7 vols., 1975–78). Selected Letters (1961) was edited by Elizabeth Hardwick. A sketchy biography is contained in his brother's A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, and Santayana's Character and Opinion in the United States includes a study of James and his philosophy.

William James

1842-1910
American philosopher and psychologist who was the principal figure in the establishment and development of functionalism.

William James was born in New York City to a wealthy, educated family that included the future novelist, Henry James, his younger brother. The family traveled extensively in Europe and America in James's youth. James studied chemistry, physiology, and medicine at Harvard College, but was unable to settle on a career, his indecision intensified by physical ailments and depression . In 1872, at the invitation of Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, James began teaching physiology at Harvard and achieved a reputation as a committed and inspiring instructor. Throughout the 1870s, his interest in psychology—initially sparked by an article by the German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)—grew. In 1875, James taught the first psychology course offered at an American university and in the same year received funding for the first psychological laboratory in the United States.

James began writing The Principles of Psychology in 1878 and published it in 1890. It had been intended as a textbook, but the original version, over 1,000 pages in length, was unsuitable for this purpose (James wrote an abridged version shortly afterwards). Nevertheless, the original text became a seminal work in the field, lauded for James's influential ideas and accessible writing style. James believed that psychology should be seen as closely linked to physiology and other biological sciences. He was among the earliest to argue that mental activity should be understood as dynamic functional processes rather than discrete structural states. The overall name generally associated with this outlook is functionalism , and it contrasts with the structural division of consciousness into separate elements that was the practice among early German psychologists, including Wundt, whose ideas James eventually

came to reject. Influenced by Charles Darwin 's theories of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the functionalist view held that the true goal of psychology was the study of how consciousness functions to aid human beings in adapting to their environment .

Probably the most well-known individual topic treated in Principles of Psychology is the concept of thought as an unbroken but constantly changing stream, which added the phrase "stream of consciousness" to the English language. Following in the footsteps of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, James argues that the exact same sensation or idea can never occur twice, and that all experiences are molded by the ones that precede them. He also emphasized the continuous quality of consciousness, even when interrupted by such phenomena as seizures or sleep . In contrast, scientific attempts to "break up" or "freeze" consciousness in order to study its disparate elements, such as those of Wundt or Edward Titchener (1867-1927), seemed misguided to James. Also treated prominently in Principles of Psychology is the importance and power of habits, as a force either to resist or cultivate, depending on the circumstances.

An especially influential part of James's book is the chapter on emotion , which expresses a principle that became known as the James-Lange Theory because the Danish physiologist Carl Lange published similar views at about the same time as James. The theory states that physical responses to stimuli precede emotional ones. In other words, James posited that emotions actually result from rather than cause physical changes. Based on this conclusion, James argued that a person's emotional state could be improved by changing his or her physical activities or attitudes.

Related to this observation about emotion were James's theories of the human will, which were also central to Principles of Psychology and contained the germ of his later philosophy of pragmatism. His emphasis on the will had its roots in his personal life: while in his twenties, an essay on free will by the French philosopher Charles-Bernard Renouvier (1815-1903) had inspired him to overcome his emotional problems. James rejected the idea of human beings responding passively to outside influences without power over their circumstances. Having himself triumphed by a strenuous exertion of the will, he recommended this course for others as well, defining an act of will as one characterized by focusing one's attention strongly on the object to be attained.

James served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1894 and 1904. He applied some of his psychological theories to his other studies, including education and religion. In 1909, the year before his death, James traveled to Clark University to meet Sigmund Freud , the founder of psychoanalysis , during the latter's only visit to the United States. In addition to Principles of Psychology and his other books, James had a great impact on psychology in America through his teaching. The work of his student G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) provided a link between James's psychological theories and the functionalist school of psychology that flourished during the 1920s. James's other books include The Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Toward the end of his career, James concentrated his work in the area of philosophy and maintained few ties to the field of psychology.

Further Reading

Perry, Ralph B. The Thought and Character of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948.

William James (1842-1910)

Psychologist

Sources

The Education of a Scientist. The elder brother of novelist Henry James, William James entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1861 and transferred to Harvard Medical School in 1864 without having first obtained an undergraduate degree. In 1865-1866 he accompanied Harvard biology professor Louis Agassiz on the Thayer Expedition to Brazil, where he collected fish specimens. While there he contracted a severe physical ailment that apparently left him in a weakened condition for the rest of his life. Like so many other American scientists of his generation, James studied in Germany to perfect his laboratory technique and to become acquainted with the latest ideas in experimental physiology. In 1867-1868 he attended the University of Berlin, where he was enrolled in Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s physiology course. Listening to this great physiologist convinced James that psychology—then a branch of philosophy—had to be recast in the mold of experimental physiology. Returning to the United States, he received an M.D. degree from Harvard in 1869.

Professor at Harvard. Joining the Harvard faculty as a lecturer on anatomy and physiology in 1872, James began teaching a course on the relations between physiology and psychology in 1875. As psychologist G. Stanley Hall later recalled, in 1876 James organized a rudimentary laboratory, later called the Laboratory for Psychophysics, “in a tiny room under the stairway of the Agassiz Museum,” in which he had “a metronome, a device for whirling a frog, a horopter chart and one or two bits of apparatus.” James taught his first philosophy course in 1879, and the following year he moved to the Department of Psychology and Philosophy, where he began to develop the philosophical ideas that he would later label “pragmatism” and worked on a psychology textbook. James complained that he lacked a theory of cognition—how people know what they know—and that he did not see how he could write a comprehensive text without one. He finally concluded that he should omit metaphysical questions and treat psychology as if it were a natural science. The core of his approach was to describe the nervous system as if it were a kind of electrical network that receives stimuli and transmits them to the brain. He concluded that this process had been perfected through Darwinian natural selection, in which the mind develops in such a way as to aid organisms in adapting to their environments.

The Standard Psychology Text. James’s great textbook, Principles of Psychology, was finally published in 1890 and remained the standard psychology text well into the twentieth century. The final product mixed physiological determinism with more subjective and creative observations on how the mind functions. James dissented from prior, mainly philosophical, commentators such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant who denied that the mind was capable of perceiving real time and space, both of which were abstract categories. According to James, human beings can feel duration and perceive through their senses the three dimensions of space. To describe this process James devised the famous metaphor “stream of consciousness,” whereby human beings cumulatively build on their experience of the passage of time. His emphasis on experience linked him with the tradition of British empiricism, which held that observation was at the core of science. James broadened the concept to include the personal, subjective experiences of each individual.

Pragmatism. The philosophical school known as pragmatism has its origins in the Metaphysical Club, whose members, including James and Charles Sanders Peirce, met in Cambridge during the 1870s. The term itself was coined by Peirce. As later reformulated by James, pragmatism is a general philosophy that builds on his psychological concept of experience and restores the metaphysical dimension that he pruned from his Principles of Psychology. Truth, James believed, was not something to be discovered; rather it is invented from one’s own experience.

Sources

Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1967);

Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: Norton, 1996).

JAMES, WILLIAM

William James was a popular and influential philosopher whose writings and theories influenced various areas of U.S. life, including the movement known as legal realism.

James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, to Henry James Sr. and Mary Walsh James. Comfortably supported by an inheritance, his parents stressed their children's abilities to make independent choices. James's formal schooling was irregular, and he studied frequently in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. James pursued an enduring interest in the natural sciences, earning a medical degree from Harvard University in 1869, though he never intended to practice medicine. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1872, teaching anatomy and physiology. He was also interested in psychology and philosophy, seeing these as related fields through his grounding in scientific studies. He began teaching those disciplines at Harvard in 1875 and 1879, respectively. He retired from the Harvard faculty in 1907.

In his first major work, Principles in Psychology (1890), James began to articulate a philosophy based on free will and personal experience. In a theory popularized as stream of consciousness, James argued that each person's thought is independent and personal, with the mind free to choose between any number of options. The subjective choices each individual makes are determined by the interconnected string of prior experiences in that person's life. In James's thought, choice and belief are always contingent, with no possibility for some permanent, definitive structure based outside of personal experience.

James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) developed further his idea that knowledge, meaning, and truth are essentially the result of each person's understanding of the experiences in her or his life. Mere formalism has no absolute authority; personal experience forms the framework of belief and action for each individual.

These important elements provided the basis for the movement known as legal realism. James's rejection of immutable truths in favor of experience as the mode to interpret reality was picked up by roscoe pound, oliver wendell holmes jr., and others in the 1920s and 1930s as a challenge to the prevailing belief that legal principles are based on an absolute structure of truth. Legal realists connected law with social and economic realities, both as legislated and as ruled on by courts. They argued that law is a tool for achieving social and policy goals, rather than the implementation of absolute truth, whether or not it is consciously treated that way. James's empiricism, based on experience as the root of human action, had a corollary within legal realism's use of social science as an analytical tool within law.

Though legal realism as a movement was considered to be played out by the 1940s, the belief that varied forces influence the actors and changes within the legal system has become more standard than the view that legal principles are immutable truths. James provided the philosophical underpinning for this shift in thinking.

"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience."
—William James

James died on August 26, 1910, in Chocorua, New Hampshire.

further readings

Allen, Gay Wilson. 1967. William James: A Biography. New York: Viking Press.

Cloud, Morgan. 1993. "Pragmatism, Positivism, and Principles in Fourth Amendment Theory." University of California at Los Angeles Law Review 41 (December).

Feinstein, Howard M. 1999. Becoming William James. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.

Hackney, James R., Jr. 1995. "The Intellectual Origins of American Strict Products Liability: A Case Study in American Pragmatic Instrumentalism." American Journal of Legal History 39 (October).

Myers, Gerald E. 1986. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press.

Schlegel, John H. 1995. American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Simon, Linda. 1999. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press.

cross-references

Jurisprudence.

William James 1842–1910, American philosopher, b. New York City, M.D. Harvard, 1869; son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James and brother of the novelist Henry James . In 1872 he joined the Harvard faculty as lecturer on anatomy and physiology, continuing to teach until 1907, after 1880 in the department of psychology and philosophy. In 1890 he published his brilliant and epoch-making Principles of Psychology, in which the seeds of his philosophy are already discernible. James's fascinating style and his broad culture and cosmopolitan outlook made him the most influential American thinker of his day.

His philosophy has three principal aspects—voluntarism, pragmatism, and "radical empiricism." He construes consciousness as essentially active, selective, interested, teleological. We "carve out" our world from "the jointless continuity of space." Will and interest are thus primary; knowledge is instrumental. The true is "only the expedient in our way of thinking." Ideas do not reproduce objects, but prepare for, or lead the way to, them. The function of an idea is to indicate "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare." This theory of knowledge James called pragmatism , a term already used by Charles S. Peirce . James's "radical empiricism" is a philosophy of "pure experience," which rejects all transcendent principles and finds experience organized by means of "conjunctive relations" that are as much a matter of direct experience as things themselves. Moreover, James regards consciousness as only one type of conjunctive relation within experience, not as an entity above, or distinct from, its experience. James's other philosophical writings include The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by his son Henry James, 1920); the Harvard Univ. Press edition of The Works of William James (17 vol., 1975–88); biographies by E. C. Moore (1965), G. W. Allen (1967), L. Simon (1998), and R. Richardson (2006); R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (2 vol. 1935, abr. ed. 1948) and In the Spirit of William James (1938, repr. 1958); studies by B. P. Brennan (1968), J. Wild (1969), P. K. Dooley (1974), and H. S. Levinson (1981); J. Barzun, A Stroll with William James (1984). See also studies of the James family by F. O. Matthiessen (1947), R. W. B. Lewis (1991), and P. Fisher (2008).

James, William (1842–1910). American scholar whose contribution to the study of religion derives from his refusal to treat physiology, psychology, and philosophy as separate disciplines. What remains a major contribution to the psychology of religion, James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), also benefited from the fact that he was equipped with ‘religious musicality’. Always tending to be individualistic, The Varieties dwells on personal religious life rather than on institutional or social expressions. He introduced the phrase, ‘stream of consciousness’, and described the nature of the stream. The Will To Believe (1897) is a commitment to struggle against evil and moral deficiencies, not an exercise in empty metaphysical speculation.

James, William (1842–1910), Pragmatist philosopher. A professor at Harvard, he held that we have a ‘right to believe in’ the existence of God (because it makes us ‘better off’), but no scientific certainty of the validity of that belief. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he drew the now familiar distinction between ‘once born’ and ‘twice born’ religious types, and made a scientific analysis of conversion.

James, William (1842–1910) US philosopher and psychologist, elder brother of Henry James. He held that the feeling of emotion is based on the sensation of a state of the body; the bodily state comes first and the emotion follows. As a philosopher, he influenced pragmatism. His most famous works are The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).