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
