JAMES, WILLIAM
(1842–1910)

William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, was born in New York City to Mary Robertson Walsh James and Henry James Sr., the eccentric Swedenborgian theologian. James's paternal grandfather and namesake was an Irishman of Calvinist persuasion who immigrated to the United States in 1798 and became very rich through felicitous investment in the Erie Canal. James had three brothers and a sister; one of them, the novelist Henry James, achieved equal fame.

James's early environment was propitious; his father's enthusiastic and unconventional scholarship, his personal and unorthodox religion, his literary association with men like Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Ralph Waldo Emerson all stimulated free intellectual growth. Even more important was the rather extraordinary respect that the elder James lavished upon the youthful spontaneities of his children; each, he thought, must go his own way and become that most valuable of creatures, himself. There was no straitlaced dogmatism in the James household, and William James was free to accept or reject the ideas of his father and his father's friends. The thought and sympathies of these transcendentalists and romantic humanitarians of the New England tradition never seemed to James the ultimate answers to his own philosophical and personal problems, but they dealt with genuine issues that he did not evade in his later work.

James's primary education took place at his father's table; its main constituents were the spirited discourse that the family held on every topic and the example of the parents, loving and unworldly. Formal education took place irregularly in various private establishments. From 1855 to 1860 James (often in the company of his younger brother Henry) attended schools in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. There, as his father said, he and his brother were able "to absorb French and German and get a better sensuous education than they are likely to get here" (Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, p. 59). During this European sojourn James's interest was divided between natural science and art, especially painting.

In spite of his continuing enthusiasm and talent for scientific inquiry, James's interest in painting became so strong by 1860 that he resolved to spend a trial period learning to paint. The elder James was not anxious for his son to become a painter, thereby prematurely cutting himself off from the rest of life's possibilities; any definite vocation, according to the father, was sadly "narrowing" (ibid., p. 171). It was nevertheless arranged that James should begin study with William M. Hunt in Newport. This experiment convinced James that he lacked the ability to be anything more than a mediocre artist, than which there was, he thought, nothing worse. The lesson at Newport permanently discouraged James's pursuit of an artistic vocation, but throughout his scientific and philosophical career he retained the artist's eye, his predilection for concrete sensuous detail, and his concern for style.

In 1861, James entered the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, studying first in the chemistry department under Charles W. Eliot, later in the department of comparative anatomy and physiology under Jeffries Wyman and Louis Agassiz. From Wyman he learned the importance of evolution; from Agassiz, an appreciation of "the world's concrete fulness" (William James, Memories and Studies, p. 14) and of acquaintance with empirical facts as against abstraction. In 1864, James transferred to the medical school, though without the intention of ever practicing medicine. His medical studies, although fruitful, were attenuated and sporadic.

While at medical school James joined Agassiz as an assistant on the Thayer expedition to Brazil during 1865/1866. In Brazil he contracted smallpox and suffered from sensitivity of the eyes. This was the first serious manifestation of that constitutional failure which was to recur throughout James's life, imposing upon it a pattern of interrupted work and of periodic flights to Europe which were always, at least in part, searches for health.

In 1867 ill health and the desire to study experimental physiology led James to Europe, to Germany in particular. While little formal study of physiology proved to be possible, James read widely and thoughtfully. His first professional literary effort, a revision of Herman Grimm's Unüberwindliche Mächte, published in the Nation (Vol. 5, 1867), dates from this period.

James returned to Cambridge in November 1868 and received his medical degree in June 1869. After a period of illness and retirement, he began teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard in 1873, psychology in 1875, and philosophy in 1879. This order is very nearly accidental and gives no adequate indication of James's development. Philosophy was an early interest which grew with his scientific studies; for James the more narrowly scientific questions could never be separated, even theoretically, from the more general questions which philosophy considers.

It was indeed a specifically philosophical concern which precipitated James's profound emotional crisis of 1870. He had been suffering from a sense of moral impotence that only a philosophical justification of the belief in the freedom of the will could cure. In the Essais de critique générale of Charles Renouvier, James found the basis of the justification he sought. And throughout his life the problem of maintaining free will and the moral attitude in the face of either religious monism or scientific determinism, as well as the problem of legitimating belief despite various intellectual skepticisms, continued to engage James's attention and to influence his mature philosophy. That philosophy, growing out of personal need and agitation, has a strong eschatological flavor. It cannot, however, be reduced either to a scheme of personal salvation or to an apology for some special way of life. James offered a philosophical, not an emotional, defense of free will, moralism, and belief. These topics became important test cases for a general metaphysics that James sought to elaborate not for its own sake but to satisfy interests which were distinctly rational and theoretical.

Having settled into the career of philosopher and teacher, if one may speak of James's settling into anything, he maintained close but not constant association with Harvard until his final resignation in 1907. He married Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878; the marriage seems to have increased his sense of purpose and coincided with a noticeable improvement in James's health. Thenceforth, he led an intensely active life, teaching at Harvard, lecturing widely, and publishing a series of books which became undeniable classics of American philosophy. Three series of James's lectures deserve special mention. He gave the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901/1902, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); lectures on pragmatism at the Lowell Institute and Columbia in 1906 and 1907, published as Pragmatism (1907); and the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1908/1909, published as A Pluralistic Universe (1909).

Character of James's Philosophy

This brief biography gives no indication of that range and richness of James's experience which so struck those who knew him and which entered into everything he wrote. James was a highly social man whose friends formed an intellectual community of great distinction. Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Shadworth Hodgson, Charles Renouvier, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, and F. H. Bradley were a few of those whom James knew as friends and fellow laborers.

From all of these men and others James drew philosophical nourishment, and the very number of sources and influences renders the search for antecedents otiose. James was essentially an original thinker, and he borrowed only what fitted his own design. This must be maintained in spite of James's habitual humility and his characteristic generosity of acknowledgment.

James impressed his friends with his vitality and strength of character, with his open-mindedness and sympathy. His spirit and attitude were admired even by those whose philosophical conclusions differed radically from his own. Santayana, for example, in his witty and condescending memoir Character and Opinion in the United States is forced to praise James, at least as an enthusiastic and explosive force. Because James wrote as he talked, much of his vividness and personal style is retained in his works. The majority of James's books are simply transcriptions of lectures; they have all the virtues and vices of spoken discourse, and the circumstances of their presentation must help to determine the kind of analysis to which they can be fruitfully subjected.

James addressed himself to the people, not especially to other philosophers, and he listened to the people to find out what life meant to them. He respected not so much their common sense as their common feelings and hopes and would not allow his philosophy to dismiss cavalierly that which figured largely in the experiences of men. The people listened to James, and his books sold well. By the end of his life he was nearly a legendary figure, and he was generally regarded as the chief representative of American philosophy. Nevertheless, professional philosophers, when they have discussed James at all, have tended to concentrate on those of his ideas that, separated from the body of his work and often distorted, have achieved currency. To this general picture there are important exceptions, such as Ralph Barton Perry, who has done more for James scholarship than anyone else.

To provide a proper perspective for the study of James, three corrective measures must be taken. First, attention must be diverted from his life, however interesting, to his published philosophy. For all its validity the biographical motive can be, and has been, pressed to the point where it precludes philosophical clarity. Second, James must be seen within the general philosophical tradition, in relation to the fundamental philosophical problems that he attempted to solve and not in relation to his position as a distinctly American thinker. To attempt to evaluate James's philosophy in terms of his American background is neither more nor less rewarding than to attempt to evaluate Immanuel Kant, say, in terms of his German background. Third, the objective aspect of James's philosophy must be stressed. James himself thought that philosophy involved the subjective factors of temperament and personal vision. In the first chapter of Pragmatism, he drew a very plausible correlation between tough-minded and tender-minded temperaments and empirical and rationalist philosophical positions. Again, in the essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" James argued that there can be no adequate definition of reason which ignores the feeling of rationality, the ultimate sense of logical fit. James believed that the subjective (or what might better be called the aesthetic) dimension was a feature of philosophy as such. James's philosophy is subjective, therefore, because it is philosophy, not because it is James's philosophy. Objectivity, like truth and reality, was redefined, not abandoned, by James.

The remainder of this entry is divided into sections on James's psychology, philosophy of religion, pragmatism, and metaphysics. This arrangement is simply an expository device. If pragmatism is a theory of all belief, then religious philosophy is a subdivision of pragmatism. If pragmatism is a description of what actually happens when men seek truth, then it is part of psychology. If the dualism between human and natural processes is finally inadmissible, then psychology is a chapter of general metaphysics. The interdependence of the various parts of James's philosophy, suggested here, will be exhibited below.

Psychology

The Principles of Psychology (1890) is, according to James himself, "mainly a mass of descriptive details"; certainly, this work more than any other justifies Alfred North Whitehead's remark that James's primary task was philosophical assemblage. The Principles "assembles" in two senses. First, there is a brilliant gathering, through extensive quotation and reference as well as careful documentation, of relevant material from the Scottish, English, French, and German schools. Second, there is the exhibition of facts which may never have appeared prominently in any system, either of psychology or of philosophy.

It has become customary, and it is certainly legitimate, to praise the Principles for its sensitive evocation of the evanescent inner life. It is indeed a kind of generalized psychic autobiography by a master of introspection, but it is much more than a document of literary psychology. The concrete rendering of experience is an essential element in the development of James's mature philosophy, for when he spoke of the world as "a world of pure experience," he referred to experience as it is described in the Principles. If experience had not the ramifications and possibilities so lovingly and exuberantly detailed by James in his "psychological" writings, it could never have become, as it did for James, the central image of complete reality. Moreover, James was not in his early days merely "collecting" facts whose subsequent careers happened to include the incident of being generalized into a total world view. James, as he said himself, "hated collecting" (Perry, op. cit., p. 225). The material of the Principles is already thrown into philosophical form, is already illuminated or stained (however one decides the matter) by the foundational metaphysical categories that recur, with greater generality, in the later works.

description

If the Principles is to be regarded as primarily a descriptive work, one must be clear about what is involved in description as James understood it. He was convinced that pure description in the manner of phenomenology is impossible. Description cannot be other than conceptual; concepts, in turn, are tools of classification that have inexpugnable conventional and theoretical elements. Concepts do not passively mirror; they select according to human interests and purposes. Assumptions, James maintained, have a way of establishing themselves "in our very descriptions of the phenomenal facts" (Principles, Vol. I, p. 145). Naive phenomenology attempts to eliminate assumptions from descriptive statements. This is an impossible task if for no other reason than that every allegedly assumption-free phenomenology must itself make doubtful assumptions, including the assumption that there can be description without classification. James's own approach was to examine the assumptions involved in all descriptions, making those assumptions "give an articulate account of themselves before letting them pass" (loc. cit.). Pragmatism as it appears in the Principles consists simply in spelling out what claims our theories and assumptions make for us and in eliminating elements which are superfluous, elements, that is, which can be eliminated without changing the tenor of what we really want to say. Pragmatism here can be fruitfully regarded as a general theory of theory criticism, as an attempt to make clear what we are actually committed to by the theories we entertain. The chapters that criticize the conscious automaton theory (Vol. I, Ch. 5) and the mind-stuff theory (ibid., Ch. 6), respectively, are indeed the first extended exercises in pragmatic criticism.

science and metaphysics

Purely phenomenological description being considered impossible by James, the question arises as to what is scientific about the Principles. The standard interpretation—the interpretation upon which the judgment of its great historical importance is based—finds the work very nearly the first attempt to treat psychology from the standpoint of a natural science—that is, descriptively and apart from metaphysical theories. The sharp distinction which we are likely to draw between scientific theories and metaphysical theories is difficult to sustain from James's own point of view and therefore cannot be used to differentiate the Principles from metaphysical treatments of the same subject matter.

A much more pregnant distinction is that between a priori and a posteriori metaphysics. A priori metaphysics was, for James, a totally illegitimate enterprise consisting of vacuous abstractions excogitated apart from any experience of the world. Throughout his work James often referred to a priori metaphysics simply as "metaphysics," and his frequent criticisms of metaphysics must therefore be carefully interpreted in their contexts. The Principles is antimetaphysical where metaphysics means "scholastic rational psychology" or "philosophical pyschology."

The more interesting problem is defining the relation between the Principles and the kind of metaphysics of which James did approve, a posteriori metaphysics, which is continuous with science and, like science, is both descriptive and theoretical. Here the differentiation must be emphatic rather than absolute. The Principles may be regarded as a deliberate (and artificial) restriction of general metaphysical scope. Science, as James saw it, must grow into metaphysics. Explanation must become more complete and more comprehensive even if, as James certainly believed, it cannot become total and absolute. But science must be science before it can become metaphysics. In the Principles metaphysics is, necessarily, postponed; its positivism is provisional rather than dogmatic and final.

The relative autonomy that science is given in the Principles is "for the sake of practical effectiveness exclusively," as James said in his essay "A Plea for Psychology as a 'Natural Science'" (Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 317). Science left to itself, with its "convenient assumptions" unquestioned, is best able to accumulate a mass of factual details which lead to the subsequent enrichment and "thickening" of the content of metaphysics. The danger of premature metaphysical reconstruction is thinness, impoverishment of content, and abstraction.

mental states

The basic assumption of the Principles and its "convenient" point of departure is the existence of mental states. The first task of psychology is to describe the conditions of these mental states with as much detail and completeness as possible. Chapter 2 of the Principles is an extended examination of the ways in which various brain states condition various mental states. The search for conditions among bodily experiences generally and brain experiences particularly is the only alternative to treating mental states as frankly miraculous. James, the evolutionary naturalist, had to maintain that mental states grow out of physical states, in spite of whatever difficulties this view entails. Since mental states, in addition to arising from physical antecedents, themselves give rise in all cases to changes in the physical world, it seems utterly impossible to create any kind of dualistic ontological chasm between the two types of process, mental and physical. There is indeed a discriminable subject matter of psychology, which James referred to both as "mental states" and as "mental life." This subject matter must be treated autonomously, which means, in practice, guarding against the reduction of mental phenomena to nothing but physical phenomena in the interest of some schematic monism. In this context James at times spoke of "irreducible dualisms," but what he meant to emphasize might perhaps better be called "irreducible dualities," discriminations that remain what they are no matter what supervenient integrations may also be pointed out.

The whole question of the dualism between the physical and the mental is complicated by the fact that James was, even in the Principles, developing a view of physical nature at large which departed radically from the familiar deterministic, mechanical model. It is often maintained, for example, that James's treatment of the will as irreducible to antecedent mechanical factors creates a dualistic chasm between natural processes and characteristically human processes. This would be true only if James had retained the customary deterministic model of nature. James, however, did not retain this model; he would sooner have conceived of all nature as willful than of man's will as an exception to nature.

James believed that the borderline of the mental is vague. Mentality, as James defined it, exists wherever we find the choice of means for the attainment of future ends. Mental life is purposive in a way that involves the overcoming, through suitable invention and appropriation, of any obstacles lying in the way of its purpose. The mind is a tactical power that reveals itself in the struggle with its environment. The only kind of world in which minds can conceivably develop and be found is one in which success is neither automatic nor impossible. An interesting consequence of James's view is that an omnipotent God could not have a mind; neither could a purely contemplative deity. The notion of mind as an instrument within the general economy of purpose and resistance to purpose, a notion which has justly been called "biological" and "Darwinian," is simply an ungeneralized expression of pragmatism.

Although it is necessary to consider mental states as "temporal events arising in the ordinary course of nature" (ibid., p. 319), with emphasis on their natural antecedents and results, it is also necessary to consider mental states in themselves as realities to be described as they are found with their generic particularity and variety intact. Here again, it must be emphasized that James was not attempting a phenomenology of mental life or consciousness. What he was attempting was the provision of adequate description that would not be guilty of gross oversimplification or distortion.

introspection

Adequate description must, of course, be based somehow upon observation, and, James maintained, the principal method of psychology is introspective observation. Introspection, as an observational process, is similar to other kinds of observation. James could find in introspection no peculiar epistemological characteristic; it is neither more nor less fallible than other kinds of observation. Its frequently alleged infallibility, based on some notion of the immediate relation obtaining between a mind and its contents, is simply contradicted by experience. Even if feeling is unmistakably what it is, our "naming, classing, and knowing" (Principles, pp. 189–190) of every feeling share in the notorious general human fallibility. The truth of any observation, introspective or otherwise, is not to be found in the character of the source of observation but in the consequent service, especially theoretical service, which the observation and its correlative preservation in description can be made to render. There is therefore no simple and immediate verification of observations, no once and for all validation of descriptions. For James "the only safeguard [of truth] is the final consensus of our further knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached" (ibid., p. 192). James's own descriptions in the Principles must lend themselves to this kind of pragmatic corroboration.

thought

The famous "descriptive" chapter, "The Stream of Thought" (perhaps the heart of the Principles ), cannot be evaluated from a simply empirical point of view. What is described and how it is described are determined by markedly theoretical affinities and avoidances. James singled out five traits of thought in that chapter: (1) Thought tends to be part of personal consciousness—that is, thought is not experienced as simply a thought but as my thought; (2) thought is always changing; (3) within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous; (4) thought deals with objects independent of itself; and (5) thought is selective and has interests. The metaphysical model that James had in mind here is of a process that is partially determined and partially self-determining—that is, centered or focused and essentially temporal. Although the analysis in the Principles is limited to one kind of process, consciousness, the structure of the analysis is similar to that Whitehead offers of all actual occasions. James himself came to believe that all of reality must be describable in terms like those used for human experience. This belief is elaborated in Essays in Radical Empiricism as the notion of a world of "pure experience."

Each of the five traits of thought which James distinguishes repudiates some important philosophical position. One dimension of James's work clearly apparent in the Principles is a sustained criticism of the "classic-academic" version of mind. No easy summary of what this meant to James is available, but its main features would seem to be the marshaling of instances of mental phenomena according to a priori canons of clarity and rationality, the overwhelming influence of the assertive paradigm (as opposed to the judgments implicit in making and doing) in construing the problems of belief and judgment, and allegiance to the spectator theory of knowledge with whatever passivity is therein involved. These attitudes James attacked in the name of a richer experience, encompassing all the concrete information we possess about the functions of mind. This is the information, so carefully assembled and considered in the Principles, which James urged the epistemologist to work into his official model and the philosopher generally to consider in making his pronouncements.

experience

The appeal to experience is not new in philosophy; James was solidly in the venerable tradition of empiricism. But empiricism in its classic British form is essentially an epistemological position that regards experience as an exclusive witness before a cognitive tribunal in which other sources of evidence are ruled out of court as uncertain or unreliable. The genius of James's empiricism lies precisely in ruling nothing out of court. His theory of experience, the object of so much of James's later labor, is perhaps the first such theory which is cosmological, rather than strictly epistemological, in intention and logical form. This shift of the total frame of reference within which experience is considered has, for better or worse, influenced a subsequent movement in philosophy typified by Whitehead and his disciples. It is this influence which points to the main philosophical significance of the Principles.

Philosophy of Religion

Even in the introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1885), a relatively early work that might be thought no more than an act of filial devotion, James's own ideas about religion were quite clear. There is, of course, a sympathetic exposition of his father's superpersonal theological monism, for William James could honestly admire his father's "instinct and attitude" even if he could not condone the "cold accounts" and abstract formulations of the elder James's system. It is religious experience, rather than religious doctrine, that matters. Unless it is a part of vital experience, religion becomes "fossil conventionalism." Here James shared his father's attitude; his father wrote so much, according to James, because he was dissatisfied with every verbal encapsulation. Writing was a necessary evil and, like the labor of Sisyphus, self-stultifying.

That James could not accept in any unqualified way the religious vision of his father is evident. The difficulty is simply this: "Any absolute moralism is a pluralism; any absolute religion is a monism" (The Literary Remains, p. 118). The recognition of the essential opposition of morality and religion was clearly made by the elder James. The logic of his system required him to reject the finite moral agent with his frantic moral efforts. It is certain that James benefited from his father's insight even though he aligned himself with morality and pluralism. The working attitude of the healthy mind must always be, for James, a moral one which takes seriously the difference between good and evil and which commits itself to struggle for the first and against the second. To adopt the religious attitude is to step out of life's fight and to justify that withdrawal by some belief about the character of the world and either the ineffectiveness or superfluity of action within it. For James the character of the world, the nature of reality, does not justify, as a general attitude, the quietism that religion counsels. On the contrary, the world is the kind of place in which moral endeavor is, as a rule, supremely worthy. James neither denied the satisfaction that religion gives to many nor declared that satisfaction illusory. The very fact of pluralism allowed him to suppose at least some aspect, however fragmentary, of reality that justifies the religious option. Religious belief gives us, in James's famous phrase, a "moral holiday." Like any holiday it may be enjoyed for its own sake; more important to James, however, holidays indirectly affect the work week.

evolutionary theory

James was strongly influenced by the Darwinian theory of evolution and was therefore predisposed to find in all feelings, including religious feelings, clues about what the world is like. Feelings that evolved in the world must somehow reflect the world. The most eccentric fancy, for example, tells us that we have the kind of world in which such a fancy is possible.

Evolutionary theory, as James saw it, begins with the presupposition that each part of reality has a function, that each part is in some way or other good for something or other. The strictly useless, according to such a theory, cannot endure, and all flourishing realities command a certain minimal respect. Religious experience is not especially justified by evolution because nothing is especially justified. Religion and irreligion, insofar as they both exist, are exactly equal before the evolutionary tribunal. Belief in evolution, at least as James interpreted that belief, makes simple dismissal impossible; even that which is evil cannot be negligible. The questions must be asked of religion as it must be asked of everything. How is it that it came to be what it is? What is it for?

antecedents and value of religion

In his major work on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James attempted to account for the antecedents and value of religion. The question of how it came to be what it is, is a matter of classifying religious feelings and religious propensities with other kinds of human experience which are found to be similar to them. The initial task, therefore, of The Varieties is the provision of a "descriptive survey" beginning with as many and as varied examples of typically religious experience as possible. The emphasis, here as elsewhere, is on spontaneous religious emotions rather than theological interpretations or institutional prolongation and regularization.

James was scrupulously careful to explain religious phenomena by ordinary scientific laws and principles, if at all possible. Accordingly, religious visitations of all kinds are classed as sudden influxions from the subject's own subconsciousness. Conversion is seen as the radical rearrangement of psychic energy around some new center of interest. Examples of this kind of felicitous theorizing could be multiplied.

James, however, was equally concerned with promoting the thesis that nothing said about the history or genesis of religious phenomena can shed the slightest light on the spiritual worth and significance of those phenomena. The older dogmatists attempted to justify religion once and for all by pointing to its privileged origin in some kind of revelation; newer dogmatists—the "medical materialists"—attempted to discredit religion once and for all by pointing to its disreputable origin in some curious bodily state. Neither approach is acceptable. Religion must be judged in the same way that everything else is judged, by proving itself useful (in specifiable ways) in some possible future. Religion must "run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience" (The Varieties, p. 426). This context includes the collection of all our established truths as well as all the exigencies of our affective and intellectual natures. Therefore, the defense of religion that can be found in James is not based on appeals to either mere social utility or subjective feeling. The question of the truth of religion arises only when religion makes some concrete, specific prediction about the world's future. Religion having framed its hypotheses, these hypotheses are supported or refuted in terms set out by James's general theory of belief, known as pragmatism.

belief

James's notorious defense of the right to believe in the widely read essay "The Will to Believe" and elsewhere, though generally given a limited religious interpretation, is, in fact, not primarily a defense of religious belief but of moral belief, belief in the efficacy of action, including, as an important instance, the active experimentalism of modern science. The point of James's doctrine is its repudiation of the methodological caution epitomized by the Baconian injunction not to "suffer the understanding to jump and fly from particulars to remote and most general axioms" or by the Cartesian rule "that the understanding should always know before the will makes a decision." James was making a general statement in support of the method of empirical science, with special emphasis upon the initially unwarranted character of every scientific hypothesis. We must at least believe our hypotheses sufficiently to bestir ourselves to test them; without our active interest in and partisanship of belief the enterprise of science would come to a silent, ghostly end. It is the theoretical daring of science that inspired James. His doctrine on the will to believe is no fuzzy ad hoc concession to self-indulgent piety but an integral part of his general theory of belief.

The doctrine of the will to believe, with all its genial encouragement of risking belief, is balanced, in James, by an unremitting fallibilism. Belief, however justified originally, is always conditional. Belief must continue to justify itself; there is no possibility of a definitive, once and for all certification. Both the options of practical life and the tenets of religion may be justified as peculiar kinds of scientific hypotheses, the first sort peculiar because of their limitation to some particular matter or situation, the second because of their elusive generality. There seems to be no difficulty in interpreting the practical decisions of life, with their inherent predictions about relevant future events, as closely analogous to the predictive, if not to the explanatory, activity of science. Religious belief, on the contrary, may seem intrinsically isolated from the arena of confirmation and disconfirmation and, therefore, alien to the scientific pattern. For James all genuine belief, including religious belief, must address itself to the tribunal of experiment. If all possible procedures of verification are irrelevant to some religious doctrine, then that doctrine cannot rightly be the object of any belief; such a doctrine, having no positive content, would be meaningless.

James did, in fact, think that at least a few religious hypotheses were truly empirical, that they made a difference which somewhere could be noticed. James was careful not to prejudice the case against religion by adopting some single restrictive paradigm of verification. If religious belief makes a difference, it is not altogether surprising that we should have to look for that difference with greater sympathy, imagination, and patience than we are used to exercising in more straightforward cases.

james's religious belief

James's own religious belief, expressed without dogmatism in the last chapter and the postscript of The Varieties and again in the last chapter of Pragmatism, consists essentially in the affirmation that the world is richer in realities than conventional science is willing to recognize. Religious experience at least suggests that there is what James called a "higher part of the universe" (ibid., p. 516) which, though beyond the immediate deliverance of the senses, is nevertheless effective in the world in a way that makes a noticeable difference. This assertion that the higher part makes concrete and local differences constitutes James's famous "piecemeal super-naturalism" (ibid., p. 520), really only a name for an enlarged and tolerant naturalism. The higher part is perhaps impossible to define given the present state of our knowledge. Certainly, for James it cannot be the infinite and omnipotent God of traditional theism who guarantees the successful outcome of the universe. The higher part is better conceived as a finite power (or perhaps even a polytheistic medley of powers) that, like men, works toward the good and helps achieve it. This is a theological notion compatible with the significance of moral choice in a way that the conventional notion is not.

The vagueness of much of James's treatment, a vagueness he frequently admitted to, has been amply noted by his critics. What must also be noted, however, is the forceful way in which a fundamental idea of our tradition, the idea of God, has been radically reconstructed by James in a manner that makes the idea more consonant with religious experience and that frees it from the congeries of paradoxes associated with the problems, among others, of free will and of evil.

Pragmatism

The chief locus for James's pragmatism is, of course, his immensely popular and influential work Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. The origin of pragmatism, however, as James always acknowledged, is found in C. S. Peirce's essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," published in 1878. This essay remained generally unnoticed until James's 1898 lecture on pragmatism, "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," at the University of California (in Collected Essays and Reviews ). This lecture may be taken as the beginning of pragmatism as an explicit, although never a unified, movement, but the essentials of the doctrine as developed by James are found earlier in the Principles of Psychology and even in the introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. Indeed, James rarely wrote anything, early or late, which did not at least imply pragmatism.

Pragmatism may be approached as a mere method, an eristic device which vouchsafes hints as to either the meaning or truth of propositions or to both together; it may be taken as a theory of meaning or a theory of truth or, once again, as a theory of both meaning and truth. A. O. Lovejoy in "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" insisted upon distinctions such as these and chided James for neglecting them. In fact, though James erred in emphasizing the autonomy of the various aspects of pragmatism, he wished to persuade his readers of the truth of whichever part he was recommending at the moment, and he therefore tended to stress the self-contained plausibility of elements which, if plausible at all, are so only when taken together in the total view.

It is the contention of James's sympathetic commentators that his pragmatism is plausible as nothing less than a theory of reality. It is the descriptive naturalism central to James that saves pragmatism from being merely a convenient device for settling philosophical disputes. The fundamental assumption that generates pragmatism is the assumption that "knowledge," "truth," and "meaning," as well as any other possible object of discourse or any other possible subject matter for philosophical discussion, must be explicable as a natural process or as a functional medley or competition of natural processes. The world, for James, is a plurality of temporal processes related in so many specifiable and concrete ways that it cannot be accounted for by abstract speculation alone.

James believed that an individual's personal, peculiar vision counts most in philosophy; not surprisingly, it is vision, not method, which is primary in James. Reality dictates the method by which it may be known. The gross encounter with the world is primary in the determination of what character the world will have for us. Theories of knowledge and of method, existing at a high level of abstraction, are second to the ineluctable fact of experience breaking in upon us.

truth and meaning

James's pragmatism is an attempt to formulate a metaphysics of truth and of meaning. Logically, such an attempt is exactly on a par with the metaphysical treatment of any discriminable subject matter. By metaphysics James meant the quest for adequate general descriptions either of reality as a whole or of some distinguishable part of it. The descriptions offered by metaphysics are, in principle, continuous with those offered by science, although their range and focus may differ. The distinction between science and metaphysics was not crucial for James; he saw the possibility of unrestricted intercourse and cooperation exactly where later thinkers are likely to see division and competition for cognitive respectability. It is therefore helpful from James's own point of view to regard pragmatism's description of truth in the same light, say, as geology's description of continental drift. Both are characterizations of natural processes, and both attempt to portray what actually happens.

The metaphysical perspective of Pragmatism itself (even apart from the context of James's total work) is so unmistakable that the prevailing interpretation of pragmatism as a set of newly devised rules that serve a certain practical purpose seems totally unjustified. If James was right, people have always unwittingly followed the "pragmatic method." A purely theoretical illumination like pragmatism will indeed clarify practice and improve it; for James no process—least of all, a process where human influence intervenes—is so canalized that modifications are utterly beyond hope. Metaphysics must recognize the plasticity of its subject matter as well as the limits of plasticity.

Pragmatism discusses truth without falling into the epistemological frame of mind habitually assumed by professional philosophers. James's description of actual processes rejects the usual question of what we ought to believe. If there is something we "ought" to believe, the authority of the "ought" itself must be explained concretely. There is no authority which is merely formal. Pragmatism therefore becomes the justification of truth's prestige in terms of the world's exigencies.

One factor discernible in the complex process called "believing truly" is the compulsion of fact or the unavoidability of a residual nonplastic pole in determination of what is true. It is here that we find truth's authority and importance.

Truth, for James, is what we must somehow take account of if we are not to perish. Men cannot in the long run believe what is false not because truth extracts from them a categorical imperative in its own behalf but because reality compels men in spite of themselves, and it is from this that the authority of truth is derived. "Agreement with reality" as a criterion of truth cannot be taken to indicate any fixed structural relation (such as the "copying" relation). The truth relation is characterized not by stasis but by the fluid resourcefulness of functional harmony. The character of the harmony itself may be anything that is compatible with survival. Even in the Darwinian world that James pictured, there is more than one way to survive as truth.

Raw compulsion may account for the authority of truth, but truth is hardly a mute registry of bruises received from the world. Indeed, people create truth, and truth is so exclusively the result of human activity that James's own view has been called "humanism." Central to this humanism is the distinction (so often insisted on by James, so often neglected by his critics) between ideas and objects, between what takes account and what is taken account of. The objects constitute what James referred to as the "unhumanized fringe," the yet to be conceptualized. What must be taken account of is presumably just what it is. Truth and falsity, however, apply not to objects but only to our ideas of objects. Our ideas of objects are mutable in the sense that we can modify ideas or replace one idea by another. In such a situation ideas are to be judged better or worse; such judgments fall between the ideal limits of complete good and complete bad. These are the same limits usually called "truth" and "falsity." Truth is viewed by James as one species of the good. The good is itself interpreted as a plurality of "good fors." In this view ideas are instruments for taking account theoretically, practically, aesthetically, and so on, of reality.

The point of James's view of truth, as Bergson suggests in The Creative Mind (p. 256), is that truth is to be described as an invention rather than a discovery. Truth, or propositions which are true, might be compared to cleverly made maps or apt predictions. If they serve us as we expect them to serve us, we have no legitimate complaint. There are, of course, ontological relations between such inventions as maps, predictions, and propositions (as well as inventions such as light bulbs and cotton gins) and what, in summary fashion, is referred to as reality. Inventions are conventional but not arbitrary. They are not arbitrary because they must somehow take account of reality; they are conventional because they embody one way (among alternatives) for that taking account.

The relationship between two processes within experience constitutes truth—(1) the inventive process or activity of proposing, of framing propositions, and (2) the particular chain of natural processes with which the proposition in question is concerned. The emphasis on the truth relation as a relation within experience and totally construable in terms of "positive experienceable operation" (Meaning of Truth, p. x) is one instance of James's general metaphysical position that all relations are within experience. Experience, as it were, forms a cohesive, self-explanatory whole; it hangs together, as James liked to say, and needs no transcendental connectives or supports.

Since the truth relation was taken by James's contemporaries as transcending experience, the strategic function of pragmatism is apparent. It is an extension of radical empiricism, an attempt to place the particularly troublesome truth relation within the total perspective of metaphysical naturalism.

James spoke of true ideas as those which "work," which "lead" propitiously, which give various kinds of satisfaction, and which bring about various kinds of success. He also spoke approvingly of the "cash value" of ideas and thought that meaningful ideas are those which make "practical differences." These highly (and obviously) metaphorical expressions have confused many commentators.

There are those who have found James vague. He intended, however, that all these metaphors should be functionally specific and indeterminate only in respect to instances. "Working," "leading," "satisfying," and "succeeding" are generic terms as respectable and as precise as terms such as "copying" and "agreeing." They are, however, functional rather than static. For those who see functions as inherently insubstantial, shadowy, and vague, any functional definition of truth will be unacceptable, but this hardly seems to be an insurmountable objection.

Other commentators have seized upon the prominence of the "practical" in James's account of meaning and truth. Surely, this is a difficult term in James, if for no other reason than that he used it as it is used in ordinary language—that is, variously. His prevailing usage, however, cannot be equated with some narrow notion of commercial efficiency. Pragmatism is not a philosophical vindication of the businessperson's common sense or acumen. It was James, after all, who saw the tendency to worship "the bitch goddess, success," as the principal weakness in the American character. It is especially in our theoretical and moral practice that meaningful ideas, according to James, are to make a difference. Belief divorced from action may well be morally effete, and James set forth this point, though not in its crudely athletic form; his main thesis, however, was that belief divorced from action is theoretically inexplicable. James's quest was not for a formula that would rouse his fellows to civic virtue or efficiency of some peculiarly American sort but for criteria which would be descriptively adequate to belief. His philosophical purpose was to find out what it means to believe, what it means to entertain ideas which may be meaningful and true.

Metaphysics

Although frequently attempted, it is not possible to isolate a final "metaphysical" period in James. The theory of the various kinds of belief, which formed his philosophy of religion and of pragmatism, has as a conspicuous feature the assumption that anything which can be meaningfully said about belief must take into account the grounding of belief in natural processes, particularly human processes. It is possible to formulate a theory of belief apart from a general metaphysics only by adopting an assumption that James explicitly rejected. This is the epistemological assumption that an existentially neutral logic of belief can be constructed. In fact, on this assumption existential reference is regarded as the indication of a certain categorial confusion frequently labeled "psychologism." James insisted, even in his least metaphysical passages, that "knowledge," "belief," "truth," and "meaning" indicate discriminable natural existences in the same way that all terms do, or at least all terms that figure as possible subjects of philosophical discussion. This is simply the corrective application of the basic postulate of metaphysical naturalism to the recalcitrant subject matter of epistemology. James regarded the prominence accorded this subject matter since the time of Kant as a distortion of perspective that his own philosophy was intended to correct.

But for the development of James's metaphysics, the psychology—or the treatment of characteristically human processes—was even more important than the theory of belief. His metaphysics was simply the attempt to apply to all reality categories originally framed for human experience. The radical generalization of the concept of experience, so central in James, is necessitated by two ideas. First, James believed that metaphysical dualism is always unacceptable. Whatever dualities or pluralities are distinguished for certain purposes, ultimately the philosopher cannot operate with irreducible categories. Second, if one categorial set or one metaphysical model must be adopted, James believed that this categorial set or metaphysical model must arise from the consideration of our own experience. It is only of human experience that we have anything like "complete concrete data." Anthropocentrism is therefore thought to be a consequence of any genuine empiricism. For James even panpsychism is at least a possible and interesting empirical hypothesis.

In the seminal essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" (1904), James asks us to assume that there is just one "primal stuff" of which everything in the world is made. This stuff, called "pure experience," is not a single entity, like Thales' water; "pure experience" is a collective name for all sensible natures, for all the "that's" which anywhere appear. The monism implied in this concept of the one primal stuff is therefore merely formal. Explanatory monism must be accepted before specific metaphysical descriptions may be attempted. In the same essay James provided a sample of metaphysical description. Consciousness is there described as a certain relation of parts of experience to one another. Consciousness is not an unanalyzable substance but simply the name that is given to a certain discriminable function within experience, the knowing function. All other functions are to be explained in the same way as consciousness. Functional explanations in terms of related strands of experience allow the abrogation of traditional dualisms because the same isolable part of experience may enter into many and various relations. What is subject may also be object; what is object may be subject. The knower may also be the known and vice versa, depending on the "context of associates" within which the part of experience so labeled is considered.

James's frequent use of the expression "part of experience" was not meant to suggest that experience has an atomistic constitution. Indeed, James constantly argued against the "pulverization" of experience in British empiricism. We experience not isolated parts but continuities of indeterminate extension. Parts and the relations between parts, both directly experienced, form new functional wholes. The use of the word part indicates nothing more than the theoretical and practical need for emphatic focus.

James regarded the "concrete" data appealed to by British empiricism as abstract, intellectual products; he accused that empiricism of committing what Whitehead later called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." If James's philosophy is to be classified historically as a criticism of British empiricism, it must also be emphasized that it is self-consciously offered as an alternative to the criticism of empiricism by idealists from Kant to Royce.

If the facts pointed to by the usual empiricism are abstract in the sense of being incomplete, inadequate, or partial, it still cannot be said, as it is said by absolute idealism, that there are no facts at all or that there is just one fact, the immovable "block-universe," as James referred to this notion that he always found slightly ridiculous. There are no general grounds, according to James, for the rejection of the obvious particularity and individuality that characterize the plural parts of experience. James certainly held that any allegedly self-sufficient fact may turn out from some point of view or for some purpose, intellectual or practical, to be partial or abstract. But there are many points of view and many purposes with equal titles to rationality. There are therefore many levels of fact, and words such as "part," "whole," "unity," "concrete," "abstract," "particular," and "individual" do not qualify any reality simply or always. These words are definable only within purposive contexts. Absolute idealism, in contrast, sets up a single standard of rationality and develops a characteristic vocabulary which it applies simpliciter. This procedure yields a certain clarity and neatness but suffers from "vicious intellectualism" or "the treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name's definition fails positively to include" (A Pluralistic Universe, p. 60).

The notion of self-sufficient centers within experience emphasized by James as particulars or individuals is a generalization of that first trait of the stream of thought referred to in Principles of Psychology. Although made familiar by Whitehead, it was James who first used the concept of personal order to replace the traditional concept of some fundamental and thinglike substance.

Other traits of existence that impressed themselves on James are first annunciated in the Principles as traits of the stream of thought or of the central human process. So, for example, the doctrine that thought is always changing becomes the doctrine that reality is always changing. Again, human freedom is eventually interpreted as a special case of universal indeterminism. My future, though continuous with my past, is not determined by it. Just so the future of the world; although it grows out of the total past, it is not a mere result of that past. If I am creative—that is, if human freedom is effectual—then the world is creative, if for no other reason than that I am part of the world. What is constant in my behavior is the result of habits that never entirely lose their flexibility. In the same way the constancies charted by the laws of science are only more inveterate habits.

Objections can be raised against all these contentions, especially in the enthusiastic, unguarded form in which James made them. They do, however, add up to a serious philosophical position which has, in fact, borne fruit in the subsequent history of philosophy and is worthy of continuing serious study.

See also Bergson, Henri; Bradley, Francis Herbert; Determinism and Indeterminism; Dewey, John; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Empiricism; Evolutionary Theory; Hodgson, Shadworth Holloway; Introspection; James, Henry; Kant, Immanuel; Panpsychism; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Perry, Ralph Barton; Philosophy of Religion; Pragmatism; Psychology; Rationality; Renouvier, Charles Bernard; Royce, Josiah; Santayana, George; Whitehead, Alfred North; Wright, Chauncey.

Bibliography

works by james

Only James's chief works are listed here. For a complete list see Perry's bibliography, below. Secondary literature is copious, and only the most important works are listed here. Those who wish to sample the periodical literature are advised to consult the fifty-year (1904–1953) index of the Journal of Philosophy (New York, 1962), under the heading "James."

The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. Edited and with an introduction by William James. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885.

Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1890. Regarded by many as James's major work, it is a prime source not only for his psychology but also for his metaphysics.

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longman, 1897. In addition to the title essay, the essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" is, if interpreted in the context of James's total thought, an important source of his basic convictions. The book also contains the famous essay "The Dilemma of Determinism," James's fullest statement of his views on free will.

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

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longman, 1907.

The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to "Pragmatism." New York: Longman, 1909. A collection of polemical essays; the preface is especially important, for it answers certain criticisms of pragmatism and states James's conception of the relation between pragmatism and radical empiricism.

A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longman, 1909. A sustained criticism of absolute idealism and intellectualism; contains chapters on G. W. F. Hegel, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and Bergson.

Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Longman, 1911. James's last project; it is incomplete. Valuable for its many very clear formulations; three chapters outline his theory of perception.

Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman, 1912. A related series of essays expounding James's mature philosophy; the essays "Does Consciousness Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience" are especially important.

Memories and Studies. New York: Longman, 1912. Fifteen popular essays and addresses selected by James's son Henry James; includes commemorative addresses on Agassiz and Emerson, an essay on Spencer, and several essays on psychical research and academic life.

Collected Essays and Reviews. New York: Longman, 1920. Thirty-nine articles, selected by Ralph Barton Perry, extending from 1869 to 1910; many historically important works, including the California lecture "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results."

Letters. Edited by Henry James. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920. Charming letters, primarily of biographical and historical significance, edited by James's son.

works on james

Aiken, H. D. "American Pragmatism Reconsidered: William James." Commentary (September 1962): 238–266.

Bergson, Henri. "On the Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality." In his The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Brief but provocative development of the thesis that to understand James's pragmatism, we must modify our general conception of reality.

Dewey, John. Characters and Events, Vol. I. New York: Holt, 1929. Book I, Ch. 12. "William James" consists of three occasional pieces that together provide an informal but penetrating analysis of James's contribution to and place in American philosophy.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963. In addition to the very influential title essay, there are eight other essays on James or pragmatism.

Moore, G. E. Philosophical Studies. London: Routledge, 1922. "William James' 'Pragmatism'" attempts to refute James from the commonsense point of view.

Perry, Ralph Barton. Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James. New York: Longmans, Green, 1920. A listing of 312 items from 1867 to 1920, with helpful indications of each item's content and value.

Perry, Ralph Barton. In the Spirit of William James. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938. A solid and sympathetic philosophical interpretation of James. The chapters "An Empirical Theory of Knowledge" (Ch. 2) and "The Metaphysics of Experience" (Ch. 3) are especially noteworthy.

Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little Brown, 1935. A massive, richly documented study; the single most important work on James.

Royce, Josiah. William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life. New York: Macmillan, 1911. An attempt to show James's place in American social history.

Russell, Bertrand. Philosophical Essays. New York: Longman, 1910. See "William James' Conception of Truth" and "Pragmatism."

Santayana, George. Character and Opinion in the United States, with Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America. New York: Scribners, 1920. Unsympathetic but extremely interesting in its own right.

William James Earle (1967)