JAMES, WILLIAM (1842-1910)

The American philosopher and psychologist William James was one of the most important American intellectuals of his era, making key contributions to the development of both philosophical pragmatism and psychological theory.

James was born in New York City in 1842, the oldest of five children (his brother Henry became a famous novelist). His father was a man of leisure who gave his children an unusual and rich education based on large amounts of travel and instruction in Europe. Young William set out to be an artist, apprenticing with William Morris Hunt for a year, but then turned toward science. He entered Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1861 and worked with Charles William Eliot in chemistry and Jeffries Wyman in comparative anatomy. He then entered Harvard Medical School, took a year off to go with Louis Agassiz on an expedition to the Amazon, and eventually received his M.D. in 1869.

James never practiced medicine but pursued an academic career at Harvard. In 1872 he was appointed instructor in physiology and anatomy. He became assistant professor of philosophy in 1880 and full professor in 1885. In 1889 he was named professor of psychology, returning to philosophy in 1892 when Hugo Münsterberg came from Germany to take charge of Harvard's psychological laboratory. James retired in 1907 and spent his last years writing out his systematic philosophy.

Like most people of his time, James saw psychology as part of philosophy, an empirical approach toward philosophical questions. Findings in science and medicine stimulated a vision of a physiological psychology in James, spurred by the writings of people like Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Sechenov, John Hughlings Jackson, Henry Maudsley, and Theodor Meynert. His varied academic appointments reflected his early efforts to establish a "new psychology" in philosophy and then, skeptical about much of the "normal science" that began growing up around him, to seek a more meaningful inquiry into psychic life through spiritualism and the study of exceptional mental states.

The culmination of James's first was his 1890 Principles of Psychology, an enormously popular and influential work that brought some people into "new psychology" and induced many others to accept it as a possibility. The two volumes are a delight to read today, brimming with life, ideas, and insights.

James defines psychology as "the Science of Mental Life, both of phenomena and their conditions" (p. 1). His book explores the psyche using a mixture of introspective, physiological, medical, comparative, and experimental observations. The first six chapters are given to "the physiological preliminaries," a psychobiology of mind. "Both the anatomy and the detailed physiology of the brain are achievements of the present generation, or rather we may say (beginning with Meynert) the last twenty years" (p. 14). James sets forth a picture of a hierarchically organized brain and mind, one that remains today, with amplifications and amendments, a framing conception of contemporary neuropsychology. There are levels of behavioral organization: first reflexes and automatisms, then instincts, then habits, and then, finally, voluntary and planned activity. Lower levels are more mechanical and sense-driven; higher centers are the seat of spontaneity and intellectual control. "In all ages the man whose determinations are swayed by reference to the most distant ends has been held to possess the highest intelligence" (p. 23).

In Chapter 7, James turns to psychological inquiry, which, he says, uses three methods: introspection, experiment, and the comparative approach. Introspection is the foundation, "what we have to remember first and foremost and always" (p. 185). The experimental method had been developed in Germany. "[It] taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored " (p. 192). Experimental psychology explores psychophysics, sensation and perception, attention span, and rote memory. The comparative method is loosest, "wild work," and includes psychological observations of the behavior of animals, mental patients, children, and people of other cultures, and inferences about the mind drawn from artifacts such as human languages, customs, and social and political institutions.

James's discussions of learning and memory are not well integrated. His discussion of learning rests largely on comparative observations, whereas he approaches memory introspectively. His book appeared only five years after Hermann Ebbinghaus launched the systematic study of human memory. James discusses Ebbinghaus's work in his chapter on memory, but the discussion is clearly an appendage. An integrated, fully elaborated discussion of human learning and memory began to emerge five years after James published his book.

A Parliamentary Theory of Learning

Like all evolutionary writers, James addresses the problem of the instinctual and the learned in the organization of human activity. Contrary to most writers, he argues that humans have many instincts and that they play a large role in the behavior of higher organisms.

Nature [in the lower wild animals] has made them act always in the manner which would be oftenest right. There are more worms unattached to hooks than impaled upon them; therefore, on the whole, says Nature to her fishy children, bite at every worm and take your chances. But as her children get higher, and their lives more precious, she reduces the risks. … Nature implants contrary impulses to act on many classes of things, and leaves it to slight alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which impulse shall carry the day. (pp. 1,012-1,013)

The proliferation of instincts in the higher animals leads to the beginnings of deliberation and choice. In higher animals, instincts do not remain fixed action patterns. Once an instinct is exercised, it produces consequences, and anticipations of those consequences henceforth accompany instinctive impulses. The experienced organism faces ever more new situations, armed with a number of impulses; the organism is not a slave to any one instinct; and there are rational anticipations of the consequences various actions might bring. James's parliamentary theory of the inner competition among impulses and their anticipated consequences foreshadows twentieth-century behaviorism. Edward L. Thorndike, James's student, was the bridging figure. His connectionism built the parliamentary theory into a logic of response choice in problem-solving situations; that connectionism, in turn, has influenced all subsequent learning theories.

Optimal human development, James argues, implies the fruition of as many instinctive tendencies as possible. After attributing to humans a large set of instincts (more, he says, than any animal), James writes,

In a perfectly-rounded development every one of these instincts would start a habit towards certain objects and inhibit a habit towards others. Usually this is the case; but, in the one-sided development of civilized life, it happens that the timely age goes by in a sort of starvation of objects, and the individual then grows up with gaps in his psychic constitution which future experiences can never fill. Compare the accomplished gentleman with the poor artisan or tradesman of a city: during the adolescence of the former, objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and mental, were offered as fast as his interests awoke, and, as a consequence, he is armed and equipped at every angle to meet the world. … Over the city poor boy's youth no such golden opportunities were hung, and in his manhood no desires for most of them exist. Fortunate it is for him if gaps are the only anomalies his instinctive life presents; perversions are too often the fruit of his unnatural bringing-up. (pp. 1,056-1,057)

Memories as Beliefs

James approaches the phenomena of human memory introspectively, though his conception of the presenting phenomena of mental life differs radically from that of previous psychological writings. Beginning with John Locke, and continuing through the research programs of nineteenth-century brass-instruments laboratories, psychologists repeatedly asserted that human experience begins with simple sensations and ideas. James argues that this is false to experience. "Simple" sensations and ideas are, in fact, abstractions contrived from experience. What presents itself to the mind is an always dynamic, often inchoate, moving flow—a fluidity that in the Principles he calls the "stream of consciousness" and in later writings he calls "pure experience." Redefining the mental life with which the psychologist must deal, James at once sets aside the traditional denizens of that mental life—sensations, ideas, faculties. In return, he has the obligation and the opportunity to ask in a very wide-open way where in the fluidity one may locate the conventional chapter headings: Attention, Conception, Discrimination and Comparison, Memory, and so on.

In older writings, memories are referred to as returns or reinstatements of experiences of the past; James, looking at mental life with a fresh eye, argues there must be more to the experience of a memory than that. "Memory," he says, "is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before " (p. 610). It is not enough to see or hear something that one has seen or heard before. There must be some aspect of the experience that says the event has occurred before, not in just any past but in the person's past. "It must have that 'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken of in the chapter on the self, as characterizing all experiences 'appropriated by the thinker as his own."' James concludes that a memory is far more than an image or copy of a fact in the mind, that it is in fact a very complex representation with objective, personal, and metacognitive components. What we usually refer to as memory, James argues, is a form of belief.

James's analyses of habit, as we have seen, had an immediate and large influence on the development of psychology in subsequent decades. His discussions of memory and other cognitive phenomena were out of step with the elementistic introspectionism of his time. It seems very likely that contemporary cognitive psychology—in particular, the study of personal, narrative memories—is picking up the thread of William James's thought.

Bibliography

Bjork, D. W. (1983). The compromised scientist: William James in the development of American psychology. New York: Columbia University Press.

Feinstein, H. M. (1984). Becoming William James. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. 2 vols. Reprinted (1981) in F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupskelis, eds,. The works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1899). Talks to teachers on psychology: And to students on some of life's ideals. New York: Holt.

—— (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York: Longmans.

—— (1983). Essays in psychology. Vol. 13 in F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupskelis, eds., The works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Myers, Gerald E. (1986). William James: His life and thought. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Perry, R. 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, Brown.

Taylor, E. (1983). William James on exceptional mental states: The 1896 Lowell lectures. New York: Scribner's.

Sheldon H.White