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