Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William James (1842-1910) was born in New York City into a cultivated, liberal, financially comfortable and deeply religious middle-class family. It was also a very literary family. His father wrote theological works, his brother Henry became famous as a novelist, and his sister Alice acquired a literary reputation on the posthumous publication of her diaries. As his parents took to traveling extensively in Europe, William James was educated at home and in various parts of Europe by a succession of private tutors and through brief attendance at whatever school was at hand. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a painter in Newport, Rhode Island, James began to study comparative anatomy at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. After a few years, James moved to the Harvard Medical School, graduating in medicine in 1869.
After teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard for two years, James began teaching physiological psychology in 1875. In 1879 James gave his first lectures in philosophy at Harvard. As he himself put it, these lectures of his own were the first lectures in philosophy that he had ever heard. In 1884 James helped found the American Society for Psychical Research and, in the following year, was appointed professor of philosophy at Harvard. In 1890, after some twelve years of labor on the project, James published his magnum opus, the two volumes of The Principles of Psychology. In that same year, James established the psychological laboratory at Dane Hall in Harvard, one of the first such laboratories to be set up in America. In 1892 James wrote a textbook of psychology for students derived from The Principles, entitled Textbook of Psychology: Briefer Course.
The next twenty years saw a rapid succession of books: The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899), The Varie-ties of Religious Experience (1902 -- his Gifford lectures at Edinburgh), Pragmatism (1907 -- lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia University), A Pluralistic Universe (1909 -- his Hibbert lectures at Oxford) and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909). These unusually accessible books of philosophy and psychology achieved a wide readership and acclaim. After a long period of illness, James died at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 1910.
At his death James left behind an uncompleted work that was published as Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (1911). This work was followed by a number of other posthumous volumes, mainly collections of his essays and reviews: Memories and Studies (1911), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), Selected Papers in Philosophy (1917) and Collected Essays and Reviews (1920). A collection of his letters was published in 1920, and a reconstruction of his 1896 Lowell lectures on "exceptional mental states" was issued in 1982.
James's best known contributions can most readily be understood when seen against the background of the temperament of his thought. One central strand of this temperament was his desire always to emphasize the practical, particular, and concrete over the theoretical, abstract and metaphysical. Thus his doctrine of pragmatism, which he shared with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, was a plea that an abstract concept of modern philosophy, MEANING, was best understood in terms of the practical effects of the words or the concepts embodying it. The meaning of a word or concept was only discernible in the practical effects of its employment, and its meaningfulness was a function of its success (or failure) in practice.
Most famously, or in some quarters, notoriously, this account of meaning was clearly illustrated by James's account of truth. For James there was no "final, complete fact of the matter," no truth with a capital T. Truth was simply a word that we applied to a "work-in-progress belief," that is, a belief which we held and have continued to hold because it enables us to make our way in the world in the long run. A true belief, then, is one that is useful and one that has survived, in Darwinian fashion, the pressures of its environment. Such "truths" are always revisable. As James himself put it, "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" (Pragmatism).
James has sometimes been referred to as the first American phenomenologist, though he himself preferred to call this aspect of his thinking radical empiricism. Both these labels have some cash value, because another strand of James's temperament was his evangelical holism in regard to all experiences. By experience, James meant any subject's current stream of consciousness. Such a stream was always experienced as a seamless flux. It alone was what was real for any subject. Any concepts, categories, or distinctions that we might refer to in regard to CONSCIOUSNESS, indeed even to speak of consciousness in the traditional way as inner, subjective, and mental, were, strictly speaking, artificial conceptual matrices that we have placed over the flow of experience for particular pragmatic purposes. Although James's fascination with consciousness has led many to refer to him as a Cartesian or as an introspectionist like WILHELM WUNDT, it is more fruitful to see him in relation to Heraclitus and Henri Bergson.
James's evangelical holism regarding the nature of experience should be coupled with what might be called an evangelical pluralism about its scope. For James believed that all experiences, whether mystical, psychical, or "normal," were of equal value. They were properly to be differentiated only in terms of the purposes for which these experiences had been deployed. So James's lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, his championing of psychical research, and his interest in "exceptional mental states" associated with cases of multiple personality and other mental illnesses, were in harmony with his radical empiricism.
James connected his radical empiricism with mainstream psychology and physiology by taking as the central task of The Principles of Psychology "the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling [as known in consciousness] with definite conditions of the brain." In the Principles James also connected his radical empiricism with his unyielding advocacy of the freedom of the will by analyzing this freedom as involving the momentary endorsement of a particular thought in our stream of consciousness such that this thought would thereby become the cause of some appropriate behavior.
In the Principles, as well as in some other texts, James also made important contributions to the psychology of MEMORY, self-identity, habit, instinct, the subliminal and religious experiences. For example, his distinction between primary and secondary memory was the precursor of the modern distinction between short-term and long-term memory, and his work on ATTENTION has influenced recent work on the human capacity for dividing attention between two or more tasks. However, the most influential part of the Principles has been the theory of emotion that James developed in parallel with the Danish physiologist Carl Lange. As James himself put it, "bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, . . . [so that] our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion." That is, an emotional state is the feeling in our stream of consciousness of the behavior and physiological effects that we usually associate with a particular emotion. "Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep. . . . The hypothesis here to be defended says. . . that we feel sorry because we cry."
Bird, G. (1986). William James. London: Routledge.
James, W. The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Myers, G. E. (1986). William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Perry, R. B. (1935). The Thought and Character of William James, vols. 1 and 2. Boston: Little, Brown.
Taylor, E. (1982). William James on Exceptional Mental States. New York: Charles Scribners Sons .
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology