William James, eminent psychologist and philosopher, was born in New York City. He, his novelist brother, Henry, and his sister were the main recipients of an unusually unsystematic education supervised by their father which consisted largely of European travels and private tutors. After an interval in which he studied painting, James enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1861. In 1864 he entered Harvard Medical School and received an MD in 1869. His life was marked by periods of acute depression and psychosomatic illnesses which occasioned solitary trips to Europe for rest and treatment. These periods, however, produced two benefits: they gave James firsthand experience of abnormal psychological states concerning which he was later to be a pioneer investigator; and they provided opportunities for extensive reading of science and literature in French, German and English. His marriage in 1878 appears to have been an important factor in improving his health and focusing his concentration on teaching and writing. His academic life was centred at Harvard where he became an instructor in psychology in 1875 and taught anatomy and physiology. Subsequently he offered courses in philosophy until his retirement in 1907.
James’s work in psychology and philosophy was interfused and is not completely separable. His greatest effort and achievement was The Principles of Psychology (1890) which, some ten years in writing, made him world famous and is now regarded a classic in both fields of study. James stated his intention to establish psychology as a natural science. By this he meant that metaphysical questions would be avoided and, wherever possible, explanations in psychology should be based on experimental physiology and biology rather than on introspective procedures which had dominated philosophic psychology since Locke and Hume. In contrast to a widely prevailing conception of mind as composed of ideas, like atoms, ordered and compounded by association, James proposed that mentality is a ‘stream of consciousness’ including in it feelings and interests. For James, the mental is to be construed in evolutionary and teleological forms: mental activity is evidenced where there are selections of means to achieve future ends.
Darwinian theory had an important influence on James’s psychological and philosophical views. Ideas and theories are interpreted as instruments enabling us to adapt successfully to, and partly transform, reality according to our interests and purposes of action.
In an address of 1898, ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’, James inaugurated the theory of pragmatism which soon became the major movement in American philosophy. He also drew attention to the neglected work of Charles S.Peirce whom he credited with having originated pragmatism. The main thesis is that the value and significance of concepts, their meaning and truth, is determined not by their origins but by their future practical consequences. An application of this view is found in ‘The Will to Believe’ (1896) and in James’s Gifford Lectures (1901–2), ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’; it is argued explicitly in Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). In his later writings and lectures, James refined and defended his metaphysical doctrines of the pluralistic character of reality, indeterminism, and ‘radical empiricism’ according to which the world is conceived as a growing continuous structure of experience.
H.S.Thayer
City University of New York
Further reading
Burkhardt, F. and Bowers, F. (eds) (1975–88), The Works of William James, 19 vols, Cambridge, MA.
Perry, R.B. (1935) The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols, Boston, MA.
Skrupskelis, I.K. and Berkeley, E.M. (1992–), The Correspondence of William James, Charlottesville, VA.
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