1842-1910
Philosopher and Psychologist

Crisis.

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life," William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He was recalling a time that was evidently a turning point in his young life, a period of crisis in 1869 and 1870 that led him to seriously contemplate suicide but ultimately helped him articulate a defining theme and one of the legacies of his work. Twenty-eight years old at the time, James had finished his medical degree at Harvard in June 1868 but had yet to settle into a direction for the course of his life. This personal confrontation with nihilistic despair gave rise to what he would later call the "will to believe." In his diary of April 1870, James...