Early history in Psychology - 6. William James

William James was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the father of American psychology. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology.

A review of General Psychology Analysis published in 2002 ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked James’s reputation in second place after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James’s work has influenced philosophers and academics such as Émile Durkheim, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Marilynne Robinson.

Born into a wealthy family, William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made him a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics. James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James.

James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard but never practiced medicine. Instead, he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. He wrote widely on many topics including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology (a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology), Essays in Radical Empiricism (an important text in philosophy), and The Varieties of Religious Experience (an investigation of different forms of religious experience, including theories on mind cure).

William James received an eclectic transatlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. He experienced a sort of phobic panic which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved, according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier on free will and the decision that “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” This decision carried with it the abandonment of all determinisms, both the scientific kind that his training had established for him and that seemed to have some relation to his neurosis, and the theological-metaphysical kind that he later opposed in the notion of the block universe.

His revolutionary discoveries in psychology and philosophy—his views concerning the methods of science, the qualities of human beings, and the nature of reality—all seem to have received a definite propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal problem. William James was a leading figure whose contributions laid the groundwork for many modern philosophers and behavioral psychologists.

James's two main schools of thought—pragmatism and functionalism—shaped his theories on the world and his mission to seek out behaviors’ practical value and function. According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea can never be proven; James proposed we instead focus on what he called the “cash value” or usefulness of an idea. According to functionalism, mental activity—perception, memory, feeling—is to be evaluated in terms of how it serves the organism in adapting to its environment. James also made notable contributions beyond pragmatism and functionalism, namely the James–Lange theory of emotion and the theory of self.

In addition to being a theorist and publishing many books, James was also a highly esteemed professor at Harvard University and was the first to teach a psychology course in the United States. The Sentiment of Rationality in 1879 and 1882: the substance of this essay was first published in Mind in 1879 and in The Princeton Review in 1882, then republished in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy in 1897. Although he never quite says that rationality is a sentiment, James holds that a sentiment—or really a set of sentiments—is a mark of rationality. The philosopher James writes will recognize the rationality of a conception as he recognizes everything else by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality. These marks include a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, and a feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness. There is also a passion for parsimony—that is felt in grasping theoretical unifications—as well as a passion for clarity and integrity of perception, and a dislike of blurred outlines or vague identifications. The ideal philosopher, James holds, blends these two passions of rationality. Even some great philosophers go too far in one direction or another. Spinoza’s unity of all things in one substance is barren, as is Hume’s looseness and separateness of everything.

Sentiments of rationality operate not just in logic or science but in ordinary life. When we move into a new room, for example, we do not know what drafts may blow upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. These minor uncertainties are mental irritants that disappear when we come to know our way around the room and feel at home there.

James begins the second part of his essay by considering the case when two conceptions are equally fit to satisfy the logical demand for fluency or unification. At this point, he holds, one must consider a practical component of rationality. The conception that awakens the active impulses or satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the other will be counted the more rational conception and will deservedly prevail. James puts the point both as one of psychology—a prediction of what will occur—and one of judgment, for he holds that it will prevail deservedly. In his essay on Spencer, James explores relations between temperaments and philosophical theorizing: idealism, he holds, will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution; materialism by another. Idealism offers a sense of intimacy with the universe, the feeling that "ultimately I am all." But materialists find in idealism a narrow, close, sick-room air and prefer to conceive of an uncertain, dangerous, wild universe that has no respect for our ego. “Let the tides flow,” the materialist thinks, even though they may flow over us. James sympathizes both with the idea that the universe is something we can be intimate with and with the idea that it is wild and unpredictable. If he criticizes idealism for its sick-room air, he criticizes reductive forms of materialism for denying to our most intimate powers any relevance in universal affairs. The closeness and wildness portrayed in these contrasting philosophies answer to propensities, passions, and powers in human beings. James predicts such a tension between the two forms of mental temper will always be seen in philosophy; certainly it is always seen in the philosophy of William James.

Regarding The Principles of Psychology (1878–1890), James agreed in 1878 to write a psychology textbook for the American publisher Henry Holt, but it took him twelve years to produce the manuscript. When he finally delivered it, he described it to Holt as “a loathsome, distended, turgid, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: first, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology; and second, that W.J. is an incapable.” Nevertheless, this thousand-page volume of psychology, physiology, and philosophy proved to be James’s masterwork, containing early statements of his main philosophical ideas in extraordinarily rich chapters on the stream of thought, the consciousness of self, emotion, will, and many other topics.

James states that he will follow the psychological method of introspection in The Principles, which he defines as looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover. In fact, he takes multiple methodological approaches in the book: early on, he includes chapters on the functions of the brain and on general conditions of brain activity—reflecting his years as a lecturer in anatomy and physiology at Harvard—and argues for the reductive and materialist thesis that habit is, at bottom, a physical principle.

As the book progresses, he involves himself in discussions with philosophers such as Hume and Kant. In his hundred-page chapter on the self, he makes metaphysical claims that anticipate his later pragmatism, for example when he writes, “There is no property absolutely essential to any one thing: the same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature on another.”

Even introspection covers a range of reports. James discusses experiments that his contemporaries—Stumpf and Fechner—were performing in their laboratories, which led him to observations such as that sounds are less delicately discriminated in intensity than lights. But many of James's most important and memorable introspective observations come from his own life.

In the famous chapter on the stream of thought, James presents what he considers a richer account of experience than that of traditional empiricists like Hume. He believes relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienced directly—a view he later defends under the name radical empiricism. He finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of discrete ideas: its waters blend, and our individual consciousness—or, as he sometimes calls it, re‑shiousness—is steeped and dyed in the waters of sheer thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm—it is a series of transitions and resting places, of flights and perchings. We rest when we remember the name we have been searching for, and we are off again when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap.

In his discussions of consciousness, James sometimes appears to adopt reductive materialism, dualism, proto-phenomenology, or a neutral monism that refuses to treat philosophical questions prematurely. One of the most original aspects of The Principles resides in James’s attempt at a pure description of the stream of thought that does not assume it is either mental or material—a pursuit that anticipates not only his own radical empiricism but also Husserl’s phenomenology.

In his chapter on sensation, for example, James insists that sensations are not located in the mind and then projected outward through an act of reflection, but rather that our original experiences are objective. Only with the development of reflection do we become aware of an inner world at all.