William James

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who is regarded as the father of the American psychology. He was one of the founders of the pragmatism and the functional psychology.

Early Life and Education

James was born in 1842 in New York City into a wealthy and cosmopolitan family. His father was a theologian and the household encouraged the intellectual inquiry.

He studied at Harvard University and the universities of Europe. He was trained in the medicine and the biology and the art.

He taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard and later the psychology and the philosophy. He was the first to offer a course in the psychology in the United States.

The Principles of Psychology

James published the Principles of Psychology in 1890. The book is regarded as one of the greatest of the works of the psychology.

He argued that the psychology should study the function of the consciousness. The approach became known as the functionalism.

He developed the theory of the stream of the consciousness. The theory holds that the thought is a continuous and the flowing process.

He developed the theory of the emotions known as the James-Lange theory. The theory holds that the emotion is the perception of the bodily changes.

The Pragmatism and the Philosophy

James developed the philosophy of the pragmatism. The philosophy holds that the truth of an idea is determined by its practical consequences.

He published the book Pragmatism in 1907. The book sets out the pragmatic method.

He wrote the book The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. The book studies the religious experience from the psychological and the philosophical perspectives.

He argued for the openness of the universe and the possibility of the free will. The philosophy was opposed to the determinism.

The Legacy

James died in 1910 in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was one of the most influential of the American thinkers.

He is regarded as the father of the American psychology. The textbook that he wrote trained a generation of the psychologists.

He was the brother of the novelist Henry James. The family is one of the most distinguished in the American intellectual history.

His work continues to be studied and applied. The concepts of the stream of the consciousness and the pragmatism remain central to the philosophy and the psychology.

The Principles of Psychology

James's Principles of Psychology (1890) is a two-volume survey that ranges across brain function, habit, attention, memory, reasoning, emotion and will. It remains one of the most quoted works in the discipline and is often credited with establishing psychology as a science in the United States. James wrote with an unusual combination of scientific detail and literary grace, and he repeatedly insisted that psychology must start from the stream of experience rather than from abstract mental entities.

The chapter on habit, still read in universities, argues that habits are not merely convenient repetitions but physical changes in the nervous system; the nervous system, James said, grows to the shape of the work it does. He derived from this physiology a piece of practical moral advice that has never gone out of date: keep a habit going daily, act on every resolution so that the accumulated action reinforces the disposition, and never allow an exception until the new habit is securely rooted.

The Principles also introduced ideas that later acquired independent careers: the specious present — the short span of time felt as now; the stream of consciousness, a phrase James coined and which became a literary technique; the theory of emotion; and the distinction between substantive and transitive parts of thought. Its influence reached well beyond psychology, shaping philosophy, literature and education for a century.

Pragmatism and Religious Experience

In philosophy James is the principal American pragmatist. Pragmatism (1907) argues that the meaning of an idea lies in its practical consequences: beliefs are instruments for action rather than copies of a fixed reality, and an idea is true insofar as it proves useful in guiding experience. This method allowed James to treat metaphysical disputes as resolvable by appeal to practical difference. It also enrolled philosophy on the side of pluralism and open-minded experiment rather than closed systems.

James turned the method on religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), based on his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh. Comparing the accounts of saints, mystics, converts and ordinary believers, he concluded that religious experience is real as an experience and should be judged by its fruits — by whether it produces serenity, strength and moral usefulness. He defended the right to believe in a meaningful universe on the ground that some hypotheses can be verified only by acting on them, a position he called the will to believe.

The varieties of religious experience gave James a lasting reputation as a sympathetic student of the inner life and one of the founders of the empirical psychology of religion. His description of conversion and of the divided self, of healthy-mindedness and the sick soul, influenced later thinkers from Carl Jung to William James's own students. His insistence that experience be taken as it comes, without reduction to a single explanatory scheme, remains a corrective to both dogmatism and reductive science.

Teaching, Pluralism and Legacy

James spent his career at Harvard, where he taught anatomy, physiology, psychology and philosophy in succession, and where he produced the first American psychology laboratory in a teaching context. He was famous as a lecturer, and his students included Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein. In Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) he translated his ideas into classroom advice that anticipates much modern pedagogy, urging teachers to arouse interest and to build on the child's existing habits and instincts.

In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912, posthumous) he developed a metaphysics of pure experience in which relations are as real as terms and the universe is open and unfinished rather than a single closed system. This pluralism, and his rejection of absolute idealism, gave later thinkers such as John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead a starting point. James was also an early public advocate for the study of exceptional mental states and for humane treatment of the mentally ill.

James died in 1910, and his reputation has grown steadily since. He is remembered as the father of American psychology, the founder of pragmatism, and one of the finest prose stylists in the history of ideas. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, held the presidency of the American Psychological Association, and his formulation of the self, the theory of emotion and the concept of the stream of consciousness continue to be taught in psychology, philosophy and literature.

See also

• Pragmatism
• Functional psychology
• Stream of consciousness
• Emotion