The Principles of Psychology

1890

William James (1842–1910)

Artistic by temperament, William James bowed to his father’s wishes and was educated as a physician. He never practiced, however, and after a period of existential struggle he accepted an appointment as a lecturer at Harvard. There he pioneered the new field of psychology in America and wrote what proved to be the most influential text of his era, The Principles of Psychology. It took him twelve years to write, and after it was published in 1890, he wrote a friend, “Psychology is a damnable subject.”

In Principles, James described psychology as the science of mental life. He wrote that the point of scientific psychology was to help us understand that consciousness and our minds evolved to help us adapt and survive in the world. Thus what consciousness does is more important than what it is or what it contains.

How might the mind best be studied? In Germany, the first laboratory psychologists were using refined mechanical instruments such as the Hipp chronoscope to measure mental reactions. James rejected this approach, as he believed that one could never understand the complexity of human mental life by adding up its contents or by measuring the speed of reactions. James offered an alternative view of consciousness. In a beautiful and enduring metaphor, he said consciousness is like a stream, dynamic and ever changing. A person, he wrote, could never step into the same river twice. Thus no instrument could ever capture this experience.

James also wrote about habit, calling it the “flywheel of life.” He proposed a theory of emotions, that feelings follow behavior, which now is known as the James-Lange theory of emotions. (Carl Lange was a Danish physician who made the same suggestion independently but at about the same time.) James also argued for a pragmatic, pluralistic view of truth; those things are true, he argued, that help us in life.

James and his book have been the greatest influence on the development of American psychology to date. To indicate his breadth, it is worth noting his obituary headline in the New York Times: “William James Dies; Great Psychologist, brother of novelist, and foremost American philosopher was 68 years old. Long Harvard professor, virtual founder of modern American psychology, and exponent of pragmatism, dabbled in spooks.”

SEE ALSO Mind-Cure (1859), Mental Chronometry (1879), Functional Psychology (1896)

William James, c. 1890s.

Tiber River at Rome, Italy, 2009. James used the phrase “stream of consciousness” as a metaphor for constantly changing mental processes.