William James (1842–1910) was one of the leading psychologists as well as one of the leading philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike most American intellectuals at the time, his reputation was as firmly established in Europe as in the United States. He is remembered now, in particular, as one of the founders of modern scientific psychology as well as a leading proponent of philosophical pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. His legacy in psychology has taken the form of various streams of development, ranging from neurological and behavioral psychology at one end of the spectrum to cognitive and humanistic psychology at the other. His legacy in philosophy has revolved primarily around the pragmatic tradition, with its unique approach to truth, knowledge, and belief. And beyond these more particular areas of influence, he is regarded as a significant contributor to modern culture, still read and frequently quoted for his sage reflections on the meaning of life, the value of religion, the dignity of individuals, the importance of character, and many other topics. All of these legacies are firmly rooted in his Principles of Psychology (1890).
William James was named after his grandfather, a poor Irish immigrant who used a variety of business ventures to become one of the richest individuals in the United States. His wealth allowed James’s father, Henry, to be an independent scholar. Henry’s chosen field was theology, which he pursued in a somewhat unorthodox manner, following the inspiration of the Swedish scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Like Swedenborg, Henry was convinced that there would be no conflict between religion and science if the province of each was properly understood. He shared this conviction with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited the James family soon after William was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. Especially after the mid-1860s, when the James family moved to Boston and then to nearby Cambridge, the Concord-based Emerson was a fixture in their lives. In many ways, William can be seen as fulfilling Emerson’s famous call for “American scholars” who would pursue innovative thought with the kind of independence from European predecessors that behooved citizens of the revolutionary United States of America. Many of James’s later ideas reflect his early and continuing exposure to Emerson’s ways of thinking.
Henry and his wife Mary had four more children after William. Next in line was Henry, Jr., who became a famous novelist; then came Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and sister Alice, whose posthumously published diary revealed what it was like to grow up as a female in a household dominated by talented males. Henry, Sr., didn’t believe that the American school system was adequate for the needs of his children, so he frequently bundled them off to Europe, where they had a rather haphazard education, but benefited from exposure to different national cultures, multiple languages, and a wider range of literatures than they would have encountered in the United States. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere, besides developing linguistic and social skills that would serve him well later in life, William enjoyed access to some of the greatest museums of Europe. As a result, he was drawn to art and, during a return to the United States in 1858–9, he began to study painting with William Morris Hunt in Newport, RI. After yet another sojourn to Europe, he became an apprentice to Hunt in 1860. This artistic experience helped him understand the significance of visual and mental perspective, and it deepened his appreciation of the role of attention in perception, both of which – perspective and attention – were to be distinctive and consequential emphases of his psychology and, by extension, his philosophy. However, partly because of his father’s reservations about artistic careers, William forsook painting and in 1861 enrolled in Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, where he studied chemistry, anatomy, and physiology.
When the Civil War began, the youngest two sons signed up and fought, but for reasons that are not entirely clear, neither William nor his brother Henry served, even though they were strongly committed to the Union cause. While it is true that health issues complicated their situation, it is also clear that their father didn’t want them to volunteer…and they didn’t. Although there was nothing exceptional in their avoidance of service – only one out of sixteen eligible northerners actually enlisted in the Union’s army or navy – it seems that not following up on their commitment to the cause aroused issues that each had to face. William, in any case, would suffer more than a decade and a half of self-questioning and self-doubt, aimed overtly at his vocational crisis (what he should become) but perhaps covertly related to who he was (and whether that was what he wanted to be). Lingering queries and qualms almost certainly played a role in his protracted indecision about a career and prompted his related interests in the making of self, freedom of will, role of emotions, and sense of reality. Each of these topics is a prominent and for many an attractive feature of his Principles of Psychology.
At the Lawrence Scientific School, William moved from one science to another as he also read widely in literature, philosophy, and the new physics of motion, force, and energy. His deepest and most persistent attraction was to philosophy, which he read and discussed with a remarkably talented group of friends (including Charles S. Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), but he worried that introspective reflection and systematic questioning of settled opinions, as demanded by a career in philosophy, would prove too taxing for him, both emotionally and physically. Meanwhile, his health issues – expanding to include “melancholy” and “neurasthenia,” in the terminology of the time – continued to plague him during these years, giving him a lifelong sympathy for those who suffer such difficulties as well as a personal interest in understanding the causes of mental illness. Largely because of his own psychological issues, he switched to Harvard’s Medical School in 1864. Then, in 1865–6, he went on a long specimen-gathering expedition to Brazil, under the leadership of the geologist and zoologist Louis Agassiz, one of the foremost scientists in the world. Though he came to respect Agassiz’s empirical observations, he was dismayed by his anti-Darwinism, and the experiences afforded by this expedition smothered any potential interest that he had in field research. Returning to medical school, he continued his study of anatomy and physiology until he went once again to Europe, still hoping to find a cure for his continuing poor health. While there, he developed a strong interest in recent advances in sensory physiology, electrophysiology, and neurology, all of which would be instrumental in his later contributions to psychology. Finally, in 1869, he earned his Harvard M.D., the only degree he ever earned.
James never practiced medicine. Instead, on and off over the next years, he taught comparative anatomy and physiology at Harvard and served for a while as the Acting Director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy. Then, in 1875, he taught the first course on physiological psychology in the United States. In connection with this course he offered a lab that has been called the first laboratory for experimental psychology in the United States, though it was used primarily for demonstrations and replications rather than original research. Teaching this course on physiological psychology – or more precisely, on “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology” – was a turning point in James’s life as well as in the development of scientific psychology. Fortuitously, the course caught the attention of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, who had been concerned about stagnation in Harvard’s Department of Philosophy. The immediate popularity of James’s course, both its topic and his style of teaching, prompted the Overseers to support James’s interest in teaching and advancing the new psychology. In 1876 they appointed him Assistant Professor of Physiology, even as he continued teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses in psychology. In 1880, his title was changed to Assistant Professor of Philosophy. By 1885 he was a Professor of Philosophy, and in 1889 he was awarded the Alford Professorship of Psychology. In 1897, as he turned more attention to philosophy, he requested that his title be changed back to Professor of Philosophy. He held this title until he retired from teaching in 1907.
James’s “annus mirabilis” was 1878, the year in which he married Alice Howe Gibbens, published his first substantive articles, and signed a contract to write a major textbook – the book that would eventually be published as The Principles of Psychology (1890). Although he was never completely free of health issues, he was notably better from that time until he began to have heart troubles in the late 1890s. Meanwhile, as he worked on Principles, he wrote a series of articles that formed the basis for many of its chapters. (For a listing of these articles, see Appendix A of this book.) Once his book was published, James devised a briefer version for classroom use and continued to explore altered states of consciousness as well as various clinical conditions (all of which he called “exceptional mental states”) as he slowly turned more and more of his attention to philosophical topics and concerns. Prior to 1890, he had been teaching philosophical as well as psychological courses, but with his Principles finally in print, he had more time to pursue the philosophical matters that interested him. In the late 1890s he began to develop and advocate pragmatism, which proved to be particularly relevant in framing his distinctive approach toward the new “science of religion.” Based upon lectures he had delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–2, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), his second masterwork, was both a profound psychological text and a notable illustration of his reliance on pragmatic principles. It was also, in essence, an affirmation of his father’s conviction that science and religion need not be in conflict. Though not formally religious himself, William ended up doing what his father had hoped to do: He demonstrated the possibility of a more coherent and respectful relation between science and religion, first by showing that science has its own belief system and then by articulating the tangible real-world benefits of religion. His classic work, subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” is still considered one of the most significant texts on the psychology of religion.
Over the years, William and Alice had five children, one of whom died in childhood. Though William loved his work (despite his frequent protests about the demands of teaching), he enjoyed escaping to the outdoors whenever he could, often to hike in the Adirondacks, and he was rarely so much at peace as when he was with his family at their summer home in Chocorua, NH.
James spent his entire career at Harvard, taking occasional leaves to recuperate and interact with colleagues in Europe. He was a very popular teacher and highly regarded as a public lecturer. His books were generally based on ideas that he had initially worked out in his teaching and then articulated, more formally, in his public lectures. Besides The Principles of Psychology (1890) and his abbreviated Briefer Course (1892), these works included The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (1897), Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Two other volumes – an incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) and a gathering of his Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) – were published after his death from heart failure in Chocorua, NH, on August 26, 1910.
It is easy to forget how vastly things have changed in science, education, and society over the past 150 years. When William James became a student at Harvard in the early 1860s, there were fewer than 500 students in Harvard College and Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School combined, and all of them were white males from prosperous or fairly prosperous families. At the same time, there were fewer than thirty professors and only one professor of philosophy. That single professor of philosophy was, necessarily, the only professor of psychology, since psychology was still a subfield of philosophy, which had its recent roots in the work of the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and their disciples. Its more distant roots, however, lay in the work of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist. So in the 1860s, the human mind, to the Harvard professor as much as to Locke, Hume, and Aristotle, was understood to be a theater of “ideas” that came and went from consciousness in various configurations and relations according to “the laws of association.” Reasoning and willing, in this tradition, were explained as mental manipulations of those same associations of ideas, and to the extent they were treated at all, emotions were depicted as manifestations of the consonances and conflicts among ideas.
So, very old ways of thinking were still regnant when James attended Lawrence Scientific School (though he himself never took a course on psychology or philosophy). Nonetheless, ferment and change were in the air. The emerging branches of what had until recently been called “natural philosophy” were undergoing rapid development. Chemistry, geology, and physics were exploding in new directions, and biology was not far behind. As the experimental work of Johannes Müller, Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and others revolutionized sensory physiology, the evolutionary theorizing of Charles Darwin, especially as advanced in his Origin of Species (1859), was changing the life sciences and casting exciting, if sometimes disturbing light on “the sciences of man,” including psychology.
In psychology, a number of works more or less representative of the trend toward “the new psychology” were published in the decades before James’s Principles. Chief among them were transitional works like Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology (1855) and Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859). There were also compendia of relevant experimental and empirical research, the most famous being Wilhelm Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874). And in the years just before James’s Principles appeared, some works that depended upon past philosophical approaches, like James Sully’s associationistic Outlines of Psychology (1884), John Dewey’s Hegelian-inspired Psychology (1887), and George Trumbull Ladd’s rationalistic Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pointed in various ways toward future developments. None, however, offered the same balance of scientific, humanistic, and what might be called rhetorical assets that brought James’s Principles so immediately to the forefront of developments in the new psychology.
Other factors played a role in the emergence of scientific psychology. For instance, in the years of James’s youth, public intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson were offering new ways to think about the human mind and human experience. Often criticizing traditional religious notions, whether implicitly or explicitly, they prompted greater openness regarding the nature and limits of human capacities, thereby expanding the desire and the audience for new forms of psychology. The transcendentalist movement that Emerson helped to start brought the quest for spiritual enlightenment into the secular realm. Not surprisingly, it was the transcendentalists and their heirs who ushered in translations and explorations of Eastern thought and meditative practices, thus intensifying curiosity about the role of mind and spirit in human life.
In the 1860s, the abrupt and premature loss of so many lives in the Civil War provoked a precipitous rise of interest in the afterlife and the possibilities of communicating with the dead. Spiritualism, séances, psychical research, and widespread interest in “spirits” and “souls” fed a more general demand for knowledge of all things spiritual and psychological. In fact, the American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1884, sought empirical confirmation of reports regarding spirit communication, telepathy, and the like. James himself, skeptical yet hopeful, was active in the ASPR and spent time exploring the possibility of discovering relevant empirical data regarding some of these phenomena. Largely under his influence, the ASPR became the first organization to establish a “Committee for Experimental Psychology.” All of this fed off earlier public enthusiasm for phrenology and mesmerism, which had prompted investigations of brain and mind while also nurturing myriad forms of “mind cure” and pastoral counseling that eventually melded into the emerging fields of abnormal and clinical psychology. Also in the 1880s, the use of natural hallucinogens (e.g., cocaine, marijuana, and peyote) and artificial gases (e.g., nitrous oxide) provided opportunities for experiences that cast doubt on previous assumptions about consciousness. As altered forms of consciousness came to the attention of the public as well as scholars, doubt was cast – or at least questions were raised – about traditional notions regarding the nature and variety of psychological states, not to mention the relation between these states and apparent physiological causes.
Meanwhile, new ways of organizing society and work were being implemented. For the first time in history, scientific research was becoming a commonly accepted form of compensated work rather than an elective activity of a relatively few wealthy or sponsored individuals. Thus, in 1848, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was formed, and in subsequent years many individual sciences were given their own institutional foundations (e.g., the American Neurological Society was formed in 1875 and the American Chemical Society in 1876). Humanistic scholars and social scientists were not far behind in organizing themselves (e.g., historians organized in 1884, economists in 1885, and political scientists in 1889). And just two years after the publication of James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), the American Psychological Association was established under the leadership of G. Stanley Hall, James’s first Ph.D. student in psychology. James would serve as president of this organization on two separate occasions.
With these new organizations came new means of communication, including professional meetings and journals, which accelerated the dissemination of new ideas and new ways of doing things. In the United States alone, before the turn of the century, the American Journal of Psychology, Psychological Review, and Psychological Bulletin became major outlets for scientific work in psychology. One effect of professional organizations was the establishment of membership as proof of “expertise” and hence the “right” of some individuals rather than others to engage in, and be compensated for, professional activities. With regard to psychology, this helped to reduce and eventually to eliminate most of the competition regarding who could speak authoritatively about the human mind and who could treat minds that were “stressed” or “ill” (to use then-popular metaphors drawn from engineering and medicine). Thus, the views and efforts of phrenologists, mesmerists, psychical researchers, and psychics of various sorts were first marginalized and then removed almost entirely from the scene. Professionalization also, at times, created tensions between traditional religious counselors and the new psychological therapists, though in the early years of clinical psychology (around the turn of the twentieth century) there was a great deal of collaboration, as illustrated by the Boston-based Emmanuel Movement that James encouraged and supported.
Increased professionalization also led to increased specialization within academic settings. Among the significant changes was the trend toward the institutional separation of psychology and philosophy. This started taking place as early as the 1890s. Interestingly, James’s Harvard was among the last institutions to make this change, in 1934. Throughout James’s career, courses in psychology were offered by the Department of Philosophy, often within integrated sequences that included both psychology and philosophy. What distinguished the new psychology more explicitly and rapidly than separation of departments, both at Harvard and elsewhere, was the establishment of psychological laboratories. By 1900, laboratories devoted exclusively to experimental research in psychology had been founded at forty-one American colleges and universities. Harvard’s formal laboratory, replacing the informal and poorly equipped room that James had reserved for his students, was established in 1892, due largely to James’s efforts, though he arranged for someone else to run it.
Another consequence of the rise of professions was a related increase in the demand for education. No longer were work-related skills learned primarily from one’s parents or through one-on-one apprenticeships. One needed an education and often certification. Thus it was that, by the time James died in 1910, Harvard had grown to have over 2,300 students and more than 170 professors in the College and Scientific School, with over 1,600 additional students in other units. The need for professional teachers to prepare students for college prompted Harvard’s Corporation to encourage James to share his psychological insights regarding teaching and learning. As a result, throughout the 1890s, James gave talks to teachers on the psychology of teaching and learning, which were published at the end of the decade as Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899). (The full title, which continues …and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, shows that James retained a clear sense of the traditional humanistic goals of collegiate education.) In this context, it is not surprising that the new psychology came, in America, to emphasize learning. James himself stressed the importance of learning proper habits if an individual is to lead and enjoy a good life, but it was soon realized that, beyond the benefits for individuals, the broader goals of contemporary progressivism depended upon an education that established such habits. Hence it was that psychology, as advanced by James and others, soon became a vital part of the American pursuit of a better life for one and all.