William James tells three different stories about mind and body in The Principles of Psychology. The first is fairly straightforward. It includes a fresh accounting of both the phenomena of mental life and the major physiological conditions associated with them. In discussing the mind, James was particularly intent upon describing the integral unity of consciousness while also depicting the richness and multiplicity of mental phenomena as they are actually experienced. With regard to the body, he summarized the main facts that were then known about the physiological correlates of psychological functioning. He emphasized in particular the neurological structures associated with sensation and perception at one end of the nervous system and with emotional responses and muscular action at the other. Prominent features of his account include some historically significant, fact-based speculations about the roles played by the cerebral hemispheres. In telling this story, he hued to the positivistic approach he had announced in his Preface, eschewing any metaphysical claims about the ultimate nature and relations of mind and body and focusing instead upon parallel descriptions of what was occurring in the mental sphere when this or that was occurring in the physiological sphere, and vice versa.
The second story crops up here and there in the midst of the first story. Unlike the first story, it ascribes interaction to the mind and body – interaction that is fundamentally consequential. At times this second story may simply reflect James’s use of “the language of common-sense” for convenience sake (PP 147), but at other times he makes explicit claims that go beyond mere linguistic custom and undercut his stated goal of maintaining a non-interactionist parallelism between mind and body. What is most notable is not that this second story – of bodily states affecting mental states and of mental states affecting physical states – attributes causal relations to mind and body (against the strictures of his avowedly positivist methodology), it is that the interaction it describes is central rather than incidental to James’s vision of the human person as conveyed in numerous places throughout Principles. Though James realized that making causal attributions put him on treacherous metaphysical grounds, it seems that James simply could not suppress his conviction that humans are dependent upon but not subservient to their bodies. As we shall see, he developed this second story, which granted important roles to willing and believing, into his philosophical as well as psychological discussions in the years after Principles.
The third story that James tells is more subtle, so subtle that it might be called a “subtext” of Principles. It goes beyond the second story in that it reduces even further – sometimes seeming to eliminate – the gap that remained between mind and body, even in the interactionist account. Though an attentive reader can discern parts of this story scattered throughout the two volumes of James’s work, it is never given an overall summation, much less a theoretical formulation. James’s advocacy of a provisional positivism, however inconsistently carried out, might well have been designed to buy time until he or someone else could make this third story more fully explicit and persuasive, seemingly (given the trajectory of his thought) so that it could replace his first two stories. James can hardly be faulted for postponing the precise articulation of this third story since it involved nothing short of a revolution in the way of thinking about mind and body: a move away from a position that had structured the thought of several millennia of Western philosophers and theologians. (In this context it seems fair to conjecture that James’s preference for Aristotle and Locke over Plato and Descartes stemmed, at least in part, from his ambivalence about the sharper distinctions made by the latter thinkers regarding mind and body. The same could be said about his attraction to Eastern ways of thought, which became more evident in the years after Principles.) In this third story, mind and body do not simply interact, they overlap and meld in ways that defy easy definition and logic. Both definition and logic, after all, treat mind and body as two separate things, while this third story treats them as different manifestations of one and the same experience. How to think and tell a story of this third sort, given our inherited dualistic terminology, is one of the profound problems that confronted James.
In all likelihood we can see more clearly than James, from our historical distance, that he was implicitly if not explicitly exploring how he could move beyond traditional dualism without reducing the mental to the physical or the physical to the mental, as his contemporary materialists and idealists were doing. As we shall see, his efforts in this regard placed him among the pioneers of a movement of thought that came to be called phenomenology. Leading practitioners of that movement, including its founder Edmund Husserl, subsequently acknowledged that some of their significant insights were sparked by passages in Principles that convey various aspects of this third story (see Edie 1987 and Wilshire 1968). Simultaneously, this story was a step toward James’s own radical empiricism, the metaphysics that eventually replaced his erstwhile positivism and interactionism.
In this chapter, we will explore all three of these stories, the first of which we will call his “standard account,” the second his “interactionist account,” and the third his “proto-phenomenological account” of mind and body. Before we begin this exploration, however, a few preliminary comments on James’s use of the words “mind” and “body” should be instructive and useful.
When he was being careful, James spoke about “the phenomena of mental life,” “mental phenomena,” and “mental states” rather than “the mind” as the subject of psychology. He defined psychology, for instance, as “the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions” (15). His preference for this terminology was consistent with his attempt to keep his natural scientific psychology at a purely descriptive level of discourse. “Mind,” after all, suggested to him and his contemporaries the kind of metaphysical entity (not unlike “soul”) that he wanted to avoid in his effort to create a positivistic psychology. Nonetheless, James did use the word from time to time, both for convenience and in deference to “the language of common-sense” (147), always assuming that no one would infer that he had suddenly been converted into a proponent of old-style “rational psychology.” (He also used “thought” and “consciousness” in a similar way, simply to signify the overall “stream” of experience, without ascribing any metaphysical status to either term.)
When it came to the body, James made the same kind of qualification. Although he was aware that the conditions of mental states are not restricted to bodily conditions, he focused on the body as the source of the most obvious of these conditions. And when he spoke of “bodily conditions,” he was usually referring yet more narrowly to “brain states,” even though he recognized the relevance of the further reaches of the nervous system and of such physiological processes as respiration, blood flow, and muscular movements. In addition, James realized that “body” and “brain,” just like “mind,” were generic names for multiple phenomena. Even a strict materialist, he argued, would have to admit that neither “the body” nor “the brain” is “a [singular] physical fact.” Instead, each is “the appearance to an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts.” As regards the brain, he remarked, “the only realities” that count for proponents of “the corpuscular or mechanical philosophy” are “the separate molecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation into a ‘brain’ is a fiction of popular speech” (178–179).
So, as indicated above, James was a philosophical nominalist when it came to speaking of “mind” and “body,” yet he did speak in such terms from time to time, as we shall too, remembering all the while that James’s actual focus was always on specific mental and physical phenomena rather than “mind” and “body” per se.
“Mind,” then, meant for James what “thought” and “consciousness” meant for him, when those words stood for the overall experience of mental functioning. The particular characteristics of mind – of “the stream of thought” as depicted in Ch. 9 of the Principles or “the stream of consciousness” as treated in Ch. 11 of James’s later Briefer Course – will be discussed in a later chapter (on “Consciousness and Unconsciousness”). Here the key point is that James went to great effort to emphasize, over and over, that this ongoing stream of mental life appears to each normally functioning individual, at the very start, as an integral, connected, undifferentiated whole that changes over time without disruption or segmentation, unless and until mental operations are performed upon it. This beginning point distinguished James’s approach from any that had gone before within the empirical tradition of thought to which his psychology belonged. Key representatives of that tradition – John Locke, David Hume, and their successors – assumed that mind is composed of elemental particles, or “ideas,” that are derived from impressions made upon the senses, which are then mechanically combined by this or that “law of association” into what then comes to be experienced as a constructed whole. The entire process, these empiricists had proposed, was passive and mechanical so that the result was an inner mirroring of the outer physical world: a proposition also emphasized by Herbert Spencer.
James rejected this view of the mind as re-presenting the passively internalized features of the external world. He argued on empirical grounds – citing the facts of actual experience – that our initial mental states arrive as connected wholes, as mental streams, which we subsequently analyze or deconstruct into their personally meaningful aspects. This analysis or deconstruction, he further argued, is motivated by our interests, so that different individuals, even though standing within the same physical environment, will notice different aspects of it. Specific examples of James’s compelling descriptions of this mental activity will be given in a later chapter; the important point now is that James’s psychology was premised on the active engagement of the mind, or mental processes, in selecting distinctive constellations of features from ongoing experience, guided by personal interests and practical needs. (For textual elaborations of James’s approach, see Ch. 9.) The upshot is that humans are portrayed by James not as passive victims of experience, but as active agents in its creation.
James not only presented his own view in richly evocative language, he went to considerable lengths to criticize in detail the contrary view which he labeled “the mind-stuff theory” of the mind – the theory that smaller elemental “stuff” somehow combines to form the larger units that constitute experience. (He dedicated all of Ch. 6 to this critical endeavor.) His central contention, however, was very simple. If we want to develop an empirically based theory of mind, we must start with experience; and when we do, we soon realize that we have no experience of “elements” that subsequently come together to form holistic states of consciousness. Consciousness comes “together.” We perceive a table as a whole before we stop to notice that it is brown or hard. The qualities are always there to be noticed; they aren’t introduced or added later. Others, of course, may see the same table and then think of it as having a surface fit for writing or eating instead of noticing that it is brown. The crucial thing, as individuals make sense of their conscious experience, is discerning what is of interest or use to them. James summarized his view in a memorable passage:
The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest…The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data [provided ultimately by the senses]…The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently…Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone!
(277)
This view of mind, which James discussed within an evolutionary perspective, was to become all the more relevant as he considered its relation to the structure and function of the body, and especially the higher regions of the nervous system. As someone who was intimately familiar with the remarkable, ongoing advances in physiology and neurology as well as psychology and psychiatry, James was well prepared to pursue this consideration of mind and body. His expertise regarding the body came not only from his scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School and the Medical School at Harvard, but also from his travels in Europe (where the leading advances were then taking place) and his extensive reading of the literature in multiple languages (including especially German, French, and English). In addition, he benefited from his collaborative research with two Harvard friends, one (James J. Putnam) a future leader in neurology and the other (Henry P. Bowditch) a pioneer in experimental physiology. James’s expertise was recognized publicly when he was hired to teach anatomy and physiology at Harvard in the early 1870s and then invited to deliver two major lecture series on the senses, brain, and mind, the first at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University (the leading research university in the United States at that time) and the second at Boston’s Lowell Institute (a leading forum for disseminating emerging knowledge to the general public), in February and October–November of 1878 (see Leary 2014). Years later, the sophistication of his knowledge was confirmed when his lengthy discussion of the localization of brain functions (PP 42–73) was cited in John Theodore Merz’s monumental survey of nineteenth-century scientific thought as an excellent account of the pertinent facts and thorny issues involved in this controversial topic (Merz 1904, 479). So, although James was not himself a leading experimentalist, he was more than sufficiently aware of the latest discoveries and hypotheses that he discussed and then used as the basis for his arguments and conjectures regarding the relation of mind and body.
Early in his chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2), James distinguished three types of behavior: reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary. The first kind, he noted, is automatic, as when an eye tears up after a cinder enters it. It occurs without consciousness. The second, as when an arm reaches out to break a fall, involves some automatic elements but can be enhanced or hindered through “conscious effort” to “learn to perform it more skillfully, or even to suppress it altogether.” The third, as when someone runs to catch a train, depends upon “education” and “a consciousness of purpose” (26). Though divisible into these types, he noted, actual behavior falls along a continuum. In addition, “if the criterion of mind’s existence be the choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed end,” as James had argued in Ch. 1 and as we have discussed in an earlier chapter, “all these acts seem to be inspired by [some degree of] intelligence.” This fact, he observed, had led some investigators to argue that all behaviors, including those that seem to involve intelligence, are ultimately purely physiological in character, and had prompted others to claim that all behaviors, including those that seem automatic, reflect the presence of at least some intelligence (i.e., mind), even if that intelligence operates unconsciously (26).
Having set up the fundamental issue by contrasting the extreme physicalist and mentalist positions in this way, James devoted the rest of the chapter to a careful review of the actual experimental evidence bearing upon it. He started this review with a systematic survey of his own experimental research on frogs, focusing on the behavioral consequences of severing their spinal cord at various junctures, extirpating different parts of their cerebral hemispheres, and confronting them with a range of environmental situations. The result was a clear demonstration that damage to specific sites in the nervous system is directly related to predictable decrements in behavioral responses. The persuasiveness of this conclusion was all the greater for having been based on such simple, straightforward experimental evidence. (Although we may take this conclusion for granted today, it was not common knowledge in 1890, nor was its implication for the relation between human bodies and minds commonly accepted.)
With his readers thus prepared, James moved on to a lengthy discussion of the functions of the cerebral hemispheres in other species, including humans, showing how behaviors of various kinds, often involving apparent mentality, are similarly dependent upon properly functioning brains. In the course of doing so, James established the empirical foundation for his own theoretical description of brain functioning (or more precisely, cerebral functioning). This theoretical description, which he dubbed “the Meynert scheme” in honor of one of the scientists who inspired its formulation, was built upon a great deal of experimental evidence. Much but not all of this evidence came from the research of the German-Austrian neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert and the British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson. Even in its first iteration, however, James’s articulation of this scheme went beyond what Meynert, Jackson, and others had claimed, primarily due to James’s critical assessment of the literature and his knowledge of various behavioral and psychological phenomena, including sensory experience and the understanding of human speech. His reasoning, in essence, was that if there is a relation between human brains and human behaviors, as there demonstrably is between frog brains and frog behaviors, then the human brain must have organic capacities that accord with observable behavioral phenomena, including explicitly psychological phenomena. After an additional review of such phenomena, including the restoration of consciousness and other functions after cortical injury, James concluded that, although his initial formulation of “the Meynert scheme” was “on the whole satisfactorily corroborated,” it needed some further modification (73, 86). He provided that modification in the closing pages of the chapter.
What was this scheme of cerebral functioning, and how did James modify it in a way that accorded more closely with his observations of psychological phenomena? And how has history judged his revised description of cerebral functioning? At its core James’s scheme assumed that the cerebral hemispheres provide “arrangements for representing impressions and movements, and other arrangements for coupling the activity of these arrangements together” (73). The “impressions” to which he was referring were made by “currents pouring in from the sense-organs” which “first excite some arrangements [in the cerebrum], which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge” from the cerebrum instigates movement of some sort (73). Up to this point, the scheme was very general and close to what any reader of Meynert or Jackson might expect. Its generality allowed James to be intentionally non-specific about the minute structural features of the nervous system, which were still being identified and described by neurologists in the decade in which Principles was published. Instead of conjecturing what those precise features might be, he suggested what a conceptual flow chart of cerebral dynamics might look like. Focusing on the cerebrum as the transition-point between incoming and outgoing electrophysiological currents, he inferred that each cerebral hemisphere functions as a “circuit or loop-line” that operates whenever “the direct line” of current, from impression to movement, “is not used” (33). An electrophysiological current, James suggested, naturally tries to make its way forward through the nervous system by “paths of least resistance” (79). The cerebral hemispheres, however, allow the brain to inhibit its progress toward immediate discharge by circulating it back through one or more of its “loop-lines” so that the animal – or human – can “deliberate, pause, postpone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare” (33). No animal or human can do these things, James indicated, without properly functioning cerebral hemispheres. Nor can they remember at a complex level (32) or be fully conscious without enjoying a similar condition (74). James offered a diagram of what he had in mind (33) and then presented a line-drawing of the basic circuitry he was proposing, using as an example the nervous system of a hypothetical child learning over time, from looping feedback, not to touch a burning candle (37). (See Woodward 1982 for a detailed explication of this well-known drawing together with a discussion of its historical significance.)
Among the critical features that James built into his schematic model was the conjectured necessity that the cerebral hemispheres have to be malleable. In order to accommodate new memories, habits, inhibitions, and the like, electrophysiological currents have to be able to forge new paths through the cortex rather than be limited to the paths set down at the start by nature (78). In fact, James argued, it is precisely the amazing “plasticity” of the human brain, far exceeding that of other species, that makes it – and its correlative mental capabilities – so remarkable. Besides making possible the combining of “motor and sensory elements in novel ways,” this plasticity allows modification of the “native tendencies” of the cerebral hemispheres (80). This extraordinary increase in the plasticity of the human brain has to be the case, he conjectured, if the parallel between brain and mind continues all the way up the evolutionary tree, since we can observe an unparalleled increase in unforeseen behaviors in humans in contrast to the ineluctably prescribed and fairly routine actions of lower species. (James made much of this in his chapters on “Habit” and “Instinct.”) But this critical flexibility has its limits, James noted, and this is where the modification of his “Meynert scheme” took place. For not only do the lower portions of the nervous system show some slight flexibility or educability, James observed, but its higher centres have a bit more inflexibility or fixity than the first version of his scheme implied (80). With these developments and qualifications, James was happy to recommend his revised theoretical description of the cerebral hemispheres to his readers, though with the caveat that much was still to be learned about the brain. All he claimed was that “some such shadowy view… is, it seems to me, that in which it is safest to indulge” (87).
What has history shown? James was largely correct in his conjectures about the broader outlines of cerebral functioning. In addition, his arguments for the brain’s plasticity, though scoffed at for a long time, have proven to be prophetic (see Leary 2014, Thompson 1990, and Baudry et al. 2000). James was also on the mark about other things he wrote regarding the “general conditions of brain-activity,” including the summation of sensory stimuli, reaction times, cerebral blood-supply, cerebral thermometry, and chemical action (in Ch. 3), which we need not review here. As for his discussion of the emotions and other topics that point toward bodily parts and processes other than those in the higher brain, we will have more to say later. For our current purposes, the foregoing review of his thoughts regarding the higher nervous system will suffice.
Now comes the tricky part – tricky, that is, in relation to James’s announced intention to maintain a methodological dualism between mind and body, as discussed in the previous chapter. For at this juncture, having concluded that the cerebral hemispheres must be plastic in order to parallel the flexibility and novelty of certain psychological phenomena, James began to tell a different story – an interactionist story – about how this cerebral plasticity allows the mind to play a role in cerebral dynamics. He had already signaled this deviation from his standard story when he seemed to apologize for a passage in which he mentioned “hemispheres” and “reminiscences” in the same sentence, thus “mixing the physical and mental…in the same breath, as if they were…factors of one causal chain.” But instead of retreating to firmly parallelist language, he went on to say that “in another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning this common-sense position” (36).
That other chapter was Ch. 5 on “The Automaton-Theory,” in which James argued against the physicalist contention that he had described at the start of Ch. 2 on “The Functions of the Brain,” namely, that neurological conditions can explain behaviors all by themselves, thus eliminating the need for mentalist (psychological) accounts. After making the Darwinian observation that “consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom” (141), James proffered that consciousness “seems [to be] an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that it helps him in some way in the struggle” (141–142). Though he was using “organ” here in a metaphorical sense, he was nonetheless including consciousness among the things that have evolved because they have been useful in the struggle for existence. Going further, he turned Darwin on his head when he noted that “survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an onlooker about the future.” Purely physical entities have no notion of past, present, or future. They simply are. “But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis.” It becomes “an imperative decree” and “real ends appear for the first time now upon the world’s stage.” “Every actually existing consciousness,” he concluded, “seems to itself…a fighter for ends” (144).
In describing consciousness as “a fighter for ends,” James was harkening back to his original definition of “mentality” as “the pursuance of future ends” (21). Except in lower forms of life, where the body is unwitting in its pursuit of ends, it is the mind or consciousness that strives for this or that goal. And it is precisely because the more fully evolved brain is able to gather an excess of sensory input and retain a vast array of memorial traces in its cerebral hemispheres, that it has become “an instrument of possibilities” that needs a “superadded” consciousness to select among the possibilities it offers for thought and action. Taking advantage of those possibilities, James argued, depends upon a consciousness, in humans and to a lesser extent in other primates, that can “reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones.” Consciousness does this by acting as “a selecting agency,” focusing on some possibilities and ignoring others (142). As James very memorably put it, consciousness loads the dice by marking some of the genuine options as more salient than others in relation to an individual’s personal interests (143). Since this selectivity leads to differential consequences for behavior as well as for thought, consciousness is thus shown to have real “causal efficacy” within the context of what James called “an instable brain” (144). (In contrast, the brains of lower animals are far more stable and hence their behaviors are far more predictable.) Consciousness would not have evolved, James noted, if it hadn’t given some advantage to its possessors. Put another way, the advantage conferred by consciousness is that “its selective emphasis” upon one possibility over another compensates for “the indeterminateness” of brain-states themselves, which would otherwise persist indifferently without resolution or be resolved in some random or accidental manner (147). To sum up in different terminology, the mind determines which among a range of possibilities offered by the body are going to be realized.
To drive his point home, James observed that “consciousness…is only intense when nerve-processes are hesitant,” that is, when electrophysiological currents do not run quickly and directly from impression to movement. “In rapid, automatic, habitual action,” consciousness “sinks to a minimum” whereas “where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense” as alternatives are being considered (145). So consciousness matters in the conduct of our lives – our bodily lives as well as our mental lives. It doesn’t simply parallel bodily processes, as James had claimed when sticking to methodological principle. At crucial moments consciousness actually directs bodily processes by selecting one option over another. (More will be said about how this comes about when we discuss consciousness, willing, and their effects upon behavior in Chapters 10 and 11.) In facilitating the influence of personal interests and providing a crucial role for willful effort in human life, consciousness assumes preeminence among the “organs” that make human lives deeply personal, richly diverse, and ultimately meaningful.
In coming chapters, we will see how James described consciousness as interacting with the world as well as with the body. Given the centrality of these descriptions to his underlying vision of human nature, it seems clear that his expressions of interactionism cannot be waved off as mere lapses in positivist rhetoric. No matter what he claimed in his more cautious moments of methodological and metaphysical stringency, James’s inclination was obviously toward interaction…when he wasn’t leaning even further away from psychophysical separatism and approaching the radical melding of mind and body suggested by the third story he had to tell about mind and body.
Though James may have been speaking metaphorically when he characterized the cortex as the organ of consciousness and consciousness as an organ of the brain (74, 142), his use of this kind of double-sided terminology presaged his inclination, here and there throughout his Principles, to describe certain phenomena in ways that conflated the physical and the mental. I have already mentioned James’s way of talking about the emotions as an example of this third way of talking about mind and body, but there were many other instances in which he reduced and even eliminated the gap between mind and body. His treatment of habit is one such instance, as we shall see in the next chapter. But even more telling and significant is his argument that our fundamental sense of personal identity – our awareness of mental continuity over time, which has prompted discussion of “minds,” “selves,” and “souls” throughout Western history – is not only dependent upon but virtually the same as the protracted physical feeling of warmth and intimacy that accompanies personal experience: “We think,” James wrote in his chapter on the self,
and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking. If the thinking be our thinking, it must be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth and intimacy that make it come as ours…Whatever the content of the ego may be, it is habitually felt with everything else by us humans, and must form a liaison between all the things of which we become successively aware.
(235)
This “penumbra” of feeling that “surrounds and escorts” our sense of identity over time “is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh” (246). James thus described the foundation of self-identity as a “halo of felt relations” (247) and a “fringe of felt affinity” (251), resulting from the equation of “I,” “me,” and “mine” with a particular body located and felt within very specific and literally definitive physical conditions.
Turning the equation around, James noted that we don’t fully identify past experiences as our own unless our memory calls forth the kind of warmth and intimacy that suffused them as they were taking place. This explains why we feel some distance or alienation from stories that others tell about us as very young children. We may trust that the reported events occurred, but their representation leaves us cold, arousing none of the sentiments that were felt at that time by our “little body” (318). More will be said about this melding of identity and feeling when we review James’s classic treatment of the self. The bottom line for now is simply that the vital sense of having experienced something depends upon “a feeling of bodily activities” (288). The feeling doesn’t cause the sense; it is the sense.
Another example: Attention, as we shall see in Chapter 11 of this book, is a key concern for James. It is a common observation that our attention is directed, instinctively, toward a loud noise. But even in the case of “voluntary” or “intellectual” attention, as when we direct our attention to “ideas of memory, etc.,” we find, if we look closely enough, that the experience of attending is “principally constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs” (412, 422). And a similar thing occurs, James asserted, whenever our introspection tries to catch other “manifestations of spontaneity in the act.” All it ever reveals “is some bodily process, for the most part taking place in the head” (288). Even the experience of time and space, which Immanuel Kant had characterized as a priori [transcendental or purely mental] forms of experience, are actually (James claimed) reducible to physiological dimensions. “In short, empty our minds as we may, some form of changing [bodily] process remains for us to feel,” whether it is the rhythm of inspiration and expiration that marks the passage of time or the relative volume of sensory processes that constitute our sense of spatiality. Such bodily processes are essential, not just correlative parts of these phenomena. Try as we might, a bodily dimension “cannot be expelled” from human experience (584).
Perhaps no aspect of experience seems so ethereal as one’s sense of beauty. That is why Socrates used it as the final stepping stone to philosophical contemplation. Yet what is this deeply personalized reaction, James suggested, but a felt physical response to someone or some object: a “cutaneous shiver,” a “lachrymal effusion,” “a glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fullness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides,” which, to be put simply, “excites us” (1065, 1072, and 1084). And the same “symptoms” occur “when we are excited by moral perceptions as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc. etc.” (1084).
Perhaps James’s nicest articulation of the conjoining of mind and body is provided by his concept of a “kinaesthetic idea” (1104), which figures prominently in his discussion of the will. James conveys the meaning of this concept through a discussion of experts, whose physical actions are so inextricably meshed with what they know that the intentional and purposeful sequencing of these actions takes place automatically, without overt consciousness, as they focus on distant ends rather than immediate means, as described in this passage:
The marksman ends by thinking only of the exact position of the goal, the singer only of the perfect sound, the balancer only of the point of the pole whose oscillations he must counteract. The associated mechanism has become so perfect in all these persons that each variation in the thought of the end is functionally correlated with the one movement fitted to bring the latter about. Whilst they were tyros, they thought of their means as well as their end…But little by little they succeeded in dropping all this supernumerary consciousness.
(1108)
In passages like this, as in his overall treatment of will, James was clearly exploring ways of talking about what we would now call embodied consciousness or refer to as intelligibility-built-into the biological world. In this, he was more in tune with recent efforts to understand how consciousness functions within living systems than with previous efforts to explain it away as an inconsequential effluvium of brain activity (e.g., see Damasio 1999 and 2010, LeDoux 2002, and Northoff 2014). In any case, he was clearly ahead of his time and until fairly recently ahead of our own (see Shusterman 2005 and 2008). As noted earlier, he anticipated developments in phenomenology in his insistence upon close descriptions of mental states. He also anticipated phenomenology with respect to the intentionality of biological as well as mental states (see Husserl 1922 and Merleau-Ponty 1963). In addition, his third story about mind and body pointed toward his own later metaphysics of radical empiricism, which posited an original “neutral monism” from which, during the life of the individual as well as in the history of the species, both mental and physical concepts are derived. Earlier I referred to this position, as anticipated in Principles, as “proto-phenomenological.” It might also, perhaps more appropriately, be called “a maverick version” of “identity-philosophy,” as the philosopher Bruce Wilshire has dubbed it (Wilshire 2000, 68, referring to Wilshire 1997). But whatever it is called, mind and body in James’s later formulation are simply different conceptual entities that can be carved from the same “stuff” of “pure experience,” analogous to the different statues that can be carved from the same stone. As James argued, these conceptual entities matter not because they represent separate things but because they serve different practical purposes as we navigate life within our singular phenomenal world (see ERE).
In conclusion, how are we to make sense of the fact that James told three different stories about mind and body? Clearly, these stories are contradictory: The first keeps mind and body apart in deference to methodological principle; the second depicts their interaction as a concession to common sense and linguistic convenience; and the third erases any clear-cut distinction between them as a result of close observations of experience. But despite their very different natures and rationales, the stories convey a consistent trajectory from complete separation of mind and body toward complete unification of them – and from what is easily described in our inherited dualistic terminology to what is difficult to describe in such language. The reality of this trajectory was confirmed when James’s third way of talking found its ultimate expression in his later metaphysics, which resulted from his searching for a way to speak about the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions, or constructions, of experience without positing “ontological dualism”: in other words, from his search for what he called “duality without dualism” (ML 253–254).
This end-point in James’s thought – his conclusion that mind and body are best seen as two different ways of construing one and the same ongoing experience – was foreshadowed more than a decade before Principles was published. In June of 1877, in a letter to his future wife Alice Howe Gibbens, he gave particularly poignant expression to an issue that was intensely personal long before its elaboration became a professional responsibility. Trying to reveal his deepest self to her, he wrote:
I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character, would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude, in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active & alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks & says “this is the real me!.”…Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active [physical] tension, of holding my own as it were, & trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any guarantee that they will. Make it a guarantee, – and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guarantee, and I feel (provided I am überhaupt in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside of my breast-bone (don’t smile at this – it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!) and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active & theoretical determination, which I possess.
(CWJ 4: 570–571)
This confession, as it were, makes it safe to say that James’s third way of talking about mind and body wasn’t simply a result of slippage from his methodological principle of psychophysical parallelism or a refusal to indulge his occasional inclination to speak the causal language of common sense. It represented, instead, his effort, however unsystematic, to get at whatever lay beyond the safety of methodological dualism and the tradition of interactionism. And what did that entail? – complete, unqualified reliance upon experience, pure, simple, and all of one piece…at least until one begins to use concepts and words to tease apart the dimensions of any particular segment of it, as he had in describing the tension, the sting, and the bliss that constituted the simultaneously subjective and objective features of his own sense of personal authenticity. As he had tried to make clear, the “mental and moral attitude” of his “real me” could not be distinguished from its “essential” physical manifestations.
James had no theoretical way of talking about or understanding this experientially based insight in 1877, nor even in 1890. That had to await his development of radical empiricism in the early 1900s. But one can’t help but wonder what a revised Principles of Psychology would have looked like, if James had been able to apply his later radical empiricism, thoroughly and consistently, to his earlier psychology. We cannot be certain about all of the consequences (though educated conjectures about some of them will be made in the final chapter of this book), but we can be confident, based upon his later publications, that a revised Principles would have rejected a substantialist view of consciousness in lieu of consciousness (which is to say “mind”) conceived unequivocally as a function, not a thing (see ERE 3–19). At the same time, it would also have dismissed any reified notion of physical things or behavior, deprived of their mentalist dimension, of the kind that came to dominate post-Jamesian, behavioristic psychology in the United States.
Indeed, even in the unrevised, original Principles, James insisted that consciousness is always related to intentional objects, and that behavior – along with brain activity – is always complicit with purpose. Habit and thought, as we shall see in the next chapter, are good examples of this melding of the mental and physical, even though James’s discussion of them – long before his development of radical empiricism – included expressions of all three stories about body and mind.