When The Principles of Psychology finally appeared in September 1890, no one was happier or more relieved than William James. He was glad to have it done, despite being aware of its limitations. Even with its extraordinary range of information, wise counsel, and astute conjectures, he knew that much remained unexpressed and unknown, and that much would need correction and revision, notwithstanding the twelve years of labor and 1,400 pages of carefully articulated writing that went into it. James readily admitted these limitations in his preface, conclusion, and throughout, noting that it might be “centuries hence” before the full promise of scientific psychology would be realized. In the meantime, he said, “the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming front” (PP 7). In his typically self-deprecating manner, he told friends that Principles was “an irredeemable waste of dullness” and “a dismal piece of work on the whole,” and he acknowledged that it was “too unsystematic & loose” (CWJ 7: 79, 574, and 329), but he knew nonetheless that he had produced something of considerable worth. In June 1890, as his manuscript was being typeset, he wrote to his brother Henry that “as Psychologies go, it is a good one.” The problem was simply that “psychology is in such an ante-scientific condition that the whole present generation of them is predestined to become unreadable old medieval lumber, as soon as the first genuine tracks of insight are made.” Far from being defensive about it, he added: “The sooner the better, for me” (CWJ 2: 138). He only hoped to have put psychology on a solid scientific footing from which others might proceed, going farther along that particular trail toward truth.
In August, a month before the publication of Principles, he suggested to Henry, only partly in jest, that with the publication of Henry’s The Tragic Muse, William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes, and “by no means least,” his own Principles of Psychology, the year 1890 was destined to be “the great epocal year in American literature” (CWJ 2: 146). From our perspective, Principles now towers above these other notable works. Indeed, as John Dewey proclaimed a half century later, Principles has become “a permanent classic, like Locke’s Essay and Hume’s Treatise,” defying “conventional appellations” as being either “psychological” or “philosophical” (Dewey 1943, 121). In fact, said Dewey, there is “nothing compartmentalized” about it at all. As the present book has striven to demonstrate, it was psychological and philosophical, scientific and humanistic. It argued that mind is intrinsically related to matter, habit to thought, cognition to emotion, and vice versa. These and all the other topics addressed in Principles were related in one way and another. The achievement of such multifaceted interrelations, updated to account for all that has been learned since James’s time, is perhaps the greatest challenge that a deeply fractured psychology faces in our time.
Upon its long-awaited publication, The Principles of Psychology was immediately accepted by other psychologists and philosophers, including James’s former student G. Stanley Hall (1891) who was by then a Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University, as “the best work [in psychology] in any language” (589 and 591). Yet some, like Hall, qualified their praise with words to the effect that Principles was nonetheless too “impressionistic,” too full of “sketches.” However “stimulating” and “suggestive” they might be, these sketches were insufficiently scientific in nature. In short, said some, Principles was not as consistently, narrowly, and systematically scientific as it ought to have been. Its “loose literary way,” as Hall put it, eventuated in “many brilliant and original pages,” but it had expanded Principles into two volumes that “could have been somewhat lessened in size” if James had simply “recorded the results of [his] private thinking” rather than “so often writing himself clear,” sharing the details of his process of discovery (558, 587, and 589).
Showing the same combination of admiration and critique, enthusiasm and ambivalence, James’s friend Charles S. Peirce wrote that Principles was “the most important contribution that has been made to the subject for many years” and “one of the most weighty productions of American thought.” Yet “as a piece of bookmaking” it failed, in his view, to evince either “the unity of an essay” or ‘the completeness of a thorough treatise” (Peirce 2010, 231). And even though he felt that “everybody interested in the subject [of psychology] must and will read the book,” Peirce – logician that he was – couldn’t refrain from averring that James’s thought, despite being “highly original,” was “of the destructive kind” insofar as it was sometimes at odds with the strictures of “logical explanation” (234 and 236). As he made clear in later comments, however, it was not so much that he disagreed with James’s conclusions – most of the time he agreed with them – but he could not always understand how James had reached those conclusions. In these instances, he was flummoxed in trying to grasp how James “communes with himself” (Peirce 1998, 421). But apart from James’s occasional disregard for logical niceties, Peirce admitted that James was “about as perfect a lover of truth as it is possible for a man to be” (Peirce 1935, 130). And a decade later he added that James was unarguably ranked as “the first psychologist living or that ever lived” (quoted in Perry 1935, 2: 422), surely a very high compliment from someone as irascible and critical-minded as Peirce. As for Peirce’s concern about James’s means of “communing,” it should be noted that James had a principled reason not to be slavishly logical. As he had argued in Principles, concepts, including definitions, are abstract and disjoined, whereas experience – concrete reality – is fluid and overflows logic’s artificial boundaries. (On James’s critique of “mere logic” and “vicious intellectualism,” see Leary forthcoming.) Presciently in tune with today’s recognition of the role of metaphor and narrative in human understanding (see Leary 1990a, 19–21, and Murray 2008), James had long since distinguished between two kinds of human thinking – (logical) reason and (descriptive) narrative (BHI 2). Producing “a coherent story,” James said, is more closely related to “our actual experience of the order of things in the real outward world” than is abstract logic, which follows an entirely other-worldly set of rules (2). Adamantly loyal to this-worldly experience, James would later produce a highly regarded classic of narrative psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
Be that as it may, the most common criticism of Principles in the 1890s was that it lacked the kind of systematic structure and logical rigor that should characterize a true science. James had foreseen this criticism and had even announced in his preface that “the reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book,” which he characterized too humbly as “mainly a mass of descriptive details” (PP 6–7). Though facetious in emphasis and expression, he told his publisher that Principles was “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass” (CWJ 7: 24). Nonetheless, he asserted that Principles was “more systematic and complete” than some believed (PP 1483). And whatever criticisms were warranted along these lines, the tide of opinion has swung over time in James’s favor. Principles may not be highly systematic, and its structure may be unusual, but it is much more coherent and consistent than initially noticed and granted. As Rand Evans (1981) has commented, “no one who reads James’s Principles from cover to cover can call him unsystematic. He has his plan for a naturalistic psychology and carries it out magnificently” (l).
Closely related criticisms, heard now as well as in the 1890s, claim that the argumentation in Principles is too loose and its style too literary. The philosopher Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1990) has addressed these impressions, noting that they stem largely from the fact that “James is delightfully easy reading the first time around.” But, she suggests, the going “gets more difficult with each successive reading” (173). There are a number of reasons for this, some indeed related to literary style (e.g., his use of metaphor and rejection of standardized jargon), which she spells out in detail (173–175), but it must be added that the difficulty results, also, from the fact that James is “more subtle, more difficult to comprehend than most readers have thought,” as an astute philosopher and historian of psychology has observed (Brett 1965, 689). The philosopher Hilary Putnam (1990) made the same point in opposing the view that James was simply “an inspiring teacher,” arguing that he was “also a deep thinker, who struggled with incredibly deep questions” (251). If The Principles of Psychology is readable despite becoming more subtle and difficult with repeated reading (and despite grappling with deep questions), so much the better! But, alas, in more recent times, too few have bothered to read it all the way through, much less for a second time, and most who cite it today seem not to have read it very thoroughly. Instead, they have apparently searched for and extracted memorable snippets rather than pondered entire passages; and even those who read entire passages often fail to understand them in the context of surrounding chapters and all the issues and discussions that are threaded through Principles.
A third area of criticism, among all the praise heaped upon Principles, was aimed at its apparent “materialism.” This criticism was to be expected from those who held particular religious and philosophical views, but it also came from James’s former student and current Harvard colleague George Santayana (1891), a naturalist philosopher who felt that James’s explications sometimes suggested a deeper physicalist commitment than he intended. Santayana knew better – he knew that James resisted materialistic reductionism – but he feared that others would take James’s descriptions of the neurological dimensions of psychological phenomena as complete and sufficient explanations of them. This reaction was understandable, given James’s fluctuating treatment of mind-body relations in Principles, though it did not keep Santayana from concluding that The Principles of Psychology was “a real contribution to psychology, and undoubtedly the most important that has yet been made in America” (556).
As far as teachers and students were concerned, The Principles of Psychology was successful right from the start, and its popularity was soon bolstered by the appearance of its abbreviated version, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892). (The long version was soon widely known as “James” while the shorter one was called “Jimmy.”) More than a simple abridgment, the Briefer Course included amendments as well as supplements. (Gerald E. Myers has estimated that almost half of the single-volumed Briefer Course, which was about one-third as long as Principles, was either rewritten or included new material. See Myers 1981, xxxvi.) For instance, while James said he had removed “all the polemical and historical matter, all the metaphysical and purely speculative passages, most of the quotations, all the book-references, and (I trust) all the impertinences, of the larger work” (PBC 1), he also added a new epilogue on “Psychology and Philosophy” (395–401); and while he condensed treatments of most subjects, he expanded his discussion of the various senses, due to “how ignorant the average student is of physiology” (1). (For a good overview of the amendments and supplements as well as the use and reception of the Briefer Course, see Sokal 1984.)
The Briefer Course quickly swept aside the alternatives – the philosophical books by Borden P. Bowne (1886), John Dewey (1886), and James McCosh (1886) and the more scientific one by George T. Ladd (1887) – as the leading college textbook in the field, and for the next generation it remained the most commonly used text for introducing undergraduates to the “new psychology.” Teachers and graduate students, however, continued to use the longer Principles as their basic manual. Some, like John Dewey, had already worked in the field, but now approached psychology in a different way, influenced by James’s more naturalistic orientation, while others, like Edward L. Thorndike, were drawn to psychology, for the first time, by their encounter with Principles.
In 1911 (just after James’s death in 1910), James R. Angell, by then a distinguished psychologist, published the following recollections of The Principles of Psychology:
With the publication of this great work…a profound and radical change came over the scene. Who does not remember the sense of glowing delight with which we first read the pages of the big, cumbrous, ill-bound and rather ill-printed volumes? It was like inhaling a rare, pungent mountain air, vital, bracing and almost intoxicating. To many of us of the younger generation the book was assigned as a text. We read it as one reads the most fascinating tale of a master – spell-bound and transported and yet withal feeling ourselves acquiring new powers, and gaining command of pregnant thoughts. Scores of other readers fared as did we and so it came to pass that almost over night James became the recognized fountain head of the most original and most vigorous psychological thinking in our country…It is difficult to appreciate how much that is now familiar and commonplace in psychological writing was introduced by James.
(Angell, 1996, 134–135)
And as regards James himself, as both teacher and person, Angell added this about his former graduate school mentor:
With few men could an inventory of his accomplishments, however impressive, be so entirely and grotesquely inadequate as with James…His personality was fascinating and magnetic to a degree which his writings hardly indicate…As a teacher he was especially sympathetic and stimulating…William James was that rarest of human beings – a great man who was also simple, kindly, brave and true.
(137–138)
Two decades later, Angell described the aspects of The Principles of Psychology that were particularly impressive to him in the early 1890s:
The great inrush of provocative observation, the wealth of pertinent facts, the ingenious manipulation of data, the wide knowledge of relevant literature, and above all the irresistibly fascinating literary style swept me off my feet…Even if somewhat shattering at first, it was extraordinarily stimulating.
(Angell 1936, 22)
And thus it was for many others too, both those who were or became psychologists and those who simply studied psychology or read Principles or the Briefer Course in the following years. With the publication of these works, the nature and significance of psychology had changed forever. And James’s influence on this change extended to Europe and indeed around the world, where he was read both in English and in translations.
The 1890s and early 1900s were the years in which the pedagogy of school instruction was being professionalized (see Cremin 1961, Ch. 4). In 1892, at the behest of the Harvard Corporation, James undertook a series of public lectures on psychology, which he presented around the country over the following years, aimed at applying the insights of the new psychology to teaching in primary and secondary schools. Eventually these and other lectures were published as Talks to Teachers and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899). Both the lectures and the book advertised the relevance of the newly scientific psychology and helped to establish the discipline as a required subject in so-called “normal schools” for teacher education. Given the importance of education as a tool for social improvement in the Progressive Era, this helped to establish psychology as a popular academic field. It also spurred the ever-expanding application of psychological knowledge to public as well as personal issues (see Leary 1987). Both through his public lectures on psychology and other topics and through the publication of The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), James became one of the most highly recognized intellectuals in the country, and thereby his Principles of Psychology was brought to the attention of an even wider audience than would otherwise have been the case. So it was that the influence of a work that was twelve full years in the making was eventually felt well beyond the halls of academe.
In 1927, as the prospects of behavioristic psychology were rising in the United States, a questionnaire distributed to seventy-three prominent American psychologists revealed that James was still considered the most important of all psychologists, based upon his continuing historical impact. A distant second was the German Wilhelm Wundt, followed by the Frenchman Alfred Binet and the German Hermann von Helmholtz (Tinker, Thuma, and Farnsworth 1927). Two decades later, E. G. Boring (1950), the premier historian of psychology at that time, estimated that James had retained his place among the four most influential individuals in the development of modern psychology, the others being Darwin, Helmholtz, and Freud (743). And yet another two decades later, as the hegemony of behaviorism was waning, a select committee of the American Psychological Association concluded that James was still the dominant historical figure in American psychology and that Principles was still the historically preeminent work in the field, saying that
James’s Principles is without question the most literate, the most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligible book on psychology that has ever appeared in English or in any other language. Part of James’ genius was his ability to recognize a fundamental problem, to formulate it clearly, to marshall the available facts and theories, and then to throw it back to the reader, cleaned and polished, as a challenge to his curiosity. In 1890 the “new psychology” was in the making. James found some aspects of it exciting, others boring, but in every chapter of his great book we find him burrowing through masses of observation and opinion, patiently sorting and discarding, and then coming through with an invitation to further inquiry. If there ever was a man who knew how to ask searching questions, it was William James.
(Bray et al., 1969)
As cognitive psychology came back into vogue, and as it has remained at the fore of psychological science over the past half century, the historical relevance of James and Principles has only increased. As one scholar has put it, “we still stand in the long intellectual shadow cast by the book and its author” (Evans 1990, 29).
James’s intellectual shadow, with regard to psychology, became even longer in the years after The Principles of Psychology and Psychology: Briefer Course (and, of course, it became longer with regard to philosophy too). Throughout the 1890s, he continued to offer courses in psychology, turning his and his students’ attention increasingly to clinical matters. (He also taught philosophy courses during the 1890s. It was only in the 1900s, from 1902 until his retirement from teaching in 1907, that he devoted his teaching entirely to philosophy.) Having developed and directed Harvard’s Psychological Laboratory from its sparse beginnings in the mid-1870s, he oversaw the hiring of Hugo Münsterberg from Germany in 1892, and passed the direction of a thoroughly refurbished laboratory to him. Continuing his exploration of hypnotism and various other techniques for investigating different levels and states of consciousness, he expanded his reading and consideration of subconscious phenomena associated with both clinical observations and psychical research. In 1896 he pulled his clinically related thinking together in a significant series of Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. These lectures treated dreams, hypnotism, automatism, hysteria, multiple personality, demoniacal possession, witchcraft, degeneration, and genius. (The lectures were not fully written out or published in his lifetime, but they have been reconstructed and published, based on James’s notes and sources, by Eugene Taylor 1982.) Reflecting his pluralistic respect for the full range and variety of human experience, James avoided the negative term “abnormal” when discussing atypical mental states, arguing that “exceptional” states, as he called them, can be beneficial at times, whether from society’s or the individual’s point of view. The contributions of geniuses, for instance, often depend upon characteristics that in individuals of different psychic make-up would be problematic (see Taylor 1982, 164–165). This open-minded yet critical attitude also characterized his ventures into psychical research (see Blum 2006, McDermott 1986, and EPR, especially 127–137 and 361–375). His innovative treatments of both exceptional mental states and psychical research, in addition to his chapters on “Habit,” “The Consciousness of Self,” “The Emotions,” “Will,” and “Hypnotism” in Principles, set the scene for the Boston School of Psychotherapy, which in turn prepared the way for the reception of Freud’s work and the development of clinical psychology in the United States (see Hale 1971, Ch. 6, Rosenzweig 1992, and Taylor 2009, Ch. 2).
This supplemental line of development in his teaching, thought, and influence was augured in James’s response to George T. Ladd’s (1892) critical review of The Principles of Psychology, which had questioned James’s success in establishing psychology as a natural science. In his reply, James pointed out that “I have never claimed…that psychology as it stands to-day, is a natural science.” Still, it seemed to him that there was “real material enough” to justify “the hope” of such a science (PPNS 270). And going further, he argued that such a science, like all natural sciences, would “aim at practical prediction and control,” especially since people want and need “a sort of psychological science which will teach them how to act.” Elaborating on this point, he suggested that
what every educator, every jail-warden, every doctor, every clergyman, every asylum-superintendent, asks of psychology is practical rules. Such men care little or nothing about the ultimate philosophic grounds of mental phenomena, but they do care immensely about improving the ideas, dispositions, and conduct of the particular individuals in their charge.
(272)
Later in the same article he added that “the kind of psychology which could cure a case of melancholy, or charm a chronic insane delusion away, ought certainly to be preferred to the most seraphic insight into the nature of the soul” (277). This was not only an allusion to Ladd’s self-proclaimed “spiritualist” approach to psychology, but also a manifesto for the kind of applied psychology that he tried to advance throughout the 1890s by means of his talks to teachers, his clinically related courses, and his public lectures. Through all of these means, he helped to spur its development as he had already enhanced the prospects of scientific psychology.
Toward the end of the 1890s, encouraged by an invitation to present the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology in Edinburgh, Scotland, James turned his focus toward religious phenomena, reviewing extensive questionnaires of contemporary religious experience as well as reading widely in the literature, especially biographies and autobiographies of religious individuals from the past. These lectures were published with great celebrity as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (1902). Both the title and subtitle underscored its psychological orientation. In this major work, James brought his interest in subconscious states of mind to the forefront in a number of important descriptive and explanatory passages. In particular, he felt confident that there was sufficient evidence regarding altered states of consciousness and “other selves” to conclude that “the conscious person is continuous with a wider self” and that this wider self could well represent (i.e., be? overlap with? express?) who or what some call God, and that “saving experiences” come from contact with this wider self and may well provide “the positive content of religious experience.” This, he said, “seems to me” to be “literally and objectively true” (VRE 405). To which he added, “as far as it goes”! Which is to say, it is true psychologically if not necessarily or in any particular way ontologically. But if in fact some feel healing effects from their religious experiences, he said, whatever brings these experiences about must itself be real in some concrete manner. This line of reasoning led James to agree with another author that, so far as psychology is concerned, it really doesn’t matter whether God exists or exists in this or that way. These are “irrelevant questions” so far as “religious consciousness” is concerned. “Not God but life,” he wrote, “more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is in the last analysis the end of religion” (399).
So, long before the recent revival of interest in spirituality among psychologists (see Paloutzian and Park 2013 and Plante 2009), James argued that spirituality, though sometimes psychologically destructive, can also be psychologically beneficial. In this and other ways, The Varieties of Religious Experience contributed to James’s reputation as a humanist who has inspired many – psychologists, students, and the public at large – to hold onto questions of meaning, value, and purpose throughout a century fraught with challenges to the significance of human existence. For good reason, Varieties has appeared on many lists of memorable twentieth-century publications, and William James has remained among those esteemed for their reflections upon the human spirit.
Through the early decades of the twentieth century, The Principles of Psychology remained the ‘bible’ of psychology, especially in the United States. But slowly it became apparent that readings of Principles were becoming partial or selective. What was lost, or set aside, in these readings was James’s attempt to integrate all of psychology into a more or less coherent whole – mind as well as body, thought as well as habit, conception as well as perception, self as well as instinct. These selective readings call to mind George Santayana’s concern about possible misreadings of James’s masterpiece, mentioned at the end of the first section of this chapter. They also indicate an important fact, namely, that those who “get” what James was trying to convey, do so less from following any single, linear sequence of ideas, and more from grasping the encompassing vision that emerges cumulatively over the course of sustained and thoughtful reading. (As we have seen, there are inconsistencies in Principles, as when James deals with mind-body issues, which can deflect attention from his larger arguments and concerns.) James granted that “what distinguishes a philosopher’s truth is that it is reasoned,” but he emphasized even more that “a man’s vision is the great fact” that characterizes serious works, and as mentioned in earlier chapters, he complained about readers who focused on isolated statements, or got stuck at some juncture, thus missing the forest for the trees (PU 11, 14, and 117; also see PP 134 and CWJ 11: 538–539). Drawing upon biological metaphors, he argued that one’s comprehension grows interstitially, largely out of sight, through the “grafting” of new ideas “upon the ancient stock” and the development of new layers of “cambium” within; only later and secondarily is it expressed in nicely serrated, ordered, visible shoots and branches (PR 35–36). Understanding James’s work proceeds in much the same way. Though Principles offers many important shoots and branches, the general vision it projects – of an active, embodied mind pursuing its interests and needs within a social and physical environment that both presses upon and sometimes yields to human endeavor – is what holds all these parts together and constitutes Principles’s central message.
Validating Santayana’s worry, James’s message, with its holistic picture of the human mind inextricably engaged within its surrounding environment, was often overlooked, or intentionally ignored, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although the “functional psychology” developed by Dewey and others at Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century emphasized this central contention of James’s work, psychologists of different types and convictions began to borrow this or that portion of Principles – his treatment of the neurological underpinnings of psychology, or his emphasis upon the importance of habit, or his innovative approach to emotions, or his description of consciousness and self – and made these severed shoots and branches the sole foundation and focus of their work. Thus it was that neurological psychology, behavioral psychology, motivational psychology, personality and social psychology came to be treated as separate matters without the integrative relations that James had striven to weave into his Principles. Investigators in each subfield referred back to Principles as a founding document, but they based their individual efforts upon a fraction of it, thus forfeiting much of the force and significance of the framework that James had bequeathed to them.
Following a massive assessment of psychology at mid-century (Koch 1959–1963), which underscored the divisive splintering of the discipline since the time of James, Sigmund Koch (1976) called for an honest acknowledgment that the one-time incipient science had become a somewhat motley cluster of tangentially related endeavors best called “the psychological studies” rather than “psychology.” The same situation prompted others (e.g. Staats 1983 and Rychlak 1988) to call for various forms of reunification, but a new James has yet to appear. Hopeful signs – meaningful if not conclusive gestures – include efforts at the cross-fertilization of ideas and methods, as in cognitive neuropsychology and other such endeavors to span the various subfields of psychological investigation. And consciousness itself is once again, as for James, at the forefront of such investigation.
Still, psychology is far from the singular science James hoped it would become. As a pluralist rather than monist he might not have been entirely sorry if he had foreseen this, but he would have supported persistent attempts at systematic unification, so long as variations and exceptions were not excluded from consideration. In any case, looking to the future, reflection upon his Principles of Psychology, while insufficient in itself, could offer inspiration – and some useful caveats – regarding the prospects for a more integrated psychology in our day and age. Support for this suggestion was offered by more than a few commentators during the centennial celebrations of Principles’s publication. Many reported their surprise, in preparing for these celebrations, to discover how relevant Principles continues to be. Susan Cross and Hazel Rose Markus (1990), for instance, put it this way:
As psychologists grapple with how to put cognition, emotion, motivation, and personality back together again, the ideas of William James are unparalleled in their relevance. One hundred years after the publication of The Principles of Psychology, they are stunningly fresh and provocative, and references to them can be seen everywhere in increasing numbers.
(726)
It isn’t that they believe James was always correct in what he said, but his approach to important questions, however provisional his answers, seems generally to have pointed in the right direction, and even his disproven hypotheses have often been productive in prompting worthwhile explorations.
The same can be said about many of the philosophical conjectures James offered in Principles and developed in subsequent works, including Pragmatism (1907), The Meaning of Truth (1909), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), his unfinished Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), and the essays gathered posthumously in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). As Russell B. Goodman (2013) has said, James’s legacy extends well beyond psychology into philosophy, “not only throughout the pragmatist tradition that he founded (along with Charles S. Peirce), but into phenomenology and analytic philosophy.” It forms a bridge, in other words, not only between the disparate subfields within psychology and between psychology and philosophy, but also between the different traditions within philosophy. And this bridge extends even further into the vast territory of the humanities and culture, wherever notions of human consciousness, conscience, inquiry, and action can be found. (The scope of James’s continuing cultural significance can be gleaned from the frequent and meaningful references to his thought in such works as Anderson 2006, Cotkin 1990, Diggins 1994, Grossman and Rischin 2003, Gunn 2001, Halliwell and Rasmussen 2014, Hollinger 1985, Jay 2005, Kittelstrom 2015, Kloppenberg 1986, Lears 1981, McDermott 1976, Posnock 2016, Richardson 2007, Stuhr 2010, and Taves 1999.)
At minimum, even if it fails to help us resolve any current dilemmas in psychology or philosophy, a careful reading of William James’s remarkable classic, The Principles of Psychology, will delight, provoke, and inform the curious reader, putting him or her in touch with one of the more consequential thinkers and writers of the past 150 years – a thinker and writer beloved by such distinct individuals as Niels Bohr, Jorge Luis Borges, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Frost, Helen Keller, Walter Lippmann, Hilary Putnam, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Rorty, Oliver Sacks, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. One need not go so far as Jacques Barzun (1983) and say that this “American masterpiece…ought to be read from beginning to end at least once by every person professing to be educated” (34). But one can say, with confidence, that not to read it is to miss an experience well worth having.