JAMES, WILLIAM (1842–1910)

William James is best known as the torch bearer of the new US psychology c. 1890, but one might also think of him as a committed medical researcher and physiologist who developed a strong and persisting love for philosophy, and then used the skills and knowledge acquired from each area to recast psychology as an admixture of the two. One should also note his strictly secular, and hence entirely untypical, view of US psychology at the time. Thus, where most nineteenth-century US psychologists and educationalists looked to European and Scottish moral and mental philosophy for their ideas, James’s inspiration was provided by the agnostic figures of Alexander Bain and JOHN STUART MILL, and the empirical insights supplied by physiology and German psychology. There was, in addition, the new US philosophy of Pragmatism (described rather pragmatically by James as ‘a method of conducting discussions’, see Bjork 1988:249), whose practical, relativistic and adaptive message can be found on most pages of his psychological masterwork of 1890, The Principles of Psychology (see also Putnam 1997 for recent comments on both James in general and on his Pragmatism).

William James was born on 11 January 1842, into a privileged New York family whose wealth had been assured by his paternal grandfather’s successful investment in projects such as banking and the building of the Erie Canal. James’s father, Henry James Sr, was, therefore, in theory able to lead any kind of life that he wished, including one of complete idleness. Instead, he married, helped raise and eccentrically educate five children (including the leading US novelist of the day, Henry James Jr), and took up the study and dissemination of Sandemanian and Swedenborgian mystical philosophy, mainly on the grounds that reading it had helped cure him of the anxiety attacks (or ‘vastations’) that had plagued his early married life. William James’s upbringing was, therefore, intensely intellectual, dizzyingly cosmopolitan and entirely unsettling. Indeed, his MD from Harvard Medical School was the only formal qualification that he ever earned, and even that had been taken after many stops and starts from 1864 to 1869. This period, for example, had included over a year off on a specimen-collecting expedition to Brazil organized by the Harvard biologist Agassiz (1864 to 1865), and an equally lengthy, partly curative, partly intellectual visit to France and Germany during 1867 and 1868, where the journey had been undertaken to alleviate a recurring back pain (termed ‘dorsal insanity’ by James and thought to run in his family). The European trip was also marred by a partial blindness brought about by an attack of smallpox during his time in Brazil.

Entries A-Z 333 More seriously for his intellectual development, however, was that from 1870 onwards

he suffered, like his father, from disabling anxiety attacks. Most commentators have interpreted this condition as the physical reaction to his attempt to reconcile his pessimistic views about the deterministic nature of the world as revealed to him by his beloved science with his equally strong wish for self determination and personal freedom (see, for instance, Fancher 1990:245–6; also Lawrence and Shapin 1998 for recent analyses of the ‘embodiment’ of scientific knowledge).

These two positions are, of course, ultimately irreconcilable and, as a consequence, James was always destined to twist and turn on their contradictions. But by erecting a barrier between the universal (‘this is how the world mechanically operates’) and the individual (‘but I am free to choose over matters of personal action and belief’), he hoped to stop the one from overwhelming the other (see Myers 1986:xiv–xv on the essentially personal nature of James’s philosophy). Most commentators have timed the discovery of James’s moderating views on personal freedom to 29 April 1870, when he had read an essay on that very topic by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. However, while this did not mean an end to his sufferings, it did grant him enough self confidence in 1872 to embark on a 35-year-long career as Harvard teacher and luminary, initially as a physiologist, then as a philosopher and finally as a psychologist And his successful marriage to Anne Gibbens in 1878 also helped, both physically and psychologically.

The major task during his first two decades at Harvard was to compile his textbook on psychology The Principles of Psychology, a work commissioned by the publisher Henry Holt as early as 1878. In the event, it took James 12 years to come up with the 1,000 pages required, which also incorporated the numerous journal articles written as multiple Prolegomena to the Principles. (James is reputed to have described the work to Holt as ‘the enormous rat which…ten years gestation has brought forth’—see Fancher 1990:250). Less well known, but just as personally significant, was James’s deep interest in the paranormal that also dates from the early 1870s, and which some have argued links the Principles with James’s late masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1902), in part through his discussion of what constitutes, and what links, consciousness and reality (see Bjork 1988:210–13).

It is often claimed that after the ordeal of the Principles, James moved back into philosophy. However, while it is the case that, post-1890, his goals were a little less overtly psychological, it is also true that what constituted scientific psychology for James was not the etiolated empiricism that it has become. Consequently, his shortened version of the Principles (Psychology: Briefer Course, also known familiarly as the Jimmy) appeared in 1892 to popular acclaim, while he maintained his support of the growing field of psychology in the USA; he served, for example, as President of the American Psychological Association on no less then two occasions. There was also his continuing work on the paranormal and his quasi-psychological treatment of religion in the Varieties, with its emphases on psychopathology, the value of personally transcendent experience and the empirical exploration of religious feelings. In addition, he felt the need in 1907 to spell out what he took to be Pragmatism, as against what his fellow members of the long-defunct Metaphysical Club such as Charles Peirce had thought was its nature; but, according to James, this was little more than an explication and extension of what had long been implicit in the Principles and elsewhere in both his and other people’s writings. However, all this furious activity ceased abruptly on 26 August 1910

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when, amidst universal mourning and tributes to his achievements, James died from a chronic heart condition.

JAMES, WILLIAM (1842–1910)