‘Time present and time past’: James’s Principles

The most influential nineteenth-century textbook in the English language on the nature, content and practices of psychology was William James’s The Principles of Psychology, which first appeared in 1890 and was then reprinted ‘innumerable times’ (to quote the publishers of the authoritative version of 1981). Given that any major textbook both recapitulates the past as well as telling it as it is, so James’s Principles says something about the past and the present of the subject, while even the future of psychology is not excluded since the book has had a serious influence long after its initial publication.

William James was trained both as doctor and as a philosopher (see Fancher 1990 and Richards 1996 for short and lively accounts of his life and work, including his attachment to Pragmatism, that most American of philosophies and rules for the moral life). Both interests are present in the extensive chapters in the Principles on neurophysiology as the materialistic basis for any modern psychology (including the study of movement), as well as in the speculative neuromuscular networks outlined in the chapter on the will. Further, the coverage of what he termed the Mind-Stuff Theory (which contained a sturdy refutation of the role of the unconscious), the treatment of epistemology and the nature of reality, and the systematic laying out of the material in all the chapters shows his commitment to the intellectualized nature of psychology, and how it should be pursued as argumentation. There is also James’s utilization of the outcomes of experimental psychology, from the extensive descriptions of the physical stimuli to investigate spatial perception and the findings from their employment, to the quantitative outcomes of

Entries A-Z 533

experiments on attention by Wundt and his students. (This was in spite of his assertion that Wundt’s notoriously lengthy experimental investigations ‘could hardly have arisen in

a country whose natives could be bored’—1890:192, James’s emphasis). Furthermore, James’s early declaration that psychology is a natural science would not look out of place in a modern introductory text, while the bulk of the chapter headings would seem equally familiar. Thus we have Functions of the Brain, Attention, Memory, Perception of Time and Space, the Stream of Thought, Reasoning, etc., but with the odd exceptions such as Instincts, Hypnotism and the more obviously philosophical chapters listed earlier. None of this is surprising since James was the critical, immensely well-read and entirely non- parochial heir to what was current and what had gone before in Britain and Europe.

There is one area, however, in which James shows both his acute sense of the danger lying in this past material and an overwhelming need to draw its fangs: this is in the psychologist’s treatment of the self as an experimental object. There are at least two places where he lays out the possibility, if not the actuality, of what psychologists can and must do in treating minds as objects in exactly the same way as chemists or biologists treat their subject matter, thus ensuring that psychology can adopt a natural-science approach. The first is contained on pp. 183 to 185 of Chapter 7, The Methods and Snares of Psychology, where the psychologist, by virtue of their skills and training, can become ‘a reporter of subjective as well as objective facts’ (1890:184–5). To help achieve this, James both differentiates between several ‘realities’ (The Psychologist; The Thought Studied; The Thought’s Object; The Psychologist’s Reality) that combine to form the ‘irreducible data of psychology’ and, in his critical sections on Introspection, shows how the psychologist can avoid the fallacies of using this key experimental technique in reporting on the thought studied and its various contexts. For James, embodied minds form the stuff of psychology, not the detached ones posited by his bugaboo IMMANUEL KANT, whose anti-psychology views are robustly savaged. Thus, when James considers the Transcendental Self, whose prime mover he takes to be Kant, the knives are out: ‘Kant’s own statements are too lengthy and too obscure for verbatim quotation here’ (1890:341), and ‘Kant’s way of describing the facts is mythological’ (1890:344), and ‘With Kant, complication of both thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence’ (1890:346). Although such ad hominem outbursts are matched by more considered argument, one eventually finds James reasserting his earlier diagram of the four psychological realities, but now supplemented by what he argued were the calamitous confoundings forced onto psychology by Kant and his followers, with the Psychologist and Thought becoming the Transcendental Ego, Thought’s Object and the Psychologist’s Reality telescoped into the World, with all of them subsumed under the Absolute Self-Consciousness (1890:346). For James to have given in to so drastic a challenge to the ‘irreducible data of psychological science’ (1890:346, my emphasis) would have meant that the century-long attempt to establish psychology as a natural science had have been set at nought. So how was psychology-as-science actually achieved?

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 534

‘Time present and time past’: James’s Principles