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William James
American psychologist and philosopher
born Jan. 11, 1842, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Aug. 26, 1910, Chocorua, N.H.
Main
American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the
philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the
psychological movement of functionalism.
Early life and education
James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic
and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him
to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William’s
brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James
held an “antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he
expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his
later years.” Both his physical and his spiritual life were
marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe,
that affected the training of his children at school and
their education at home. Building upon the works of
Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from
God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder
James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have
served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy
provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William’s
home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined
irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to
Boulogne, Fr., and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired
in dealing with his father’s views at dinner and at tea
carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet
critical manner that William displayed in dealing with
anybody’s views on any occasion.
When James was 18 years of age he tried his hand at
studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an
American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of
it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific
School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry,
anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of
medicine in the Harvard Medical School; but he interrupted
this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist
Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an
expedition to the Amazon. There James’s health failed, and
his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for
a term and then during 1867–68 went to Germany for courses
with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz,
who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with
Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the
foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with
others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology
and philosophy then current, especially the writings of
Charles Renouvier, a Kantian Idealist and relativist.
The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in
James’s personal and intellectual history. He seems from
adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and
at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a
breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home
in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still
ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard
Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin
practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of
semi-invalidism in his father’s house, doing nothing but
reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this
period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which
persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved,
according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier
on free will and the decision that “my first act of free
will shall be to believe in free will.” The decision carried
with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the
scientific kind that his training had established for him
and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and
the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in
the notion of “the block universe.” His revolutionary
discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views
concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men, and
the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite
propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal
problem.
Interest in psychology
In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology at
Harvard College, in which capacity he served until 1876. But
he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the
step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology—not the
traditional “mental science” but physiological
psychology—was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It
meant a challenge to the vested interests of the mind,
mainly theological, that were entrenched in the colleges and
universities of the United States; and it meant a definite
break with what Santayana called “the genteel tradition.”
Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and became a
laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in
the grammar of assent and became an adventure in
methodological invention and metaphysical discovery.
With his marriage in 1878, to Alice H. Gibbens of
Cambridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old
neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks
with a zest and an energy of which his earlier record had
given no hint. It was as if some deeper level of his being
had been tapped: his life as an originative thinker began in
earnest. He contracted to produce a textbook of psychology
by 1880. But the work grew under his hand, and when it
finally appeared in 1890, as The Principles of Psychology,
it was not a textbook but a monumental work in two great
volumes, from which the textbook was condensed two years
later.
The Principles, which was recognized at once as both
definitive and innovating in its field, established the
functional point of view in psychology. It assimilated
mental science to the biological disciplines and treated
thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to
live. At one and the same time it made the fullest use of
principles of psychophysics (the study of the effect of
physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism)
and defended, without embracing, free will.
Interest in religion
The Principles completed, James seems to have lost interest
in the subject. Creator of the first U.S. demonstrational
psychological laboratory, he disliked laboratory work and
did not feel himself fitted for it. He liked best the
adventure of free observation and reflection. Compared with
the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed
to him “a nasty little subject” that he was glad to have
done with. His studies, which were now of the nature and
existence of God, the immortality of the soul, free will and
determinism, the values of life, were empirical, not
dialectical; James went directly to religious experience for
the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after
death, to fields of belief and action for free will and
determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing
foregone conclusions. Having begun to teach ethics and
religion in the late 1880s, his collaboration with the
psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after
death he ultimately concluded to be unproved; but the
existence of divinity he held to be established by the
record of the religious experience, viewing it as a
plurality of saving powers, “a more of the same quality” as
oneself, with which, in a crisis, one’s personality can make
saving contact. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness
in the conjunction of things, so that what the future will
be is not made inevitable by past history and present form;
freedom, or chance, corresponds to Darwin’s “spontaneous
variations.” These views were set forth in the period
between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures,
afterward collected into works, of which the most notable is
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described
as James’s religious period, all of his studies were
concerned with one aspect or another of the religious
question.
His natural interest in religion was reinforced by the
practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford
Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh.
He was not able to deliver them until 1901–02, and their
preparation focussed his labours for a number of years. His
disability, involving his heart, was caused by prolonged
effort and exposure during a vacation in the Adirondacks in
1898. A trip to Europe, which was to have taken up a
sabbatical year away from university duties, turned into two
years of invalidism. The Gifford Lectures were prepared
during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), they had an even greater
acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative
though it was, the rich concreteness of the material and the
final summary of the evidence—that the varieties of
religious experience point to the existence of specific and
various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies with which
we can make specific contact in times of trouble—touched
something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at
least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict
with science and scientific method. The book was the
culmination of James’s interest in the psychology of
religion.
Career in philosophy
James now explicitly turned his attention to the ultimate
philosophic problems that had been at least marginally
present along with his other interests. Already in 1898, in
a lecture at the University of California on philosophical
conceptions and practical results, he had formulated the
theory of method known as Pragmatism. Originating in the
strict analysis of the logic of the sciences that had been
made in the middle 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, the
theory underwent in James’s hands a transforming
generalization. He showed how the meaning of any idea
whatsoever—scientific, religious, philosophical, political,
social, personal—can be found ultimately in nothing save in
the succession of experiential consequences that it leads
through and to; that truth and error, if they are within the
reach of the mind at all, are identical with these
consequences. Having made use of the pragmatic rule in his
study of religious experience, he now turned it upon the
ideas of change and chance, of freedom, variety, pluralism,
and novelty, which, from the time he had read Renouvier, it
had been his preoccupation to establish. He used the
pragmatic rule in his polemic against monism and the “block
universe,” which held that all of reality is of one piece
(cemented, as it were, together); and he used this rule
against internal relations (i.e., the notion that you cannot
have one thing without having everything), against all
finalities, staticisms, and completenesses. His classes rang
with the polemic against absolutes, and a new vitality
flowed into the veins of American philosophers. Indeed, the
historic controversy over Pragmatism saved the profession
from iteration and dullness.
Meanwhile (1906), James had been asked to lecture at
Stanford University, in California, and he experienced there
the earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco. The same
year he delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston, afterward
published as Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking
(1907). Various studies appeared—“Does Consciousness Exist?”
“The Thing and Its Relations,” “The Experience of
Activity”—chiefly in The Journal of Philosophy; these were
essays in the extension of the empirical and pragmatic
method, which were collected after James’s death and
published as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The
fundamental point of these writings is that the relations
between things, holding them together or separating them,
are at least as real as the things themselves; that their
function is real; and that no hidden substrata are necessary
to account for the clashes and coherences of the world. The
Empiricism was radical because until this time even
Empiricists believed in a metaphysical ground like the
hidden turtle of Hindu mythology on whose back the cosmic
elephant rode.
James was now the centre of a new life for philosophy in
the English-speaking world. The continentals did not “get”
Pragmatism; if its German opponents altogether misunderstood
it, its Italian adherents—among them, of all people, the
critic and devastating iconoclast Giovanni Papini—travestied
it. In England it was championed by F.C.S. Schiller, in the
United States by John Dewey and his school, in China by Hu
Shih. In 1907 James gave his last course at Harvard. In the
spring he repeated the lectures on Pragmatism at Columbia
University. It was as if a new prophet had come; the lecture
halls were as crowded on the last day as on the first, with
people standing outside the door. Shortly afterward came an
invitation to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester
College, Oxford. These lectures, published in 1909 as A
Pluralistic Universe, state, in a more systematic and less
technical way than the Essays, the same essential positions.
They present, in addition, certain religious overbeliefs of
James’s, which further thinking—if the implications of the
posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy may be trusted—was to
mitigate. These overbeliefs involve a panpsychistic
interpretation of experience (one that ascribes a psychic
aspect to all of nature) that goes beyond radical Empiricism
and the pragmatic rule into conventional metaphysics.
Home again, James found himself working, against growing
physical trouble, upon the material that was partially
published after his death as Some Problems of Philosophy
(1911). He also collected his occasional pieces in the
controversy over Pragmatism and published them as The
Meaning of Truth (1909). Finally, his physical discomfort
exceeded even his remarkable voluntary endurance. After a
fruitless trip to Europe in search of a cure, he returned,
going straight to the country home in New Hampshire, where
he died in 1910.
Significance and influence
In psychology, James’s work is of course dated, but it is
dated as is Galileo’s in physics or Charles Darwin’s in
biology because it is the originative matrix of the great
variety of new developments that are the current vogue. In
philosophy, his positive work is still prophetic. The world
he argued for was soon reflected in the new physics, as
diversely interpreted, with its resonances from Charles
Peirce, particularly by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell,
and the Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr—a world of
events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next
relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating
in chance, perpetuated by habits (that the scientist calls
laws), and transformed by breaks, spontaneities, and
freedoms. In human nature, James believed, these visible
traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific
event is the individual, whose intervention in history gives
it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history,
as in nature, the continuous flux of change and chance
transforms every being, invalidates every law, and alters
every ideal.
James lived his philosophy. It entered into the texture
and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It
determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted
therapies, such as Christian Science or mind cure, and
repugnant ideals, such as militarism. It made him an
anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the
unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they
appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too
hedged, experiential, and tentative to have become the dogma
of a school. It has functioned rather to implant the germs
of new thought in others than to serve as a standard old
system for others to repeat.
Horace M. Kallen
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PRAGMATISM: A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking
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Type of work: Philosophical essays
Author: William James (1842-1910)
First published: 1907
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No more illuminating or entertaining account of pragmatism has ever
been written than William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old
Ways of Thinking. But this is more than a popular exposition prepared
for the academic audiences of Lowell Institute and Columbia University
during the winter of 1906-1907, it is historic philosophy in the making.
Although James was profoundly influenced by Charles Sanders Pierce, who
invented the basic statement and name of pragmatism, he was in
independent thinker with a distinctive creative direction of his own.
Pierce's essay, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," introduced the pragmatic
notion that ideas are clarified by considering what we would expect in
the way of experience if we were to act in a certain manner. The whole
of our conception of the "sensible effects" of an object is the whole of
our conception of the objects, according to Peirce. This essay, clear,
radical, entertaining, appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in
January, 1878. But professional philosophers were not interested in
theory advanced by a mathematician, particularly when the theory went
against the prevailing idealism of American philosophers. It was not
until James revived the idea in 1898 with a talk on "Philosophical
Conceptions and Practical Results" that the pragmatic philosophy began
to stir up controversy. With the lectures on meaning and truth which
were published under the titles Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, the
former in 1907 and the latter in 1909, James brought pragmatism into the
forefront of American thought.
In his first lecture on "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," James
distinguished between the "tender-minded" and the "tough-minded" in
temperament, the former inclining toward a philosophy that is rational,
religious, dogmatic, idealistic, and optimistic, and the latter, the
tough-minded, inclining toward a philosophy that is empirical,
irreligious, skeptical, materialistic, and pessimistic. He then went on
to state his conviction that philosophy can satisfy both temperaments by
becoming pragmatic.
His lecture on the pragmatic method begins with one of the most
entertaining anecdotes in philosophical discourse. James describes a
discussion by a group of philosophers on this question: Does a man go
around a squirrel that is on a tree trunk if the squirrel keeps moving
on the tree so that the trunk is always between himself and the man?
Some of the philosophers claimed that the man did not go around the
squirrel, while others claimed that he did. James settled the matter by
saying "which party is right depends on what you practically mean by
'going round* the squirrel." It could be said that the man goes around
the squirrel since he passes from the north of the squirrel to the east,
south, and west of the squirrel. On the other hand, the man could be
said not to go around the squirrel since he is never able to get on the
various sides of the squirrel—on the right of him, then behind him, and
so forth. "Make the distinction," James said, "and there is no occasion
for any further dispute,"
James then applied the method to a number of perennial philosophical
problems, but only after a careful exposition of the meaning of
pragmatism. He described the pragmatic method as a way of interpreting
ideas by discovering their practical consequences—that is, the
difference the idea's truth would make in our experience. He asks, "What
difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather
than that notion were true?" and he replies, "If no practical difference
whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same
thing, and all dispute is idle."
In his lecture James argued that the pragmatic method was not new;
Socrates, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume had used it. But what was
new was the explicit formulation of the method and a new faith in its
power. Pragmatism is to be understood, however, not as a set of grand
theories but as a method which turns attention away from first
principles and absolutes and directs it to facts, consequences, and
results in our experience.
A bare declaration would hardly have been enough to make pragmatism
famous. James devoted a considerable part of his lectures to brief
examples of the application of the pragmatic method. He cited with
approval Berkeley's analysis of matter as made up of sensations.
Sensations, he said, "are the cash-value of the term. The difference
matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations .
. ." Similarly, Locke applied the pragmatic method, James claimed, when
he discovered that unless by "spirit" we mean consciousness, we mean
nothing by the term.
Is materialism or theism true? Is the universe simply matter acting and
interacting, or is God involved? James considers this problem
pragmatically and reaches a curious result. As far as the past is
concerned, he says, it makes no difference. If rival theories are meant
to explain what is the case and if it makes no difference in our
experience which theory is true, then the theories do not differ in
meaning. If one considers the difference now and in the future, however,
the case is different: "Materialism means simply the denial that the
moral order is eternal. . . spiritualism means the affirmation of an
eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope."
To this kind of analysis some critics have answered with the charge that
James is one of the "tender-minded" philosophers he spoke harshly of in
his earlier lectures. But throughout the course of this series of
lectures and in subsequent books James continued to use pragmatism as a
way of combining the tough and tender temperaments. He extended the use
of the term "difference" so that the meaning of an idea or term was no
longer to be understood merely in terms of sense experiences, as Peirce
had urged, but also in terms of passionate differences, of effects upon
human hopes and fears. The essays in Pragmatism show this liberalizing
tendency hard at work.
The temperate tone of James's suggestions concerning the religious
hypothesis is clear in one of his later lectures in the book,
"Pragmatism and Religion," in which he writes that "Pragmatism has to
postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of
religion is going to work best in the long run." He states again that
the tough-minded can be satisfied with "the hurly-burly of the sensible
facts of nature." and that the tender-minded can take up a monistic form
of religion; but for those who mix temperaments, as James does, a
religious synthesis that is moralistic and pluralistic, allowing for
human development and creativity in various directions, is to be
preferred.
Pragmatism is important not only as a clear statement of the pragmatic
method and as an illustration of its application to certain central
problems but also as an exposition, although introductory, of James's
pragmatic theory of truth. His ideas were developed more fully two years
later in The Meaning of Truth.
Beginning with the common notion that truth is a property of ideas that
agree with reality, James proceeded to ask what was meant by the term
"agreement." He decided that the conception of truth as a static
relation between an idea and reality was in error, that pragmatic
analysis shows that true ideas are those which can eventually be
verified, and that an idea is said to be verified when it leads us
usefully to an anticipated conclusion. Since verification is a process,
it becomes appropriate to say that truth "happens to" an idea, and that
an idea "becomes true, is made true by events." A revealing summary
statement is this: "The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the
expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the
expedient in the way of our behaving."
The ambiguity of James's account, an ambiguity which he did not succeed
in removing, allows extremes of interpretation. On the one hand, a
reader might take the tender-minded route, something in the manner of
James himself, and argue that all kinds of beliefs about God, freedom,
and immortality are true in so far as they lead a man usefully in the
course of his life. On the other hand, a tough-minded reader might be
inclined to agree with James that an idea is true if the expectations in
terms of which the idea makes sense are expectations that would be met,
if one acted—but he might reject James's suggestions that this means
that a great many ideas which would ordinarily be regarded as doubtful
"become true" when they satisfy the emotional needs of a believer.
One difficulty with which James was forced to deal because of his theory
of truth resulted, it might be argued, not from his idea of truth as the
"workableness" of an idea, but from his inadequate analyses of the
meanings of certain terms such as "God," "freedom" and "design." James
maintained that, pragmatically speaking, these terms all meant the same
thing, namely, the presence of "promise" in the world. If this were so,
then it would be plausible to suppose that if the idea that the world is
promising works out, the idea is true. But if James's analysis is
mistaken, if "God" means more than the possibility of things working out
for the better, James's claim that beliefs about God are true if they
work loses its plausibility.
Whatever its philosophic faults, Pragmatism is saved by its philosophic
virtues. For the general reader it offers the rare experience of
confronting first-rate ideas by way of a clear and entertaining, even
informal, style.
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