William James

The American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) is considered America's major philosopher and one of the great psychologists of all times.

Member of an illustrious family which included his younger brother, the novelist Henry James, William James was born in New York and reared there and in Europe by adoring parents. The family went repeatedly for long and intimate visits to the great cultural centers of England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. William's cosmopolitanism went deep; when in Europe he always felt eager to be home again, and when in America he was homesick for Europe.

James's Education

James was equally interested in art (he almost became a painter), in literature, in philosophy, and in science (he made a visit as a field naturalist under Louis Agassiz to the Amazon and achieved broad science training and a medical degree at Harvard in 1869). In these same years he was studying philosophy and physiology, notably in Germany, where he attended lectures and saw the laboratory work of such great leaders as Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolf Virchow. But James was also drawn very vigorously into the pioneering intellectual adventures of the America of the mid-19th century, notably its new religious movement.

As an ardent evolutionist, William James saw many ways in which the mind could be fruitfully regarded as the organ of primary adaptation to the environment, in a full Darwinian sense, and how all its functions - whether cognitive, emotional, or impulsive - could be viewed in evolutionary terms. This conception drew him to a philosophy which later he was to call pragmatism; it constitutes one of the major bridges between his psychology and his philosophy.

Despite his eager and strenuous ways, as shown in his mountain rambles with his brother Henry, James was not strong, and in the 1860s and early 1870s he was subject to ill health, which included much depression and doubt of his own worth. During this period, however, he read the French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier on the problem of the freedom of the will and came suddenly and firmly to the conviction that he could, by his own act of free will, make himself a well man. His own life and the testimony of the family bear out the profundity of this experience.

James's appointment to a junior teaching position at Harvard in 1872 set him on a new professional track. He was to teach anatomy and physiology to undergraduate students, and he soon set up a small psychological laboratory, emphasizing the fact that it was not a classical "mental philosophy" that he was to teach but a physiological and experimental science. It is plain from his letters to his brother that he was already thinking of himself as committed to the new laboratory approach to psychology. This does not, however, mean that he was willing to relinquish any of his other manifold interests. He was soon publishing original and brilliant articles in the professional journals of psychology and philosophy. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.

Principles of Psychology

Also in 1878 James began writing a comprehensive treatise and textbook, Principles of Psychology, the two volumes of which, intended for 1880, finally appeared in 1890. This extraordinary treatise brought him worldwide response and has continued everywhere to be regarded as one of the few great comprehensive treatises that modern psychology has produced.

Five of the chapters are worthy of special note: (1) The chapter dealing with "habit," considered as a prime factor so deeply organized within one as to make each one the creature of a system of inbuilt ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. (2) "Emotion," the subjective or inner aspect of the "coarser" organic physiological responses to stress situations, such as fear and rage, with a place also provided for the subtler emotions, entering into the intellectual and esthetic life. (3) The "consciousness of self," the various ways in which one knows one's self and the aspects of one's own individuality that are most precious to one. (4) The "stream of thought," the complex, dynamic, ever-changing world of subjectivity in which there is no firmly fixed invariant part, no unalterable unit, except that each person is always aware that it is his own continuous past, present, and anticipated future. (5) The "will." The very long and rich chapter on the will provides for many "types of decision" and for the experience of effort when "we ourselves incline the beam." An empirical psychology must accept as a reality the experience of making an effortful decision; this leaves the ultimate philosophical question of the nature of such freedom as a problem beyond the scope of scientific psychology as such.

James's treatment indeed is embedded in the context of a lifetime preoccupation with the nature of freedom. James recurred to this problem in other writings again and again. In his lecture "The Will to Believe," he argued that spontaneous and free decisions may initiate a new path through life, and the will does, in fact, implement beliefs; the "will to believe," instead of being intellectually disreputable, may engender beliefs which are creative. He made clear the basic differentiation to be made between "hard determinism," or fatalism, and "soft determinism," in which persons are part of the causal texture of reality, products of real forces, and in turn forces which create new realities. Soft determinism is still determinism, but it gives the freedom to act in terms of what one is. This is still to be distinguished from the kind of freedom represented by a belief in undetermined action.

Not only was the Principles of Psychology universally acclaimed, but James, as teacher, dynamically taught a generation concerned with psychology and its relation to life. The playwright and poet Gertrude Stein, for example, was a Radcliffe-Harvard student of James, who put the notion of the "stream of thought" or "stream of consciousness" to work in American letters. Many of his lectures, both at Harvard and elsewhere, became landmarks of the era of social confrontation, notably "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he pleaded for warlike intensities in devotion to nonwar like social struggles.

During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, James was plainly moving away from the new "experimental psychology" of the university laboratories to the world of personal, subjective, philosophically challenging problems, such as the perennial problem of whether there is really any truth independent of the working principles which are known to be effective in one's own action (pragmatism). These questions were being raised in new form by many, notably Charles Peirce, and James himself offered the term pragmatism as "a new name for some old ways of thinking." During the last years of his life he was constantly asked to explain and develop pragmatism, and it became a major American way of thinking.

Lectures on Philosophy

Very great indeed was the impact of James's extraordinary lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901 under the title "The Varieties of Religious Experience." This is regarded by many as the first great, insightful application of psychology to the study of the religious life. Insisting that the religious experience of "individual men in their solitude" must be studied independently of medical preconceptions, he distinguished between the "religion of healthymindedness" and the "sick soul." James showed how a wider and deeper range of sensitivity, often shown by the sick soul, may lead to meaningful experiences of deep change or conversion and to states of ecstasy and self-renewal.

The concluding lectures were given to the psychology of mystical experience as represented in the mystical tradition of such men as Plotinus and of modern men, Eastern and Western, who were speaking and writing of "cosmic consciousness." To James it appeared that the message of mystical experience, the "windows" into experience which it offered, could well be absolute and compelling for the individual, though, of course, not compelling to the outside observer or analyst who has not had such experiences. Here he stressed the importance of many "altered states of consciousness." (He himself studied nitrous oxide intoxication and was keenly interested in the new drug experiences of the day as well as in a variety of trance and hypnotic states: a person's present mode of consciousness is only one from among many "states of consciousness that exist.")

James strongly supported "mental healing." He went to the Boston State House to protest the attempt of many physicians to require non medical practitioners to take a type of medical examination as a qualification for practice; he insisted that no one can really tell by what means the sick are healed. He had himself, shortly before that time, sought help from a "healer" and remained entirely empirical regarding the question of gains in health due to unorthodox sources.

Psychical Research

In the same empirical spirit James pursued throughout his life many types of psychological phenomena rejected by official science, such as apparitions, hauntings, and spiritualist trance mediumship. In 1884 he discovered Mrs. L. E. Piper, who, in the sittings given to his wife and his wife's mother, had referred to information which they were positive Piper could not have acquired through any normal channel. In his own sittings, equally convincing evidence was given, and many of James's professional friends, both in the United States and in Britain, had similar experiences which entirely convinced them of the reality of her powers, which, at the very least, included telepathy from distant persons. He took the initiative in organizing an American counterpart to the Society for Psychical Research, which had just been launched in London in 1882. He made firsthand studies of the powers of other clairvoyants whose work was drawn to his attention. In a much-quoted essay, "What Psychical Research Has Accomplished," he asserted that telepathy, as represented by Piper's experiences, constituted a true breakthrough into a world of vast scientific importance. Her powers pointed to a new kind of reality. Regarding the spiritualist conviction that survival of death was established through such research, he remained uncertain.

James was also profoundly impressed by the current French studies of "subconscious ideas." Pierre Janet, for example, had apparently shown that in deep hypnotic trance a man may act upon ideas which have been planted in his mind, though he is plainly not conscious at the time. He gave much attention likewise to dreaming, to hypnotic consciousness, and to multiple personality. He felt that Sigmund Freud was one of those to whom the future belonged. In his last years his emphasis was not on rounding out a system of ideas but in gaining new varieties of experience. His expression "radical empiricism" is his fortunate summary of a whole approach to life. He was empirical in the sense of looking always for the quality of immediate experience and remaining loyal to this first reality, as against the abstractions which seek an "absolute," an approach characteristic of much of the German, British, and American philosophy of his era. He was radical in the sense that he wanted to find the very roots of reality in the nature of experience itself. Faith healing, psychical research, and the stream of consciousness were all to be embraced for the same reason: they offered realities which were incapable of being rationally ruled out of their right to exist. So, too, the "pluralistic universe" of which he wrote in the last years, when pragmatism was everywhere being discussed, was a loosely articulated collection of separate parts, each aspect of which must be respected although a philosophically unified system cannot be created from it.

Further Reading

James's correspondence was edited by his son, Henry James, The Letters of William James (1920). Robert C. LeClair edited The Letters of William James and Theodore Flournoy (1966). The two indispensable works for studying James are Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (2 vols., 1935), and Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (1967). Also useful are Edward C. Moore, William James (1965), and Bernard P. Brennan, William James (1968). For a discussion of William, his brother Henry, and his father Henry, Sr., see C. Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses: A Family of Minds (1932).

Additional Sources

Bjork, Daniel W., The compromised scientist: William James in the Development of American psychology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Bjork, Daniel W., William James: the center of his vision, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Feinstein, Howard M., Becoming William James, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Lewis, R. W. B. (Richard Warrington Baldwin), The Jameses: a family narrative, New York: Anchor Books, 1993.

Weissbourd, Katherine, Growing up in the James family: Henry James, Sr., as son and father, Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985.

William James remembered, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

For more information on William James, visit Britannica.com.

James, William (1842-1910) American psychologist and philosopher. James was born into a wealthy New York family, and surrounded from an early age by a humanitarian, literary, and scholarly family life (his father was a theologian, and his brother the novelist Henry James). James had already spent years in Europe and begun an education as an artist, when he entered Harvard medical school in 1863, and he travelled in Brazil and Europe before he graduated with a medical degree in 1869. There followed years lecturing both on psychology and philosophy. James's first major work was the two-volume Principles of Psychology (1890), a work that does justice both to the scientific, laboratory study of experimental psychology, and the importance of a sound phenomenology of experience. James's own emotional needs gave him an abiding interest in problems of religion, freedom, and ethics; the popularity of these themes and his lucid and accessible style made James the most influential American philosopher of the beginning of the 20th century. His Gifford Lectures of 1901-2 were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature; they are widely regarded as the most important work on religion produced in America (although see Santayana).

The philosophy of pragmatism, of which together with Peirce he is the founding figure, became a rallying-point for opposition to absolute idealism. Its central tenets are, however, not easy to disentangle in James. He believed that philosophies express large currents of feeling as much as rigorous intellectual theorems, so that exactitude is not a particular virtue, and refuting a philosopher by seizing upon and refuting some statement is like trying to divert a river by planting a stick in it. This goes some way towards excusing his lecturer's fondness for aphorism and overstatement. Formulae such as ‘the true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving’ (Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907, p. 222) brought instant denunciation, and James wrote many papers (collected in The Meaning of Truth, 1909) softening the doctrine and replying to detractors. Part of the trouble is that whilst James is in many respects a humanist and empiricist, he also wanted to preserve a place for religious belief, allowable if it ‘works’, in spite of the fact that working is here not the survival of verification or integration with the rest of our world view, but the generation of emotional benefits. James's later philosophy also included a ‘radical empiricism’ in which streams of experience regarded in one way constitute minds, and in another way constitute the objects of the external world (see also neutral monism). As well as those mentioned, major works include The Will to Believe (1897) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

(1842-1910), psychologist, theologian, and philosopher. James's family background and his travels, wide interests, and friendliness combined with his scholarly work to make him internationally famous. His Irish immigrant grandfather, also named William, had made the family fortune in Albany, partly from the Erie Canal. His father, Henry, a man of leisure, was well known in American and English literary and theological circles, and his younger brother, Henry, was the famous novelist.

William himself was a polyglot cosmopolitan. He studied in Bonn, Boulogne, Geneva, London, and Paris. Throughout his life he often returned to Europe to visit friends, give lectures, receive honors from universities, or seek health cures. (He was slight, easily fatigued, and often ill; at twenty-eight, he suffered a prolonged, almost suicidal depression.)

James was also a polymath. His first serious ambition was to be a painter, but he turned from that to the study of chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, receiving an M.D. at age twenty-seven. He went up the Amazon with Louis Agassiz in 1865 to collect zoological specimens. As a Harvard professor, he started by teaching physiology and then, in turn, anatomy, psychology, and philosophy. Other strong interests included religion, psychic research, self-help psychotherapy, and education.

Principles of Psychology (1890), ten years in the writing, was his magnum opus. Written in his typical concrete, humorous, colloquial, and metaphoric style, it was interesting to both students and professionals. It became the most widely used text in the field and is still by far the best summary of the science of psychology at that time. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) became and remains his most popular book. It is filled with case studies of people whose lives were changed by mystical experiences. Although his intent was scientific, it still brings to many readers a confirmation of their own religious faith. James himself was noncommittal about mystical phenomena, but the skepticism of orthodox scientists regarding the subject aroused his sympathy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research and president of the English society.

Pragmatism (1907) was James's major contribution to philosophy. He viewed pragmatism as a means of moderating the conflicts between those with religious and those with scientific values. Pragmatism stresses the importance of evaluating ideas not by their origins but by their consequences. James did not mean by this worldly success, as is often assumed, but rather psychological, artistic, and moral consequences. Thus, for example, in the argument over abortion, pragmatism would advocate looking away from the origins of the prolife and prochoice principles and considering the actual consequences of enacting them into law.

Some thought that James had an excessive sympathy for lonely souls and lost causes. His earnestness, however, was softened by his love of fun and absence of self-righteousness. And the attention, affection, and recognition he lavished on others was repaid in kind by his friends in the arts and sciences. John Dewey called him "the greatest of American psychologists, a case of James first and no second"; Bertrand Russell considered him "the most widely known of contemporary philosophers"; and the Boston Evening Transcript said he was "the greatest of contemporary Americans."

Bibliography:

William James, The Letters of William James, edited by his son Henry James (1920); R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (1954).

Author:

Henry Clay Smith

See also James, Henry.

James, William, 1842–1910, American philosopher, b. New York City, M.D. Harvard, 1869; son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James and brother of the novelist Henry James. In 1872 he joined the Harvard faculty as lecturer on anatomy and physiology, continuing to teach until 1907, after 1880 in the department of psychology and philosophy. In 1890 he published his brilliant and epoch-making Principles of Psychology, in which the seeds of his philosophy are already discernible. James's fascinating style and his broad culture and cosmopolitan outlook made him the most influential American thinker of his day.

His philosophy has three principal aspects—voluntarism, pragmatism, and “radical empiricism.” He construes consciousness as essentially active, selective, interested, teleological. We “carve out” our world from “the jointless continuity of space.” Will and interest are thus primary; knowledge is instrumental. The true is “only the expedient in our way of thinking.” Ideas do not reproduce objects, but prepare for, or lead the way to, them. The function of an idea is to indicate “what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare.” This theory of knowledge James called pragmatism, a term already used by Charles S. Peirce. James's “radical empiricism” is a philosophy of “pure experience,” which rejects all transcendent principles and finds experience organized by means of “conjunctive relations” that are as much a matter of direct experience as things themselves. Moreover, James regards consciousness as only one type of conjunctive relation within experience, not as an entity above, or distinct from, its experience. James's other philosophical writings include The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Bibliography

See his letters (ed. by his son Henry James, 1920); the Harvard Univ. Press edition of The Works of William James (17 vol., 1975–88); biographies by E. C. Moore (1965), G. W. Allen (1967), and L. Simon (1998); studies by B. P. Brennan (1968), J. Wild (1969), and P. K. Dooley (1974); R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (2 vol. 1935, abr. ed. 1948) and In the Spirit of William James (1938, repr. 1958); H. S. Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (1981); J. Barzun, A Stroll with William James (1984). See also studies of the James family by F. O. Matthiessen (1947), R. W. B. Lewis (1991), and P. Fisher (2008).

(1842–1910)

William James was the American philosopher whose work in psychology established that science as an important element in the revision of social and philosophical doctrines at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thereafter it was no longer possible to erect systems in purely deductive fashion. All thought must take account of the deliverances of current natural science, and particularly the branch relating to man's mind. This respect for the organized experience of the laboratory inevitably influenced educational theory and practice, then still known by their proper name of pedagogy.

But James was not merely a scientist in psychology and a proponent of scientific rigor in moral philosophy, including education. He was a philosophical genius - the greatest that America has produced - who touched upon every department of life and culture and who ranks as a chief architect of the reconstruction in Western thought that took place in the 1890s. In the company of Nietzsche, Dilthey, Renouvier, Bergson, Mach, Vaihinger, and Samuel Butler, he led the revolt against orthodox scientism, Spencerism, and materialism and contributed to that enlargement of outlook that affected the whole range of feeling and opinion and has since earned the name of Neo-Romanticism. Every academic discipline and every art was involved in the change; and, in each, thinkers of uncommon scope laid the foundation for the new systems of ideas on which the twentieth century still lives.

William James was in a favored position for adding something unique to the movement: He possessed the American experience as his birth-right and was early acclimated to European ways, British and Continental. He studied in Germany and was fluent in both German and French, and his family circumstances were propitious. He was the eldest son of Henry James Sr., son of the original William James who had emigrated from Ireland to this country and made a fortune. Henry Sr. could devote himself to study and did so. His original ideas on religion and society won no acceptance in his day, but they have been found important by modern scholars, and they certainly influenced the two geniuses who were his sons, William the philosopher and Henry the novelist.

William James's own intellectual career is marked by his father's easy unconventionality, which as will be seen permitted long exploration before "settling down." Every shift in his own development is caught up in, and contributory to, his mature work. James wanted at first to become a painter, but he had the critical sense to see that his talent was insufficient. Next he took up chemistry at Harvard, went on to study physiology in response to his interest in living things, and wound up preparing for a medical degree. He interrupted his course to spend a highly formative year as one of Louis Agassiz's assistants in the Thayer expedition to Brazil. He then went abroad, where he read literature, attended university lectures, and became acquainted with the new psychology, which the Germans had made experimental and exact. He returned to take his Harvard M.D. in 1869 and after further study abroad began to teach anatomy and physiology.

It was not long before his inquiring spirit led him to offer courses in the relations of psychology to physiology, for which he soon established the first psychology laboratory in America. After the publication of his great book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, James's work exhibited the flowering of an intellect that had from the beginning been haunted by the enigmas of life and mind: He gave himself exclusively to metaphysics, morals, and religion.

By an oddity of academic arrangements, James was a professor of philosophy four years before he was made a professor of psychology, but nomenclature is irrelevant: His beginnings in the psychology laboratory were very soon followed by his offering of a course in philosophy. In other words, the subjects for him commingled and he was always a philosophical writer and teacher. Those were the great days of the Harvard department of philosophy, and during his thirty-five years of teaching James's direct influence spread over a wide range of students, as disparate as George Santayana and Gertrude Stein.

To the end of the century James, despite his new goals, continued to write and lecture on the subject that had first brought him fame. He pursued his research on the newest topics of abnormal psychology, he read Freud and helped bring him over for a lectureship at Clark University. And what is more to the point of the present entry, between 1892 and 1899, James delivered at a number of places the Talks to Teachers, which were an offshoot of the Psychology and which constitute his important contribution to educational theory.

In any such theory, the assumptions made about the human mind are fundamental and decisive. If "the mind" - which for this most practical of purposes is the pupil's mind - is imagined as a sensitive plate merely, then teaching can take the simple form of making desired impressions on the plate by attending chiefly to the choice and form of those impressions. The rest is done by setting the child to take these in by rote, by repeating rules, by watching and remembering contrived experiments. In other words, the teacher points the camera and pushes the button for a snapshot or time exposure.

No pedagogy has ever been quite so simple, of course, for the least gifted or attentive teacher is aware that the child must exert some effort, be in some way active and not photographically passive, before he can learn the set verses or the multiplication table. So, to start the machinery, a system of rewards and punishments is established, which will by mechanical association strengthen the useful acts of mind or hand and discourage the useless or harmful. In this primitive pedagogy, the pupil's acquirements are deemed a resultant of essentially mechanical forces, and the teacher serves as the manipulator of a wholly environmentalist scheme.

It is unlikely that any good teacher has ever adhered strictly to that role or thought of himself or herself as operating that sort of invisible keyboard. If it were so, no child would ever have learned much of value from any schooling whatever. But it is also true that educational practice always tends toward the crude mechanics just described. And the reasons are obvious: sheer incompetence in many teachers and weariness in the rest. For the two great limitations on classroom performance under any theory are (1) the scarcity of born teachers; and (2) the strenuousness of able and active teaching (which means that even the best teachers can sustain the effort for only a given number of hours at a time).

The state of affairs which James and other school reformers of the 1890s found and sought to remedy was a result of these several deficiencies. The movement of Western nations toward providing free, public, and compulsory education was, it must be remembered, an innovation of the nineteenth century. The inherent difficulties of this new social and cultural goal were great. It made unprecedented demands - on children, parents, administrative systems, and (most important) on the national resources of teaching talent, which are not expandable at will. Theory, too, was wanting for the supervision and teaching of teachers themselves. The confusion that ensued was therefore to be expected. Only a few points were clear: the older pedagogies were too mechanical in their view of the mind; the number of inadequate teachers was excessive; and the exploitive use of the good ones was a danger to the trying-out of mass education.

It was high time, therefore, that psychology put in its word on the subject it supposedly knew all about - the mind. Unfortunately, the mechanical view of the mind existed in two forms - one, as the view natural to ignorant or indifferent persons and, two, as the view that the prevailing scientific metaphor of the time seemed to justify. The universe, according to the Darwin-Spencer philosophy, was a vast machine, and its elements, living or dead, were also moved by the great push-pull of matter like the parts of a machine. The prophets of science - T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, John Fiske - held audiences spellbound with illustrations of this principle, which everyone was sure could be demonstrated in the laboratory. The newest science, German born and bred, was psychophysics, a name which alone was enough to show that the operations of the mind bore the universal character of mechanism. Man was no exception to the law exemplified by the collision of billiard balls or (in more refined form) by the effect of light on a photographic plate.

To be sure, these scientific interpreters of nature would not have subscribed to a simplistic pedagogy if they had ever turned the full force of their minds on the problem of teaching. One of them, Herbert Spencer, did write a fairly sensible tract on education. And the psychophysicists did not entirely blot out the influence of earlier and richer pedagogies, notably that of the German psychologist Johann Herbart, who died in 1841. But on the whole the situation of the schools in the decades of the nineteenth century was critical, and the strictures and exhortations of the reformers tell us very precisely in what ways.

James, with his encyclopedic knowledge of psychology, theoretical and experimental, his mastery of the art of teaching, and his genius for diagnosis in the study of human feeling, was in an ideal position for showing up the false principles, old and new, and propounding the true ones. The root of the matter was to consider the pupil as an active being - not merely a mind to be filled, but complex and growing organism, of which the mind was but one feature. That feature, in turn, was not a receptacle, but an agent with interests, drives, powers, resistances, and peculiarities which together defined a unique person. Nothing can be imagined farther removed from this than a machine built to a pattern and responding passively to external prods and prizes.

Rather, as one marks the difference, the familiar outline appears of the child who presides over the child-centered school of the Progressives - the men and women who came to dominate theory and practice thirty years after James. But it is only the outline of that child, for James was much too wise a philosopher to suppose that doing the opposite of whatever is done will correct present abuses. His Talks to Teachers (1899) fill but a small volume, yet they contain an extremely subtle and complex set of precepts - precepts, not commandments. To follow the precepts one must - alas - use intelligence and judgment, not because James is not clear and definite, but because the teaching situation is infinitely variable - like its object, the child.

To begin with, James does not reject the associationist principle that was the mainstay of the earlier pedagogy. It is a sound principle, but it is not simple or automatic as was once thought. Associations impress the mind not in a one-to-one arrangement, but in groups or constellations, some members of which fight or inhibit each other. Moreover, the structure of the particular mind favors or excludes certain kinds and ranges of associations. It follows that to reach - and teach - any mind, the teacher must multiply the number of cues that will bring to full consciousness in the pupil the points he should retain or remember. The reason for this method, which is in fact less a method than a call to exert the imagination, is that the same reality can be cognized by any number of psychic states. It is accordingly a field theory of thought that James substitutes for the linear-mechanical and would have the teacher act upon.

Throughout his chapters, James moves back and forth from the schoolroom to the world, where the habits and powers of great minds and dull ones can be observed and turned into examples. The point of the shuttling is that there is or should be no difference in kind between what the child is asked to imagine, perform, remember, or reason out and what the grown man does or fails to do. This soon becomes an important criterion. Meanwhile the difference is in degree, which means that the teacher must be aware of differences in development - crudely measured by the age of the child, more closely measured by his rate of maturing, most delicately marked by what is called native ability.

Any teacher starts with the pupil as a lively bouncing creature in which the body and its needs predominate. The curiosity of the child is indeed a sign that mind is present also, but James knows that the "native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of sensation" (1899, p. 92). Hence James recommends that until artificial interests develop, children be taught through objects, things that move, events of dramatic quality, anecdotes in place of propositions. Stressing also the link between instinct (which rules these early interests) and action, James strongly favors letting the child handle the means of instruction, build, take apart, try out, do.

In this commonsense view that instruction should begin by exploiting native interests (which turn out to be physical and active), James is a fore-runner of the Chicago School, of which John Dewey was the instigator and later the idol. But neither James nor Dewey was an innovator in the desert. The European kindergarten movement, the early, scattered elements of the Montessori method, and numerous other reforms of school and preschool instruction were in full swing even before James. Indeed, Rabelais and Rousseau had long since made the identical point about the value for education of having the naturally restless child learn by playing, both because playing is congenial and because it is the fundamental form of learning: trial and error.

That point evidently has to be made over and over again in history. But each time history gives it a special coloring. It was natural that in the period immediately after Darwin, which saw the popular triumph of science, the reminder about the child's activism should be seen as the root of the scientific march of mind; for if play is the germ of trial and error, trial and error is the germ of experimentation. It is this plausible linkage that set Dewey and the Progressives to pursue the scientific analogy to an extreme. For them - at least as educators - the mind is forever facing problems and seeking solutions. Teaching school therefore becomes the art of devising situations that will challenge the problem-solving mind and build up in its child-owner a stronger and stronger capacity to size up, ascertain, verify, and solve.

William James never had to confront this hypothesis head on, but it is clear what form his refutation would have taken. In the first place, not every adult is a scientist, and though it is true that adults who are not scientists encounter problems and resolve them, that activity is but one of many forms that cerebration takes. The poet, the painter, the mystic, the housewife, the salesman, the rabble-rouser, each performs his task differently, even if at times they all resort to "situation analysis" and "problem-solving." We must remember James's assertion that the mind is continuous: it stretches from the kindergarten, where it learns, to the laboratory, where James studies it, just as it stretches from Plato's garden to the London Stock Exchange; which is to say that within the unity of the human mind reigns a great diversity, not reducible to the very special, historically late, and purposely artificial form of scientific reasoning.

According to James, good teaching, therefore, cannot follow a set form; it is not the curing of a weakness, such as the replacement of unreason by reason and superstition by science. Rather, it is the interaction of a practiced or well-filled mind with one on its way to the same state. The contents of any mind at any moment - that which James first called "the stream of consciousness" - is an ever-flowing rush of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. The art of teaching consists in helping to develop in the child the power to control this stream, to sort out its objects, classify their kinds, observe their relationships, and then multiply their significant associations.

In the abstract, this work may be called attending; the power generated is Attention. James is particularly valuable on this faculty. He points out that if passive attention is sustained by making subject matter continuously interesting, active attention will not develop. He knows that a good part of any subject for any learner of whatever age is bound to be dull; mastering it is drudgery. Therefore, while he encourages the teacher to arouse the pupil's interest in the dull parts of the work by associating them closely with the more interesting through showing unsuspected facets, by challenging pugnacity to overcome difficulty, by dwelling on the concrete effects of the abstract, and by any other means that ingenuity can supply, he does not lose sight of the goal. All this effort at building up enticing associations is to "lend to the subject…an interest sufficient tolet loose the effort" of deliberate attention (1899, p.110).

Not the precept alone but its pattern has significance. Throughout his educational doctrine, James is at pains to counteract what he calls the "softer pedagogy" by qualifying its blind zeal. The softer pedagogy is that which, having seized on a good teaching principle, such as "make the work interesting," forgets that it is only a device and reduces the end of education to its means: What we can't make interesting we won't teach - or at least not require; there is a good reason for the pupil's not learning it: it's not interesting. On the contrary, says James, education that works for voluntary attention is "the education par excellence" (1890, p. 424).

The Jamesian correctives spring from a sense of the original complexity of the human mind. It is not a machine that mysteriously gets more complicated. Thus, when James recommends the use of objects, the indulgence of childish touching, building, and trying out, it is not in order to ingrain a habit of fiddling, but in order to develop mental powers that transcend the tangible and even the visual. Again, he refuses to give objects primacy over words or to deride the utility of abstraction: "…words…are the handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very rapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sensations more easily than any other items of our experience" (1890, p. 266). And he goes on to remark that the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the less they depend on visualization. The implications for educational method, when we consider its evolution since 1890 and are aware that the abandonment of teaching to read has lately been urged on the strength of the visual substitutes at our disposal, deserve our closest attention.

The retreat from the word was already beginning in James's time and he warned against its dangers. He bore incessant witness to the important connection between words and memory and its role in making knowledge secure. "I should say therefore, that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now exactly recollect" (1899, pp. 131 - 132). The description seems to fit the student mind that does best at "objective" examinations, where the case or quotation is helpfully supplied. To summon it up unaided requires a more athletic type of mind, developed by training in verbal memory.

It is clear that James's standard of performance, for both teacher and pupil, was quite simply the bestmind. He was in that sense a thorough educational democrat, unwilling to classify and mark down intelligences ahead of time, on the basis of their background or their probable future. Everybody had a chance to rival the greatest; education was the means of finding out who could succeed, while helping all equally in the effort. This assumption and the attitude it dictates is the opposite of competing with oneself alone, setting one's own standards, and pursuing only one's own "needs" - which boil down to one's own momentary wants.

All these limiting, hierarchical ideas were in the air when James wrote and lectured, and he put his finger on their unfortunate cause: "Our modern reformers…write too exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;…Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms" (1899, p.151). The implication here - and experience justifies it - is that the pupils are often brighter than their teachers: "Too many school children 'see'…'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them." The absurdity of believing that geography begins and ends with "the school-yard and neighboring hill" is a case in point. The child soon comes to think of all schooling as contemptible make-believe - and James with prophetic vision denounces the Dick-and-Jane reading books as yet unheard of: "School children can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the only kind of things their minds can digest" (1899, pp. 151 - 152).

A principal cause of James's impatience with spoon-feeding methods, with educational research and statistics ("those unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements"), with theoretical advice, including his own ("a perceptive teacher…will be of much more value"), is his awareness of the deadly grip of habit (1899, p. 136). "Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state" (1899, p. 77).

If this is true, how much more to blame are the teachers whose "method" in instruction becomes the mold of a habit imposed on the young mind. For James, a right education is precisely the power to sidestep ruts, to link ideas freely over a wide range, to exert voluntary attention, to be rich in suggestion and invention, and to be prompt in receptivity. He repeatedly contrasts the dry, prosaic mind with the witty and imaginative. And since knowledge and experience alike tell him that this balance of freedom and control which he disiderates depends on a well-furnished and strenuously trained mind, he wants teachers capable of arousing passion in their charges - the "whole mind working together." Native deficiencies in this or that faculty can be over-come or ignored: "In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you." And at the same time he shows a warm understanding of the non-academic type. The student who cuts a poor figure in examinations may in the end do better than "the glib and ready reproducer," just because of deeper passions and of "combining power less commonplace" (1899, pp. 137, 143).

It comes as no surprise, then, that James ends by defining education not in intellectual terms - though his whole impetus is toward intellect - but in terms that unite emotion and action: education is "the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior…. To think is the moral act:" it "is the secret of will,…it is the secret of memory…. Thus are your pupils to besaved: first, by the stock of ideas with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention that they can exert in holding to the right ones…. ; and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter to which they have been successfully trained" (1899, pp. 29, 186 - 188).

The "saving" is of course from the blind compulsion of determinism reinforced by bad habit. James's pronouncements about education rest upon a mass of physiological and psychological facts and are abundantly illustrated by reference to them. The reflex arc is as much a condition of learning as the stream of thought; the individual type of memory (visual, auditory, muscular) as determinative as the hereditary constitution of the neural synapses. But James is not a materialist, for he can find no evidence that these factors which limit or condition thought also produce it. And at the same time he finds in man's power of fixing the mind upon an idea - the power of thinking - a range of freedom to be exploited.

These considerations and conclusions bring us back to the starting point. If the nascent mind to be taught in the schoolroom is not a machine, if it is continuous and unified in kind, but diversified in quality and degree, if its operations are not exclusively analytic and directed at problem-solving, what sort of mind is it, in a single word? And what sort of educational theory will suit its needs? To answer the second question first, psychology can and ought to give the teacher help, but it is a great mistake to think that "the science of the mind's laws" can serve to define "programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality" (1899, pp. 7 - 8).

In short, no matter which way we turn, we cannot in education get away from the work of the mind or substitute for it an ingenious abstraction. How then does the mind work? The scientific way, we saw, was but a special form of its activity; what is the inclusive mode, or as we just asked, what sort of mind? It is, so to put it, an artistic mind: it is by a kind of artistry that we perceive reality, which is the mind's most inclusive task. True, sensations hold a controlling position commanding our belief in what is real, but not all sensations are "deemed equally real. The more practically important ones, the more permanent ones, and the more aesthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the mass, to be believed in most of all; the others are degraded to the position of mere signs and suggestions of these" (1890, p. 305). This description of the mind's seizing upon reality fairly parallels the operations of the artist upon his materials for the creation of another kind of reality: it is the pragmatic method, which only means human impulse seeking convenience and delight, seeking the permanent and the recognizable, the orderly and the satisfying. All education therefore aims at preparing the mind to fulfill its native tendencies and thereby to grasp and enjoy an enlarged order of multifarious reality.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. 1967. William James: A Biography. New York: Viking Press.

Bakewell, Charles M., ed. 1917. Selected Papers on Philosophy by William James. Everyman's Library. New York: Dutton.

Barzun, Jacques. 1956. "William James and the Clue to Art." In The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors, Classic and Modern. New York: Harper.

Blanshard, Brand, and Schneider, Herbert W., eds. 1942. In Commemoration of William James, 1842 - 1942. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cremin, Lawrence A. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876 - 1957. New York: Knopf.

Dewey, John. 1910. How We Think. New York: Heath.

Hechinger, Grace, and Hechinger, Fred M. 1963. Teenage Tyranny. New York: Morrow.

James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. American Science Series. Advanced Course. 2 Vols. New York: Holt.

James, William. 1892. Psychology. American Science Series. Briefer Course. New York: Holt.

James, William. 1916. Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899). New York: Holt.

Kallen, Horace M., ed. 1953. The Philosophy of William James. Selected from his chief works. With an introduction by Horace M. Kallen. New York: Modern Library.

Key, Ellen K. 1909. The Century of the Child. New York and London: Putnam.

Perry, Ralph Barton. 1948. The Thought and Character of William James. Briefer Version. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

— JACQUES BARZUN

(1842-1910)

1890	The Principles of Psychology. The groundbreaking summary of contemporary views in psychology by the Harvard physiologist and brother of Henry James helps establish the field as a science. The work is immediately adopted as a college textbook. James's chapter "The Stream of Thought" is considered an influence in the eventual development of the stream of consciousness, the literary technique employing a nonlinear, fluid conception of thought and consciousness.
1897	The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. James's essays are important early indicators of the drift of his thinking, which later would produce Pragmatism (1907) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
1902	The Varieties of Religious Experiences. James submits religious states of consciousness to a psychological interpretation, asserting the practical value of religious belief as measured by personal happiness and positive human action.
1907	Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute and at Columbia in 1906 and 1907 present James's major philosophical tenets of a "mediating system" that avoids abstractions, "pretended absolutes and origins" toward "facts, towards action, and towards power." A follow-up, The Meaning of Truth, would appear in 1909.
1909	The Meaning of Truth and The Pluralistic Universe. The first is a sequel to Pragmatism (1907), which amplifies its tenets and defends James's theories against the attacks prompted by the first book. The second is a further elaboration of his metaphysical beliefs, based on a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1908.
1911	Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. James's unfinished treatise is published posthumously. It gives an overview of his pragmatic philosophy whereby "empiricism and rationalism may join hands in a concrete view of life."
1912	Essays in Radical Empiricism. This posthumously published collection of essays asserts James's central thesis that "the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience."

(1842-1910)

Professor of psychology at Harvard University and one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, and obtained his M.D. in 1870 from Harvard Medical School. In 1872 he was appointed instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard College. He went on to study psychology and hygiene and in 1890 published his famous work The Principles of Psychology. In 1897 James became professor of philosophy at Harvard and lectured at universities in the United States and Britain. He developed the doctrine of pragmatism, and one of his most important philosophical books is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which has been an influential work in the attempt to reconcile science and religion.

The first case that piqued James's interest in psychic phenomena is reported in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (vol. 1, part 2, pp. 221-31). It is the case of a drowned girl whose body was seen by a Mrs. Titus of Lebanon, New Hampshire, in a dream. The girl's head was under the timber trussing of a bridge at Enfield. Divers had searched for the girl's body in vain, but following Titus's vision they found it.

The discovery of Leonora Piper 's mediumship for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was attributed to James. His mother-in-law, led by curiosity, paid a visit to Piper in 1885. She returned with a perplexing story. Seeking a simple explanation for the supernatural nature of the facts related to him, James took a rationalist view. Then a few days later, with his wife, he went to get a direct personal impression. The Jameses arrived unannounced, and they were careful not to make any reference to a relative who had preceded them. James later noted: "My impression after this first visit was that Mrs. P. was either possessed of supernormal powers or knew the members of my wife's family by sight and had by some lucky coincidence become acquainted with such a multitude of their domestic circumstances as to produce the startling impression which she did. My later knowledge of her sittings and personal acquaintance with her has led me to absolutely reject the latter explanation, and to believe that she has supernormal powers."

For 18 months after his first experiments, James was virtually in charge of all arrangements for Piper's séances. When, because of other duties, he dropped his inquiries for a period of two years, he wrote to the SPR (London) and induced them to engage Piper for experiments. "The result," he wrote of his personal investigations, "is to make me feel as absolutely certain as I am of any personal fact in the world that she knows things in her trances which she cannot possibly have heard in her waking state." He admitted there was a strong case in favor of survival when the following message, obtained while a Ms. Robbins had a sitting with Piper, was submitted to him: "There is a person named Child, who has suddenly come and sends his love to William and to his own wife who is living. He says L …" Neither Robbins nor Piper knew Child, who was an intimate friend of James and whose Christian name began with L.

In the autumn of 1899 Piper visited James at his country house in New Hampshire. There he came to know her personally better than ever before. "It was in great measure," wrote Alta L. Piper in her biography of the medium, "due to his sympathetic encouragement and understanding of the many difficulties, with which she found herself confronted in the early days of her career, that my mother was able to adhere unfalteringly to the onerous course which she had set herself to follow."

In an often quoted lecture in 1890 James declared: "To upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstration that no crow is black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient." Since his proclamation of Piper as his "one white crow," the concept of the single "white crow" has become a cliché in psychical research.

James published several papers in the Proceedings of the SPR and an important essay on psychical research in his book The Will to Believe (1902). In a lecture at Oxford in 1909 he announced his firm conviction that "most of the phenomena of psychical research are rooted in reality." Shortly before his death he stated in the American Magazine that, after 25 years of psychical research, he held the spiritistic hypothesis unproven and was inclined "to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon them."

James served as president of the SPR, London, from 1894 to 1895 and as vice president from 1896 to 1910. His name and prestige and his open espousal of the cause of psychical research were a great benefit to the nascent science. He died at Chocorua, New Hampshire, August 26, 1910. His alleged return after death is discussed in a long chapter in James Hyslop 's Contact with the Other World (1919).

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

James, William. Essays in Psychical Research. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

——. Letters of William James and Theodore Flournoy. Edited by R. C. Le Clair. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

——. William James on Psychical Research. Edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. New York: Viking Press, 1960.

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.

An American philosopher and psychologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was one of the first theorists to suggest that humans, like other animals, possess instincts. He also opposed then-dominant views by arguing that human identity is grounded not in metaphysics but in behavior.

Novelist Henry James was William James's brother.

William James was a popular and influential philosopher whose writings and theories influenced various areas of U.S. life, including the movement known as legal realism.

James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, to Henry James, Sr., and Mary Walsh James. Comfortably supported by an inheritance, his parents stressed their children's abilities to make independent choices. James's formal schooling was irregular, and he studied frequently in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. James pursued an enduring interest in the natural sciences, earning a medical degree from Harvard University in 1869, though he never intended to practice medicine. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1872, teaching anatomy and physiology. He was also interested in psychology and philosophy, seeing these as related fields through his grounding in scientific studies. He began teaching those disciplines at Harvard in 1875 and 1879, respectively. He retired from the Harvard faculty in 1907.

In his first major work, Principles in Psychology (1890), James began to articulate a philosophy based on free will and personal experience. In a theory popularized as stream of consciousness, James argued that each person's thought is independent and personal, with the mind free to choose between any number of options. The subjective choices each individual makes are determined by the interconnected string of prior experiences in that person's life. In James's thought, choice and belief are always contingent, with no possibility for some permanent, definitive structure based outside of personal experience.

James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) developed further his idea that knowledge, meaning, and truth are essentially the result of each person's understanding of the experiences in her or his life. Mere formalism has no absolute authority; personal experience forms the framework of belief and action for each individual.

These important elements provided the basis for the movement known as legal realism. James's rejection of immutable truths in favor of experience as the mode to interpret reality was picked up by Roscoe Pound, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and others in the 1920s and 1930s as a challenge to the prevailing belief that legal principles are based on an absolute structure of truth. Legal realists connected law with social and economic realities, both as legislated and as ruled on by courts. They argued that law is a tool for achieving social and policy goals, rather than the implementation of absolute truth, whether or not it is consciously treated that way. James's empiricism, based on experience as the root of human action, had a corollary within legal realism's use of social science as an analytical tool within law.

Though legal realism as a movement was considered to be played out by the 1940s, the belief that varied forces influence the actors and changes within the legal system has become more standard than the view that legal principles are immutable truths. James provided the philosophical underpinning for this shift in thinking.

Quotes:

"How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?"

"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it."

"Events are influenced by our very great desires."

"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."

"To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified."

"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain."

See more famous quotes by William James

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