James was an American who, for most of his adult life, was associated with Harvard, where he graduated in medicine and taught successively physiology, psychology, and philosophy. He was also very much a European. He first visited Europe before his second birthday, and almost every year of his life spent some time there, occasionally staying for a year or two at a stretch. He was fluent in German and French, competent in Italian, and personally acquainted with most of the leading intellectuals of his time, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. His brother, the novelist Henry James (1843–1916), settled in England, where he, the novelist who wrote like a psychologist, often received William, the psychologist who wrote like a novelist. Both brothers were fascinated by the problem of expressing in words the phenomena of individual consciousness. Henry approached the problem through novels which exhibited the subtle uniqueness and partiality of individual people's perspectives. William approached the problem through psychology.
James was born in New York, the eldest of five children whose education was unconventional. His father, a brilliant conversationalist and writer on theology, enjoyed a large inherited fortune which enabled him to devote his time to travelling, meeting interesting people, and educating his children. Wherever father went, his wife and children went also, accompanied by a variable entourage of relatives, friends, and servants. The children were actively encouraged to absorb their surroundings, talk about their experiences, read, write, and paint. This lively nomadic troupe lodged in hotels and rented houses on both sides of the Atlantic. They everlastingly engaged in wide-ranging, self-analytic discussions which, often shared by visiting celebrities, dominated Jamesian life and education.
James was educated by short-stay tutors and brief attendances at private schools, but mainly by his father and family. The upshot was that he developed a formidably heterogeneous repertoire of academic, social, linguistic, and artistic talents. Between the ages of 18 and 30 he continued further studies and intensive programmes of private reading. He also became increasingly perturbed about what to do with his life. He was torn among so many possibilities. He suffered bouts of depression and neurotic malady, and family letters spoke of his 'ill health', 'the choice of a profession', and 'the awful responsibility of such a choice'.
At 18 he started training as a painter. He later switched to the study of science, then to medicine. Even after deciding on medicine he had doubts, and interrupted his studies to go on a geological expedition to Brazil, and again to spend a year in Germany. He travelled in Europe in 1867–8, graduated MD from Harvard in 1869, and thereafter entered a period of black despair and took a decisive step towards resolving his existential crisis. This step averted suicide and began to heal what he later called his 'sick soul'; it also contained themes which he explored for the rest of his life and which dominated his mature work. On 30 April 1870, he wrote as follows in his private diary.
- Yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will — 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' — need be the definition of an illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from mere speculation and contemplative Grübelei [musing] in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom. ... Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. ... Now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief to be sure can't be optimistic — but I will posit life, (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.
Once his self-administered, existentialist cure began to work, he returned to Harvard, where he was offered a post as a teacher of physiology. He accepted and, at the age of 30, began his career as a university teacher. In 1878 he married, happily, and subsequently children were born in whom he and his wife took delight. Also in 1878, he contracted to write a book based on the lectures he was giving on psychology. The book took twelve years to write but, when Principles of Psychology appeared, it established James as the foremost psychologist of the day. The opening pages plunged into the recurrent Jamesian themes of individuality, , and purpose. Each of us is, within the limits of our biological potential and environmental circumstances, forever pursuing purposes, long term and short term, by making choices, great and small, which cumulatively shape every aspect of our individual being. As James said elsewhere, 'Sow an action, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny'.
These themes ran through all James's work. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he examined the biographies of people who reported a belief 'that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto'. Such beliefs were subjective, but none the less real to the experiencer, and they had manifest effects on the individual's conduct. When such effects were 'good', he argued, the individual was right to exercise the 'will to believe', although not to insist that others share the same belief. James's contributions to the philosophy of pragmatism were in the same vein. In brief, any hypothesis was true if the consequences of holding it were satisfactory to the individual concerned. The truth of which he spoke was not absolute but relative to each individual. The 'pluralistic and unfinished universe' had undiscovered potentialities which different individuals might make actual through the hypotheses they held, the choices they made, and the purposes they pursued.
Between 1878 and 1899, James vigorously enjoyed work, family life, and social life. He travelled, attended conferences, lectured, kept up a massive correspondence, and took unassuming pleasure in his growing international fame. In 1899 he suffered the first of many attacks of angina, which progressively impeded his vigour even though he still continued a formidable round of activities. On 11 August 1910, he and his wife left Henry James's home at Rye in England and made what William knew to be his last Atlantic crossing. He died in America fifteen days later.
During his life, James fostered much psychological discussion and enquiry, but he was precluded, by his artistic sensitivity to the many-sidedness of the human condition, from adopting any one view as final. His popular lectures inspired many people with a new sense of human worth and dignity, but he himself was never entirely free from bouts of depression. In 1875 he established at Harvard a laboratory for psychological experiment (see laboratories of psychology), but he himself had insufficient patience to conduct experiments, make measurements, or use statistics. He was consistently protean.
His pluralistic vision is evident in the brilliant perceptiveness, intuitiveness, and inconsistency of the Principles. The book presents, in masterly language, a wealth of naturalistic observation about human behaviour and conscious experience, culled partly at first hand and partly from wide reading. It contains sharp intellectual analyses in which issues are turned over critically and open-mindedly. It makes clear that psychology concerns, and is of concern to, the lives of individual people. It is exploratory, not consistently scientific in spirit, and arrives at no coherent theory of psychology. However, it widens horizons and raises issues that were, in the 20th century, approached scientifically. It raises many issues that still challenge scientific enquiry.
(Published 1987)
See also emotion.
— Ian M. L. Hunter
- Bibliography
- Allen, G. W. (1967). William James: A Biography.
- James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology, 2 vols.
- — — (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
- Myers, G. E. (2001). William James: His Life and Thought.
