William James

Childhood and family

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian who moved easily among the literary and intellectual elites of his day, and of Mary Robertson Walsh. He had four siblings: Henry, the future novelist; Garth Wilkinson (Wilkie); Robertson (Bob); and Alice, whose diary survives as a record of family life. The brilliance of the James household and the talents of several of its members have held the interest of historians and biographers for generations.

His education was eclectic and transatlantic. The family made two trips to Europe while William was a child, and the habit continued through thirteen further European journeys in his lifetime. He became fluent in German and French, and acquired a cosmopolitan outlook that would shape his career.

Shifting vocations

As a young man he wanted to become a painter and worked briefly as an apprentice in William Morris Hunt's studio in Newport, Rhode Island. His father urged him toward medicine. James first agreed to specialise in physiology; when that also failed to suit him, he turned to the nervous system and psychology. In 1861 he began scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.

In these years he suffered a range of physical ailments affecting his eyes, back, stomach and skin, along with psychological symptoms then diagnosed as neurasthenia, including depressive periods in which he contemplated suicide for months at a time. His younger brothers Wilkie and Bob fought in the American Civil War, while James himself became an advocate of peace and proposed that young men perform a period of public service instead of military service. He entered Harvard Medical School in 1864. In the spring of 1865 he joined Louis Agassiz's scientific expedition up the Amazon, but abandoned it after eight months because of severe seasickness and a mild case of smallpox. Illness interrupted his studies again in April 1867. He travelled to Germany in search of a cure and stayed until November 1868. The stay proved intellectually fertile: there he came to see that his real interests lay in philosophy and psychology rather than medicine. He earned his medical degree in June 1869 but never practised. His "soul-sickness" was not resolved until 1872, after a long period of philosophical searching. In 1878 he married Alice Howe Gibbens, and the couple had five children.

The Harvard career

James spent nearly his entire academic career at Harvard. He began as an instructor in physiology in 1873 and rose steadily: assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, and holder of an endowed chair in psychology in 1889. He returned to philosophy in 1897 and retired as emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907. He taught Harvard's first experimental psychology course in the 1875–1876 academic year, drawing on the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and Pierre Janet. He became one of the foremost proponents of functional psychology and of pragmatism, and co-founded the American Society for Psychical Research.

During the Harvard years he took part in the informal discussion group later known as the Metaphysical Club, with Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Chauncey Wright. His students included George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Stanley Hall, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann and Theodore Roosevelt. Those who studied under him remembered his brilliance and the absence of personal arrogance in his manner. His correspondence, published in a twelve-volume edition, shows a wide network that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

Major works

His most ambitious achievement was The Principles of Psychology (1890), two volumes of some twelve hundred pages that took him twelve years to complete. It broke with the English associationist school and with the Hegelianism of the period, which he regarded as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and treated the mind as inherently purposive and selective. A shorter version, Psychology: Briefer Course, appeared in 1892 as a less rigorous introduction. Among his writings for a general audience are The Will to Believe (1897) and Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899).

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), based on his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, approaches religion through personal experience rather than through institutions. It argues that intense and even pathological states offer the best "microscope" for studying the mind, and it describes mystical experience as ineffable, noetic, transient and passive.

Pragmatism (1907) presents the pragmatic method as a way of dissolving metaphysical disputes: for any notion, one asks what practical difference it would make if it were true. Truth, for James, is not a fixed property of ideas but something that happens to them as they are verified and prove useful in experience. He followed this with A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909) and, posthumously, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) develops an epistemology in which consciousness is a function rather than a thing.

Ideas and style

James wrote with unusual literary care, which helped his ideas reach readers outside the academy. His philosophy can be summed up in the phrase "fruits over roots": judging ideas by their practical consequences rather than by abstract foundations. His empiricism led him to see truth as something built up within shared experience rather than as a fixed correspondence with an absolute reality.

On free will he proposed a two-stage model: chance, which introduces undetermined alternatives, and choice, which the individual makes according to character and desire. He rejected both hard determinism and compatibilism, which he dismissed as a "quagmire of evasion". Together with Carl Lange he also formulated the theory of emotion that bears their names: we do not fear because we tremble, but feel the emotion as we perceive our bodily responses. In psychology his notion of the "stream of consciousness" had a direct influence on avant-garde literature and art, notably on James Joyce.

Later years and death

After retiring from Harvard in 1907 he continued to write and lecture. His heart troubled him more and more in his final years. In the spring of 1910 he sailed to Europe for experimental treatments, which failed, and he returned home in August. He died on August 26, 1910, at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, and was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Massachusetts.

Legacy

James is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is often called the father of American psychology. Together with Peirce he founded pragmatism, which shaped John Dewey and many others. His work was read and debated by Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, among others. His critics objected that the standard of practical usefulness is hard to measure, and that his defence of religious belief was too indulgent toward the absence of evidence. Even so, his influence on psychology, the philosophy of religion and American culture remains considerable.