William James

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, often called the father of American psychology and, with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, a founder of pragmatism. His Principles of Psychology helped establish psychology as a science in the United States, and his lectures on pragmatism and on religious experience reached a wide public. Writing in a vivid, conversational style, he insisted that ideas should be judged by the difference they make to human lives.

James was born on 11 January 1842 in a hotel in New York, the eldest son of Henry James Sr., a wealthy and unconventional religious thinker influenced by the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. His younger brother was the novelist Henry James, and his sister Alice became known for her diary. Their father moved the family repeatedly between the United States and Europe, so William's schooling was scattered across New York, London, Paris, Geneva and Bonn, and he grew up fluent in French and German.

He first wanted to be a painter and studied art in Newport, Rhode Island, but in 1861 entered Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School to study chemistry and then comparative anatomy. In 1864 he began medical studies at Harvard, interrupted in 1865 by an expedition to Brazil with the naturalist Louis Agassiz and by a long stay in Germany, where he encountered the new experimental psychology. He received his medical degree in 1869 but never practised.

Around 1870 James suffered a severe depression, made worse by fear that scientific determinism left no room for human freedom. He later described how reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier helped him: he decided that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. The episode foreshadowed his later view that belief can rightly be guided by its effects on how we live.

In 1873 he began teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, and he spent his whole academic career there. In 1875 he offered one of the first courses in experimental psychology in America, along with a small laboratory for demonstrations. He became a professor of philosophy in 1885 and later held a chair in psychology. In 1878 he married Alice Howe Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher, and they had five children. Among his many students were the sociologist and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, the writer Gertrude Stein, the philosopher George Santayana and the future president Theodore Roosevelt.

The Principles of Psychology (1890), on which he worked for twelve years, was a survey of the whole field that remains readable today. Influenced by Charles Darwin, James treated the mind as something that evolved to help organisms adapt, and asked what mental processes are for rather than only what they are made of, an approach later called functionalism. He described consciousness not as a chain of separate ideas but as a continuously flowing "stream of thought", a phrase that later gave novelists the term stream of consciousness. He wrote influential chapters on habit, attention, memory and the self. With the Danish physician Carl Lange he proposed that emotions are our experience of bodily changes: we do not tremble because we are afraid, but feel afraid partly because we tremble.

James gave the name pragmatism wide currency in an 1898 lecture, crediting the idea to his friend Peirce. Pragmatism holds that the meaning of an idea lies in its practical consequences, and that philosophical disputes which make no difference to experience are empty. In Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909), James went further, arguing that true ideas are those that we can verify and that work reliably in guiding us through experience; truth, in his phrase, is something that happens to an idea. Critics, among them Bertrand Russell, objected that this seemed to make truth a matter of usefulness or convenience, and James spent his later years defending and clarifying his view.

In The Will to Believe (1897) he argued that when a question cannot be settled by evidence and the choice is momentous and unavoidable, as he thought religious belief could be, a person is entitled to let their will and feelings decide. His radical empiricism held that experience includes the relations between things, not only separate sensations, and he defended a pluralistic universe, open and unfinished, against the unified systems of idealist philosophers.

James's Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), studied religion through first-hand accounts of conversion, mysticism and saintliness. He did not try to prove that religious beliefs were true, but asked what such experiences meant to people and what they did for their lives. The book became a classic of the psychology of religion. James also took part in psychical research, investigating mediums with an open but critical mind, and he was a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing the American war in the Philippines.

After retiring from Harvard in 1907, James continued to write and lecture, and in 1909 he met Sigmund Freud when Freud visited Clark University in Massachusetts. He died of heart failure at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, on 26 August 1910. His influence ran through American philosophy, especially the work of Dewey, and through psychology, education and religious studies. In Europe, Edmund Husserl drew on the Principles, and Ludwig Wittgenstein greatly admired the Varieties. His place among the thinkers of his age is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page.