Background

William James was born on January 11, 1842, in Aston House, New York to Henry James, Sr., and Mary Walsh James as their first child.

His father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian theologian. He was born in a wealthy educated family wherein his father focused on providing quality education to his children. William's younger brother, Henry James, became a great author.

Education

James's primary education took place at his father's table; its main constituents were the spirited discourse that the family held on every topic and the example of the parents, loving and unworldly. Formal education took place irregularly in various private establishments. From 1855 to 1860 James attended schools in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. There, as his father said, he and his brother were able "to absorb French and German and get a better sensuous education than they are likely to get here." During this European sojourn, James's interest was divided between natural science and art, especially painting.

In spite of his continuing enthusiasm and talent for scientific inquiry, James's interest in painting became so strong by 1860 that he resolved to spend a trial period learning to paint. The elder James was not anxious for his son to become a painter, thereby prematurely cutting himself off from the rest of life's possibilities; any definite vocation, according to the father, was sadly "narrowing." It was nevertheless arranged that James should begin to study with William M. Hunt in Newport. This experiment convinced James that he lacked the ability to be anything more than a mediocre artist, than which there was, he thought, nothing worse. The lesson at Newport permanently discouraged James's pursuit of an artistic vocation, but throughout his scientific and philosophical career, he retained the artist's eye, his predilection for concrete sensuous detail, and his concern for style.

In 1861, James entered the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, studying first in the chemistry department under Charles W. Eliot, later in the department of comparative anatomy and physiology under Jeffries Wyman and Louis Agassiz. From Wyman he learned the importance of evolution; from Agassiz, an appreciation of "the world's concrete fulness" and of acquaintance with empirical facts as against abstraction. In 1864, James transferred to the medical school, though without the intention of ever practicing medicine. His medical studies, although fruitful, were attenuated and sporadic.

While at medical school James joined Agassiz as an assistant on the Thayer expedition to Brazil during 1865-1866. In Brazil, he contracted smallpox and suffered from the sensitivity of the eyes. This was the first serious manifestation of that constitutional failure which was to recur throughout James's life, imposing upon it a pattern of interrupted work and of periodic flights to Europe which were always, at least in part, searches for health.

In 1867 ill health and the desire to study experimental physiology led James to Europe, to Germany in particular. While little formal study of physiology proved to be possible, James read widely and thoughtfully. His first professional literary effort, a revision of Herman Grimm's Unüberwindliche Mächte, published in the Nation, dates from this period. James returned to Harvard's Medical School in November 1868 and received his medical degree in June 1869.

Career

A year after graduation, William James was offered a job as an instructor which he accepted and continued to serve in this capacity for 35 years. By the mid-1870s he started teaching psychology. James is known to have introduced psychology as a subject and also the first one to introduce psychology laboratories in the United States. In 1872, he started teaching physiology, later moving to anatomy and philosophy.

Among James' students at Harvard were Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, Granville Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Morris Raphael Cohen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, Clarence Irving Lewis, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Gabriel Wells.

In 1880, James was hired to write a book on the emerging field of psychology. He took ten years to write one of the early primers on the subject, The Principles of Psychology (1890). The book influenced other leading thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.

During most part of 1882-1883, James was in Europe visiting laboratories and meeting psychologists to delve deeper into psychological studies and its procedures.

After his resignation from the Harvard psychology lab, he drifted his focus towards philosophy. Gradually, his focus shifted to empirical studies covering topics such as God, immortality, and values.

In 1902, James published The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is considered to be another one of his leading works. Pragmatism (1907) further explored his philosophical beliefs.

A Pluralistic Universe (1909) proved to be his last major work to be published during his lifetime. The following year, he went to his family's summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, where he died of heart failure on August 26, 1910.

Achievements

• William James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labeled him the "Father of American psychology."
  
  He was the founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing.
  
  James wrote his extraordinary treatise and textbook "Principles of Psychology," the two volumes of which were published in 1890. This brought him worldwide response and has continued everywhere to be regarded as one of the few great comprehensive treatises that modern psychology has produced.
  
  He is also remembered for his psychological research on the phenomenology of religious and mystic experiences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Psychology: The Briefer Course

    (Condensed and reworked from James's monumental Principles...)

    1892
  • The Collected Works of William James

    (This collection contains dozens of lectures from William ...)

    2011
  • The Will to Believe and Human Immortality

    (This volume contains the complete texts of two books by A...)

    1896
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902
  • Talks to Teachers on Psychology 1899

Religion

James' studies, which were 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. Survival after death he ultimately concluded to be unproven, 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 published 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.

Politics

William was not inclined to politics.

Views

William James' lectures, writings, and theories were organized around the dual principles of functionalism and pragmatism. Functionalism considers thought and behavior in terms of how they help a person adapt to their environment. In other words, how they help a person "function" in the world and be successful. The functional approach was a response to prevailing structuralist approaches in psychology that broke down abstract mental events into their smallest elements through experimental techniques and introspection. Structuralists believed that the parts of the brain acted the same in any circumstance, whereas James was much more interested in its functional adaptability.

James was also active in the world of philosophy and his ideas of Pragmatism reflected his fundamental perspective. The basic assumption of pragmatism is that the abstract "truth" of an idea can never be fully proven and so philosophy should instead focus on the usefulness of an idea, or the difference they can make in people's lives. James called this the "cash value" of an idea.

As James developed these views, he moved away from scientific, experimental approaches to psychology, towards a more philosophical approach. His writing is notable for its engaging, accessible, humorous, literary, and almost conversational tone. It was said of his book Principles of Psychology (1890), "It is literature. It is beautiful, but it is not psychology."

James's famous book Principles of Psychology and the Stream of Consciousness examines the history of human psychology in three main ways: first, through an analysis of historical and contemporary views of the mind, particularly those of Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, all famous philosophers of their time. Secondly, through an introspective account and study of his own states of mind. And lastly, a discussion of 19th-century experimental techniques and findings. The book was especially critical of early ideas of human psychology and considered them of little value. James instead built his own distinct theory of the mind, identifying human cognition as inherently pragmatic, physically motivated, and intentionally selective.

The book is also a valuable historical text in its recording of experimental results and discoveries concerning the different locations of certain functions in the brain, or how each sense is located in a particular neural center. One particularly influential chapter titled The Stream of Thought argues that human consciousness is not experienced as a succession of ideas but instead as a blended stream of both oneself and everything outside of oneself.

This concept was hugely influential to avant-garde and modernist art and literature, where the experimental stream of consciousness was frequently employed as a technique. People can see this concept at work in themselves when we take a few minutes to pay attention to the thoughts that pass through their heads. They are usually free-formed, random associations that lead rather wildly from one thought to the next.

The other important theory that William James proposed in his masterpiece has since been termed the James-Lange theory of emotion due to the fact that he and Danish physician Carl Lange formed the idea independently of each other in the 1800s. The theory suggests that emotions occur as a mental reaction to the physiological conditions that result from stimulus, rather than from the stimulus itself.

To demonstrate this, James described a person's reactions to encountering a bear. He claimed that the person does not see a bear, fears it, and runs away; instead of seeing a bear, runs and consequently fears the bear because of the mind's perception of the physical response. It is not the bear that makes humans realize that they are afraid; it is the racing heart and surging adrenaline that lets them know they should be fearful. Different kinds of emotions, therefore, result from different physiological reactions. James would say that "love" is nothing more than the perception of human hormones and physical reactions to another person.

Membership

William James was a founding member and vice-resident of the American Society for Psychical Research.

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  The American Society for Psychical Research

Personality

Physical Characteristics: In his childhood, William James suffered from various health issues related to the eyes, back, skin, and stomach. He had some serious psychological ailments such as neurasthenia, depression phases which led to suicidal instincts too.

He finally resorted to experimental treatments for his health issues in 1910 but in vain and he passed away on August 26, 1910, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, due to heart failure and cremated at a family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Interests

• Painting, reading

Connections

James married Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878. The couple had five children together - Henry, William, Herman, Margaret Mary, and Alexander. James was devastated when he and his wife lost their son Herman to complications from whooping cough at the age of 2.

Father:

Henry James, Sr.

Mother:

Mary Walsh James

Spouse:

Alice Howe Gibbens

Brother:

Henry James

Son:

Henry James

Son:

William James

Son:

Herman James

Daughter:

Margaret Mary James

Son:

Alexander James

Friend:

Charles Sanders Peirce

teacher:

Louis Agassiz

References

• William James: His Life and Thought by Gerald Myers
  1986
• William James: The Center of His Vision by Daniel W. Bjork
  1988
• William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
  2006