Does Williams View Man As Being In Control Of Himself, His Actions, And His World?

Photo of William James
(ca. 1895, in The Letters of William James, ed. by Henry James, Boston, 1920)

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given the states such ideas as "the stream of thought" and the baby's impression of the earth "as one great blooming, buzzing confusion" (PP 462). Information technology contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. "Some Remarks on Spencer'southward Notion of Mind as Correspondence" (1878) and "The Sentiment of Rationality" (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher'due south temperament.

James hints at his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The Principles, but they become more than explicit in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human being Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), The Varieties of Religious Feel (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). James oscillated betwixt thinking that a "written report in human nature" such equally Varieties could contribute to a "Science of Faith" and the belief that religious experience involves an birthday supernatural domain, somehow inaccessible to science simply accessible to the individual human subject area.

James fabricated some of his most important philosophical contributions in the last decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904–5 (nerveless in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)) he set out the metaphysical view most usually known as "neutral monism," according to which in that location is i fundamental "stuff" that is neither material nor mental. In "A Pluralistic Universe" he defends the mystical and anti-businesslike view that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, and in his influential Pragmatism (1907), he presents systematically a fix of views about truth, cognition, reality, faith, and philosophy that permeate his writings from the late 1870s onwards.

1. Chronology of James'due south Life

1842. Built-in in New York City, first child of Henry James and Mary Walsh. James. Educated by tutors and at private schools in New York.
1843. Blood brother Henry born.
1848. Sister Alice born.
1855–8. Family moves to Europe. William attends school in Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer; develops interests in painting and scientific discipline.
1858. Family settles in Newport, Rhode Island, where James studies painting with William Hunt.
1859–60. Family settles in Geneva, where William studies science at Geneva Academy; then returns to Newport when William decides he wishes to resume his study of painting.
1861. William abandons painting and enters Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.
1864. Enters Harvard School of Medicine.
1865. Joins Amazon expedition of his teacher Louis Agassiz, contracts a mild form of smallpox, recovers and travels up the Amazon, collecting specimens for Agassiz'due south zoological museum at Harvard.
1866. Returns to medical schoolhouse. Suffers eye strain, back problems, and suicidal depression in the autumn.
1867–8. Travels to Europe for wellness and education: Dresden, Bad Teplitz, Berlin, Geneva, Paris. Studies physiology at Berlin University, reads philosophy, psychology and physiology (Wundt, Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Renan, Renouvier).
1869. Receives M. D. degree, simply never practices. Astringent depression in the fall.
1870–1. Depression and poor wellness go along.
1872. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate course in comparative physiology.
1873. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy and physiology, but postpones instruction for a year to travel in Europe.
1874–five. Begins teaching psychology; establishes outset American psychology laboratory.
1878. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Publishes "Remarks on Spencer'south Definition of Mind equally Correspondence" in Periodical of Speculative Philosophy.
1879. Publishes "The Sentiment of Rationality" in Heed.
1880. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. Continues to teach psychology.
1882. Travels to Europe. Meets with Ewald Hering, Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Wundt, Joseph Delboeuf, Jean Charcot, George Croom Robertson, Shadworth Hodgson, Leslie Stephen.
1884. Lectures on "The Dilemma of Determinism" and publishes "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology" in Mind.
1885–92. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: logic, ethics, English language empirical philosophy, psychological research.
1890. Publishes The Principles of Psychology with Henry Holt of Boston, twelve years after agreeing to write it.
1892. Publishes Psychology: Briefer Course with Henry Holt.
1897. Publishes The Volition to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, with Longmans, Greenish & Co. Lectures on "Human Immortality" (published in 1898).
1898. Identifies himself as a pragmatist in "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," given at the University of California, Berkeley. Develops heart problems.
1899. Publishes Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (including "On a Certain Blindness in Man Beings" and "What Makes Life Worth Living?") with Henry Holt. Becomes active fellow member of the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. S. policy in Philippines.
1901–ii. Delivers Gifford lectures on "The Varieties of Religious Feel" in Edinburgh (published in 1902).
1904–5 Publishes "Does 'Consciousness' Be?," "A Earth of Pure Experience," "How Two Minds Tin Know the Same Thing," "Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?" and "The Identify of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience" in Periodical of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. All were reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).
1907. Resigns Harvard professorship. Publishes Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking with Longmans, Greenish & Co., based on lectures given in Boston and at Columbia.
1909. Publishes A Pluralistic Universe with Longmans, Green & Co., based on Hibbert Lectures delivered in England and at Harvard the previous year.
1910. Publishes "A Pluralistic Mystic" in Hibbert Journal. Abandons try to complete a "system" of philosophy. (His partially completed manuscript published posthumously every bit Some Issues of Philosophy). Dies of heart failure at summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire.

2. Early Writings

"Remarks on Spencer'due south Definition of Mind as Correspondence" (1878)

Although he was officially a professor of psychology when he published information technology, James'southward discussion of Herbert Spencer broaches characteristic themes of his philosophy: the importance of religion and the passions, the variety of human responses to life, and the idea that nosotros assistance to "create" the truths that we "register" (E 21). Taking upward Spencer'southward view that the adjustment of the organism to the environment is the bones characteristic of mental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own vision of what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to depict. Survival, James asserts, is merely i of many interests human beings have: "The social angel, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of fine art, the delights of philosophic contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral complacency, the charm of fancy and of wit—some or all of these are admittedly required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable;…" (E 13). We are all teleological creatures at base, James holds, each with a fix of a priori values and categories. Spencer "only takes sides with the telos he happens to prefer" (Eastward 18).

James's feature empiricism appears in his claim that values and categories fight it out in the grade of human experience, and that their conflicts "tin merely exist solved ambulando, and not by whatsoever a priori definition." The "formula which proves to have the most massive destiny," he concludes, "volition be the true one" (Eastward 17). Yet James wishes to defend his sense that whatsoever such conception volition be adamant as much past a freely-interim man mind every bit past the world, a position he later (in Pragmatism) calls "humanism": "in that location belongs to listen, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should-be, its ethics, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences…" (E 21).

"The Sentiment of Rationality" (1879, 1882)

The substance of this essay was outset published in Mind in 1879 and in the Princeton Review in 1882, and and so republished in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy in 1897. Although he never quite says that rationality is a sentiment, James holds that a sentiment—really a set of sentiments—is a "mark" of rationality. The philosopher, James writes, will recognize the rationality of a formulation "as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality." These marks include a "strong feeling of ease, peace, rest" (WB 57), and a "feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness" (WB 58). At that place is also a "passion for parsimony" (WB 58) that is felt in grasping theoretical unifications, as well as a passion for distinguishing, a "loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague identifications" (WB 59). The ideal philosopher, James holds, blends these two passions of rationality, and even some great philosophers go besides far in one direction or some other: Spinoza'south unity of all things in ane substance is "arid," as is Hume'southward "'looseness and separateness' of everything…" (WB 60).

Sentiments of rationality operate not simply in logic or scientific discipline, merely in ordinary life. When we start move into a room, for example, "we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be constitute in cupboards and corners." These minor uncertainties deed equally "mental irritant[due south]," which disappear when nosotros come to know our manner around the room, to "feel at domicile" there (WB 67–8).

James begins the second function of his essay by because the example when "ii conceptions [are] equally fit to satisfy the logical demand" for fluency or unification. At this point, he holds, i must consider a "practical" component of rationality. The conception that "awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more than rational conception, and will deservedly prevail" (WB 66). James puts the point both equally one of psychology—a prediction of what will occur—and as one of judgment, for he holds that information technology will prevail "deservedly."

As in his essay on Spencer, James explores the relations between temperaments and philosophical theorizing. Idealism, he holds, "volition be chosen past a homo of one emotional constitution, materialism by another." Idealism offers a sense of intimacy with the universe, the feeling that ultimately I "am all." But materialists find in idealism "a narrow, shut, ill-room air," and prefer to excogitate of an uncertain, unsafe and wild universe that has "no respect for our ego." Let "the tides menstruation," the materialist thinks, "even though they catamenia over us" (WB 76). James is sympathetic both to the idea that the universe is something we tin can be intimate with and to the thought that information technology is wild and unpredictable. If he criticizes idealism for its "sick-room air," he criticizes reductive forms of materialism for denying to "our almost intimate powers…all relevancy in universal affairs" (WB 71). The intimacy and the wildness portrayed in these contrasting philosophies answer to propensities, passions, and powers in man beings, and the "strife" of these ii forms of "mental temper," James predicts, will always be seen in philosophy (WB 76). Certainly it is always seen in the philosophy of William James.

3. The Principles of Psychology

In 1878, James agreed to write a psychology textbook for the American publisher Henry Holt, but it took him twelve years to produce the manuscript, and when he did he described it to Holt as "a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable" (The Messages of William James, ed. Henry James. (Boston: Piddling, Brown, 1926, pp. 393–4). Nevertheless, this thousand page volume of psychology, physiology and philosophy has proved to be James'southward masterwork, containing early statements of his main philosophical ideas in extraordinarily rich chapters on "The Stream of Thought," "The Consciousness of Self," "Emotion," "Will," and many other topics.

James tells united states that he will follow the psychological method of introspection in The Principles, which he defines as "the looking into our ain minds and reporting what nosotros there observe" (PP 185). In fact he takes a number of methodological approaches in the book. Early, he includes chapters on "The Functions of the Brain" and "On Some General Weather condition of Brain Activity" that reflect his years every bit a lecturer in beefcake and physiology at Harvard, and he argues for the reductive and materialist thesis that habit is "at bottom a physical principle" (PP 110). As the book moves along, he involves himself in discussions with philosophers—for example with Hume and Kant in his hundred-page chapter on the self, and he finds himself making metaphysical claims that anticipate his later on pragmatism, equally when he writes: "There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to whatsoever one thing. The aforementioned property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature on the other" (PP 959).

Even "introspection" covers a range of reports. James discusses the experiments that his contemporaries Wundt, Stumpf and Fechner were performing in their laboratories, which led them to results such as that "sounds are less delicately discriminated in intensity than lights" (PP 513). But many of James's most important and memorable introspective observations come from his own life. For example:

The rhythm of a lost word may exist there without a audio to clothe information technology…. Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the bare rhythm of some forgotten poetry, restlessly dancing in one's heed, striving to be filled out with words (PP 244).
Our father and female parent, our wife and babes, are bone of our os and flesh of our mankind. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our acrimony flashes forth every bit readily as if we stood in their place. (PP 280).

There is an excitement during the crying fit which is non without a certain pungent pleasure of its own; only it would take a genius for felicity to discover any nuance of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry and shrunken sorrow (PP 1061).

"Will you or won't you take it so?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every 60 minutes of the 24-hour interval, and about the largest likewise every bit the smallest, the most theoretical besides equally the most practical, things. We respond past consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of advice with the nature of things! (PP, p. 1182).

In this last quotation, James tackles a philosophical problem from a psychological perspective. Although he refrains from answering the question of whether these "responses" are in fact deep organs of communication with the nature of things—reporting but that they seem to us to be so—in his subsequently writings, such as Varieties of Religious Experience and A Pluralistic Universe, he confesses, and to some caste defends, his belief that the question should exist answered affirmatively.

In the equitably famous chapter on "The Stream of Thought" James takes himself to exist offering a richer account of experience than those of traditional empiricists such every bit Hume. He believes relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienced directly (a view he would later defend as part of his "radical empiricism.") James finds consciousness to exist a stream rather than a succession of "ideas." Its waters blend, and our private consciousness—or, as he prefers to call information technology sometimes, our "sciousness"—is "steeped and dyed" in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: information technology is a series of transitions and resting-places, of "flights and perchings" (PP 236). We rest when we remember the name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap.

Involvement—and its close relative, attention—is a major component not merely of James'due south psychology, simply of the epistemology and metaphysics that seep into his discussion. A thing, James states in "The Stream of Thought," is a grouping of qualities "which happen practically or aesthetically to involvement us, to which we therefore give substantive names…". (PP 274). And reality "means merely relation to our emotional and agile life…whatsoever excites and stimulates our involvement is real" (PP 924). Our chapters for attending to one thing rather than some other is for James the sign of an "active element in all consciousness,…a spiritual something…which seems to get out to run into these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it." (PP 285). Faced with the tension between scientific determinism and our belief in our ain liberty or autonomy, James—speaking not equally a psychologist simply as the philosopher he had become—argues that science "must exist constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider guild, on which she has no claims at all" (PP 1179).

In his discussions of consciousness James appears at various times to exist a reductive materialist, a dualist, a proto-phenomenologist, and a neutral psychologist who wouldn't cartel to consider philosophical questions. Ane of the most original layers of The Principles lies in James's pursuit of a "pure" description of the stream of thought that does not presuppose it to be either mental or cloth, a pursuit that anticipates not merely his own later "radical empiricism," but Husserl's phenomenology. In his affiliate on "Sensation," for instance, James is at pains to deny that sensations are "in the mind" and then "by a special act on our part 'extradited' or 'projected' so as to appear located in an outer world" (PP 678). He argues that our original experiences are objective, that "merely as reflection becomes developed exercise we go aware of an inner globe at all" (PP 679). Nevertheless, the objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial relations that nosotros think:

Certainly a kid newly built-in in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who] does not experience either of these objects to exist situated in longitude 71 W. and latitude 42 North.….The flame fills its own place, the pain fills its own place; but as yet these places are neither identified with, nor discriminated from, whatever other places. That comes later. For the places thus first sensibly known are elements of the child's infinite-world which remain with him all his life. (PP 681–2)

James'due south chapter on "Habit," early on in the book, begins with habit every bit a concrete matter but ends by considering its ethical implications. James argues that the laws of nature are themselves habits, "nothing simply the immutable habits which the different unproblematic sorts of affair follow in their deportment and reactions upon each other" (PP 109). In our brains, habits are paths of nervous energy, as rivers and streams are the paths of water's catamenia. At skin level, fifty-fifty a scar is a kind of habit, "more likely to be abraded, inflamed, to suffer pain and common cold, than are the neighboring parts" (PP 111). On the psychological level likewise, "any sequence of mental activity which has been frequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself ..." (PP 116). Habits are useful in diminishing the attending that we have to devote to our actions, thereby allowing usa to develop "our higher powers of heed" (PP 126). On the social level, habit is "the enormous fly-wheel of society, its nearly precious conservative agent. Information technology alone is what keeps us all within the premises of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor" (PP 125). The "ethical implications of the police of habit," (PP 124) equally James sees them, business organisation which habits we choose to develop, and when. Many habits must begin early on in life: "Inappreciably e'er is a language learned after twenty spoken without a strange emphasis" (PP 126). We should strive to brand our "nervous organization our marry instead of our enemy" by forming as many proficient habits equally we can, equally early on in life as we can. Even later in life, we are to keep our capacity for resolution in shape by every day or two doing "something for no other reason than that you lot would rather not exercise information technology" (PP 130).

Two noteworthy chapters tardily in The Principles are "The Emotions" and "Will." The offset sets out the theory—also enunciated past the Danish physiologist Carl Lange—that emotion follows, rather than causes, its bodily expression: "Common-sense says, nosotros lose our fortune, are sorry and cry; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis hither to be defended says that this order of sequence is wrong…that we feel pitiful because we weep, angry because nosotros strike, afraid because nosotros tremble…" (PP 1065–6). The significance of this view, co-ordinate to James, is that our emotions are tied in with our bodily expressions. What, he asks, would grief be "without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the chest-bone?" Not an emotion, James answers, for a "purely disembodied human being emotion is a nonentity" (PP 1068).

In his affiliate on "Volition" James opposes the theory of his contemporary Wilhelm Wundt that in that location is one special feeling—a "feeling of innervation"—present in all intentional action. In his survey of a range of cases, James finds that some actions involve an human action of resolve or of outgoing nervous energy, but others do not. For example:

I sit at table subsequently dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am inappreciably aware of what I do; merely the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may swallow it, seem fatally to bring the deed about. At that place is certainly no limited fiat here;… (PP 1131).

The chapter on "Will" likewise contains striking passages that anticipate the concerns of The Varieties of Religious Feel: about moods, "changes of heart," and "awakenings of censor." These, James observes, may affect the "whole scale of values of our motives and impulses" (PP 1140).

James'due south pop and influential, The Volition to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, published in 1897, collects previously published essays from the previous xix years, including "The Sentiment of Rationality" (discussed above), "The Dilemma of Determinism," "Great Men and Their Surround" and "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." The title essay—published just 2 years earlier—proved to be controversial for seeming to recommend irresponsible or irrationally held behavior. James later wrote that he should have called the essay "the right to believe," to indicate his intent to justify holding certain behavior in certain circumstances, not to claim that we can (or should) believe things but past an act of will.

In scientific discipline, James notes, we can afford to await the outcome of investigation before coming to a belief, just in other cases nosotros are "forced," in that we must come up to some belief even if all the relevant evidence is not in. If I am on an isolated mountain trail, faced with an icy ledge to cross, and do not know whether I tin go far, I may exist forced to consider the question whether I can or should believe that I can cross the ledge. This question is not only forced, it is "momentous": if I am incorrect I may fall to my expiry, and if I believe rightly that I tin can cross the ledge, my holding of the belief may itself contribute to my success. In such a case, James asserts, I have the "right to believe"—precisely because such a belief may help bring nigh the fact believed in. This is a case "where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming" (WB, 25).

James applies his analysis to religious belief, particularly to the possible case in which 1'southward salvation depends on believing in God in accelerate of any proof that God exists. In such a case the conventionalities may exist justified by the consequence to which having the belief leads. He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain, all the same, to a wide range of secular human being life:

A social organism of whatsoever sort is what it is because each member gain to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs…. A authorities, an ground forces, a commercial organisation, a send, a college, an able-bodied squad, all be on this status, without which not simply is nothing accomplished, but nothing is even attempted (WB 24).

Moral questions as well are both momentous and unlikely to exist sustained by "sensible proof." They are not matters of science but of "what Pascal calls our heart" (WB 22). James defends our right to believe in sure answers to these questions anyway.

Another essay in the collection, "Reflex Activity and Theism," attempts a reconciliation of science and religion. James's expression "reflex action" alludes to the biological moving-picture show of the organism every bit responding to sensations with a series of deportment. In the higher animals a theoretical or thinking stage intervenes betwixt sensation and action, and this is where, in human beings, the thought of God arises. James maintains that this idea is a natural man response to the universe, independent of any proof that God exists, and he predicts that God will exist the "centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle of life" (WB, 116). He ends the essay by advocating a "theism" that posits "an ultimate opacity in things, a dimension of being which escapes our theoretic command" (WB 143).

The Will to Believe also contains James's well-nigh adult business relationship of morality, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Morality for James rests on sentience—without it there are no moral claims and no moral obligations. Merely one time sentience exists, a merits is made, and morality gets "a foothold in the universe" (WB 198). Although James insists that at that place is no common essence to morality, he does find a guiding principle for ethical philosophy in the principle that we "satisfy at all times as many demands every bit nosotros can" (WB 205). This satisfaction is to exist accomplished by working towards a "richer universe…the good which seems most organizable, nearly fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole" (WB 210). This work proceeds by a serial of experiments, by means of which we have learned to live (for the most part) without "polygamy and slavery, individual warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and capricious royal power." (WB 205) . However, James holds that at that place is "nothing final in whatsoever actually given equilibrium of human ethics, [and then that] every bit our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their plough be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they nevertheless give rise to, without producing others louder yet" (WB 206).

James's essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," published in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals in 1899, illustrates another important chemical element of James's moral outlook. The blindness to which James draws attention is that of one human being to another, a blindness he illustrates with a story from his own life. Riding in the mountains of Due north Carolina he comes upon a devastated landscape, with no copse, scars in the earth, hither and there a patch of corn growing in the sunlight. Simply after talking to the settlers who had cleared the forest to make room for their subcontract, James comes to see information technology their way (at to the lowest degree temporarily): non as devastation simply as a manifestation of "duty, struggle, and success." James concludes: "I had been as bullheaded to the peculiar ideality of their conditions every bit they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor bookish ways of life at Cambridge" (TT 233–4). James portrays a plurality of outlooks in the essay to which he attaches both a metaphysical/epistemological and an ethical import. This plurality, he writes:

commands u.s. to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to u.s.. Easily off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of expert is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Fifty-fifty prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations (TT 264).

Although "On a Certain Blindness" is most toleration and the appreciation of different points of view, James sets out his ain romantic point of view in his choice of heroes in the essay: Wordsworth and Shelley, Emerson, and West. H. Hudson, all of whom are said to accept a sense of the "limitless significance in natural things" (TT 244). Even in the city, there is "unfathomable significance and importance" (TT 254) in the daily events of the streets, the river, and the crowds of people. James praises Walt Whitman, "a hoary loafer," for knowing how to profit past life's common opportunities: subsequently a forenoon of writing and a bath, Whitman rides the double-decker downward Broadway from 23rd street to Bowling Light-green and back, only for the pleasure and the spectacle of information technology. "[W]ho knows the more of truth," James asks, "Whitman on his omnibus-superlative, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, total of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?" (TT 252). James's interest in the inner lives of others, and in writers like Tolstoy who share his understanding of their "mysterious ebbs and flows" (TT 255), leads him to the prolonged written report of human religious feel that he presented as the Gifford Lectures in 1901–ii, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902.

5. The Varieties of Religious Feel

Similar The Principles of Psychology, Varieties is "A Study in Man Nature," as its subtitle says. But at some five hundred pages it is only half the length of The Principles of Psychology, befitting its more restricted, if still large, telescopic. For James studies that part of human nature that is, or is related to, religious experience. His interest is not in religious institutions, ritual, or, fifty-fifty for the well-nigh part, religious ideas, but in "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their confinement, then far every bit they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (V 31).

James sets out a fundamental distinction of the book in early chapters on "The Religion of Good for you-Mindedness" and "The Sick Soul." The healthy-minded religious person—Walt Whitman is i of James's main examples—has a deep sense of "the goodness of life," (V 79) and a soul of "sky-bluish tint" (V 80). Healthy-mindedness can exist involuntary, merely natural to someone, but often comes in more than willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for case, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid "old hell-fire theology" (V 91). James also cites the "listen-cure movement" of Mary Bakery Eddy, for whom "evil is but a lie, and any ane who mentions it is a liar" (V 107). For "The Ill Soul," in contrast, "radical evil gets its innings" (V 163). No matter how secure one may experience, the sick soul finds that "[u]nsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises upwards: a bear upon of nausea, a falling expressionless of the delight, a whiff of melancholy…." These states are non but unpleasant sensations, for they bring "a feeling of coming from a deeper region and oftentimes have an appalling convincingness" (V 136). James's main examples are Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession," John Bunyan's autobiography, and a study of terrifying "dread"—allegedly from a French contributor but actually from James himself. Some sick souls never become well, while others recover or even triumph: these are the "twice-born." In chapters on "The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification" and on "Conversion," James discusses St. Augustine, Henry Alline, Bunyan, Tolstoy, and a range of popular evangelists, focusing on what he calls "the state of balls" (Five 247) they achieve. Central to this state is "the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to exist, even though the outer weather condition should remain the aforementioned" (5 248).

Varieties' classic affiliate on "Mysticism" offers "iv marks which, when an feel has them, may justify us in calling it mystical…" (Five 380). The first is ineffability: "it defies expression…its quality must be straight experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others." 2nd is a "noetic quality": mystical states present themselves as states of knowledge. Thirdly, mystical states are transient; and, quaternary, subjects are passive with respect to them: they cannot control their coming and going. Are these states, James ends the chapter by asking, "windows through which the heed looks out upon a more than all-encompassing and inclusive earth[?]" (V 428).

In chapters entitled "Philosophy"—devoted in large function to pragmatism—and "Conclusions," James finds that religious feel is on the whole useful, even "amid the most important biological functions of flesh," but he concedes that this does non brand it true. Nevertheless, James articulates his own belief—which he does non merits to show—that religious experiences connect united states of america with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world: "The further limits of our beingness plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' earth" (Five 515).

6. Late Writings

Pragmatism (1907)

James get-go announced his commitment to pragmatism in a lecture at Berkeley in 1898, entitled "Philosophical Conceptions and Applied Results." Later sources for Pragmatism were lectures at Wellesley Higher in 1905, and at the Lowell Constitute and Columbia University in 1906 and 1907. Pragmatism emerges in James's book as six things: a philosophical temperament, a theory of truth, a theory of meaning, a holistic business relationship of knowledge, a metaphysical view, and a method of resolving philosophical disputes.

The pragmatic temperament appears in the volume'southward opening chapter, where (following a method he beginning set out in "Remarks on Spencer'southward Definition of Listen as Correspondence") James classifies philosophers co-ordinate to their temperaments: in this case "tough-minded" or "tender-minded." The pragmatist is the mediator betwixt these extremes, someone, like James himself, with "scientific loyalty to facts," merely also "the old conviction in man values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic blazon" (P 17). The method of resolving disputes and the theory of meaning are on display in James'south discussion of an argument about whether a human chasing a squirrel effectually a tree goes around the squirrel too. Taking meaning every bit the "conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve," the pragmatist philosopher finds that ii "practical" meanings of "go effectually" are in play: either the man goes N, East, South, and West of the squirrel, or he faces first the squirrel'south head, and then one of his sides, then his tail, so his other side. "Make the stardom," James writes, "and at that place is no occasion for any farther dispute."

The pragmatic theory of truth is the field of study of the book's sixth (and to some caste its second) chapter. Truth, James holds, is "a species of the skilful," like health. Truths are goods because we tin "ride" on them into the futurity without beingness unpleasantly surprised. They "lead the states into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well every bit directly up to useful sensible termini. They pb to consistency, stability and flowing human being intercourse. They atomic number 82 away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking" (103). Although James holds that truths are "fabricated" (104) in the course of human feel, and that for the virtually part they live "on a credit arrangement" in that they are not currently being verified, he also holds the empiricistic view that "beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure" (P 100).

James's chapter on "Pragmatism and Humanism" sets out his voluntaristic epistemology. "Nosotros carve out everything," James states, "but as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes" (P 100). Nonetheless, he recognizes "resisting factors in every feel of truth-making" (P 117), including not only our nowadays sensations or experiences just the whole torso of our prior behavior. James holds neither that we create our truths out of goose egg, nor that truth is entirely contained of humanity. He embraces "the humanistic principle: y'all can't weed out the human contribution" (P 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of process in the merits that "for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making," whereas for "rationalism reality is ready-fabricated and complete from all eternity" (P 123). Pragmatism'south final chapter on "Pragmatism and Religion" follows James's line in Varieties in attacking "transcendental absolutism" for its unverifiable business relationship of God, and in defending a "pluralistic and moralistic religion" (144) based on homo experience. "On pragmatistic principles," James writes, "if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the discussion, it is true" (143).

A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

Originally delivered in Oxford as a set up of lectures "On the Present Situation in Philosophy," James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a word of the temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which, James states, "are just then many visions, modes of feeling the whole push … forced on 1 by 1's total character and feel, and on the whole preferred—there is no other truthful word—equally one'due south best working mental attitude" (PU 15). Maintaining that a philosopher's "vision" is "the of import thing" about him (PU three), James condemns the "over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities…" (PU 13).

James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce'southward idealism and the "vicious intellectualism" of Hegel to philosophers whose visions he admires: Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson. He praises Fechner for holding that "the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and developments, is everywhere alive and conscious" (PU, seventy), and he seeks to refine and justify Fechner'southward thought that carve up human being, animal and vegetable consciousnesses see or merge in a "consciousness of still wider scope" (PU 72). James employs Henri Bergson'south critique of "intellectualism" to argue that the "concrete pulses of feel announced pent in past no such definite limits every bit our conceptual substitutes are confined by. They see 1 another continuously and seem to interpenetrate" (PU 127). James concludes by embracing a position that he had more tentatively prepare forth in The Varieties of Religious Experience: that religious experiences "point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual surround from which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only human that scientific psychology, and then chosen, takes cognizance of) is shut off" (PU 135). Whereas in Pragmatism James subsumes the religious inside the pragmatic (equally yet some other way of successfully making one's way through the world), in A Pluralistic Universe he suggests that the religious offers a superior relation to the universe.

Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

This posthumous collection includes James'southward groundbreaking essays on "pure experience," originally published in 1904–5. James's cardinal idea is that heed and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more than fundamental stuff—pure feel—that (despite being chosen "experience") is neither mental nor physical. Pure feel, James explains, is "the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our afterward reflection with its conceptual categories… a that which is non yet any definite what, tho' fix to be all sorts of whats…" (ERE 46). That "whats" pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and cloth objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference amongst these "pure experiences," but on the relations into which they enter. Sure sequences of pure experiences constitute physical objects, and others establish persons; but one pure feel (say the perception of a chair) may be part both of the sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person. Indeed, one pure feel might be part of two distinct minds, as James explains in a chapter entitled "How Two Minds Can Know One Thing."

James'southward "radical empiricism" is distinct from his "pure experience" metaphysics. It is never precisely defined in the Essays, and is all-time explicated past a passage from The Significant of Truth where James states that radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a conclusion. The postulate is that "the only things that shall exist debatable among philosophers shall exist things definable in terms drawn from feel," the fact is that relations are just as directly experienced as the things they relate, and the determination is that "the parts of experience hold together from adjacent to next by relations that are themselves parts of feel" (MT, 6–7).

James was all the same working on objections to his "pure experience" doctrine, replying to critics of Pragmatism, and writing an introduction to philosophical problems when he died in 1910. His legacy extends into psychology and the written report of religion, and in philosophy not only throughout the pragmatist tradition that he founded (along with Charles Peirce), but into phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Edmund Husserl incorporated James'due south notions of the "fringe" and "halo" into his phenomenology (Moran, pp. 276–80), Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind is indebted to James's doctrine of "pure feel," (Russell, 1921, pp. 22–half dozen), Ludwig Wittgenstein learned nearly "the absence of the will act" from James's Psychology (Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James, p. 81), and the versions of "neopragmatism" set out by Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam are saturated with James'southward ideas. In physics, James's humanistic pragmatism, and his suggestion that "new being come[south] in local spots and patches" (P 138; Fuchs 2017, p. 33) take inspired the version of quantum theory known as QBism (run into Healey). James is one of the nearly attractive and endearing of philosophers: for his vision of a "wild," "open" universe that is notwithstanding shaped by our human being powers and answers to some of our deepest needs, simply too, equally Russell observed in his obituary, because of the "large tolerance and … humanity" with which he sets that vision out. (The Nation (3 September 1910: 793–4).

Bibliography

Main Literature: Works by William James

The works that stand for to the abbreviations [PP], [WB], [TT], [V], [P], [PU], [MT], and [Due east] are referenced below -- the abbreviation is indicated occurs at the cease of relevant reference.

The Works of William James, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 17 vol., 1975–.
William James: Writings 1878–1899. New York: Library of America, 1992.
William James: Writings 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1987
"Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind every bit Correspondence," kickoff published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1878. Contained in Essays in Philosophy, pp. 7–22.
The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Originally published in 1890 [PP].
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Pop Philosophy, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979; get-go published in 1897 [WB].
"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," 1898. Contained in Pragmatism, in The Works of William James, pp. 255–70.
Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals. New York: Henry Holt, 1899 [TT].
The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Longmans, Green, 1916. Originally published in 1902 [V].
Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Originally published in 1907 [P].
A Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Academy Press, 1977. Originally published in 1909 [PU].
The Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979 [MT]. Originally published in 1909.
Essays in Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Academy Press, 1978 [Due east].
Some Problems of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Academy Press, 1979. Originally published in 1911.
The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, Boston: Little Brown, 1926.
The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 volumes. Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 1992–.
Selected Letters of William and Henry James, Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Secondary Literature

Baghramian, Maria and Sarin Marchetti (eds.), 2017, Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Dandy Divide, New York and London: Routledge.
Barzun, Jacques, 1983, A Stroll with William James New York: Harper and Row.
Benoist, Jocelyn, 2005, "A Phenomenology or Pragmatism?" in Pragmatism, Disquisitional Concepts in Philosophy, vol. 2, Russell B. Goodman (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, pp. 89–112.
Bernstein, Richard, 2010, The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge, U.Yard. and Malden, MA: Polity Printing.
Bird, Graham, 1986, William James (The Arguments of the Philosophers), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Campbell, James, 2017, Experiencing William James: Belief in a Pluralistic Earth, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Carrette, Jeremy, 2013, William James'southward Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations, New York: Routledge.
Edie, James, 1987, William James and Phenomenology, Indianapolis: Indiana Academy Press.
Feinstein, Howard Thou., 1984, Becoming William James, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Academy Printing.
Friedl, Herwig, 2019, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fuchs, Christopher A., 2017, "Notwithstanding Bohr: The Reasons for QBism," Mind and Thing, 15(two): 245–300; folio reference is to the preprint of Fuchs 2017 bachelor online].
Gale, Richard M., 1999, The Divided Self of William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2004, The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press.
Girel, Mathias, 2004, "Les Angles de 50'acte. Usages d'Emerson dans la Philosophie de William James," Cahier Charles Five, XXXVII (October): 207–245.
Goodman, Russell B., 1990, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, Chapter 3.
–––, 2002, Wittgenstein and William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing.
–––, 2004, "James on the Nonconceptual," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII: 137–148.
–––, 2008, "Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism," in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak, Oxford: Oxford University Printing, pp. 19–37.
–––, 2010, "William James'southward Pluralisms," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 2: 155–76.
–––, 2016, "Thinking about Animals: James, Wittgenstein, Hearne", in Nordic Wittgenstein Review, v(one): 9–29.
Healey, Richard, 2017, "Quantum-Bayesian and Pragmatist Views of Quantum Theory," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Jump 2017 edition), Edward Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/athenaeum/spr2017/entries/breakthrough-bayesian/>.
Jackman, Henry, 2008, "William James," in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Cheryl Misak (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. threescore–86.
–––, 2017, "William James on Conceptions and Individual Language," Belgrade Philosophical Almanac, 30: 175–193.
Klein, Alexander, 2009, "On Hume on Space: Green's Set on, James'south Empirical Response," in Periodical of the History of Philosophy, 47(iii): 415–49.
––– (ed.), 2018, The Oxford Handbook of William James, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, Henry S., 1981, The Religious Investigations of William James, Chapel Colina: University of North Carolina Press.
Madelrieux, Stéphane, 2008, William James, l'attitude empiriste, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Marchetti, Sarin, 2015, Ideals and Philosophical Critique in William James, New York: Palmgrave Macmillan.
–––, forthcoming, The Jamesean Mind, New York and London: Routledge.
Matthiessen, F. O., 1947, The James Family unit, New York: Knopf.
McDermott, John, 1986, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Civilization, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Misak, Cheryl, 2013, The American Pragmatists, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moore, G. E., 1922, "William James' 'Pragmatism'," in Philosophical Studies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 97–146.
Moran, Dermot, 2017, "Phenomenology and Pragmatism: Two Interactions. From Horizontal Intentionality to Practical Coping," in Baghramian and Marchetti 2017, pp. 272–93.
Myers, Gerald, 1986, William James: His Life and Thought, New Oasis: Yale University Press.
Pawelski, James O., 2007, The Dynamic Individualism of William James, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Perry, Ralph Barton, 1935, The Thought and Graphic symbol of William James, Boston: Little, Brown, 2 vols.
Pihlström, Sami, 2008, The Trail of the Human Snake is over Everything: Jamesian Perspectives on Listen, World, and Religion, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Poirier, Richard, 1992, Poetry and Pragmatism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Academy Printing.
Proudfoot, Wayne, ed., 2004, William James and a Scientific discipline of Religions, New York: Columbia University Press.
Putnam, Hilary, 1987, The Many Faces of Realism, La Salle, IL: Open Court.
––– (with Ruth Anna Putnam), 1990, "William James's Ideas," in Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Printing, pp. 217–231.
Putnam, Ruth Anna, 1997, The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Robert D., 2006, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Russell, Bertrand, 1921, The Assay of Mind, London: George Allen and Unwin.
–––, 1986, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Volume 6), London: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 257–306.
Simon, Linda, 1998, Genuine Reality: a life of William James, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 1990, William James'southward Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Skillen, Anthony, 1996, "William James, 'A Sure Blindness' and an Uncertain Pluralism," in Philosophy and Pluralism, ed. David Archard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, pp. 33–45.
Slater, Michael R., 2009, William James on Ethics and Faith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2014, Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S., 1993, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality, Chicago: Open Court.
Suckiel, Ellen Kappy, 1982, The Businesslike Philosophy of William James, Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Matriarch Printing.
–––, 1996, Sky'south Champion, Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Matriarch Press.
Tarver, Erin C. and Shannon Sullivan (eds.), 2015, Feminist Interpretations of William James, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania Country University Printing.
Taylor, Eugene, 1996, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Fringe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Printing.
Wahl, Jean, 1925, Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell , London: Open Court.
Wilshire, Bruce, 1979, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of "The Principles of Psychology", New York: AMS Press, 1979.