## 1. Chronology of James's Life


* 1842. Born in New York City, first child of Henry James and Mary
Walsh. James. Educated by tutors and at private schools in New
York.
* 1843. 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 science.
* 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's zoological museum at
Harvard.
* 1866. Returns to medical school. Suffers eye strain, back
problems, and suicidal depression in the fall.
* 1867-8. Travels to Europe for health 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, but never practices. Severe
depression in the fall.
* 1870-1. Depression and poor health continue.
* 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 teaching for a year to travel in
Europe.
* 1874-5. Begins teaching psychology; establishes first
American psychology laboratory.
* 1878. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Publishes "Remarks on
Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence" in
*Journal of Speculative Philosophy*.
* 1879. Publishes "The Sentiment of Rationality" in *Mind*.
* 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 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 Will to Believe and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy*, with Longmans, Green & 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 Human Beings" and "What Makes Life
Worth Living?") with Henry Holt. Becomes active member of
the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. S. policy in
Philippines.
* 1901-2. Delivers Gifford lectures on "The Varieties of
Religious Experience" in Edinburgh (published in 1902).
* 1904-5 Publishes "Does 'Consciousness'
Exist?," "A World of Pure Experience," "How
Two Minds Can Know the Same Thing," "Is Radical Empiricism
Solipsistic?" and "The Place of Affectional Facts in a
World of Pure Experience" in *Journal 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, Green &
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 attempt to complete a "system" of
philosophy. (His partially completed manuscript published posthumously
as *Some Problems of Philosophy*). Dies of heart failure at
summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire.


## 2. Early Writings


### "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence" (1878)



Although he was officially a professor of psychology when he published
it, James's 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 we help to "create" the truths that we
"register" (E 21). Taking up Spencer's view that the
adjustment of the organism to the environment is the basic feature of
mental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own vision
of what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to describe.
Survival, James asserts, is merely one of many interests human beings
have: "The social affections, all the various forms of play, the
thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophic
contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral
self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit--some or all of
these are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence
tolerable;..." (E 13). We are all teleological creatures at
base, James holds, each with a set of *a priori* values and
categories. Spencer "merely takes sides with the *telos*
he happens to prefer" (E 18).



James's characteristic empiricism appears in his claim that
values and categories fight it out in the course of human experience,
and that their conflicts "can only be solved *ambulando*,
and not by any *a priori* definition." The "formula
which proves to have the most massive destiny," he concludes,
"will be the true one" (E 17). Yet James wishes to defend
his sense that any such formulation will be determined as much by a
freely-acting human mind as by the world, a position he later (in
*Pragmatism*) calls "humanism": "there
belongs to mind, 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 ideals, 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 first published in *Mind* in
1879 and in the *Princeton Review* in 1882, and then
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
conception "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). There 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 too far in one direction or
another: Spinoza's unity of all things in one substance is
"barren," as is Hume's "'looseness and
separateness' of everything..." (WB 60).



Sentiments of rationality operate not just in logic or science, but in
ordinary life. When we first 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 found in
cupboards and corners." These minor uncertainties act as
"mental irritant[s]," which disappear when we come to know
our way around the room, to "feel at home" there (WB
67-8).



James begins the second part of his essay by considering the case when
"two conceptions [are] equally fit to satisfy the logical
demand" for fluency or unification. At this point, he holds, one
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
rational conception, and will deservedly prevail" (WB 66). James
puts the point both as one of psychology--a prediction of what
will occur--and as one of judgment, for he holds that it will
prevail "deservedly." 



As in his essay on Spencer, James explores the relations between
temperaments and philosophical theorizing. Idealism, he holds,
"will be chosen by a man 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, close, sick-room
air," and prefer to conceive of an uncertain, dangerous and wild
universe that has "no respect for our ego." Let "the
tides flow," the materialist thinks, "even though they
flow over us" (WB 76). James is sympathetic both to the idea
that the universe is something we can be intimate with and to the idea
that it is wild and unpredictable. If he criticizes idealism for its
"sick-room air," he criticizes reductive forms of
materialism for denying to "our most 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 human beings, and the
"strife" of these two 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 Letters of William James*, ed. Henry
James. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926, pp. 393-4). Nevertheless,
this thousand page volume of psychology, physiology and philosophy has
proved to be James's 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 us that he will follow the psychological method of
introspection in *The Principles*, which he defines as
"the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there
discover" (PP 185). In fact he takes a number of methodological
approaches in the book. Early on, he includes chapters on "The
Functions of the Brain" and "On Some General Conditions of
Brain Activity" that reflect his years as a lecturer in anatomy
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 pragmatism, as
when he writes: "*There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential
to any one thing*. The same 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 be there without a sound to clothe
> it.... Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the blank
> rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's
> mind, striving to be filled out with words (PP 244).
> 
> 
> Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and
> flesh of our flesh. 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
> anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. (PP
> 280).
> 
> 
> 
> There is an excitement during the crying fit which is not without a
> certain pungent pleasure of its own; but it would take a genius for
> felicity to discover any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling of
> dry and shrunken sorrow (PP 1061).
> 
> 
> 
> "*Will you or won't you have it so?*" is the
> most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of
> the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most
> theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by
> *consents or non-consents* and not by words. What wonder that
> these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication
> 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 only
that they seem to us to be so--in his later writings, such as
*Varieties of Religious Experience* and *A Pluralistic
Universe*, he confesses, and to some degree defends, his belief
that the question should be answered affirmatively. 



In the deservedly famous chapter on "The Stream of
Thought" James takes himself to be offering a richer account of
experience than those of traditional empiricists such as 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 be a stream rather
than a succession of "ideas." Its waters blend, and our
individual consciousness--or, as he prefers to call it sometimes,
our "sciousness"--is "steeped and dyed"
in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic
life has rhythm: it 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.



Interest--and its close relative, attention--is a major
component not only of James's psychology, but of the
epistemology and metaphysics that seep into his discussion. A thing,
James states in "The Stream of Thought," is a group of
qualities "which happen practically or aesthetically to interest
us, to which we therefore give substantive names...". (PP
274). And reality "*means simply relation to our emotional
and active life...whatever excites and stimulates our interest is
real*" (PP 924). Our capacity for attention to one thing
rather than another is for James the sign of an "*active*
element in all consciousness,...a spiritual
something...which seems to go out to meet 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 own freedom or autonomy, James--speaking not as a
psychologist but as the philosopher he had become--argues that
science "must be 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 order, on which she has no claims at all" (PP
1179).



In his discussions of consciousness James appears at various times to
be a reductive materialist, a dualist, a proto-phenomenologist, and a
neutral psychologist who wouldn't dare to consider philosophical
questions. One 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 material, a pursuit that anticipates not only his own later
"radical empiricism," but Husserl's phenomenology.
In his chapter on "Sensation," for example, 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 "only as reflection becomes developed do we
become aware of an inner world at all" (PP 679). However, the
objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial
relations that we think: 



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



James's chapter on "Habit," early in the book,
begins with habit as a physical matter but ends by considering its
ethical implications. James argues that the laws of nature are
themselves habits, "nothing but the immutable habits which the
different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions 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 flow. At skin level, even a scar is a kind of habit,
"more likely to be abraded, inflamed, to suffer pain and cold,
than are the neighboring parts" (PP 111). On the psychological
level as well, "any sequence of mental action which has been
frequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself ..." (PP 116).
Habits are useful in diminishing the attention that we have to devote
to our actions, thereby allowing us to develop "our higher
powers of mind" (PP 126). On the social level, habit is
"the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious
uprisings of the poor" (PP 125). The "ethical implications
of the law of habit," (PP 124) as James sees them, concern which
habits we choose to develop, and when. Many habits must begin early in
life: "Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent" (PP 126). We should strive to make our
"nervous system our ally instead of our enemy" by forming
as many good habits as we can, as early 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
would rather not do it" (PP 130).



Two noteworthy chapters late in *The Principles* are "The
Emotions" and "Will." The first sets out the
theory--also enunciated by the Danish physiologist Carl
Lange--that emotion follows, rather than causes, its bodily
expression: "Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry
and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a
rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says
that this order of sequence is incorrect...that we feel sorry
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble..." (PP 1065-6). The significance of this
view, according 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
breast-bone?" Not an emotion, James answers, for a "purely
disembodied human emotion is a nonentity" (PP 1068).



In his chapter on "Will" James opposes the theory of his
contemporary Wilhelm Wundt that there 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 act of resolve or of outgoing nervous energy, but
others do not. For example:



> 
> I sit at table after 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 hardly aware of what I
> do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I
> may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about. There is certainly no
> express fiat here;... (PP 1131).
> 



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


## 4. Essays in Popular Philosophy



James's popular and influential, *The Will to Believe and
Other Essays in Popular Philosophy*, published in 1897, collects
previously published essays from the previous nineteen years,
including "The Sentiment of Rationality" (discussed
above), "The Dilemma of Determinism," "Great Men and
Their Environment" and "The Moral Philosopher and the
Moral Life." The title essay--published just two years
earlier--proved to be controversial for seeming to recommend
irresponsible or irrationally held beliefs. James later wrote that he
should have called the essay "the *right* to
believe," to indicate his intent to *justify* holding
certain beliefs *in certain circumstances*, not to claim that
we can (or should) believe things simply by an act of will.



In science, James notes, we can afford to await the outcome of
investigation before coming to a belief, but in other cases we are
"forced," in that we must come 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 can
make it, I may be 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 wrong I may fall to my
death, and if I believe rightly that I 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
about 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 one's salvation depends on believing in
God in advance of any proof that God exists. In such a case the belief
may be justified by the outcome to which having the belief
leads. He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain,
however, to a wide range of secular human life:



> 
> A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member
> proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will
> simultaneously do theirs.... A government, an army, a commercial
> system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this
> condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is
> even attempted (WB 24).
> 



Moral questions too are both momentous and unlikely to be 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 certain answers to these questions anyway.



Another essay in the collection, "Reflex Action and
Theism," attempts a reconciliation of science and religion.
James's expression "reflex action" alludes to the
biological picture of the organism as responding to sensations with a
series of actions. In the higher animals a theoretical or thinking
stage intervenes between sensation and action, and this is where, in
human beings, the thought of God arises. James maintains that this
thought is a natural human response to the universe, independent of
any proof that God exists, and he predicts that God will be 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 control" (WB
143).



*The Will to Believe* also contains James's most
developed account 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. But once sentience exists, a claim is made, and morality
gets "a foothold in the universe" (WB 198). Although James
insists that there 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 as we can" (WB 205).
This satisfaction is to be achieved by working towards a "richer
universe...the good which seems most organizable, most fit to
enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more
inclusive whole" (WB 210). This work proceeds by a series of
experiments, by means of which we have learned to live (for the most
part) without "polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty
to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power." (WB
205) . However, James holds that there is "nothing final in
any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, [so that] as our
present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so
they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to,
without producing others louder still" (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 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 North Carolina he comes upon a
devastated landscape, with no trees, scars in the earth, here and
there a patch of corn growing in the sunlight. But after talking to
the settlers who had cleared the forest to make room for their farm,
James comes to see it their way (at least temporarily): not as
devastation but as a manifestation of "duty, struggle, and
success." James concludes: "I had been as blind to the
peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also
have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange
indoor academic 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 us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see
> harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however
> unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of
> truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,
> although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the
> peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have
> their special revelations (TT 264).
> 



Although "On a Certain Blindness" is about toleration and
the appreciation of different points of view, James sets out his own
romantic point of view in his choice of heroes in the essay:
Wordsworth and Shelley, Emerson, and W. H. Hudson, all of whom are
said to have 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 by
life's common opportunities: after a morning of writing and a
bath, Whitman rides the omnibus down Broadway from 23rd street to
Bowling Green and back, just for the pleasure and the spectacle of it.
"[W]ho knows the more of truth," James asks,
"Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which
the spectacle inspires him, or you, full 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 study of human
religious experience that he presented as the Gifford Lectures in
1901-2, published as *The Varieties of Religious
Experience* in 1902.


## 5. The Varieties of Religious Experience



Like *The Principles of Psychology*, *Varieties* is
"A Study in Human 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, scope. 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, even for the most part, religious ideas, but
in "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (V 31).



James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on
"The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" and "The Sick
Soul." The healthy-minded religious person--Walt Whitman is
one of James's main examples--has a deep sense of
"the goodness of life," (V 79) and a soul of
"sky-blue tint" (V 80). Healthy-mindedness can be
involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful
forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a
resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid "old
hell-fire theology" (V 91). James also cites the
"mind-cure movement" of Mary Baker Eddy, for whom
"evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it is a
liar" (V 107). For "The Sick Soul," in contrast,
"radical evil gets its innings" (V 163). No matter how
secure one may feel, the sick soul finds that "[u]nsuspectedly
from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said,
something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the
delight, a whiff of melancholy...." These states are not
simply unpleasant sensations, for they bring "a feeling of
coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling
convincingness" (V 136). James's main examples are
Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession," John Bunyan's
autobiography, and a report of terrifying
"dread"--allegedly from a French correspondent but
actually from James himself. Some sick souls never get 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 assurance" (V 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 be*,
even though the outer conditions should remain the same" (V
248).



*Varieties*' classic chapter on "Mysticism"
offers "four marks which, when an experience has them, may
justify us in calling it mystical..." (V 380). The first is
ineffability: "it defies expression...its quality must be
directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to
others." Second is a "noetic quality": mystical
states present themselves as states of knowledge. Thirdly, mystical
states are transient; and, fourth, 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
mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world[?]" (V
428).



In chapters entitled "Philosophy"--devoted in large
part to pragmatism--and "Conclusions," James finds
that religious experience is on the whole useful, even "amongst
the most important biological functions of mankind," but he
concedes that this does not make it true. Nevertheless, James
articulates his own belief--which he does not claim to
prove--that religious experiences connect us with a greater, or
further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to
the world: "The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to
me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible
and merely 'understandable' world" (V 515).


## 6. Late Writings


### *Pragmatism* (1907)



James first announced his commitment to pragmatism in a lecture at
Berkeley in 1898, entitled "Philosophical Conceptions and
Practical Results." Later sources for *Pragmatism* were
lectures at Wellesley College in 1905, and at the Lowell Institute 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 account of knowledge,
a metaphysical view, and a method of resolving philosophical
disputes.



The pragmatic temperament appears in the book's opening chapter,
where (following a method he first set out in "Remarks on
Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence") James
classifies philosophers according to their temperaments: in this case
"tough-minded" or "tender-minded." The
pragmatist is the mediator between these extremes, someone, like James
himself, with "scientific loyalty to facts," but also
"the old confidence in human values and the resultant
spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic type" (P 17).
The method of resolving disputes and the theory of meaning are on
display in James's discussion of an argument about whether a man
chasing a squirrel around a tree goes around the squirrel too. Taking
meaning as the "conceivable effects of a practical kind
the object may involve," the pragmatist philosopher finds that
two "practical" meanings of "go around" are in
play: either the man goes North, East, South, and West of the
squirrel, or he faces first the squirrel's head, then one of his
sides, then his tail, then his other side. "Make the
distinction," James writes, "and there is no occasion for
any further dispute."



The pragmatic theory of truth is the subject of the book's sixth
(and to some degree its second) chapter. Truth, James holds, is
"a species of the good," like health. Truths are goods
because we can "ride" on them into the future without
being unpleasantly surprised. They "lead us into useful verbal
and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible
termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human
intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation,
from foiled and barren thinking" (103). Although James holds
that truths are "*made*" (104) in the course of
human experience, and that for the most part they live "on a
credit system" 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. "We carve out
everything," James states, "just as we carve out
constellations, to serve our human purposes" (P 100).
Nevertheless, he recognizes "resisting factors in every
experience of truth-making" (P 117), including not only our
present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior
beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing,
nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces
"the humanistic principle: you can't weed out the human
contribution" (P 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of
process in the claim that "for pragmatism [reality] is still in
the making," whereas for "rationalism reality is
ready-made and complete from all eternity" (P 123).
*Pragmatism's* final chapter on "Pragmatism and
Religion" follows James's line in *Varieties* in
attacking "transcendental absolutism" for its unverifiable
account of God, and in defending a "pluralistic and moralistic
religion" (144) based on human experience. "On
pragmatistic principles," James writes, "if the hypothesis
of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is
true" (143).


### *A Pluralistic Universe* (1909)



Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures "On the
Present Situation in Philosophy," James begins his book, as he
had begun *Pragmatism*, with a discussion of the temperamental
determination of philosophical theories, which, James states,
"are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push
... forced on one by one's total character and experience,
and on the whole *preferred*--there is no other truthful
word--as one's best working attitude" (PU 15).
Maintaining that a philosopher's "vision" is
"the important thing" about him (PU 3), 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's
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, 70), and he seeks to
refine and justify Fechner's idea that separate human, animal
and vegetable consciousnesses meet or merge in a "consciousness
of still wider scope" (PU 72). James employs Henri
Bergson's critique of "intellectualism" to argue
that the "concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no
such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes are confined by.
They run into one another continuously and seem to
interpenetrate" (PU 127). James concludes by embracing a
position that he had more tentatively set forth in *The Varieties
of Religious Experience*: that religious experiences "point
with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness
with a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential
man (who is the only man that scientific psychology, so called, takes
cognizance of) is shut off" (PU 135). Whereas in
*Pragmatism* James subsumes the religious within the pragmatic
(as yet another 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's groundbreaking
essays on "pure experience," originally published in
1904-5. James's fundamental idea is that mind and matter
are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental
stuff--pure experience--that (despite being called
"experience") is neither mental nor physical. Pure
experience, James explains, is "the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories... a *that* which is not yet any definite *what*, tho' ready to be all sorts of whats..."
(ERE 46). That "whats" pure experience may be are minds
and bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on a
fundamental ontological difference among these "pure
experiences," but on the *relations* into which they
enter. Certain sequences of pure experiences constitute physical
objects, and others constitute persons; but one pure experience (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 experience might be part of two distinct minds, as
James explains in a chapter entitled "How Two Minds Can Know One
Thing."



James's "radical empiricism" is distinct from his
"pure experience" metaphysics. It is never precisely
defined in the *Essays*, and is best explicated by a passage
from *The Meaning 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 be
debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn
from experience," the fact is that relations are just as
directly experienced as the things they relate, and the conclusion is
that "the parts of experience hold together from next to next by
relations that are themselves parts of experience" (MT,
6-7).



James was still 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 study 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's 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 experience," (Russell,
1921, pp. 22-6), Ludwig Wittgenstein learned about "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's
ideas. In physics, James's humanistic pragmatism, and his
suggestion that "new being come[s] in local spots and
patches" (P 138; Fuchs 2017, p. 33) have inspired the version
of quantum theory known as QBism (see Healey). James is one of the
most attractive and endearing of philosophers: for his vision of a
"wild," "open" universe that is nevertheless
shaped by our human powers and answers to some of our deepest needs,
but also, as 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).