William James

• 1. Introduction

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  William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on the 11th of January 1842, and by the time he died in Chocorua, New Hampshire on the 26th of August 1910, he had left a mark on American intellectual life that no single label can contain. He was a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian in spirit if not in title, a man who experimented with nitrous oxide to understand Hegel, and a Harvard professor whose students included Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein. He is often called the "father of American psychology", yet he spent much of his career insisting that the most important questions lay beyond the reach of the laboratory. How did a man trained as a physician, who never once practiced medicine, end up reshaping the way an entire civilization thinks about truth, belief, and the nature of the mind? That is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. A Restless Education

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  Henry James Sr., William's father, was an independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian who moved his family across the Atlantic and back with remarkable frequency. The family made two trips to Europe while William was still a child, and those early crossings established a pattern: James would eventually make fifteen European journeys in his lifetime. His education in several countries gave him fluency in both German and French and an instinctive cosmopolitanism that never left him.

  Initially, James wanted to be a painter. He apprenticed in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, before his father steered him toward medicine. James complied, but the compliance was partial. In 1861, he enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard College, and in 1864 he began formal medical training at Harvard Medical School. The following spring he broke off his studies to join the naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River. He lasted eight months before severe seasickness and a bout of mild smallpox drove him home.

  Physical ailments plagued James through these years. His eyes, back, stomach, and skin all troubled him at various points, and his symptoms were diagnosed as neurasthenia, a catch-all term of the era that included prolonged depression and, for James, months of contemplating suicide. In April 1867, illness forced another interruption, and aged twenty-six he traveled to Germany in search of a cure. He stayed until November 1868. That German sojourn proved decisive: the distance from medicine clarified that his real appetite was for philosophy and psychology. He would later write, in 1902, that he had "never had any philosophic instruction" and that "the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave."

• 3. The Harvard Decades

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  James spent almost his entire academic life at a single institution. He was appointed instructor in Physiology at Harvard for the spring 1873 term, and his titles accumulated steadily over the decades: Assistant Professor of Psychology in 1876, full professor in 1885, Endowed Chair in Psychology in 1889, and finally Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in 1907. The scope of his work widened at each step.

  In the 1875-1876 academic year, James taught the first experimental psychology course at Harvard, introducing students to the science of the human mind at the very moment the discipline was constituting itself as a science. He drew on the work of figures such as Hermann Helmholtz and Pierre Janet, but the classroom he created was distinctly his own. Students remembered him not for arrogance but for kindness and a humble manner of teaching. Those students were not ordinary undergraduates: Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Alain Locke, Walter Lippmann, and Mary Whiton Calkins all passed through his courses.

  The philosophical conversations James pursued outside the classroom were equally significant. In 1872, a lively informal group that met for discussions with Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright had evolved into what Louis Menand, writing in 2001, described as The Metaphysical Club, a gathering that provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come. James joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, in explicit opposition to the United States annexation of the Philippines. His rejection of social Darwinism, in an era when Herbert Spencer's ideas held enormous sway at Harvard, was a minority opinion he held without apology.

• 4. Writing the Mind

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  The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, was twelve hundred pages long, filled two volumes, and took twelve years to complete. Its bibliography alone, compiled later by John McDermott, runs forty-seven pages. The book criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of the day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value. It proposed instead that the human mind is inherently purposive and selective. An abridged version, Psychology: The Briefer Course, followed in 1892 as a less demanding entry point into the field.

  At the core of The Principles was a concept James called "instincts". He argued that humans possessed more instincts, not fewer, than other animals, and that these instincts could be overridden by experience or by one another, since many were in direct conflict. His theory of emotion, developed in the 1880s independently of the Danish physiologist Carl Lange and now known as the James-Lange theory, proposed something that struck most readers as counterintuitive: we do not run from a bear because we are afraid; we are afraid because we run. In James's framing, the mind's perception of its own physiological responses, elevated heart rate, tense muscles, sweating palms, is the emotion itself. The bodily changes come first; the feeling of fear follows.

  In 1884, he published the article "What Is an Emotion?" in Mind, and the question it raised about the sequence from stimulus to feeling remains a central problem in emotion research today. His description of the mind as a "stream of consciousness" had a direct impact on modernist literature, notably in the work of James Joyce.

• 5. Pragmatism and Truth

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  In "What Pragmatism Means," published in 1906, James laid out his view of the relationship between truth and fact in terms that were deliberately concrete. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, he developed the concept of "cash value": the meaning of any idea is the entire set of its practical consequences, and a single truth must be capable of being related to some collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions. James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. As he put it directly: "There can be no difference that doesn't make a difference."

  To illustrate the pragmatic method, James used a story about a man chasing a squirrel around a tree. The man circles the tree; the squirrel keeps the trunk between itself and the man; does the man go round the squirrel? James's answer was that the dispute dissolves once you distinguish the two practical meanings of "round": whether the man occupies the space north, east, south, and west of the squirrel, or whether he occupies the space facing the squirrel's belly, back, and sides. Depending on which meaning you choose, the question answers itself or vanishes as "idle."

  His critics, including Bertrand Russell in Free Thought and Official Propaganda and Alfred Henry Lloyd in The Will to Doubt, accused him of abandoning the principle of evidentialism. James responded in The Meaning of Truth in 1909, insisting he was not a relativist, and pointing to what he called an "epistemological realism" position. Richard Rorty later made the contested claim that James never intended to give a theory of truth at all; other pragmatism scholars, including Susan Haack and Howard Mounce, rejected that reading.

• 6. Religion and the Mystical

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  James delivered his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh as the basis for The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902. The book was an investigation of religious experience in its most intense and even pathological forms, on the grounds that extreme states function like a microscope for the mind, revealing in enlarged form the normal processes of consciousness. He proposed that religious genius, individual experience, should be the primary topic in the study of religion, not institutions, which he regarded as merely the social descendants of genius.

  James's own investigation of mysticism was not purely theoretical. He experimented with chloral hydrate in 1870, amyl nitrite in 1875, nitrous oxide in 1882, and peyote in 1896. Inspired by a report from Benjamin Paul Blood in 1874, he inhaled nitrous oxide and reported a "tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination" in which "every opposition... vanished in a higher unity." He had been an ardent anti-Hegelian; under the gas, he claimed, he finally understood Hegel. He concluded that mystical revelations hold true only for the individual who experiences them; others are under no obligation to accept them without personal experience.

  James described four criteria for mystical states: ineffability, a noetic quality (the sense of genuine knowledge), transiency, and passivity. He considered the first two sufficient to designate a state as mystical. He was also a founding member and vice president of the American Society for Psychical Research. After the death of his young son, he attended his first sitting with the medium Leonora Piper in 1885, and he spent years evaluating sixty-nine reports of her mediumship. He concluded that the "spirit-control" hypothesis was incoherent, but remained convinced that "the future will corroborate" the existence of telepathy.

• 7. Free Will and the Self

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  On the 30th of April 1870, James made a diary entry he later described as a crisis. Having just finished part of Charles Renouvier's second Essais, he wrote that he saw no reason why Renouvier's definition of free will, "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts," needed to be an illusion. He resolved: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

  James developed a two-stage model of free will that separated chance from choice. Chance is the indeterminate element, the set of alternative possibilities that exist before a decision is made. Choice is what the person does with those possibilities, a deterministic act flowing from character, values, and desire. Free will in relation to effort balances what one sees as best against what is easiest to do; without effort, the propensity wins over the ideal. To illustrate, he asked his students to consider which road he would take walking home from Lowell Lecture Hall: both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street were possibilities, and only after he chose would the future become an unalterable past.

  In 1884, he delivered the lecture "The Dilemma of Determinism" to Harvard Divinity School students, in which he coined the terms "hard determinism" and "soft determinism" as they are still used today. He called compatibilism, the soft determinist position, a "quagmire of evasion." His theory of the self drew another productive distinction: the "I", the thinking self that cannot be further divided and provides the thread of continuity through time, and the "Me", which splits further into a material self, a social self, and a spiritual self. The spiritual self, for James, was the most permanent: personality, core values, and conscience that do not typically change across a lifetime. Subsequent thinkers who built on his two-stage free will model include Henri Poincare, Arthur Holly Compton, and Karl Popper.

• 8. Final Years and Lasting Reach

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  After retiring from Harvard in January 1907, James published Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth in quick succession. Cardiac pain worsened through 1909 as he worked on what would become Some Problems in Philosophy, left unfinished and published posthumously. In the spring of 1910, he sailed to Europe for experimental treatments that did not help, returned home on August 18, and died eight days later at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  A Review of General Psychology analysis published in 2002 ranked James as the fourteenth most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century. A survey in American Psychologist in 1991 placed his reputation second, behind only Wilhelm Wundt. His influence reaches across disciplines in ways that are not always credited back to him: his description of the stream of consciousness shaped Joyce; his two-stage free will model shaped Poincare and Popper; his Gifford Lectures shaped the academic study of religious experience; his Harvard classroom produced two presidents and one of the founding voices of American sociology.

  President Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War Speech, delivered on the 17th of April 1977, drew its title and much of its theme from James's 1906 Stanford address and his 1910 essay "The Moral Equivalent of War", in which James explored how a society might sustain civic virtue in the absence of armed conflict and called for a term of public service for young people. The essay was James's last major speech. Its echo in a presidential address sixty-seven years later is a measure of how far into American life his ideas had traveled.