(ca. 1895, inThe Letters of William James, ed. by HenryJames, Boston, 1920)

William James

First published Thu Sep 7, 2000; substantive revision Wed Nov 3, 2021

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplinesof physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred pagemasterwork,The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a richblend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflectionthat has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought”and the baby’s impression of the world “as one greatblooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds ofpragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkersin Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell,John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’sLawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but hiswritings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific.“Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind asCorrespondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment ofRationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism andpluralism, and contain the first statements of his view thatphilosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’stemperament.

James hints at his religious concerns in his earliest essays and inThe Principles, but they become more explicit inThe Willto Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897),Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine(1898),The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) andA Pluralistic Universe (1909). James oscillated betweenthinking that a “study in human nature” such asVarieties could contribute to a “Science ofReligion” and the belief that religious experience involves analtogether supernatural domain, somehow inaccessible to science butaccessible to the individual human subject.

James made some of his most important philosophical contributions inthe last decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904–5(collected in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)) he setout the metaphysical view most commonly known as “neutralmonism,” according to which there is one fundamental“stuff” that is neither material nor mental. In“A Pluralistic Universe” he defends the mystical andanti-pragmatic view that concepts distort rather than reveal reality,and in his influentialPragmatism (1907), he presentssystematically a set of views about truth, knowledge, reality,religion, and philosophy that permeate his writings from the late1870s onwards.

1. Chronology of James’s Life

1842. Born in New York City, first child of Henry James and MaryWalsh. James. Educated by tutors and at private schools in NewYork.
1843. Brother Henry born.
1848. Sister Alice born.
1855–8. Family moves to Europe. William attends school inGeneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer; develops interests in paintingand science.
1858. Family settles in Newport, Rhode Island, where James studiespainting with William Hunt.
1859–60. Family settles in Geneva, where William studiesscience at Geneva Academy; then returns to Newport when Williamdecides he wishes to resume his study of painting.
1861. William abandons painting and enters Lawrence ScientificSchool 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 atHarvard.
1866. Returns to medical school. Suffers eye strain, backproblems, and suicidal depression in the fall.
1867–8. Travels to Europe for health and education: Dresden,Bad Teplitz, Berlin, Geneva, Paris. Studies physiology at BerlinUniversity, reads philosophy, psychology and physiology (Wundt, Kant,Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Renan, Renouvier).
1869. Receives M. D. degree, but never practices. Severedepression in the fall.
1870–1. Depression and poor health continue.
1872. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teachundergraduate course in comparative physiology.
1873. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy andphysiology, but postpones teaching for a year to travel inEurope.
1874–5. Begins teaching psychology; establishes firstAmerican psychology laboratory.
1878. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Publishes “Remarks onSpencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” inJournal of Speculative Philosophy.
1879. Publishes “The Sentiment of Rationality” inMind.
1880. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy atHarvard. Continues to teach psychology.
1882. Travels to Europe. Meets with Ewald Hering, Carl Stumpf,Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Wundt, Joseph Delboeuf, Jean Charcot, George CroomRobertson, Shadworth Hodgson, Leslie Stephen.
1884. Lectures on “The Dilemma of Determinism” andpublishes “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology”inMind.
1885–92. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: logic, ethics, English empirical philosophy, psychologicalresearch.
1890. PublishesThe Principles of Psychology with HenryHolt of Boston, twelve years after agreeing to write it.
1892. PublishesPsychology: Briefer Course with HenryHolt.
1897. PublishesThe Will to Believe and Other Essays inPopular Philosophy, with Longmans, Green & Co. Lectures on“Human Immortality” (published in 1898).
1898. Identifies himself as a pragmatist in “PhilosophicalConceptions and Practical Results,” given at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. Develops heart problems.
1899. PublishesTalks to Teachers on Psychology: and toStudents on Some of Life’s Ideals (including “On aCertain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes LifeWorth Living?”) with Henry Holt. Becomes active member ofthe Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. S. policy inPhilippines.
1901–2. Delivers Gifford lectures on “The Varieties ofReligious Experience” in Edinburgh (published in 1902).
1904–5 Publishes “Does ‘Consciousness’Exist?,” “A World of Pure Experience,” “HowTwo Minds Can Know the Same Thing,” “Is Radical EmpiricismSolipsistic?” and “The Place of Affectional Facts in aWorld of Pure Experience” inJournal of Philosophy,Psychology and Scientific Methods. All were reprinted inEssays in Radical Empiricism (1912).
1907. Resigns Harvard professorship. Publishes Pragmatism: ANew Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking with Longmans, Green &Co., based on lectures given in Boston and at Columbia.
1909. PublishesA Pluralistic Universe with Longmans,Green & Co., based on Hibbert Lectures delivered in England and atHarvard the previous year.
1910. Publishes “A Pluralistic Mystic” inHibbertJournal. Abandons attempt to complete a “system” ofphilosophy. (His partially completed manuscript published posthumouslyasSome Problems of Philosophy). Dies of heart failure atsummer 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 publishedit, James’s discussion of Herbert Spencer broachescharacteristic themes of his philosophy: the importance of religionand the passions, the variety of human responses to life, and the ideathat we help to “create” the truths that we“register” (E 21). Taking up Spencer’s view that theadjustment of the organism to the environment is the basic feature ofmental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own visionof what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to describe.Survival, James asserts, is merely one of many interests human beingshave: “The social affections, all the various forms of play, thethrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophiccontemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moralself-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit—some or all ofthese are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existencetolerable;…” (E 13). We are all teleological creatures atbase, James holds, each with a set ofa priori values andcategories. Spencer “merely takes sides with theteloshe happens to prefer” (E 18).

James’s characteristic empiricism appears in his claim thatvalues and categories fight it out in the course of human experience,and that their conflicts “can only be solvedambulando,and not by anya priori definition.” The “formulawhich proves to have the most massive destiny,” he concludes,“will be the true one” (E 17). Yet James wishes to defendhis sense that any such formulation will be determined as much by afreely-acting human mind as by the world, a position he later (inPragmatism) calls “humanism”: “therebelongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It isin the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of theshould-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of thecogitandum as if they were excrescences…” (E 21).

“The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882)

The substance of this essay was first published inMind in1879 and in thePrinceton Review in 1882, and thenrepublished inThe Will to Believe and Other Essays in PopularPhilosophy in 1897. Although he never quite says that rationalityis a sentiment, James holds that a sentiment—really a set ofsentiments—is a “mark” of rationality. Thephilosopher, James writes, will recognize the rationality of aconception “as he recognizes everything else, by certainsubjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, hemay 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 itsabsoluteness” (WB 58). There is also a “passion forparsimony” (WB 58) that is felt in grasping theoreticalunifications, as well as a passion for distinguishing, a“loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike ofblurred outlines, of vague identifications” (WB 59). The idealphilosopher, James holds, blends these two passions of rationality,and even some great philosophers go too far in one direction oranother: Spinoza’s unity of all things in one substance is“barren,” as is Hume’s “‘looseness andseparateness’ of everything…” (WB 60).

Sentiments of rationality operate not just in logic or science, but inordinary life. When we first move into a room, for example, “wedo not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors mayopen, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found incupboards and corners.” These minor uncertainties act as“mental irritant[s],” which disappear when we come to knowour way around the room, to “feel at home” there (WB67–8).

James begins the second part of his essay by considering the case when“two conceptions [are] equally fit to satisfy the logicaldemand” for fluency or unification. At this point, he holds, onemust consider a “practical” component of rationality. Theconception that “awakens the active impulses, or satisfies otheraesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the morerational conception, and will deservedly prevail” (WB 66). Jamesputs the point both as one of psychology—a prediction of whatwill occur—and as one of judgment, for he holds that it willprevail “deservedly.”

As in his essay on Spencer, James explores the relations betweentemperaments and philosophical theorizing. Idealism, he holds,“will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,materialism by another.” Idealism offers a sense of intimacywith the universe, the feeling that ultimately I “am all.”But materialists find in idealism “a narrow, close, sick-roomair,” and prefer to conceive of an uncertain, dangerous and wilduniverse that has “no respect for our ego.” Let “thetides flow,” the materialist thinks, “even though theyflow over us” (WB 76). James is sympathetic both to the ideathat the universe is something we can be intimate with and to the ideathat it is wild and unpredictable. If he criticizes idealism for its“sick-room air,” he criticizes reductive forms ofmaterialism for denying to “our most intimate powers…allrelevancy in universal affairs” (WB 71). The intimacy and thewildness portrayed in these contrasting philosophies answer topropensities, passions, and powers in human beings, and the“strife” of these two forms of “mentaltemper,” James predicts, will always be seen in philosophy (WB76). 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 Americanpublisher Henry Holt, but it took him twelve years to produce themanuscript, and when he did he described it to Holt as “aloathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying tonothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as ascience of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is anincapable” (The Letters of William James, ed. HenryJames. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926, pp. 393–4). Nevertheless,this thousand page volume of psychology, physiology and philosophy hasproved to be James’s masterwork, containing early statements ofhis main philosophical ideas in extraordinarily rich chapters on“The Stream of Thought,” “The Consciousness ofSelf,” “Emotion,” “Will,” and many othertopics.

James tells us that he will follow the psychological method ofintrospection inThe Principles, which he defines as“the looking into our own minds and reporting what we therediscover” (PP 185). In fact he takes a number of methodologicalapproaches in the book. Early on, he includes chapters on “TheFunctions of the Brain” and “On Some General Conditions ofBrain Activity” that reflect his years as a lecturer in anatomyand physiology at Harvard, and he argues for the reductive andmaterialist thesis that habit is “at bottom a physicalprinciple” (PP 110). As the book moves along, he involveshimself in discussions with philosophers—for example with Humeand Kant in his hundred-page chapter on the self, and he finds himselfmaking metaphysical claims that anticipate his later pragmatism, aswhen he writes: “There is no property ABSOLUTELY essentialto any one thing. The same property which figures as the essenceof a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature on theother” (PP 959).

Even “introspection” covers a range of reports. Jamesdiscusses the experiments that his contemporaries Wundt, Stumpf andFechner were performing in their laboratories, which led them toresults such as that “sounds are less delicately discriminatedin intensity than lights” (PP 513). But many ofJames’s most important and memorable introspective observationscome from his own life. For example:

The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clotheit…. Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the blankrhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one’smind, striving to be filled out with words (PP 244).
Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone andflesh 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, ouranger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. (PP280).
There is an excitement during the crying fit which is not without acertain pungent pleasure of its own; but it would take a genius forfelicity to discover any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling ofdry and shrunken sorrow (PP 1061).
“Will you or won’t you have it so?” is themost probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour ofthe day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the mosttheoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer byconsents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder thatthese dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communicationwith the nature of things! (PP, p. 1182).

In this last quotation, James tackles a philosophical problem from apsychological perspective. Although he refrains from answering thequestion of whether these “responses” are in fact deeporgans of communication with the nature of things—reporting onlythat they seem to us to be so—in his later writings, such asVarieties of Religious Experience andA PluralisticUniverse, he confesses, and to some degree defends, his beliefthat the question should be answered affirmatively.

In the deservedly famous chapter on “The Stream ofThought” James takes himself to be offering a richer account ofexperience than those of traditional empiricists such as Hume. Hebelieves relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienceddirectly (a view he would later defend as part of his “radicalempiricism.”) James finds consciousness to be a stream ratherthan a succession of “ideas.” Its waters blend, and ourindividual 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 psychiclife has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of“flights and perchings” (PP 236). We rest when we rememberthe name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we heara noise that might be the baby waking from her nap.

Interest—and its close relative, attention—is a majorcomponent not only of James’s psychology, but of theepistemology and metaphysics that seep into his discussion. A thing,James states in “The Stream of Thought,” is a group ofqualities “which happen practically or aesthetically to interestus, to which we therefore give substantive names…”. (PP274). And reality “means simply relation to our emotionaland active life…whatever excites and stimulates our interest isreal” (PP 924). Our capacity for attention to one thingrather than another is for James the sign of an “activeelement in all consciousness,…a spiritualsomething…which seems to go out to meet these qualities andcontents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it.” (PP285). Faced with the tension between scientific determinism and ourbelief in our own freedom or autonomy, James—speaking not as apsychologist but as the philosopher he had become—argues thatscience “must be constantly reminded that her purposes are notthe only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which shehas use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be envelopedin a wider order, on which she has no claims at all” (PP1179).

In his discussions of consciousness James appears at various times tobe a reductive materialist, a dualist, a proto-phenomenologist, and aneutral psychologist who wouldn’t dare to consider philosophicalquestions. One of the most original layers ofThe Principleslies in James’s pursuit of a “pure” description ofthe stream of thought that does not presuppose it to be either mentalor 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 atpains 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 outerworld” (PP 678). He argues that our original experiences areobjective, that “only as reflection becomes developed do webecome aware of an inner world at all” (PP 679). However, theobjective world originally experienced is not the world of spatialrelations that we think:

Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from thecandle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who]does not feel either of these objects to be situated in longitude 71W. and latitude 42 N.….The flame fills its own place, the painfills its own place; but as yet these places are neither identifiedwith, nor discriminated from, any other places. That comeslater. For the places thus first sensibly known are elements ofthe child’s space-world which remain with him all his life. (PP681–2)

James’s chapter on “Habit,” early in the book,begins with habit as a physical matter but ends by considering itsethical implications. James argues that the laws of nature arethemselves habits, “nothing but the immutable habits which thedifferent elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions andreactions upon each other” (PP 109). In our brains, habits arepaths of nervous energy, as rivers and streams are the paths ofwater’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 psychologicallevel as well, “any sequence of mental action which has beenfrequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself ...” (PP 116).Habits are useful in diminishing the attention that we have to devoteto our actions, thereby allowing us to develop “our higherpowers of mind” (PP 126). On the social level, habit is“the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most preciousconservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds ofordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the enviousuprisings of the poor” (PP 125). The “ethical implicationsof the law of habit,” (PP 124) as James sees them, concern whichhabits we choose to develop, and when. Many habits must begin early inlife: “Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spokenwithout a foreign accent” (PP 126). We should strive to make our“nervous system our ally instead of our enemy” by formingas many good habits as we can, as early in life as we can. Even laterin life, we are to keep our capacity for resolution in shape by everyday or two doing “something for no other reason than that youwould rather not do it” (PP 130).

Two noteworthy chapters late inThe Principles are “TheEmotions” and “Will.” The first sets out thetheory—also enunciated by the Danish physiologist CarlLange—that emotion follows, rather than causes, its bodilyexpression: “Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorryand weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by arival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended saysthat this order of sequence is incorrect…that we feel sorrybecause we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because wetremble…” (PP 1065–6). The significance of thisview, according to James, is that our emotions are tied in with ourbodily expressions. What, he asks, would grief be “without itstears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in thebreast-bone?” Not an emotion, James answers, for a “purelydisembodied human emotion is a nonentity” (PP 1068).

In his chapter on “Will” James opposes the theory of hiscontemporary Wilhelm Wundt that there is one special feeling—a“feeling of innervation”—present in all intentionalaction. In his survey of a range of cases, James finds that someactions involve an act of resolve or of outgoing nervous energy, butothers do not. For example:

I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time takingnuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly isover, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what Ido; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that Imay eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about. There is certainly noexpress fiat here;… (PP 1131).

The chapter on “Will” also contains striking passages thatanticipate the concerns ofThe Varieties of ReligiousExperience: about moods, “changes of heart,”and “awakenings of conscience.” These, Jamesobserves, may affect the “whole scale of values of our motivesand impulses” (PP 1140).

4. Essays in Popular Philosophy

James’s popular and influential,The Will to Believe andOther Essays in Popular Philosophy, published in 1897, collectspreviously published essays from the previous nineteen years,including “The Sentiment of Rationality” (discussedabove), “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “Great Men andTheir Environment” and “The Moral Philosopher and theMoral Life.” The title essay—published just two yearsearlier—proved to be controversial for seeming to recommendirresponsible or irrationally held beliefs. James later wrote that heshould have called the essay “theright tobelieve,” to indicate his intent tojustify holdingcertain beliefsin certain circumstances, not to claim thatwe can (or should) believe things simply by an act of will.

In science, James notes, we can afford to await the outcome ofinvestigation before coming to a belief, but in other cases we are“forced,” in that we must come to some belief even if allthe relevant evidence is not in. If I am on an isolated mountaintrail, faced with an icy ledge to cross, and do not know whether I canmake it, I may be forced to consider the question whether I can orshould believe that I can cross the ledge. This question is not onlyforced, it is “momentous”: if I am wrong I may fall to mydeath, and if I believe rightly that I can cross the ledge, my holdingof the belief may itself contribute to my success. In such a case,James asserts, I have the “right tobelieve”—precisely because such a belief may help bringabout the fact believed in. This is a case “where a fact cannotcome at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming”(WB, 25).

James applies his analysis to religious belief, particularly to thepossible case in which one’s salvation depends on believing inGod in advance of any proof that God exists. In such a case the beliefmay be justified by the outcome to which having the beliefleads. 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 memberproceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members willsimultaneously do theirs…. A government, an army, a commercialsystem, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on thiscondition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing iseven 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 ourright to believe in certain answers to these questions anyway.

Another essay in the collection, “Reflex Action andTheism,” attempts a reconciliation of science and religion.James’s expression “reflex action” alludes to thebiological picture of the organism as responding to sensations with aseries of actions. In the higher animals a theoretical or thinkingstage intervenes between sensation and action, and this is where, inhuman beings, the thought of God arises. James maintains that thisthought is a natural human response to the universe, independent ofany proof that God exists, and he predicts that God will be the“centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle oflife” (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” (WB143).

The Will to Believe also contains James’s mostdeveloped account of morality, “The Moral Philosopher and theMoral Life.” Morality for James rests onsentience—without it there are no moral claims and no moralobligations. But once sentience exists, a claim is made, and moralitygets “a foothold in the universe” (WB 198). Although Jamesinsists that there is no common essence to morality, he does find aguiding 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 “richeruniverse…the good which seems most organizable, most fit toenter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a moreinclusive whole” (WB 210). This work proceeds by a series ofexperiments, by means of which we have learned to live (for the mostpart) without “polygamy and slavery, private warfare and libertyto kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power.” (WB205) . However, James holds that there is “nothing final inany actually given equilibrium of human ideals, [so that] as ourpresent laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, sothey will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered orderwhich 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 HumanBeings,” published in hisTalks to Teachers on Psychologyand 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 humanbeing to another, a blindness he illustrates with a story from his ownlife. Riding in the mountains of North Carolina he comes upon adevastated landscape, with no trees, scars in the earth, here andthere a patch of corn growing in the sunlight. But after talking tothe settlers who had cleared the forest to make room for their farm,James comes to see it their way (at least temporarily): not asdevastation but as a manifestation of “duty, struggle, andsuccess.” James concludes: “I had been as blind to thepeculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would alsohave been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strangeindoor academic ways of life at Cambridge” (TT 233–4).James portrays a plurality of outlooks in the essay to which heattaches both a metaphysical/epistemological and an ethical import.This plurality, he writes:

commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we seeharmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, howeverunintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole oftruth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from thepeculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms havetheir special revelations (TT 264).

Although “On a Certain Blindness” is about toleration andthe appreciation of different points of view, James sets out his ownromantic point of view in his choice of heroes in the essay:Wordsworth and Shelley, Emerson, and W. H. Hudson, all of whom aresaid to have a sense of the “limitless significance in naturalthings” (TT 244). Even in the city, there is “unfathomablesignificance and importance” (TT 254) in the daily events of thestreets, the river, and the crowds of people. James praises WaltWhitman, “a hoary loafer,” for knowing how to profit bylife’s common opportunities: after a morning of writing and abath, Whitman rides the omnibus down Broadway from 23rd street toBowling 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 whichthe spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which thefutility of his occupation excites?” (TT 252). James’sinterest in the inner lives of others, and in writers like Tolstoy whoshare his understanding of their “mysterious ebbs andflows” (TT 255), leads him to the prolonged study of humanreligious experience that he presented as the Gifford Lectures in1901–2, published asThe Varieties of ReligiousExperience in 1902.

5. The Varieties of Religious Experience

LikeThe Principles of Psychology,Varieties is“A Study in Human Nature,” as its subtitle says. But atsome five hundred pages it is only half the length ofThePrinciples of Psychology, befitting its more restricted, if stilllarge, scope. For James studies that part of human nature that is, oris related to, religious experience. His interest is not in religiousinstitutions, ritual, or, even for the most part, religious ideas, butin “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men intheir solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand inrelation 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 SickSoul.” The healthy-minded religious person—Walt Whitman isone 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 beinvoluntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willfulforms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of aresolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “oldhell-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 aliar” (V 107). For “The Sick Soul,” in contrast,“radical evil gets its innings” (V 163). No matter howsecure one may feel, the sick soul finds that “[u]nsuspectedlyfrom the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said,something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of thedelight, a whiff of melancholy….” These states are notsimply unpleasant sensations, for they bring “a feeling ofcoming from a deeper region and often have an appallingconvincingness” (V 136). James’s main examples areLeo Tolstoy’s “My Confession,” John Bunyan’sautobiography, and a report of terrifying“dread”—allegedly from a French correspondent butactually from James himself. Some sick souls never get well, whileothers recover or even triumph: these are the“twice-born.” In chapters on “The Divided Self, andthe Process of Its Unification” and on “Conversion,”James discusses St. Augustine, Henry Alline, Bunyan, Tolstoy, and arange of popular evangelists, focusing on what he calls “thestate of assurance” (V 247) they achieve. Central to this stateis “the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimatelywell with one, the peace, the harmony, thewillingness to be,even though the outer conditions should remain the same” (V248).

Varieties’ classic chapter on “Mysticism”offers “four marks which, when an experience has them, mayjustify us in calling it mystical…” (V 380). The first isineffability: “it defies expression…its quality must bedirectly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred toothers.” Second is a “noetic quality”: mysticalstates present themselves as states of knowledge. Thirdly, mysticalstates are transient; and, fourth, subjects are passive with respectto them: they cannot control their coming and going. Are these states,James ends the chapter by asking, “windows through which themind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world[?]” (V428).

In chapters entitled “Philosophy”—devoted in largepart to pragmatism—and “Conclusions,” James findsthat religious experience is on the whole useful, even “amongstthe most important biological functions of mankind,” but heconcedes that this does not make it true. Nevertheless, Jamesarticulates his own belief—which he does not claim toprove—that religious experiences connect us with a greater, orfurther, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations tothe world: “The further limits of our being plunge, it seems tome, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensibleand merely ‘understandable’ world” (V 515).

6. Late Writings

Pragmatism (1907)

James first announced his commitment to pragmatism in a lecture atBerkeley in 1898, entitled “Philosophical Conceptions andPractical Results.” Later sources forPragmatism werelectures at Wellesley College in 1905, and at the Lowell Institute andColumbia University in 1906 and 1907. Pragmatism emerges inJames’s book as six things: a philosophical temperament, atheory of truth, a theory of meaning, a holistic account of knowledge,a metaphysical view, and a method of resolving philosophicaldisputes.

The pragmatic temperament appears in the book’s opening chapter,where (following a method he first set out in “Remarks onSpencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence”) Jamesclassifies philosophers according to their temperaments: in this case“tough-minded” or “tender-minded.” Thepragmatist is the mediator between these extremes, someone, like Jameshimself, with “scientific loyalty to facts,” but also“the old confidence in human values and the resultantspontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic type” (P 17).The method of resolving disputes and the theory of meaning are ondisplay in James’s discussion of an argument about whether a manchasing a squirrel around a tree goes around the squirrel too. Takingmeaning as the “conceivable effects of a practical kindthe object may involve,” the pragmatist philosopher finds thattwo “practical” meanings of “go around” are inplay: either the man goes North, East, South, and West of thesquirrel, or he faces first the squirrel’s head, then one of hissides, then his tail, then his other side. “Make thedistinction,” James writes, “and there is no occasion forany 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 goodsbecause we can “ride” on them into the future withoutbeing unpleasantly surprised. They “lead us into useful verbaland conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensibletermini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing humanintercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation,from foiled and barren thinking” (103). Although James holdsthat truths are “made” (104) in the course ofhuman experience, and that for the most part they live “on acredit system” in that they are not currently being verified, healso holds the empiricistic view that “beliefs verifiedconcretely bysomebody are the posts of the wholesuperstructure” (P 100).

James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” setsout his voluntaristic epistemology. “We carve outeverything,” James states, “just as we carve outconstellations, to serve our human purposes” (P 100).Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in everyexperience of truth-making” (P 117), including not only ourpresent sensations or experiences but the whole body of our priorbeliefs. 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 humancontribution” (P 122). He also embraces a metaphysics ofprocess in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still inthe making,” whereas for “rationalism reality isready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123).Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism andReligion” follows James’s line inVarieties inattacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiableaccount of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralisticreligion” (144) based on human experience. “Onpragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesisof God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it istrue” (143).

A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures “On thePresent Situation in Philosophy,” James begins his book, as hehad begunPragmatism, with a discussion of the temperamentaldetermination 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 wholepreferred—there is no other truthfulword—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 youngerdisciples at our American universities…” (PU 13).

James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce’sidealism and the “vicious intellectualism” of Hegel tophilosophers whose visions he admires: Gustav Fechner and HenriBergson. He praises Fechner for holding that “the whole universein its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and developments,is everywhere alive and conscious” (PU, 70), and he seeks torefine and justify Fechner’s idea that separate human, animaland vegetable consciousnesses meet or merge in a “consciousnessof still wider scope” (PU 72). James employs HenriBergson’s critique of “intellectualism” to arguethat the “concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by nosuch definite limits as our conceptual substitutes are confined by.They run into one another continuously and seem tointerpenetrate” (PU 127). James concludes by embracing aposition that he had more tentatively set forth inThe Varietiesof Religious Experience: that religious experiences “pointwith reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousnesswith a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudentialman (who is the only man that scientific psychology, so called, takescognizance of) is shut off” (PU 135). Whereas inPragmatism James subsumes the religious within the pragmatic(as yet another way of successfully making one’s way through theworld), inA Pluralistic Universe he suggests that thereligious offers a superior relation to the universe.

Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

This posthumous collection includes James’s groundbreakingessays on “pure experience,” originally published in1904–5. James’s fundamental idea is that mind and matterare both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamentalstuff—pure experience—that (despite being called“experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pureexperience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life whichfurnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptualcategories… athat which is not yet any definitewhat, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…”(ERE 46). That “whats” pure experience may be are mindsand bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on afundamental ontological difference among these “pureexperiences,” but on therelations into which theyenter. Certain sequences of pure experiences constitute physicalobjects, and others constitute persons; but one pure experience (saythe perception of a chair) may be part both of the sequenceconstituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person.Indeed, one pure experience might be part of two distinct minds, asJames explains in a chapter entitled “How Two Minds Can Know OneThing.”

James’s “radical empiricism” is distinct from his“pure experience” metaphysics. It is never preciselydefined in theEssays, and is best explicated by a passagefromThe Meaning of Truth where James states that radicalempiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and aconclusion. The postulate is that “the only things that shall bedebatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawnfrom experience,” the fact is that relations are just asdirectly experienced as the things they relate, and the conclusion isthat “the parts of experience hold together from next to next byrelations that are themselves parts of experience” (MT,6–7).

James was still working on objections to his “pureexperience” doctrine, replying to critics ofPragmatism, and writing an introduction to philosophicalproblems when he died in 1910. His legacy extends into psychology andthe study of religion, and in philosophy not only throughout thepragmatist tradition that he founded (along with Charles Peirce), butinto phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Edmund Husserlincorporated James’s notions of the “fringe” and“halo” into his phenomenology (Moran, pp. 276–80),Bertrand Russell’sThe Analysis of Mind is indebted toJames’s doctrine of “pure experience,” (Russell,1921, pp. 22–6), Ludwig Wittgenstein learned about “theabsence of the will act” from James’sPsychology(Goodman,Wittgenstein and William James, p. 81), and theversions of “neopragmatism” set out by Nelson Goodman,Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam are saturated with James’sideas. In physics, James’s humanistic pragmatism, and hissuggestion that “new being come[s] in local spots andpatches” (P 138; Fuchs 2017, p. 33) have inspired the versionof quantum theory known as QBism (see Healey). James is one of themost attractive and endearing of philosophers: for his vision of a“wild,” “open” universe that is neverthelessshaped 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 setsthat vision out. (The Nation (3 September 1910:793–4).

Bibliography

Primary Literature: Works by William James

The works that correspond to the abbreviations [PP], [WB], [TT], [V],[P], [PU], [MT], and [E] are referenced below -- the abbreviation isindicated occurs at the end 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 asCorrespondence,” first published inThe Journal ofSpeculative Philosophy, 1878. Contained inEssays inPhilosophy, pp. 7–22.
The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1981. Originally published in 1890 [PP].
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in PopularPhilosophy, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,1979; first published in 1897 [WB].
“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,”1898. Contained inPragmatism, inThe Works of WilliamJames, pp. 255–70.
Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some ofLife’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 UniversityPress, 1977. Originally published in 1909 [PU].
The Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, MA and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1979 [MT]. Originally published in 1909.
Essays in Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1978 [E].
Some Problems of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London:Harvard University 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 andLondon, 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,Pragmatismand the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy andPhenomenology Before the Great Divide, New York and London:Routledge.
Barzun, Jacques, 1983,A Stroll with William James NewYork: Harper and Row.
Benoist, Jocelyn, 2005, “A Phenomenology orPragmatism?” inPragmatism, Critical Concepts inPhilosophy, vol. 2, Russell B. Goodman (ed.), London and NewYork: Routledge, pp. 89–112.
Bernstein, Richard, 2010,The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge,U.K. and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Bird, Graham, 1986,William James (The Arguments of thePhilosophers), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Campbell, James, 2017,Experiencing William James: Belief in aPluralistic World, Charlottesville: University of VirginiaPress.
Carrette, Jeremy, 2013,William James’s Hidden ReligiousImagination: A Universe of Relations, New York: Routledge.
Edie, James, 1987,William James and Phenomenology,Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Feinstein, Howard M., 1984,Becoming William James,Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Friedl, Herwig, 2019,Thinking in Search of a Language: Essayson American Intellect and Intuition, New York and London:Bloomsbury Academic.
Fuchs, Christopher A., 2017, “Notwithstanding Bohr: TheReasons for QBism,”Mind and Matter, 15(2): 245–300;page reference is to thepreprint of Fuchs 2017 available online].
Gale, Richard M., 1999,The Divided Self of WilliamJames, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2004,The Philosophy of William James:An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Girel, Mathias, 2004, “Les Angles de l’acte. Usagesd’Emerson dans la Philosophie de William James,”Cahier Charles V, XXXVII (October): 207–245.
Goodman, Russell B., 1990,American Philosophy and theRomantic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,Chapter 3.
–––, 2002,Wittgenstein and WilliamJames, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2004, “James on theNonconceptual,”Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII:137–148.
–––, 2008, “Emerson, Romanticism, andClassical American Pragmatism,” inThe Oxford Handbook ofAmerican Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, pp. 19–37.
–––, 2010, “William James’sPluralisms,”Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 2:155–76.
–––, 2016, “Thinking about Animals: James,Wittgenstein, Hearne”, inNordic Wittgenstein Review, 5(1):9–29.
Healey, Richard, 2017, “Quantum-Bayesian and PragmatistViews of Quantum Theory,” inThe Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (Spring 2017 edition), Edward Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/quantum-bayesian/>.
Jackman, Henry, 2008, “William James,” inTheOxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Cheryl Misak (ed.),Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 60–86.
–––, 2017, “William James on Conceptionsand Private Language,”Belgrade Philosophical Annual,30: 175–193.
Klein, Alexander, 2009, “On Hume on Space: Green’sAttack, James’s Empirical Response,” inJournal of theHistory of Philosophy, 47(3): 415–49.
––– (ed.), 2018,The Oxford Handbook of WilliamJames, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, Henry S., 1981,The Religious Investigations ofWilliam James, Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress.
Madelrieux, Stéphane, 2008,William James,l’attitude empiriste, Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance.
Marchetti, Sarin, 2015, Ethics and Philosophical Critique inWilliam James, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
–––, forthcoming,The Jamesean Mind,New York and London: Routledge.
Matthiessen, F. O., 1947,The James Family, New York:Knopf.
McDermott, John, 1986,Streams of Experience: Reflections onthe History and Philosophy of American Culture, 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: TwoInteractions. From Horizontal Intentionality to PracticalCoping,” in Baghramian and Marchetti 2017, pp.272–93.
Myers, Gerald, 1986,William James: His Life and Thought,New Haven: Yale University Press.
Pawelski, James O., 2007,The Dynamic Individualism of WilliamJames, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Perry, Ralph Barton, 1935,The Thought and Character ofWilliam James, Boston: Little, Brown, 2 vols.
Pihlström, Sami, 2008,The Trail of the Human Serpent isover Everything: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, andReligion, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Poirier, Richard, 1992,Poetry and Pragmatism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Proudfoot, Wayne, ed., 2004,William James and a Science ofReligions, New York: Columbia University Press.
Putnam, Hilary, 1987,The Many Faces of Realism, LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
––– (with Ruth Anna Putnam), 1990,“William James’s Ideas,” in Putnam, Hilary,Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, pp. 217–231.
Putnam, Ruth Anna, 1997,The Cambridge Companion to WilliamJames, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Robert D., 2006,William James: In the Maelstromof American Modernism, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Russell, Bertrand, 1921,The Analysis of Mind, London:George Allen and Unwin.
–––, 1986,The Collected Papers of BertrandRussell (Volume 6), London: George Allen and Unwin, pp.257–306.
Simon, Linda, 1998,Genuine Reality: a life of WilliamJames, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 1990,William James’sRadical Reconstruction of Philosophy, Albany: State University ofNew York Press.
Skillen, Anthony, 1996, “William James, ‘A CertainBlindness’ and an Uncertain Pluralism,” inPhilosophyand Pluralism, ed. David Archard. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, pp. 33–45.
Slater, Michael R., 2009,William James on Ethics andFaith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2014,Pragmatism and the Philosophy ofReligion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S., 1993,James and Bradley: American Truth andBritish Reality, Chicago: Open Court.
Suckiel, Ellen Kappy, 1982,The Pragmatic Philosophy ofWilliam James, Notre Dame, IN and London: University of NotreDame Press.
–––, 1996,Heaven’s Champion,Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Tarver, Erin C. and Shannon Sullivan (eds.), 2015,FeministInterpretations of William James, University Park, PA: ThePennsylvania State University Press.
Taylor, Eugene, 1996,William James on Consciousness Beyondthe Fringe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wahl, Jean, 1925,Pluralist Philosophies of England andAmerica, trans. Fred Rothwell , London: Open Court.
Wilshire, Bruce, 1979,William James and Phenomenology: AStudy of “The Principles of Psychology”, New York:AMS Press, 1979.

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