William James (1842–1910), elder brother of the novelist Henry James, trained in medicine at Harvard (MD 1869) after studying painting and joining Louis Agassiz's expedition to Brazil. A long period of illness and depression in his late twenties ended, by his own account, in a decision to believe in free will. He taught physiology, then psychology and philosophy at Harvard, founded one of the first American psychology laboratories, and became a leading figure in pragmatism. His other books include The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism.
“'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”
“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”
“our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Pragmatism collects eight popular lectures that William James gave at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906 and at Columbia University in January 1907. Published that year and dedicated to the memory of John Stuart Mill, the book presents pragmatism as both a method for settling disputes and a theory of what truth is.
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