Reflections on the Principles of Psychology

William James After A Century

Michael G. Johnson, Tracy B. Henley, Tracy Henley, Michael Johnson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134990085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This important volume looks back to 1890 and -- 100 years later -- asks some of the same questions William James was asking in his Principles of Psychology. In so doing, it reviews our progress toward their solutions. Among the contemporary concerns of 1990 that the editors consider are: the nature of the self and the will, conscious experience, associationism, the basic acts of cognition, and the nature of perception. Their findings: Although the developments in each of these areas during the last 100 years have been monumental, James' views as presented in the Principles still remain viable and provocative. To provide a context for understanding James, some chapters are devoted primarily to recent scholarship about James himself -- focusing on the time the Principles was written, relevant intellectual influences, and considerations of his understanding of this "new" science of psychology. The balance of this volume is devoted to specific topics of particular interest to James. One critical theme woven into almost every chapter is the tension between the role of experience (or phenomenological data) within a scientific psychology, and the viability of a materialistic (or biologically reductive) account of mental life. Written for professionals, practitioners, and students of psychology -- in all disciplines.

Chapter 1

William James and His Principles

Rand B. Evans
University of Baltimore

Just 100 years ago William James published his monumental Principles of Psychology (W. James, 1890). The Principles has remained in print ever since, a remarkable feat for its hesitant and self-deprecating author. So well known are the author and the book that they hardly need introduction. Still, the centenary of the publication of the Principles and the approaching 150th anniversary of James's birth is an appropriate time to stand back and consider the background of his remarkable book.

The Principles is certainly James's masterpiece and probably the most significant psychological treatise ever written in America. In its richness of descriptive detail into the varieties of mental life, in its boldness of explanation, and even in its leaps into speculative possibilities, it has no equal in American psychological literature. The Principles is also perhaps the best entree to any thorough understanding of James's thought (McDermott, 1977, p. xxxiii).

A century ago, however, the Principles was just a huge stack of paper on William James's desk being prepared for shipment to Henry Holt for publication. James had reason to anticipate a positive reception for his book. Several of the chapters had already appeared as articles in periodicals and had been well received. When he submitted the manuscript to Henry Holt, however, James was quite self-effacing, calling himself “an incapable” and his manuscript “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass . . .“ (Perry, 1935, Vol. II, p. 48). To his brother Henry, however, James intimated that, “As ‘psychologies’ go, it is a good one . . . ” (H. James, 1920, Vol. I, p. 296).

James's Principles was a very personal document. James's philosophy and his life history were tightly intertwined. His emphases of the themes of naturalism, will, and self in his Principles was clearly a product of major struggles in his own life. His insights were, at least in part, due to his gaining control of his own self and will from influences that seemed to overcome him in his early life. James tells us that he “drifted” into psychology and philosophy (Perry, 1935, Vol. I, p. 228). The currents on which he drifted, however, can be seen as influenced by his personal struggles. A consideration of some of the major points of James's early life may make that relationship clearer.

LIFE OF WILLIAM JAMES TO 1890

William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842 (see Allen, 1967; H. James, Jr., 1920; Myers, 1986; Perry, 1935 for more complete biographical details). He was born to wealth and privilege. His grandfather, also named William, had come to America from Ireland in the late 18th century and made his fortune in land speculation. Of this William's 13 children, Henry James Sr. was the father of our William James. Due to his share of the family wealth, Henry James Sr. never had to work in the standard meaning of the word. He spent most of his adult life involved in intellectual pursuits centering primarily around his own religious philosophy, a free-thinking view strongly influenced by the mystical philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Henry James had five children, the eldest of whom was our William James. The most famous of William's siblings was his brother, Henry, the author of finely crafted “psychological” novels and stories. The other siblings did not reach the attainments of William and Henry. The one sister, Alice, suffered most intensely from the neuroses that seem to have inflicted all of the James children, which chronically disabled her throughout her life. This was particularly unfortunate since Alice showed in her diaries a spark no less than that of William and Henry. The two youngest brothers, Robertson and Garth Wilkinson, in contrast, did little writing and lived, relatively speaking, mediocre lives. Growing up, however, the James children had the benefit of parents who were interested in intellectual attainment. Although the children received a fragmented and somewhat unbalanced education, it was a rich one. The family traveled extensively. William and his siblings attended school in Europe as well as America. He became adept in French and passable in German and Italian, languages that would aid him in his scholarly life. He also spoke a little Portuguese and read Latin and Greek.

Although Henry James Sr. moved in a circle of literary luminaries and there were often visitors in the James home, the family was largely self-contained intellectually, virtually a subculture unto itself. Once, when William James was asked what nationality his brother was, he responded that: “— he's really, I won't say a Yankee, but a native of the James family, and has no other country . . . “(Perry, 1935, Vol. I, p. 412). Because of this unusually self-contained family situation and its famous products, the James family has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Every extant and available line written by any member to or about any other member has been evaluated and interpreted from every standpoint imaginable. The result of all this, as is probably the case with other over-analyzed and over-interpreted individuals and families, is that the James family, which was certainly an unusual one, sometime appears merely eccentric (Bjork, 1983, pp. 15–36; Myers, 1986 pp. 18–34).

It is clear that the members of William James's family shared a neurotic predilection called, in the late 19th century, neurasthenia. The term represented a congeries of illnesses and was vague at best, although perhaps no more vague than the term, neurosis, that replaced it (Carlson, 1980; Gosling, 1987). Although the origin and nature of his ailments is not really known with any precision, his dealing with such symptoms appears to have shaped much of his approach to understanding mental life.

Perhaps the greatest single influence on William's early intellectual life was his father, Henry Sr. Although William claimed he never understood his father's religious philosophy, the environment in which William grew up and in which he lived into his late thirties, was permeated by his father's ideas and their application in the family's domestic sphere.

Henry James wrote of his hopes for William's future:

I desire my child to become an upright man, a man in whom goodness shall be induced not by mercenary motives as brute goodness is induced, but by love for it or a sympathetic delight in it. And inasmuch as I know that this character or disposition cannot be forcibly imposed upon him, but must be freely assumed, I surround him as far as possible with an atmosphere of freedom. (H. James, Sr., 1855, p. 170)

This freedom and desire for self-actualization Henry Sr. gave to William and his other children, along with a loving, even coddled environment. Henry Sr. believed that his children should remain innocent and unworldly as long as possible and sought a family atmosphere that would foster such unworldliness. In doing so he and his wife, Mary, effectively extended the childhoods of their offspring well into the age when others were expressing the independence of their adulthood. This artificial, hothouse approach to child rearing was not given without cost to William and the other children. When the realities of the world had to be faced, the children, although chronologically adults, were largely unprepared.

William's childhood extended well into his thirties and it might be argued that his transition into adulthood, as it is ordinarily understood, was completed only after his marriage to Alice Howe Gibbons in 1878 and his move from his family's house. This extended adolescence was quite likely the source of some of William's personal tendencies, particularly those involving the avoidance or forestalling of commitments, as well as avoiding firm definitions, hardened concepts, or fixed situations. These tendencies, although they contributed to aspects of James's psychological thought that we prize so much in the Principles, were also a source of stress and conflict in his own personal life. I would argue that the ailments and the convalescence that made up so much of James's life before the publication of the Principles was a product of William's artificially extended childhood in the James family and the conflicts that resulted from his being presented with an adult world after enrolling at Harvard and being unable to deal with them.

Henry Sr. impressed on his children that they should pursue intellectual delights without consideration to mundane matters such as income. Henry Sr. could and did pursue his own intellectual delights in just this way. Being independently wealthy, he could afford to do so. His children, however, were the generation who would be unable to support themselves only on their shares of the diluted family fortune. It was, in particular, the conflict between individual self-actualization and the practicalities of making a living that would plague William, perhaps most of all, as he attempted to make his way in the world.

A negative influence of Henry Sr. on William was Henry's deterministic belief that an individual's life was controlled by the will of God and that the individual must subjugate his own will to God's. The story of William James's transition from childhood to adulthood is, in many ways, the story of his rejection of his father's notions and his recognition of the necessity for an individual to project his ego into the world through the exercise of his own free will rather than a submissive acceptance of any determinism.

Henry James Sr.’s influence on his children was aided and abetted by his wife, Mary. Although she was the most emotionally stable member of the family and was the glue that held the family together, she also helped create the atmosphere that legitimized and promoted hypochondriasis among the children. She appears to have been a firm believer in overwork as the source of nervous exhaustion and was continually cautioning members of the family against any exertion, lest they overtax themselves and require convalescence. The fact that the James family could afford extended convalescence may have been a contributing factor as well.

In his late teens, William began seeking a direction for his life. He was having some difficulty in finding it, not an uncommon problem for someone born into independent wealth. William found that he had an aptitude for and an interest in painting, and had thoughts of art as a career. On one of the family's sojourns to Newport William came to know the artist, William Morris Hunt. Henry Sr., however, believed that William was better suited for science than for art. Perhaps to avoid the kind of break he had experienced with his father and to maintain at least the appearance of the freedom he declared available to his children, Henry Sr. did not openly forbid his son's dabbling in art. After it became apparent that William was determined to be an artist, Henry Sr. allowed him to study for a while with Hunt in Newport. After a period of study, William, either by his own decision or one influenced by Henry Sr., decided that he did not have sufficient talent to become an artist of quality.

In the fall of 1861, William gave up the notion of becoming an artist and entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard to study chemistry. This shift from art to science on William's part and its supposed role in the onset of William's neurosis has been the subject of several studies, perhaps the most notable of which is found in Howard M. Feinstein's Becoming William James (1984). One aspect of the argument has been that the emergence of William's nervous symptoms at this time was incited by his being dragooned from a life of art into a life of science. The argument is interesting but not entirely compelling. There seems to be no clear evidence that Henry Sr. did more than allow William to see whether he had sufficient talent to make art a career. Apparently William decided he did not have the talent. The fact that William apparently had expressed “ardor” for chemistry before he left for Harvard (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 43) and that there was no sign of acrimony between him and his father, makes the case for a father–son conflict somewhat questionable. The fact that James later seemed to lament his not pursuing art is not sufficient in itself to support the frustrated artist hypothesis since James tended to lament any lost possibility (See, H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 128).

It is a fact, however, that William showed signs of ill health during his first year and a half at college. His instructor in chemistry, Charles W. Eliot, recalled that James's work during those first three semesters was “much interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined to be a delicacy of nervous constitution” (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 32). Eliot's notes taken at the time indicate that James had “irregular attendance at laboratory” (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 32fn). William showed ability to learn from the texts but seemed not to have a devotion to the study of chemistry or the perseverance for laboratory work (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, pp. 31–32). James complained for instance, “This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely ‘muddled and beat’ and have to employ most all my time reading up” (Perry, 1935, Vol. I, p. 210). It is quite likely that these periods of ill health and William's inability to hold to a task or a study for great lengths of time were due to the onset of neurotic episodes. The cause of the episodes is open to question, however. It is entirely possible, for instance, that the largely undemanding, self-paced and even dilettantish educational background William had experienced all his life left him unprepared for the more intense and stringent demands of college life. The onset of symptoms, such as William's, among students suffering the “culture shock” of a transition from a high school environment to that of college is not unusual even today. Eliot noted that James's educational preparation had been irregular, “it did not conform to the Boston and Cambridge traditional method.” He also noted that his education had been slanted strongly in the direction of the biological sciences and was “in large proportion observational” (Perry, 1935, Vol. I, p. 207). The nature of James's early education could well have made a transition into the college environment difficult. Whatever the source of William's nervousness and ill-health, which began that fall of 1861, the ailment made laboratory work difficult for him.

William would spend a year and a half in the study of chemistry until he found that his ardor for the field had become “somewhat dulled” (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 43). He then spent the following semester and summer at home. The fall of 1862, William returned to Harvard, this time transferring from chemistry to comparative anatomy under Jeffries Wyman.

Coming to the end of his sophomore year, he was expected to come up with “finally and irrevocably ‘the choice of a profession’ ” (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, p. 43). He pointed out that he had four alternatives:

Natural History, Medicine, Printing, Beggary. Much may be said in favor of each. I have named them in the ascending order of their pecuniary invitingness. After all, the great problem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together, and I have to consider lucre. To study natural science, I know I should like, but the prospect of supporting a family on $600 a year is not one of those rosy dreams of the future with which the young are said to be haunted. Medicine would pay, but I should still be dealing with subjects which interest me—but how much drudgery and of what an unpleasant kind is there! Of all departments of Medicine that to which Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I should think, the most interesting. And I should like to see him and his patients at Northampton very much before coming to a decision.

The worst of this matter is that everyone must more or less act with insufficient knowledge—“go it blind,” as they say. Few can afford the time to try what suits them. However, a few months will show. (H. James, Jr., 1920, Vol. I, P. 44)

“Beggary,” according to Feinstein, is James's word for the life of a student gaining income from his family. William had gone through a bit of a strain with his mother about his demands for money (Feinstein, 1984, p. 162). The Dr. Prince mentioned here was an alienist to whom William's cousin Katharine was married. This letter gives an early indication on James's part of an interest in the study of mental science.

William's conflict between developing his highest interest and making a living can be traced directly to his father's view of the “Artist” and the perfect life. Henry James Sr. had long impressed a distinction between the artist and artisan. Art, in Henry James's meaning, is meant in the broad sense of creation, not in its narrow sense of creation of specific works. Henry James wrote in 1852, for instance:

The sphere of Art properly so called, is the sphere of man's spontaneous productivity. I say his spontaneous productivity, in order to distinguish it on the one hand from his natural productivity, or that which is prompted by his physical necessities, and on the other by his m...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 William James and His Principles
• Chapter 2 New Light on the Origin of William James's Experimental Psychology
• Chapter 3 The Implications of James's Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science
• Chapter 4 William James and Gestalt Psychology
• Chapter 5 William James on the Self and Personality: Clearing the Ground for Subsequent Theorists, Researchers, and Practitioners
• Chapter 6 William James and Habit: A Century Later
• Chapter 7 Association, Cognition, and Neural Networks
• Chapter 8 Imagination
• Chapter 9 A Look Back at William James's Theory of Perception
• Chapter 10 Space Perception and the Psychologist's Fallacy in James's Principles
• Chapter 11 Consciousness and Comparative Psychology
• Chapter 12 The Stream of Consciousness Since James
• Chapter 13 James on the Will
• Author Index
• Subject Index