by Morton Hunt
But the detailed laboratory work tried his patience and he soon switched to physiology, then the vogue, what with the pioneering work in Europe of Müller, Helmholtz, and Du Bois-Reymond. After a while, however, because the family fortune was dwindling and William realized he would someday have to earn his own living, he switched to Harvard Medical School. Medicine, too, failed to arouse his enthusiasm, and he took off much of a year to travel to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz, the eminent Harvard naturalist, hoping that natural history might be his true love. It proved not to be; he hated collecting specimens.
He resumed medical school but was beset by assorted ailments—back pain, weak vision, digestive disorders, and thoughts of suicide—some or most of which were exacerbated by his indecision about his future. Seeking relief, he went to France and Germany for nearly two years, took the baths, studied under Helmholtz and other leading physiologists, and became thoroughly conversant with the New Psychology.
Finally he returned and at twenty-seven completed medical school. He made no effort to practice because of his poor health, but spent his time studying psychology, sunk in gloom about his prospects and troubled by the profound differences between his scientific views of the mind and the world and his father’s mystical and spiritual ones. In 1870, at twenty-eight, after nearly a year in these doldrums, he had an abrupt emotional crisis very much like his father’s. Many years later he described it in Varieties of Religious Experience in the guise of a memoir given him by an anonymous Frenchman:
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.11
In his mature years William diagnosed his father’s crisis as an outbreak of long-repressed hostile feelings against his tyrannical father, but never suggested an explanation of his own crisis. Jacques Barzun has offered a hypothesis: “One may plausibly surmise that it was the intolerable pressure of not being able to rebel against a father who exerted no tyranny but that of love.”12
The attack left James incapacitated for many months. During this period he was particularly troubled by the German physiologists’ mechanistic vision of the world, the scientific equivalent of the Calvinistic determinism his own father had rebelled against. If mechanism gave a true picture of the mind, then all his thoughts, desires, and volitions were no more than the predetermined interactions of physical particles; he was as helpless to determine his actions as the epileptic patient in the asylum.
Finally, like his father, he was freed from his depression by reading— not Swedenborg but an essay on free will by Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher. As James wrote in his diary:
[I] see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.13
His will to believe in free will worked; he slowly began to recover, although all his life his health remained fragile and he continued to have minor bouts of depression. He spent the next two years reading widely in physiological and philosophical psychology and regaining his mental health. In 1872, nearing thirty, he was still financially dependent on his father and had no plans for his future when Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, a neighbor—the James family had been living in Cambridge for some time—invited him to teach physiology at Harvard. He accepted, and remained there for the next thirty-five years.
But not as a professor of physiology. Within three years he began offering courses in physiological psychology and performing demonstrations for students in his little laboratory in Lawrence Hall. He continued to read omnivorously, forming his own lofty conception of psychology, and during the next three years presented some of his ideas so brilliantly in articles and book reviews that the publisher Henry Holt offered him a contract for a textbook of the new scientific psychology. James signed, apologizing that he would need two years. He took twelve, completing the task in 1890, but he produced a work that was successful far beyond the publisher’s hopes.
The year James began the book, 1878, was a landmark in another way. At thirty-six, he married. Despite his belief in free will, he seems to have been something less than a free agent in his choice of mate. Two years earlier his father had come home from a meeting of the Radical Club in Boston and announced that he had met William’s future wife, Alice Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher and accomplished pianist. Although William dragged his feet about meeting her, once he did so the die was cast. After a prolonged courtship, Alice became his dutiful, strong wife and helpmeet, mother of his five children, amanuensis, and lifelong intellectual companion. She appreciated his genius and understood his emotional needs and temperamental volatility, and despite many a spell of tension and many a battle, particularly before William’s long trips—he needed periods of apartness—they were a devoted and loving couple.
Once he was married, James’s remaining nervous and physical symptoms diminished; although his health was always imperfect, he went at life with a zest and energy he had never shown before. He was at last an independent man with his own identity, home, and income, free to pursue his own goals. Two years later Harvard recognized his special interests and abilities by making him an assistant professor of philosophy (his larger view of psychology fit more comfortably in that department than in the department of physiology), and in 1889 changed his title, finally, to professor of psychology.
Founding Father
There were no professors of psychology in American universities before James began teaching the subject in 1875. The only forms of psychology then taught in the United States were phrenology and Scottish mental philosophy, an offshoot of associationism used chiefly as a defense of revealed religion. James himself had never taken a course in the New Psychology because none was available; as he once jested, “The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.”
But within two decades at least two dozen American universities were offering instruction in psychology, three psychology journals were being published, and a professional psychology society had been founded. There were several reasons for the efflorescence: the desire of many university presidents to emulate the success of the German psychological institutes, the arrival in America of psychologists trained by Wundt, and, most of all, James’s influence, exerted through his teaching, his dozens of well-received articles, and his masterwork, Principles of Psychology.
James introduced experimental psychology to America. He began giving laboratory demonstrations to students at least as early as Wundt, and he and his students started performing laboratory experiments about the same time as Wundt and his students, if not earlier. Ironically, while James made much of the value of experimentation, he himself found it boring and intellectually confining. He usually spent no more than two hours a day in the laboratory, told a friend that “I naturally hate experimental work,” and said of the Leipzig style of laboratory work, “The thought of psycho-physical experimentation and altogether of brass-instrument and algebraic-formula psychology fills me with horror.”14
Yet he believed in it and had his students perform a broad array of experim
ents. They whirled frogs around to explore the function of the inner ear; did the same to human deaf mutes to test James’s hypothesis that, since their semicircular canals were damaged, they should be less subject to dizziness than normal people (he was right); carried out reflex experiments on frogs’ legs, and reaction-time and speed of nerve-conduction experiments on human subjects; and, venturing far beyond Wundtian physiological psychology, did studies of hypnosis and automatic writing.
Although James hated to do experiments, he forced himself to when it was the best way to prove or disprove a theory. While writing the chapter on memory for Principles, he wanted to test the ancient belief still held by “faculty” psychologists that memory, like a muscle, can be strengthened by exercise, and that memorizing anything would therefore improve the memory not just for the memorized kind of material but for every kind. James was skeptical and used himself as his experimental subject. Over an eight-day span he memorized 158 lines of “Satyr,” a poem by Victor Hugo, taking an average of fifty seconds a line to do so. Next, working twenty minutes daily for thirty-eight days, he memorized the entire first book (798 lines) of Milton’s Paradise Lost. If the exercise theory were correct, this prolonged effort should have greatly strengthened his memory. He then went back to “Satyr” and memorized another 158 lines—and found that it took him seven seconds longer per line than the first time. Exercise hadn’t increased the strength of his memory; it had diminished it, at least temporarily.15 (He had several associates repeat the experiment, with roughly similar results.) A psychological theory accepted for two thousand years, and believed today by many laypeople, had been disproven.
But James’s own experiments were only one source, and a minor one, of his ideas about psychology. He drew upon all his reading in both philosophical and physiological psychology; spent half a year in Europe in 1882–1883 visiting universities, attending laboratory sessions and lectures, and meeting and talking to dozens of leading psychologists and other scientists; corresponded regularly with many of them; and gathered reports and clinical studies of abnormal minds, and of normal ones under hypnosis, drugs, or stress.
He derived many of his major insights and hypotheses from another and very different source: introspection, of a kind quite unlike that practiced by Wundt and his students. In James’s opinion, any effort to seize and isolate individual elements of a thought process by means of Wundtian introspection would be doomed to failure:
As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of a relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.16
But he felt that a naturalistic kind of introspection—an effort to observe our own thoughts and feelings as they actually seem to us— could tell us much about our mental life. This was, for him, the most important of investigative methods; he defined it as “looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover.”17 (He was referring to the introspection of conscious mental processes; at the time, neither he nor most other psychologists were aware of how large a part of our mental processes takes place outside consciousness.)
Such introspection required both concentration and practice, because inner states follow each other rapidly and often are blended and difficult to distinguish from one another. Yet it was feasible, James said, likening it to sense perception. Just as with practice one can notice, carefully observe, name, and classify objects outside oneself, one can do so with inner events.
There was, to be sure, a classic question about how this was possible. The conscious mind can observe external objects, but how can it observe itself? Was there a second consciousness that could watch the first one? How could we know that such a second consciousness existed—could we observe it, too? And how? James had an answer to such perplexities: introspection is, in reality, immediate retrospection; the conscious mind looks back and reports what it has just experienced.
He admitted that introspection is difficult and prone to error. Who could be sure of the exact order of feelings when they were excessively rapid? Of the comparative strengths of feelings when they were very much alike? Or which is longer when both occupied but an instant of time? Who could enumerate all the ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger?
But he said that the validity of some kinds of introspective reports could be tested and verified by at least half a dozen kinds of well-established experimentation. The duration of simple mental processes, for one, could be estimated introspectively and then verified by reaction-time experiments; the introspective report of how many digits or letters one could simultaneously keep in mind, for another, could be verified by apperception experiments.
And while introspective reports of the more complex and subtle mental states might be impossible to verify experimentally, James maintained that since those acts are introspectively observable, any straightforward account of them can be regarded as literal. In any event, “introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”18
One other source of James’s psychological ideas—possibly the most important of all—was personal and nonscientific: his naturalistic, perceptive, and wise interpretation of human behavior, based on his own experience and understanding. Many of his major insights came from “psychologizing,” says the distinguished psychologist Ernest Hilgard in his authoritative Psychology in America:
To “psychologize” is to reflect on ordinary observations and then to offer a plausible interpretation of the relevant experience and behavior. Once expressed, such interpretations are often so plausible that detailed proof would seem irrelevant—or at least too tedious to be worth the effort. Shakespeare was such a “psychologizer” without making any pretense of being a psychologist. Among psychologists, James is the preeminent psychologizer. The consequence is that he encouraged a full-bodied, warm-hearted psychology that is impatient with the trivial—a robust and vital psychology facing courageously psychology’s most puzzling problems.19
After twelve years of research, introspection, psychologizing, and writing, James completed Principles, which had been an almost intolerable burden to him. It was a huge work—nearly fourteen hundred pages in two volumes—and unsuitable for textbook use after all. Within two years, however, he turned out an abridged textbook version. (The full-length version became known as “James” and the abridged version as “Jimmy.”) Principles was an immediate and resounding success, and had a lasting effect on the development of American psychology. Nearly sixty years later Ralph Barton Perry, professor of philosophy at Harvard, would say of it, “No work in psychology has met with such an enthusiastic reception… nor has any other work enjoyed such enduring popularity.”20
By 1892, when James completed Jimmy, he had been teaching and writing about psychology for seventeen years, and grown weary of it. From then on he turned his creative efforts toward other things: education (he lectured on the applications of psychology in the classroom and published Talks to Teachers in 1899); the practical results of different kinds of religious experience (The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared in 1902); and philosophy (Pragmatism, published in 1907, established him as a leading American thinker).
He did, however, continue to write popular treatments of some of the ideas he had advanced in Principles and to keep up with psychological developments. In 1894 he was the first American to call attention to the work of the then obscure Viennese physician Sigmund Freud, and in 1909, though ailing, he went to Clark University to meet Freud on his only visit to the United States and to hear him speak.
Ever the nonconformist, James was willing to explore forms of psychology outside accepted scientific bounds. He took a
keen interest in spiritualism and “psychical” phenomena, considering them an extension of abnormal psychology; closely followed the efforts of psychical researchers; attended séances; and in 1884 founded the American Society for Psychical Research. He once made a pact with a dying friend to sit outside his room after his death and wait for a communication from the Beyond; none came. James coupled an open-minded attitude toward such subjects with an insistence on solid scientific evidence; late in life he concluded, “I find myself believing that there is ‘something in’ these never ending reports of psychical phenomena, although I haven’t yet the least positive notion of the something… Theoretically, I am no further than I was at the beginning.”21
From 1898 on, James had a personal reason to be interested in the afterlife. That year, at fifty-six, he overtaxed his heart while climbing in the Adirondacks, and thereafter had chronic heart trouble. His health gradually worsened; he resigned from Harvard in 1907, wrote two of his most important works of philosophy in the next three years, and died in 1910, at sixty-eight. John Dewey said of him at that time, “By common consent he was far and away the greatest of American psychologists. Were it not for the unreasoned admiration of men and things German, there would be no question, I think, that he was the greatest psychologist of his time in any country—perhaps of any time.”22
Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer
James had something to say about every topic within psychology, as known in his day, but his chief influence was due to the following handful of his concepts:
Functionalism: This is the label usually applied to Jamesian psychology. Unlike the New Psychologists, who maintained that higher mental processes are assembled in each individual from simple elements, James held that the higher processes were developed over the ages by evolution because of their adaptive value. He was seventeen when Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared (1859), twenty-nine when The Descent of Man was published (1871), and was impressed by both. It seemed clear to him that the mind’s complex processes had evolved because of their life-preserving functions, and that to understand those processes one had to ask what functions they perform.
