William James

Their life

American philosopher and psychologist, the father of American psychology. His Principles of Psychology defined the field; he coined "the stream of consciousness", championed pragmatism — judging ideas by their practical effects — and wrote with rare humanity on habit, will, attention, and the varieties of religious experience.

Known for

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• coining 'stream of consciousness'
• founding pragmatism
• The Varieties of Religious Experience
• radical empiricism
• essays on habit, will, and attention

The road they walked

William James was born January 11, 1842, in New York City, the eldest of five children in a family that treated ideas as a kind of inheritance. His father, Henry James Sr., was an eccentric, independently wealthy theologian obsessed with questions of freedom and selfhood; his younger brother was the novelist Henry James. The family crossed the Atlantic repeatedly during William's childhood, enrolling him in a shifting succession of tutors and schools in New York, London, Paris, and Geneva, so that his education was less a curriculum than an immersion in European art, science, and argument. He tried painting seriously for a time before deciding, in his early twenties, that his gifts lay elsewhere.

He studied chemistry and physiology at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and went on to earn an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1869, though he never practiced medicine. His twenties were shadowed by chronic ill health and a period of severe depression bordering on despair over the problem of free will; he later described pulling himself out of it in 1870 after reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, resolving that his first free act would be to believe in free will. In 1872 he joined the Harvard faculty to teach physiology, then began teaching psychology, and around 1875 set up what was among the first psychology laboratories in the United States. It took him twelve years to write his sprawling, unifying textbook The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, which effectively founded the discipline in America and introduced the phrase "stream of consciousness" to describe the mind's continuous, unbroken flow.

In his later career James turned increasingly to philosophy, building on ideas from his friend Charles Sanders Peirce into the doctrine he called pragmatism, judging beliefs by their practical consequences, laid out in his 1907 lectures published as Pragmatism. His 1901–02 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh became The Varieties of Religious Experience, a study of mysticism and conversion that treated religious feeling as psychological data worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Writing in a plain, vivid style aimed at general readers as much as scholars, and corresponding with figures like John Dewey and Josiah Royce, he became a central figure in what would be called American pragmatism and remained, to the end, as much a moralist of everyday habit and attention as a theorist of the mind.

How their story ended

James died on August 26, 1910, at his family's summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, with his brother Henry at his side. He had suffered for years from heart trouble, worsened by a strenuous 1898 hiking accident in the Adirondacks, and had spent his final months in Europe seeking treatment that brought no lasting relief. He returned home knowing the end was near, and died of heart failure at age sixty-eight, his last work on radical empiricism left unfinished and published posthumously.