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The Writings of William James
A comprehensive collection of writings by the legendary philosopher, whose sweeping body of work influenced our ideas about psychology, religion, free will, and pragmatism.In his introduction to this collection, John McDermott presents James's thinking in all its manifestations, stressing the importance of radical empiricism and placing into perspective the doctrines of pragmatism and the will to believe. The critical periods of James's life are highlighted to illuminate the development of his philosophical and psychological thought. The anthology features representative selections from The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, and The Variety of Religious Experience in addition to the complete Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. The original 1907 edition of Pragmatism is included, as well as classic selections from all of James's other major works. Of particular significance for James scholarship is the supplemented version of Ralph Barton Perry's Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James.
- GenresPhilosophy
1505 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 6, 2013
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October 12, 2024
AN EXCELLENT (TOPICALLY-ARRANGED) COLLECTION OF JAMES’S WRITINGS
William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher (noted for his influence on Pragmatism) and psychologist (the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S.; see his Principles of Psychology); he was also the brother of the novelist Henry James.
This book contains a very comprehensive collection of James’s writings (mostly relatively brief excerpts, rather than entire pieces) on a wide variety of subjects, subdivided into: I. Personal Depression and Recovery; II. Psychological Foundations; III. Radical Empiricism; IV. The Pragmatic Method; V. Historical Judgments; and VI. Ethical and Religious Dimensions of Radical Empiricism.
It begins with an excellent Introduction to James by James McDermott, who makes perceptive comments such as the following: “James did not see the meaning of ‘pure experience’ as a monistic type of catch-all which could account for all other versions of reality. The blame for these misinterpretations clearly falls on James and his use of the word ‘stuff.’ Bertrand Russell, who borrowed the term from James, later lamented its use and the neutral monism which he thought it implied. The difficulty in James’s use of the term arises in his essay on ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ in which he refers to ‘pure experience’ as a ‘stuff.’” (Pg. xxxviii)
James wrote, “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” (Pg. 33)
He explains, “Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say ‘empiricism,’ because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say ‘radical,’ because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.” (Pg. 134)
Later, he adds, “Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion. The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience… The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” (Pg. 136)
He states, “The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute’s own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just IS our philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment.” (Pg. 495)
He observes, “The organ that gives us the most trouble is the brain. All the consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains---Can there be consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain… performs a function which the earth performs in an entirely different way… Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors…For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special brain than she needs eyes or ears. OUR brains do indeed unify and correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light together, and compare them.” (Pg. 539)
He says, “Shall we say that every complex mental act is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived, and replace it by the ‘God’ of theism… But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced, we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind… That secret of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, nor reality to logic.” (Pg. 555-556)
He points out, “What holds attention determines action. If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better call it their INTEREST. ‘The interesting’ is a title which covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual… It seems as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea’s impulsiveness, not in any peculiar relations which it may have with paths of motor discharge---for ALL ideas have relations with some such paths---but rather in a preliminary phenomenon, the urgency, namely, with which is able to compel attention and dominate in consciousness.” (Pg. 708)
He admits, “The fact is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds… For ourselves, we can hand the free-will controversy over to metaphysics. Psychology will surely never grow refined enough to discover, in the case of any individual’s decision, a discrepancy between her scientific calculations and the fact. Her prevision will never foretell, whether the effort be completely predestinate or not, the way in which each individual emergency is resolved. Psychology will be psychology, and Science science, as much as ever… in this world, whether free-will be true in it or not. We can thus ignore the free-will question in psychology.” (Pg. 714-715)
This is an excellent collection of James’s writings, and will be an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the many phases of his thought, and may stimulate the reader to look into his many complete books.
William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher (noted for his influence on Pragmatism) and psychologist (the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S.; see his Principles of Psychology); he was also the brother of the novelist Henry James.
This book contains a very comprehensive collection of James’s writings (mostly relatively brief excerpts, rather than entire pieces) on a wide variety of subjects, subdivided into: I. Personal Depression and Recovery; II. Psychological Foundations; III. Radical Empiricism; IV. The Pragmatic Method; V. Historical Judgments; and VI. Ethical and Religious Dimensions of Radical Empiricism.
It begins with an excellent Introduction to James by James McDermott, who makes perceptive comments such as the following: “James did not see the meaning of ‘pure experience’ as a monistic type of catch-all which could account for all other versions of reality. The blame for these misinterpretations clearly falls on James and his use of the word ‘stuff.’ Bertrand Russell, who borrowed the term from James, later lamented its use and the neutral monism which he thought it implied. The difficulty in James’s use of the term arises in his essay on ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ in which he refers to ‘pure experience’ as a ‘stuff.’” (Pg. xxxviii)
James wrote, “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” (Pg. 33)
He explains, “Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say ‘empiricism,’ because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say ‘radical,’ because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.” (Pg. 134)
Later, he adds, “Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion. The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience… The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” (Pg. 136)
He states, “The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute’s own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just IS our philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment.” (Pg. 495)
He observes, “The organ that gives us the most trouble is the brain. All the consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains---Can there be consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain… performs a function which the earth performs in an entirely different way… Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors…For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special brain than she needs eyes or ears. OUR brains do indeed unify and correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light together, and compare them.” (Pg. 539)
He says, “Shall we say that every complex mental act is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived, and replace it by the ‘God’ of theism… But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced, we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind… That secret of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, nor reality to logic.” (Pg. 555-556)
He points out, “What holds attention determines action. If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better call it their INTEREST. ‘The interesting’ is a title which covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual… It seems as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea’s impulsiveness, not in any peculiar relations which it may have with paths of motor discharge---for ALL ideas have relations with some such paths---but rather in a preliminary phenomenon, the urgency, namely, with which is able to compel attention and dominate in consciousness.” (Pg. 708)
He admits, “The fact is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds… For ourselves, we can hand the free-will controversy over to metaphysics. Psychology will surely never grow refined enough to discover, in the case of any individual’s decision, a discrepancy between her scientific calculations and the fact. Her prevision will never foretell, whether the effort be completely predestinate or not, the way in which each individual emergency is resolved. Psychology will be psychology, and Science science, as much as ever… in this world, whether free-will be true in it or not. We can thus ignore the free-will question in psychology.” (Pg. 714-715)
This is an excellent collection of James’s writings, and will be an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the many phases of his thought, and may stimulate the reader to look into his many complete books.
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