William James constructed a discipline of psychology almost single-handed—professor of the first university courses, author of the first comprehensive textbook—and when he was done, he threw up his hands. His own Principles of Psychology, he wrote, was “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that WJ is an incapable.”
