JAMES, WILLIAM (d. 1827), English naval historian, author of the Naval History of Great Britain from the Declara tion of War by France in 1793 to the Accession of George IV., practised as a proctor in the admiralty court of Jamaica between 18oi and 1813. He was in the United States when the war of broke out, and was detained as a prisoner, but escaped to Halifax. His literary career began by letters to the Naval Chronicle over the signature of "Boxer." In 1816 he published An Inquiry into the Merits of the Principal Naval Actions between Great Britain and the United States. In 1819 he began his Naval History (182 2 1824). James died on May 28, 1827, in London.
An edition of the Naval History epitomized by R. O'Byrne appeared in i888, and an Index by C. G. Toogood was issued by the Navy Records Society in 1895.
When James was 18 years old and the family was living in New port, R.I., he tried his hand at studying art, with William M. Hunt for a teacher and John LaFarge for a fellow pupil. But he soon tired of it, and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific school of Harvard university. From courses in chemistry, anatomy and similar subjects there, he went to the study of medicine it the Harvard Medical school, but interrupted this study in order to accompany Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an exploring expedition to the Amazon. There his health failed and his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for a term, and then during 1867-68, went to Germany for courses with Helmholtz, Virchow and Bernard, among others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology and philosophy then current, especially Renouvier.
The acquaintance with Renouvier is a focal point in James' per sonal and intellectual history. He seems from adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and at this period of his stay in Germany to have suffered a breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home, in Nov. 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still ill. Though he took the degree of M.D.
at the Harvard Medical school in June 1869, he was unable to begin practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of semi-invalidism in his father's house, doing nothing but reading, and writing a very occasional review. Early in this period he ex perienced a sort of phobic panic which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved, according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier on Freewill and the decision that "my first act of freewill shall be to believe in freewill." The decision carried with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the scientific kind which his training had established for him, and which seems to have had some relation to his neurosis, and the theological, metaphysical kind, that he kept combating in the notion of "the block universe." His revolutionary discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men and the nature of reality, seem all to have received a definite propulsion from this resolution of his poig nant personal problem.
In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology in Harvard college. He served in this capacity till 1876. But he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology—not the traditional "mental science" but physiological psychology—was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It meant a challenge to the vested inter ests of the mind, mainly theological, which were entrenched in the colleges and universities of the United States. It meant a definite break with what Mr. Santayana has called "the genteel tradition." Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and be came a laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in the grammar of assent and became an adventure in methodologi cal invention and metaphysical discovery.
With his marriage in 1878, to Miss Alice H. Gibbens of Cam bridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks with a zest and an energy his earlier record had given no hint of. It was as if some deeper level of his being had been tapped : his life as an originative thinker began in earnest. He signed a contract with Henry Holt and Company to produce a text-book of psychology by 1880. But the work grew under his hand and did not appear till 1891.
When it did appear, as The Principles of Psychology, it was not a text-book but a monumental work in two great volumes from which the text-book was condensed the following year. The Principles was at once recognized as both definitive and innovat ing in its field. It established the "functional point of view" in psychology. It assimilated mental science to the biological dis ciplines and treated also thinking and knowledge in the aspect of instruments in the struggle to live. It made at one and the same time the fullest use of principles of psychophysics and defended, without embracing, freewill.
The Psychology completed, James seems to have lost interest in the subject. Creator of the first psychological laboratory in America, he had an aversion to laboratory work and did not think himself fitted for it. He liked best the adventure of free observa tion and reflection. Compared with the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed to him "a nasty little subject" that he was glad to have done with. His studies were now of the nature and existence of God, the immortality of the soul, freewill and determinism, the values of life. They differed from the usual thing in method. They were empirical, not dialectical. James went directly to religious experience for the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after death, to the fields of belief and action for freewill and determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing foregone conclusions. He had begun to teach ethics and religion in the late '8os and his collaboration with the psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after death he found at the end to be unproved, but the existence of divinity he held to be established by the record of the religious experience, but as a plurality of saving powers, "a more of the same quality" as oneself, that one's personality can in a crisis, make contact with and be saved. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness in the conjunction of things, so that what the future shall be is not made inevitable by past history and present form ; freedom or chance corresponds to Darwin's "spontaneous variations"; it is what saves history from being mere repetition. These views were set forth in the period between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures, afterwards collected into works : The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897) ; Human Immortality (1898) ; Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899) ; The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The decade may be correctly described as James' religious period. All his studies are concerned with one aspect or another of the religious question. His natural interest in the subject was reinforced by the practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh.
He was not able to give them until 1901-02 and the preparation of them focussed his labours for a number of years.
His disability, involving his heart, was due to prolonged effort and exposure during a holiday in the Adirondacks, in June 1899. A trip to Europe which was to have taken up a sabbatical year away from university duties turned into two years of invalidism. The Gifford lectures were prepared during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, they had an even greater acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative though it was, the rich concreteness of the material, the final summary of the evidence that the varieties of religious expe rience point to the existence of specific and various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies which we can make specific contact with in times of trouble, touched something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict with science and scientific method.
The book also topped off James' interest in the psychology of religion. He now explicitly turned his attention to the ultimate philosophic problems that were at least marginally present with his other interests. Already in 1898, in a lecture at the University of California on philosophical conceptions and practical results, he had formulated the theory of method known as Pragmatism. Having its roots in the strict analysis of the real logic of the sciences made in the middle '7os by that extraordinary eccentric genius, Charles S. Peirce, it underwent, in James' hands a trans forming generalization. He showed how the meaning of any idea whatsoever—scientific, religious, philosophical, political, social, personal—can be found ultimately in nothing save the succession of experiential consequences it leads through and to, that truth and error are identical with these consequences or else nothing within reach of the mind at all. He had made use of the pragmatic rule in his study of religious experience. He now turned it upon the ideas of change and chance, of freedom, variety, pluralism, nov elty, which, from the time he had read Renouvier it had been his preoccupation to establish. He used the pragmatic rule in his polemic against monism and the "block universe," against internal relations, i.e., the notion that you can't have one thing without having everything, against all finalities, staticisms and complete nesses. His classes rang with the polemic against absolutes, and a new vitality crept into the veins of American philosophers. The historic controversy over Pragmatism saved the profession from iteration and dullness.
Meantime (1906) James had been asked to lecture at Stanford university, in California, and experienced there the earthquake which destroyed San Francisco. The same year he delivered the Lowell lectures, in Boston, Mass., afterwards published as Prag matism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking. Various studies: "Does Consciousness Exist," "The Thing and its Rela tions," "The Experience of Activity," etc. appeared, chiefly in the Journal of Philosophy, which were essays in the extension of the empirical and pragmatic method to everything that has a name. These studies were collected after James' death and published as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The fundamental point of these essays is that the relations between things, holding them together or separating them, are at least as real as the things themselves, that their function is real and that no hidden sub strata is necessary to account for the clashes and coherences of the world. The empiricism was radical, because until this time even empiricists believed in a hidden turtle on whose back the cosmic elephant rode.
James was now the centre of a new life for philosophy in the English speaking world; the continentals did not "get" Pragma tism; if its German opponents altogether misunderstood it, its Italian adherents—Papini, of all people—travestied it. In Eng land it was championed by Schiller; in the United States there were Dewey and his school. The pragmatists were by no means unanimous among themselves, but that added to the interest of the situation. In 1907 James gave his last course—an introduc tion to philosophy—in Harvard, and the students surprised him and broke an academic precedent, by presenting him with a loving cup. In the spring he went to Columbia university in New York city to repeat the lectures on "Pragmatism." It was as if a new prophet had come : the lecture halls were crowded on the last day as on the first, with people standing outside the door. He was feted and photographed; he himself describes the visit as the "high tide of my existence." His hope was, when the thing was over, to settle down at last, to a free consideration of the philo sophical questions that obsessed him. But there came an invita tion to give the Hibbert lectures at Manchester college in Oxford, England, that constituted, he felt, a challenge which, in view of the status of Pragmatism in England at that time, he might not disregard. These lectures, published in 1909 as A Pluralistic Universe, state in a more systematic and less technical way than the Essays in Radical Empiricism, the same essential positions. They present in addition certain religious overbeliefs of James' which further thinking, if one may trust the implications of the posthumous Some Problems in Philosophy, seemed to be miti gating. These overbeliefs involve a pan-psychistic interpretation of experience which goes beyond radical empiricism and the pragmatic rule into conventional metaphysics.
Home again, James found himself working, against growing physical trouble, upon the material of which some was published after his death (1911) as the Some Problems, etc. referred to above. He also collected the occasional pieces in the controversy over Pragmatism and published them as The Meaning of Truth (1909). He remained available to students and good causes, and he wrote various other pieces—the last one about B. P. Blood, the "pluralistic mystic." Finally his physical discomfort exceeded even his remarkable voluntary endurance. It was decided to try again a cure at Nauheim and he sailed with Mrs. James in the spring of 1910 for Europe. But in Europe he gave himself too freely to people and Nauheim did not help him. They came back, in the company of his brother Henry, in midsummer, going straight to the country home in Chocorua, N.H. There he died on Aug. 26, 1910. He was survived by his widow, three sons and one daughter.
It is still too early to estimate James' significance and influence.
In psychology, his work is of course dated, but it is dated as Galileo's was in physics or Darwin's in biology, because it was the originative matrix of the great variety of new developments which are the current vogue. In philosophy, his positive work still is prophetic. The world he argued for is that which the new physics, the physics of Einstein and Russell and Bohr definitely point to— a world of events connected with one another by kinds of next to next relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating in chance, perpetuated by habits (we call such habit laws) and transformed by breaks, spontaneities and freedoms. In human nature, James thinks, these visible traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific event is the individual; his character, his beliefs, his endeavour are an adventure in autobiography of which the conclusion is not established in advance. He integrates societies as he lives, and he breaks them. He validates beliefs by living them out or he makes them false. He is the primary event from which history dates, and whose intervention gives it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history as in nature, the flux of change and chance transforms every being, invalidates every law and alters every ideal. "What," he asks, "has concluded, that we should conclude about it"? Let us therefore, he urged, allow the claim of everything that makes a claim before us, let us give it an opportunity to make good its claim. The world of thought and the world of things, are alike to be treated in the spirit of sportsmanlike fair play; the new, the untried, the doubt ful are to have their chance whenever they arise, and 'however.
James lived his philosophy. It enters into the texture and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted therapies, like Christian Science or mind cure and repugnant ideals like militarism. It made him an anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too hedged, experiential and tentative to have become the dogma of a school. It has functioned rather as a germinative of new thought in other s than as a standard old system for others to repeat.
Letters of William James, edit. by his son Henry James (192o) ; W. James, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) ; T. Flournoy, The Philosophy of William James (authorized translation by E. B. Holt and W. James, Jr., I917) ; H. M. Kallen, Introduction to The Philosophy of William James (drawn from the writings of W. James, 1925) and William James and Henri Bergson (1914) . (H. M. K.)