The Books
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Pragmatism
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The founding father of American psychology — who suffered a decade of depression and existential crisis before discovering, from within that darkness, the philosophy that saved him.
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.William James — The Principles of Psychology, 1890
William James was born in New York in 1842, the eldest son of a wealthy theologian and the brother of the novelist Henry James. He studied painting, then chemistry, then medicine at Harvard, drifting between disciplines while suffering what he later described as a decade of depression, physical illness, and existential paralysis. He was in his late twenties, unable to complete his medical degree, convinced that the will was an illusion and that free choice was impossible, when he encountered the work of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier.
Renouvier's definition of free will — the ability to hold a thought in mind simply because you choose to — struck James with the force of revelation. He recorded in his diary on April 30, 1870: My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. From that entry, he began to reconstruct himself. He completed his degree, joined the Harvard faculty, and spent the next forty years building the most influential body of psychological and philosophical work America has yet produced.
He was never entirely free of depression. He described himself as having lived on the boundary between sanity and its opposite throughout his adult life. What he produced on that boundary — the philosophy of pragmatism, the psychology of habit and consciousness, the investigation of religious experience — has the texture of philosophy written under genuine existential pressure.
The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after twelve years of work, established American psychology as an independent discipline. Its two volumes cover perception, memory, habit, consciousness, emotion, will, and the self with a depth and clarity that have not been surpassed. Two chapters stand out for this library: the chapter on habit and the chapter on will.
On habit, James argued that the nervous system is the organ of tendency — that every action, every thought, every emotional response becomes easier with repetition until it requires no effort at all. Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. The practical implication is that character is not fixed but built: by choosing your actions deliberately and repeating them consistently, you are literally reshaping the neural substrate of who you are.
On will, James argued that attention is the fundamental act of the will — that to choose is, at bottom, to attend. You cannot will yourself to feel differently, but you can choose what to attend to; and what you attend to shapes what you feel, what you desire, and what you eventually become. This is the root of what Hill called controlled attention and what modern psychology calls directed focus.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.William James — as attributed
Two volumes. Begin with the chapter on Habit (Chapter IV) and the chapter on Will (Chapter XXVI). These two chapters alone are worth the entire work.
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