Copyright 1996, 2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College
William James was born in New York City, in 1842, three years after the birth of Charles Sanders Peirce. In contrast to the academic (Harvard) provincialism
of Peirce's household, the James household was entirely cosmopolitan. James' father, Henry James, Sr., was an independently wealthy man who had gone
through a religious "inversion" from the Presbyterian Calvinism of his own father to utopian eccentricities of Swedenborg and Fourier. Henry, Sr., knew
Emerson well and met Thoreau through Emerson. All in all, he was very well positioned in intellectual circles, and he was a passionate and voluminous author
of religious and moral tracts. The James family removed to Europe, where they lived in Geneva, then to the old family home in Albany, and then back to New
York, on an annual cycle. Brothers William and Henry were thoroughly exposed to the world, languages, literature, arts, and intellectual discourse.
It was so rich a childhood experience, in fact, that James did not matriculate at Harvard University until he was 19. There he began his studies in chemistry, at the Lawrence Scientific School, but he also studied anatomy and physiology. In 1864 he entered Harvard Medical School; and somewhat later he joined Louis Agassiz's zoological famous expedition to the Amazon. Returning to Harvard, he finished his medical degree in 1869.
William James began a long teaching career at Harvard, in 1872, as an instructor in physiology. He remained at Harvard until he retired at 65 in 1907. But James did not long remain in physiology, and his influence is best known in psychology and, then, philosophy.
Perhaps James would have made a strong single-minded physiologist if his youth had been different; but his relationship to the arts, religion, and philosophy had been too significant. James had even studied art in Paris prior to matriculating at Harvard. He was strongly aware of the growing rift between science and traditional values; in fact, the trip to the Amazon brought on a mild physical and mental collapse, requiring him to take a brief leave of absence from medical school. The gap in time between his M.D. and his first teaching position was, again, accountable to psychological depression. James was experiencing an acute spiritual crisis which he himself described as ". . . the ebbing of the will to live, for lack of a philosophy to live by --- a paralysis of action occasioned by a sense of moral impotence." The humane environment of his youth had collided with the cold objectivity of science. James could not completely abandon either and so, in brief periods of withdrawal from his scientific studies, he retreated to Europe where he read literature and immersed himself in the arts. This personal dilemma became the agenda for James' entire career.
Through the decade of the 1870s, James moved from physiology toward psychology and even established a laboratory in psychology. He had read Renouvier's Traite de psychologie and eventually came to know Renouvier personally. Aside from Renouvier, James met Ernst Mach, Carl Stumpf, and other great Europeans of his time. G. Stanley Hall, who became one of the great American psychologists, was one of James' students during this period. While teaching psychology, James began preparing a text which finally appeared in 1890 as Principles of Psychology. In this text, he introduced a new theory of the emotions (simultaneously suggested by the Danish psychologist Lange); the book remains significant in the history of the subject.
Nevertheless, James' interests in psychology were motivated by a deeper need and this need kept pushing him toward philosophy. By 1879 he was already teaching a course, at Harvard, called "Philosophy of Evolution;" and he was publishing essays in journals like Critique Philosophique and Mind, including a famous piece, "The Sentiment of Rationality," which undertook a direct assault on the issue of a "philosophy to live by." In 1880, James was made assistant professor of philosophy and, in 1885, he was advanced to full professor. James was a very popular lecturer, and most of what remains of his philosophic thought comes from lectures and essays, written during this time. He lectured in California in 1898, in Edinburgh (The Gifford Lectures) in 1901-02, and in Oxford (The Hibbert Lectures) in 1908-09. Closer to home, he gave the Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1906-07. He continued in philosophy until his retirement in 1907, and continued to work on collections of his essays and his books until his death, in 1910.
James had been active in a Harvard philosophic discussion group throughout the 1870s and Charles Sanders Peirce was a member of this same group so it was during this time that James and Peirce became colleagues and friends. James was impressed by Peirce's account of scientific reasoning without metaphysical constructs and heavily dependent on the concept of practical results. James soon built this into his own system of reasoning, called Pragmatism, and freely gave credit to Peirce as its author. Nevertheless, while Peirce may have been the stimulus, James' response was a pervasive use of Pragmatic reasoning in all spheres, especially in attempting to understand traditional fields such as religion and morality. James protected Peirce in his old age and poverty but died five years ahead of Peirce, leaving him without aid.
[This biographical essay has been written on the basis of materials in Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James (New York: George Braziller, 1954).]
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