The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

William James

• “It is not difficult to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions….Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity….We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am personally discontented with extant solutions; so I seem to read the signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight-edged and artificial.”[1]
• “Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ‘temperament’ of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.”[2]

William James (1842 – 1910), the elder brother of last week’s sage, Henry James, was a leading American philosopher and scientific thinker of the nineteenth century. His career and thought are strongly indicative of the time in which he flourished, contrasting sharply with the 21^st century in many ways, but remarkably similar in several others. Gaining a better picture of his life and ideas provides a valuable perspective for understanding both the currents of American history and the swirling rapids of our own time.

James was born to Henry James Sr., a wealthy and influential Swedenborgian theologian and writer. William’s education was enriched by repeated trips across the Atlantic as a young man, allowing him to develop fluency in German and French, along with a deep familiarity with the leading writers and thinkers of history and James’s own time. This eclectic background led young William to consider many pursuits, including art and exploration.

Nevertheless, James began studying at Harvard University in 1861, focusing on medicine in 1864. As with his younger brother Henry, William suffered from numerous physical ailments that exempted him from Civil War service, and forced him to seek a cure in Europe. During these later travels, James gained a significant interest in the intellectual atmosphere of his time, and, while gaining his M.D. in 1869, began to publish instead of practicing medicine.

As a young man suffering from depression, James grew increasingly interested in understanding the mind. He interacted with the leading thinkers of his day, including luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. Their influence on James remained latent for a time, as he returned to teach anatomy at Harvard throughout the 1870’s, based on his medical training. However, as the field of psychology developed rapidly, James became an influential pioneer as a result of his 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology.

William James’ works reveal an incredible ability to link and envision concepts, so his turn toward philosophy is understandable. His approach to phenomena such as mystical experiences was to categorize and define, building a scientific foundation from which an analytical structure could be developed. No wonder, then, that James was known as one of the founders of pragmatism.

The world of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries had a greater unified accumulation of ideas – classical, Christian, Islamic, Enlightenment, Hegelian, and Asiatic – than previous civilizations. Pragmatism sought to clear away the ground of intellectual conflict for the sake of certainty. The fundamental argument of pragmatism was that if two ideas disagree, but there is no practical significance from their difference, no separation between the activities that the ideas lead toward, then the separation between the ideas is unimportant. Further, if an idea has no practical significance, then it commands no obedience. To James, beliefs were merely rules for action. If, then, a religion or philosophy produced the best people, the best lives, the best civilization, then it was justified. An inability to do so implies the failure of the idea itself.

Thus, James’ writings proceed in a strong confidence in the human mind’s ability to assess its surroundings, to weigh good and evil, and to organize its environment. This led him towards a very humanistic, individualistic perspective in his own philosophical articulations. Feelings were very significant to him. The entire universe consisted, to James, of a string of conscious perceptions, a pluralistic array rather than a universe. As such, scepticism was the appropriate outcome of a recognition that more information could always be gained and that knowledge is always filtered through the personal, subjective mind of the observer.

William James developed these ideas in numerous, influential works from approximately 1890 until his death in 1910. The most significant books in this series include several collections of lectures, such as Essays in Radical Empiricism, On Some of Life’s Ideals, The Will to Believe, and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Others, such as Pragmatism and the Text Book of Psychology, formed stand-alone works.

In these works, James’ collection of facts and anecdotes is incredible and impressive. He was able to synthesize a wide range of accounts and ideas that others had generated, assessing and arranging them without personal bias to provide clear, meaningful discussions of human thought and activity. James’ ability to describe and explain the complications of man’s religious and intellectual experience is unique, still containing insights of value today.

Nevertheless, William James’ work, so influential and exploratory at the time, appears insufficient in the light of broader history. The Darwinism that appears so frequently throughout his writing had a pessimistic side that James and his contemporaries recognized – violent struggle in an age of massive industrialization and technological development would push hard against the moral scruples that had bound man for centuries. William James hoped that by loosening the dogmatism of ethical systems that they would be more broadly applicable, but the violent rise of Stalin, Hitler, and others revealed that an ideology of power cannot simply be outcompeted by a moral philosophy of amenability. While the psychology and philosophy that James practiced have seen incredible growth since his day, along lines he began to lay out, the mild-mannered liberal Protestantism he embraced, once so widespread, is much less recognizable and influential today.

• “The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub who has turned on the water and who can not turn it off.”[3]
• “I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game….On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.”[4]

[1] William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947), 39-40.

[2] William James, Pragmatism, (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948), 51-52.

[3] Ibid, 187.

[4] William James, The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), 21.