William James

He was born in a hotel — the Astor House on Broadway, on January 11, 1842 — to a father with money and no occupation. Henry James Sr., a Swedenborgian theologian, hauled his children across the Atlantic on principle, and the resulting education was fluent, cosmopolitan and disorderly. James wanted to paint, apprenticed in William Morris Hunt's Newport studio, and gave it up when his father pushed medicine. In 1865 he sailed up the Amazon with Louis Agassiz and quit after eight months, undone by seasickness and mild smallpox. His eyes, back, stomach and skin failed by turns. Doctors called it neurasthenia. He considered suicide for months, then wrote in his diary on April 30, 1870 that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will.

He took the Harvard medical degree in June 1869 and never practiced. He taught instead: physiology in 1873, experimental psychology in 1875, then psychology, then philosophy, then a chair, all inside one institution. The Principles of Psychology took 12 years and ran to 1,200 pages when it appeared in 1890. It threw out the associationist mechanics of the day for a mind that selects: a stream of consciousness rather than a chain of ideas, an emotion that follows the body rather than causing it. The Varieties of Religious Experience came out of the 1902 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh and treated conversion as evidence rather than a claim to be settled. Pragmatism, in 1907, held that an idea is true in proportion to what it does. His students included W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann and Theodore Roosevelt.

The man who put American psychology in a laboratory spent 30 years on material his colleagues found disreputable. He helped found the American Society for Psychical Research, presided over the British society in 1884 and 1885, and sat repeatedly with the Boston medium Leonora Piper. To upset the law that all crows are black, he wrote, it is enough to prove that one crow is white — and his white crow was Mrs. Piper. He did not conclude that she spoke with the dead. He weighed telepathy and ordinary snooping and left the question open, which was the real offense. He also dosed himself for data: chloral hydrate in 1870, amyl nitrite in 1875, nitrous oxide in 1882, peyote in 1896. Only under nitrous oxide, he said, could he make sense of Hegel.

His heart began to fail around 1909. He sailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 for treatments that failed, came home on August 18, and died eight days later at his summer house in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He is buried in the family plot at Cambridge Cemetery. What he wrote has since been divided among departments: psychologists still argue about the theory that emotion follows bodily change, philosophers took pragmatism forward through Dewey, religion courses assign the Varieties. Jimmy Carter borrowed the title of his 1906 Stanford address, The Moral Equivalent of War, for an energy speech in April 1977. His brother Henry wrote the novels and his sister Alice kept the diary. All three Jameses are still read.

William James's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Principles of Psychology book
  Twelve years of work, 1,200 pages, two volumes 1890
• Psychology: The Briefer Course book
  The classroom abridgement of the Principles 1892
• The Will to Believe book
  On the right to hold beliefs that evidence cannot settle 1897
• The Varieties of Religious Experience book
  The Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, turned on conversion as data 1902
• Pragmatism book
  An idea is true in proportion to what it does 1907
• A Pluralistic Universe book
  The Hibbert Lectures, published the year before he died 1909

• 1861 aged ~19 Gives up painting for the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard He had apprenticed under William Morris Hunt at Newport.
• 1865 aged ~23 Sails up the Amazon with Louis Agassiz and quits after eight months Seasickness and a mild case of smallpox ended it.
• June 1869 aged 27 Earns his MD and never practices medicine
• April 30, 1870 aged 28 Reads Renouvier and writes that he will believe in free will The diary entry ended years of what he called soul-sickness.
• 1875 aged ~33 Teaches his first experimental psychology course at Harvard
• July 10, 1878 aged 36 Marries Alice Howe Gibbens They had five children. One, Herman, died in infancy.
• 1890 aged ~48 Publishes The Principles of Psychology after 12 years
• 1902 aged ~60 The Gifford Lectures appear as The Varieties of Religious Experience
• August 26, 1910 aged 68 Dies of heart failure at Chocorua, eight days after coming home from Europe

• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. brother
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. taught
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. taught
• Walter Lippmann 1889–1974
  Columnist and political thinker whose work shaped modern journalism and debate over public opinion and democracy. taught
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. argued with in the Metaphysical Club
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. godfather