A Lecture on William James: The Father of Real Psychology

Here's the transcript of a lecture I presented in the fall of '92 to a PSYC 301, Theories of Personality class at Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA. One of these days I'll get around to including the slides I prepared for it also.

William James is my favorite philosopher/psychologist. He laid the foundation for humanistic psychology and introduced a methodology for the inclusion of conscious mental processes when studying both healthy mental life and psychopathology. Much of the material for this lecture came from The Jameses (Lewis, 1991). I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of psychology or turn of the 20th century American literary and academic history.

Following the tradition set forth by your normal lecturer for this course, Professor Rosekrans, I must make the following disclaimer, since many of these views are colored by my own biases. It's not really my fault, I'm the "victim" of normal parents and a functional family (which makes me really weird today (and/or obviously in denial.))

If Sigmund Freud can be called the father of psychoanalysis, then William James deserves to be called the father of real psychology. After a hopefully brief biography, the main part of this lecture will concern how James dealt with personality, or the self, before the reductionists led everyone down the wrong path with the invention of personality theory as a separate field in psychology.

The start of the James family in America was with William James of Albany, an Irish immigrant who came to the new land of opportunity just after the American Revolutionary War. He settled in Albany, New York, became a merchant, and ended up being one of the two or three richest men in the fledgling colonies. Grandfather James was one of the people who lobbied for and helped finance the construction of the Erie Canal to further help commerce prosper in the formative years of this country.

One of his sons, Henry James Sr., was to become the father of William the philosopher/psychologist and Henry James, one of the great American literary talents. Henry Sr. lost a leg while a teenager in a barn fire while rescuing a horse; attended and dropped out of Union College but was developing a decidedly humanistic view and a theological broadmindedness that he picked up from the President of Union College, a friend of his fathers, who also happened to hold the deed to Union College. He went to Boston and worked on the Unitarian newspaper, but quit when his father died and left him an inheritance of about $12,000 a year, which is roughly equivalent to $300,000 today. Henry Sr. declared he was "leisured for life" and immediately went to London to get a cork leg so he could better pursue his favorite hobby, which was to stroll through busy city streets. Back in America he joined a seminary but shortly dropped out; he was drawn to the Sandemanism tenets of loving brotherhood, the common sharing of communal goods, and a hatred of moral self-righteousness. During this time Henry Sr. became a good friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He went back to England in 1843 with a young James and Henry Jr. and spent time with John Stuart Mill, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and other intellectuals of the time. He later said of most of them that "life to them began and ended in conversation, not in action," and here formulated what would become one of William James's tenets of the philosophy of pragmatism, an unmistakenly American doctrine.

Henry Sr. was basically optimistic about the human future, pointing to the rise of technology as an example and he was always hopeful that men would start living their ideas and not merely write about them. His main occupation during the mid 1800s was as a lecturer and he was highly regarded by Henry David Thoreau. Henry Sr. was distrustful of individual sovereignty and the isolated family, he foresaw the golden age as when individual sovereignty gave way to communal life. In an 1855 essay entitled The Nature of Evil he distinguished between spiritual evil (what one is) from both physical evil (which one suffers) and moral evil (which one does). "The conceit of one's finite endowments is the origin of all the sin which afflicts humanity. This alone is spiritual evil."

Henry Sr. was pursuing the formulation of his intellectual vision, but each new twist led to a fresh dissatisfaction, and with his son's education and his intellectual friends he was also often disappointed. The family moved quite a bit and William and Henry had a perpetually changing educational experience with 10 schools and 12 chief teachers in eight years. In Henry Jr.'s later writings he would characterize this overschooled boyhood not as a process, but as a procession.

These schools were, however, among the best schools America and Europe had to offer that stressed freedom, socialistic community, and had unique specialties in both science and the humanities. This was mainly in response to Henry Sr.'s own educational philosophy; to be allowed the freedom to accept goodness; to broaden one's outlook; to be placed in touch with the larger realities.

William thought the entire European time was educationally worthless but enjoyed the art and was beginning to be admired as an artist, as well as his developing scientific interests. He was the most excited upon receiving a microscope one Christmas in Paris when he was about 13. William was turning more to art though, and back in America the family settled in Newport, RI, where William studied in the studio of William Morris Hunt. He also took great pleasure in baiting his father into philosophical discussions by reading aloud to the family Schopenhauer's "delightful pessimism," although as he matured he realized his mistake and regained his fathers optimism.

When William was 18 he was in Genoa, Switzerland and beginning to show his hallmark unique openness or accessibility to experience. His brother wrote "Whatever he played with or worked at entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his humour." He was never more gregarious or popular, belonging to a large Swiss organization that went in for brotherhood and beer. After moving to Bonn, Germany, he talked his father into returning to American to be enrolled in the Newport studio of Hunt. This took no little doing, as his father showed a general displeasure with the life of an artist, plus Henry Sr.'s attitude that settling on any one thing in life led to a narrowing, because it dispensed with any suggestion of an alternative. This, combined with the constant uprooting, gave William the flexibility and resilience that he perceived as key ingredients in human thought and conduct. "It led to a philosophy uniquely open to the pragmatics of life; to the varieties of human experience," and he was able to draw from art and chemistry, literature and electronics, religion and history, as well as English, French, and Germans way of expressing and organizing experience. Anyway, after a year William dropped out of art school, deciding he was not suited for the life of an artist.

William's actual college career began at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in chemistry. This lasted a year, then he took a year off, then in 1864 at 22 he switched to medical school where he studied anatomy and physiology, and then interned at Massachusetts General Hospital. Having committed to medicine, he immediately expressed doubts. He writes, "I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much humbug therein, and that, with the exception of surgery, in which something positive is sometimes accomplished, a doctor does more by the moral effect of his presence on the patient and family, than by anything else. He also extracts money from them."

During this time he started philosophizing in his writings about human nature and will, which seemed to be taken from a natural talent that all the Jameses possessed which was "the ability simultaneously to experience and to study ones experiencing." In Berlin in 1868, William attended a series of scientific lectures on the German work relating the nerves and consciousness and at this time wrote, "It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science."

William was starting to work on his later theory of knowledge, which in the idiom of the time had the head and the heart inextricably entangled together. This was also the beginning of Williams version of the mind-cure, "the all saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such and in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust."

From here on out I'll be talking almost exclusively about William James, and quoting heavily in the development of his ideas that led to The Principles of Psychology and his theory of conscious mental life, which basically is our personality, and how, properly used could lead to a healthy mental, and therefore social, life. I'll try to put "in my opinion" when I start interpreting too freely, but I can't promise anything, as William James lays part of the foundation for parts of my own theorizing in humanistic psychology.

I'm also not going to spend much effort on political correctness. Instead of translating into PC terminology, I'll use the speech idioms of James's time, and the meaning. When James used men and mankind, he meant the human race as a whole as evidenced in his 1902 book, Varieties of Religions Experience, when he wrote, "Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." His cast of paradigmatically religious characters include Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint Catherine of Genoa, and the blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. William James, his family and friends, were as non-sexist as one got in the nineteenth century. Henry Sr., in an 1854 debate in the pages of the New York Tribune on marriage, divorce, and free love, did agree with Stephen Pearl Andrews when he wrote, rather forthrightly, "I ask for the complete emancipation and self-ownership of woman, simply as I ask the same for man."

William often worried his abolitionist stance was not strong enough, especially compared to the actions of his two youngest brothers, Wilky and Bob. They helped form, with some family influence, the two first black cavalries that President Lincoln allowed to form in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

Well, enough of that little digression...In 1865 James took some time off from medical school to go on a biology expedition to Brazil. His discovery was there is nothing wrong with admitting your personal limitations. He wrote, "The grit and energy of some men are called forth by the resistance of the world. But as for myself, I seem to have no spirit whatever of that kind, no pride which makes me ashamed to say 'I can't do that.'" From his reading of the ancient Greek philosophers he got the idea of the essential rightness of the natural realm, and saw the modern corruption of self-righteousness and vainglory which was more subtly evil than normal lack of justness.

In 1870 he was reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier and was taken by Renouvier's definition of free will: "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts." James said "my first act of free will will be to believe in free will." James thought that freedom of will was moral freedom and a mental affair. One must acquire the habit of strong mental activity, in habitual acts of thought, and not be a passive observer, disputing Herbert Spencer's "spectator theory of knowledge." James saw the intellect as a creative power that had a self-governing power to overcome.

By 1872 he had given up the idea that all mental disorder is required to have a physical basis. The mind did act irrespectively of material coercion, and the mind had as much impact on the body as the body did on the mind.

In 1875, in a review of G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, James said approvingly that Lewes had moved beyond the popular skepticism, as all serious thinkers ultimately must do, for "at a certain point most of us get tired of the skeptical game, resolve to stop, and assuming something to be true, pass on to a life of action based on that." He later made the point about freedom of the will as against determinism, saying at least even skepticism was a free choice. James also advanced the idea that mental or theoretic life should be as adventurous in its way as the practical life.

1877 saw James, at the age of 35, finally courting. In a letter to his future wife, Alice Howe, he wrote how he thought his greatest good would come from mental action, or acts of thought, which would be "the acting for the deepest, widest, most general good I can see and feel."

In a series of lectures he was invited to give at the newly established Johns Hopkins University in 1878, entitled "The Brain and the Mind" he distinguished between the physical brain which more or less automatically responded to outside stimuli, and the mind, better called consciousness or mental life, quite a different entity and composed of interacting swarms of ideas and feelings, choices and aversions, hopes and terrors. The elaborated discussion was epochal for both James and the history of thought in America. It was devised as a rebuttal to those materialists such as Spencer whose theory of mind as automaton was gaining in popularity in American intellectual circles.

James finished the lecture series off by saying, "I, for one, as a scientific man and a practical man alike, deny utterly that science compels me to believe that my conscience is an unreliable guide or outcast, and I trust that you too, after the evidence of this evening, will go away strengthened in the natural faith that your delights and sorrows, your loves and hates, your aspirations and efforts are real combatants in life's arena, and not impotent, paralytic spectators of the game." James was here further refining his theory of the mind as active.

Also in 1878 he published an article in French on "Considerations of the Subjective Method" which the editor of Critical Philosophy called absolutely remarkable and by an author who did the publication proud. The issue that James laid down at the start was whether "one has the right to reject a theory apparently confirmed by a very considerable number of objective facts solely because" it makes absolutely no sense with regard to the way the majority of people actually perceive the world. James's answer, of course, was a resounding yes.

In 1980, after being an assistant professor of psychology for a few years, James was promoted to assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard, and opened the first psychology lab in America, in physiological psychology. As a professor at Harvard it was common to see him walking across campus with a student debating some thesis James had made in class. He encouraged and enjoyed the strongest intellectual resistance, and in 1888 made the then unheard of proposal for student evaluations at the end of whatever course he was teaching.

In 1889 George Santayana, one of many of James' students who made a name for themselves, gave his dissertation defense in the library of the James home. Then in 1890, after twelve years, and quite a few of the chapters being published in the interim in various journals and periodicals, James finished the Principles of Psychology, sustained, he said, in the last few weeks only by coffee. The finished work, almost 1300 pages, was called by some the best work in any language, and in addition to being a scholarly work was also considered a literary work.

As an example of the literary merit of the Principles, in the chapter on instinct, James writes, "Of all propensities the sexual impulses bear on their face the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in the sense of being blind, automatic, and untaught." But the facts, he goes on at once to say, are just the reverse: "The sexual instinct is particularly liable to be checked and modified," especially by contrary impulses like shyness and "what might be called the anti-sexual instinct." This instinct comes from a mode of repulsiveness in the mere idea "of intimate contact with most of the persons we meet."

The most well know chapter of Principles is the "Stream of Thought" which became the phrase that caught on in the abridged version, "The Stream of Consciousness." This idea gave impetus to stream of consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf. Another major influence James had on American society was from his writing on the healthy state of will.

"The healthy state of will," says James, "requires both that vision should be right, and that action should obey its lead. The consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears." James then posits an ideal impulse which will overcome "obstructive conditions" and manifest itself in moral action that is equal in power to the resistance it meets. At this point I should mention that the word "moral" in James's vocabulary invariably had to do with the intelligent and forceful exercise of will. In the Principles he describes the "obstructed will" as one of the two chief forms of unhealthiness in the voluntary power.

In what is both the climax of the chapter on will, and the climax of the book itself, James writes, "If the 'searching of our hearts and reins' be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its darkest abysses to our view, then the worthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or if they cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and fear. But the heroic mind does differently. To it, too, objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate. He can stand this Universe. He can meet it and keep up his faith in it in presence of those same features which lay his weaker brethren low, and thereby he becomes one of the masters and the lords of life. He must be counted with henceforth; he forms part of the human destiny. Neither in the theoretic or in the practical sphere do we care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks, or sense for living on the perilous edge. We draw new life from the heroic example."

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.

The mention of T. S. Eliot brings one to realize, with a certain surprise, that William James had arguably a greater literary influence than Henry James: that is, influence upon literary practitioners, poets and novelists, rather than critics and theorists. Robert Frost, who went to Harvard as a special student in 1897 to study classic literature, but even more to study under James, used the abridged version of the Principles in his own high school psychology course in Massachusetts. In Frost's poem "The Onset" the speaker faces the alien entanglements of night, the dark woods, the first falling snow, and almost surrenders:

I almost stumble looking up and round,

As one who overtaken by the end

Gives up his errand, and lets death descend

Upon him where he is . . .

Robert Penn Warren has remarked that "Frost's basic view of poetry can be regarded as an extension of James's philosophy of pragmatism, of the interplay of will and uncertified possibility in the pluralistic universe, of the interplay of courage and the tragic contingencies." Warren goes on to say about Gertrude Stein, one of James's favorite students at Harvard, that her theory and practice of writing were conditioned by James's ideas about the nature of consciousness; and suggests that Stein might herself have been the nexus between James and Hemingway, who, in a certain sense, was the embodiment in action of James's theories.

Ok, well that finishes up digression number two...In 1891 James prepared the abridged version of the Principles, called Psychology: The Briefer Course. At Harvard this version became known as "Jimmy" to distinguish it from the full length text which was known as "James." James's version of the abridgement as given to Henry Holt, the publisher, goes along these lines: he had added some twaddle about the senses, had left out all polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details, had excised all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all "interest" in short, and had produced a tome "which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's mind." The text was indeed phenomenally successful.

Now we get to the real meat of this lecture, which is the type of naturalistic, pragmatic, and optimistically humanistic psychology that emerges from one not suffering from the near debilitating pathologies that most of the psychodynamicists seem to exhibit. What we call personality theory was known by James as simply the self, and the basis of our personality is that feeling of vitality which, because it is so perpetually present, remains in the background of our consciousness. Changes in personality, as experienced in extreme pathological cases such as insane delusions come from present perversions of sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but cause the patient to think that the present me is an altogether new person. Something of this sort also happens normally in the rapid expansion of the whole character, intellectual as well as volitional, which takes place after puberty. A further assumption is that the "I" which knows the sum total of experience and thoughts of the "me" does not have to be, for psychological purposes, an unchanging metaphysical entity like the soul, or a principle like pure Ego.

James's approach to psychology is that it is a natural science with mentality as a product of Darwinian natural selection with no metaphysically odd properties. This naturalism departs from classical materialism, though, in the view that mental phenomena do not require a simple mechanistic analysis. Naturalism is the holistic view of biological organisms interacting with the physical environment and other organisms. Organisms are functional systems which grow by continuously interacting with other functional systems. This biological view of humans as organisms adaptively fitting into the environment is why James is given credit as the founder of psychological functionalism. James's view is that mental life, as we experience it, is a causally effective functional feature of the incredibly complex interactions that humans have with the natural and social environment. This, to me, is also the basis of one of the tenets of evolutionary epistemology (which, for those of you who heard my presentation at the Psi Chi colloquium last spring, I promise I won't go into again now.)

Psychology has two jobs: to accurately describe mental phenomena, and explain the causal conditions that give rise to these phenomena. One of the assumptions James uses is that all or most of mental life is actually conscious or capable of becoming so. James does place primacy on the methodology of introspection, although today introspection is seen as merely a part of the methodological check-and-balance system which can be, and often is, overruled. Critics of James, especially proponents of a separate unconscious, say that consciousness is only the tip of the iceberg in mental life. James answers by stating it may be only the tip of the iceberg, but the extent that we come to know the unconscious is only because it has become conscious in one way or another.

On some of the other methodologies of psychology, experimentation and comparison, he takes a somewhat dimmer view. While admitting they both have their place in increasing our knowledge, neither experimentation nor comparison by themselves are capable of constituting a complete science of psychology.

On the experimental method James says that "psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them they are sure to combine. New ground will from year to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow. Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the face of the science so far as the latter is a record of mere work done."

The comparative method combines introspective and experimental methods. In looking for the origin of a mental phenomena, it is taken to be "of the utmost importance to trace the phenomenon considered through all its possible variations of type and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, mad- men, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life." The end result of this is that we don't get much more than a reflection of the investigators own psychosis.

The way James conceptualized Conscious Mental Life (CML) in its differences from the rest of nature is through seven essential features: purposefulness, intentionality, consciousness itself, personality, personal change, personal continuity, and selectivity.

CML is purposeful and willful. James says, "no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of mind." This is basically teleological, where we behave instrumentally. In other words, we mentally represent some goal, choose the means to reach it, and proceed to do so. Purposeful cognitive processes interact with the rest of the body to produce purposeful action.

CML has intentionality. This is taken from the Greek intendo, which is to aim at or point toward and is more general than purposefulness. This is sometimes know as Brentano's Thesis, that intentionality is the ineliminable mark of the mental and deals with the difference between mental acts and the contents of those mental acts. Belief, hope, desire, expectation, perceptions; these are all mental acts that have meaningful content. When you fill in the blank on any of the above, you have the intention, or what the mental act is about. James says, "The psychologists attitude towards cognition is a thorough going dualism. It supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as irreducible." There is both consciousness and its contents; they have an aboutness; they are an information bearing state. This thesis can also be argued as the demarcation between the mental and the non-mental.

CML is conscious. Quite simply, this is the epistemic feature of sentience or awareness. It is all around us, more familiar, and less understood than any other mental process. It also must be pointed out that these first three features of CML must figure prominently in any biological system we attribute CML to.

CML is personal, private, uniquely one's own. All thoughts and feelings are owned, or occur to someone, they don't sit around disembodied. This doesn't mean that one's mental life can't be shared or understood by others, doesn't necessitate the problem of knowledge of other minds, but merely points out that we are unique and possess and experience integrity and identity as persons.

CML is always changing, in flux. We gain experience, learn, mature; every mental event is unique if only in that it occupies a different space/time than any previous or future mental event. Because mental life is in flux, human personality is never fixed, permanent, or stationary. It is, therefore, an untenable idea that in addition to our biological selves there exists an unchanging and indestructible metaphysical self or soul. To ward off some obvious objections, we must also consider the sixth feature of CML.

CML is sensibly continuous, it flows like a stream. That consciousness wends its way in an uninterrupted flow helps temper the previous thesis. We tend to focus on the substantive states of consciousness, where the mind rests in a memory or perception. We focus on states that represent objects and events we consider important, and tend to ignore those transitive states that take us from on to the next. A student of James, Ralph Barton Perry, said, "The practically habituated mind flies from perch to perch, and is aware of the perch rather than the passage." These last three feature of CML have an important consequence for personal identity.

The problem of personal identity often gets an all-or-none answer. Rationalists tend to follow Descartes and claim that even after radical body change you remain exactly the same person. The irresistible conclusion this lead to is that there is something immutable, and therefore non-physical, that accounts for our persistent identity over time. The empiricists, following Hume, can not find any empirical warrant for the belief in a "self" which has a unified consciousness, integrity, and sameness over time. All empirical evidence points to the persistent changeability of everything. Of course, with this view the self or person is at best a mere bundle of perceptions and ideas, and at worst a vaporous wish.

James, however, combines evolutionary thinking with the ideas of flux and continuity which gets around the all-or-none problem of personal identity. Against the rationalist he points out the phenomenological fact that we do not experience ourselves as being the same over time. This gets rid of the idea there is an immutable "self" that needs to be accounted for. Against the empiricists skepticism he brings the phenomenological data of continuity, and locates the naturalistic ground of this continuity in our biological integrity.

The implication is that our experience of continuity is very much like all other natural phenomena, which under normal circumstances change gradually and in coherent and patterned ways (even complex and dynamic ones, as presently shown by chaos theory.) Due to the type of biological organization we have in our nervous system, we have the physical basis for memory and our feelings of self-connectedness. We have change over time, and at the same time we see that major portions of what makes up an individuals identity remain relatively constant. Basic thought patterns, or outlooks on life, normally change slowly, if at all, while daily events can either cause change or not.

The analogy I like to use is that of a glacier, where part of the glacier melts away while more is being added. In the absence of catastrophe, the glacier remains enough the same to be named on maps. While most humans don't change quite this slowly, personal identity usually remains fairly stable over the course of a human lifetime.

CML is selective, attentive, and interested; it is excited by some features of the world, not by others. The way human infants perceive the world as all noise and chaos is one of James's best known conjectures. The way in which we reduce the original noise and chaos, and come to move about in an orderly and comprehensible universe is through selective attention.

The thesis of selectivity and interestedness has two major effects, especially in regards to experimental and therapeutic psychology. The first is that it requires the rejection of all naive brands of empiricist learning theories, especially those psychologists that apply a strict reflex arc model to the higher cognitive structures, because they fail to take into account how selective and interested mental life is. Our mental life is such that voluntary and cognitive acts are already taking place at the receiving stage of sense impressions upon the mind. How we choose to experience the world is effected by our beliefs, desires, and needs. This, by the way, is currently one of the deepest problems in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and is known as the frame problem. This is the problem of precisely describing the cognitive structures with which we anticipate experience.

The second major effect of selectivity and interestedness is an ethical one. Because of the unique constitution of personal experiences, and the wide range of interests that effect those experiences, the universe of human thought and action is a pluralistic one. A psychology that promotes the view that everything is experienced differently by every person supports, therefore, a social philosophy that takes individuality seriously, and treats it respectfully.

What is CML for?

The short and simple answer is Evolutionary advantage, and by that I mean we can adapt more quickly than organisms that must go through a long conditioning process, or worse yet, actual evolutionary change. Remember this is only an advantage to an organism that can both plan and know what to plan for in both the natural and social environments. This use of Darwinian theory could only have come from someone like James who emphasized human energy, ingenuity, and creativity. The psychological thesis that mental life seeks the most functional, adaptive fit with the environment is supported by the view that the ultimate test of the truth of a system of beliefs, or paradigm, lies in its functionalness, adaptiveness, and predictive power.

Consciousness is not a thing, it is a process. CML is realized due to the complexity of our nervous system. James's stance is that the phenomenological description of CML as a "stream of consciousness" is a way of dislodging the mind-brain problem; from thinking that for consciousness to be a respectable part of nature it must be an entity. CML is the functional outcome of brain-world interactions.

I think this is the main basis for James' belief in free will, as opposed to determinism, and why intuitively, phenomenologically, and logically free will can rightfully replace mindless determinism in explaining how we interact with the world and ourselves.

So, how can all this be put to use? how does this effect us? and how can this guide the approach we take to human understanding and therapy? I think by applying James's principles of pragmatism. Pragmatism comes from the Greek pragma, meaning action. James credits Charles Sanders Pierce, who in an 1878 article called it "practicality", with setting this intellectual seed in his mind. The basic idea behind pragmatism is that our beliefs are really rules for action, and to develop a thoughts meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. Experience as invariably lying ahead, and its weak optimism, are what give pragmatism is unique American flavor. From Emerson to James, we have the party of hope.

To develop this a bit further, pragmatism's central precepts are that thinking is primarily a guide to action and that the truth of any idea lies in its practical consequences, one of which I feel would have to be Karl Popper's thesis of conjecture and refutation.

According to James, "The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready made and complete for all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future." Against the pessimists who declare it impossible and the optimists who think it inevitable, the pragmatist takes the view that the worlds salvation is possible. The pragmatist believes that the world can be bettered, here and there, bit by bit, in patches--and this by the moral and intellectual actions of individual human beings.

With this emphasis, it becomes clear that we must act. William James foresaw the morbid-minded and the sick in soul, mistrustful of the chanciness of life, surrendering themselves to the enfolding dogma of divinity. The tough-minded are seen cheerfully and willingly marching forth to face the danger. Writes James, "I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play.'"

Bibliography

Flanagan, Owen. (1991). The Science of the Mind, 2nd edition.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

James, William. (1884). What is an Emotion?.

In Calhoun, Cheshire & Robert C. Solomon (Eds.), (1984). What is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

James, William. (1890). The Principles of Psychology.

Reprint 1950. New York: Dover Books.

Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A Family Narrative.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.