William James was born in New York City in 1842. His father was a Swedenborgian mystic, whose mysticism did no damage to his wit and humor; and the son was not lacking in any of the three. After some seasons in American private schools, William was sent with his brother Henry (one year his junior) to private schools in France. There they fell in with the work of Charcot and other psychopathologists, and took, both of them, a turn to psychology; one of them, to repeat an old phrase, proceeded to write fiction like psychology, while the other wrote psychology like fiction. Henry spent most of his life abroad, and finally became a British citizen. Through his more continuous contact with European culture he acquired a maturity of thought which his brother missed; but William, returning to live in America, felt the stimulation of a nation young in heart and rich in opportunity and hope, and caught so well the spirit of his age and place that he was lifted on the wings of the Zeitgeist to a lonely pinnacle of popularity such as no other American philosopher had ever known.
He took his M.D. at Harvard in 1870, and taught there from 1872 to his death in 1910, at first anatomy and physiology, and then psychology, and at last philosophy. His greatest achievement was almost his first—The Principles of Psychology (1890); a fascinating mixture of anatomy, philosophy and analysis; for in James psychology still drips from the foetal membranes of its mother, metaphysics. Yet the book remains the most instructive and easily the most absorbing, summary of its subject; something of the subtlety which Henry put into his clauses helped William James to the keenest introspection which psychology had witnessed since the uncanny clarity of David Hume.
This passion for illuminating analysis was bound to lead James from psychology to philosophy, and at last back to metaphysics itself; he argued (against his own positive inclinations) that metaphysics is merely an effort to think things out clearly; and he defined philosophy, in his simple and pellucid manner, as “only thinking about things in the most comprehensive possible way.”48 So, after 1900, his publications were almost all in the field of philosophy. He began with The Will to Believe (1897); then, after a masterpiece of psychological interpretation—Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)—he passed on to his famous books on Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). A year after his death came Some Problems of Philosophy (1911); and later, an important volume of Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). We must begin our study with this last book, because it was in these essays that James formulated most clearly the basis of his philosophy.49
2. PRAGMATISM
The direction of his thought is always to things; and if he begins with psychology it is not as a metaphysician who loves to lose himself in ethereal obscurities, but as a realist to whom thought, however distinct it may be from matter, is essentially a mirror of external and physical reality. And it is a better mirror than some have believed; it perceives and reflects not merely separate things, as Hume supposed, but their relations too; it sees everything in a context; and the context is as immediately given in perception as the shape and touch and odor of the thing. Hence the meaninglessness of Kant’s “problem of knowledge” (how do we put sense and order into our sensations?)—the sense and the order, in outline at least, are already there. The old atomistic psychology of the English school, which conceived thought as a series of separate ideas mechanically associated, is a misleading copy of physics and chemistry; thought is not a series, it is a stream, a continuity of perception and feeling, in which ideas are passing nodules like corpuscles in the blood. We have mental “states” (though this is again a misleadingly static term) that correspond to prepositions, verbs, adverbs and conjunctions, as well as “states” that reflect the nouns and pronouns of our speech; we have feelings of for and to and against and because and behind and after as well as of matter and men. It is these “transitive” elements in the flow of thought that constitute the thread of our mental life, and give us some measure of the continuity of things.
Consciousness is not an entity, not a thing, but a flux and system of relations; it is a point at which the sequence and relationship of thoughts coincide illuminatingly with the sequence of events and the relationship of things. In such moments it is reality itself, and no mere “phenomenon,” that flashes into thought; for beyond phenomena and “appearances” there is nothing. Nor is there any need of going beyond the experience-process to a soul; the soul is merely the sum of our mental life, as the “Noumenon” is simply the total of all phenomena, and the “Absolute” the web of the relationships of the world.
It is this same passion for the immediate and actual and real that led James to pragmatism. Brought up in the school of French clarity, he abominated the obscurities and pedantic terminology of German metaphysics; and when Harris and others began to import a moribund Hegelianism into America, James reacted like a quarantine officer who has detected an immigrant infection. He was convinced that both the terms and the problems of German metaphysics were unreal; and he cast about him for some test of meaning which would show, to every candid mind, the emptiness of these abstractions.
He found the weapon which he sought when, in 1878, he came upon an essay by Charles Peirce, in the Popular Science Monthly, on “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” To find the meaning of an idea, said Peirce, we must examine the consequences to which it leads in action; otherwise dispute about it may be without end, and will surely be without fruit. This was a lead which James was glad to follow; he tried the problems and ideas of the old metaphysics by this test, and they fell to pieces at its touch like chemical compounds suddenly shot through with a current of electricity. And such problems as had meaning took on a clearness and a reality as if, in Plato’s famous figure, they had passed out of the shadows of a cave into the brilliance of a sun-lit noon.
This simple and old-fashioned test led James on to a new definition of truth. Truth had been conceived as an objective relation, as once good and beauty had been; now what if truth, like these, were also relative to human judgment and human needs? “Natural laws” had been taken as “objective” truths, eternal and unchangeable; Spinoza had made them the very substance of his philosophy; and yet what were these truths but formulations of experience, convenient and successful in practice; not copies of an object, but correct calculations of specific consequences? Truth is the “cash-value” of an idea.
The true . . . is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as “the right” is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient is almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently all the experiences in sight won’t necessarily meet all further experiences equally satisfactorily . . . . Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coördinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.50