In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
WJ–1842–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

William
James

1842  —  1910
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
William James
William James
New York, 1842  ·  Chocorua, New Hampshire, 1910

The father of American psychology who talked himself out of despair — by choosing to believe in free will.

He tried painting, went up the Amazon with Agassiz, took a medical degree he never used, and fell into a despair so deep he later disguised it as another man's case. His first act of free will, he wrote, would be to believe in free will. He taught America's first psychology course, spent twelve years on the Principles, founded pragmatism, and studied religious experience with a doctor's eye.

He walked with Freud at Clark in 1909, and had doubts.

Consultation

It is nothing jointed;
it flows.

James speaks from 4,190 chunks across nine works — both volumes of The Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, The Will to Believe, Talks to Teachers, The Meaning of Truth, and two volumes of his letters.

His discourse holds Bertrand Russell's Philosophical Essays, with its attack on the pragmatist theory of truth, and George Santayana's reminiscences of his teacher in Character and Opinion in the United States.

Ask him how he climbed out of his depression. Ask him whether truth is just whatever works. Ask him whether a chatbot has a stream of consciousness. Ask him what he really thought of Freud — whose room is down the hall.

Stream of ConsciousnessPragmatismHabitReligious ExperienceThe Will to BelieveEmotionFree Will
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. … It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
The Principles of Psychology  ·  Chapter IX  ·  1890

Drawn From the Corpus