For a man remembered as the father of American psychology, William James didn’t always show much interest in being a psychologist. He spent his twenties experimenting with a variety of pursuits without settling purposefully on any particular one. He had a freshly minted medical degree from Harvard and no intention of practicing medicine. He had, at various points, tried to be a painter, a chemist, and an anatomist. For nearly three years after graduation he lived at home, plagued by back pain, poor eyesight, digestive trouble, and a period of physical illness and depression that developed into a profound crisis over freedom, responsibility and whether life was worth living. It’s an interesting origin story for one of the discipline’s founders—and the questions it forced on him would resurface throughout his writing on habit, will, belief and religious experience.
James was born in New York City in 1842, the eldest of five children raised by Henry James Sr., a restless, independently wealthy intellectual who dragged his family across the Atlantic repeatedly in pursuit of the right tutors and the right ideas about God, freedom, and moral character. It was an unusual education—long on philosophical conversation, short on formal discipline—and it produced two James brothers who would each, in his own field, become preoccupied with the interior life: William in psychology and philosophy, and his younger brother Henry in writing everything from fiction to biographies to travel sketches.
William’s own interior life nearly broke him after a punishing expedition to the Amazon and subsequent studies in Germany. He reached a critical low point by the spring of 1870. It was then that, in reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, he found language for a way out of the bind that had been feeding his despair. On April 30 of that year, he recorded in his diary a line that would become one of the most quoted sentences in his biography: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” It didn’t cure him overnight—he wrote to Henry within the week that he still felt melancholy—but it marked a turn. The choice to act as though the will really was free, rather than to feel bound to resolve the metaphysical question first, became a working principle James would return to for the rest of his career, in his psychology of habit as much as in his later writing on religion and belief.
“I feel melancholy as a whip-poor-will and took up pen and paper to sigh melodiously to you. But sighs are hard to express in words. . . . I have at last, I think, begun to rise out of the sloughs of the past three months.”
William James, letter to Henry James (May 7, 1870)
In 1872 James joined Harvard’s faculty to teach physiology; within a few years he had shifted into philosophy and the still-emerging discipline of psychology. In 1875, he offered one of the country’s earliest courses in the new physiological and experimental psychology, accompanied by a demonstration laboratory. He was hired in 1878 to write a textbook on the new science. It took him twelve years. The result, the monumental two-volume Principles of Psychology, ran well over a thousand pages and gave psychology some of its most durable images: consciousness as a “stream of thought,” and the newborn’s experience of the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”
James was characteristically modest about the field he had just helped define, writing in a companion volume two years later that psychology was “no science; it is only the hope of a science.” History would prove him partially right—the hope was realized, though not entirely on his terms. Principles had helped inspire the approach later known as functionalism, which asked what mental activity does—how attention, emotion, habit, and thought help an organism adapt—rather than treating consciousness as something that could be understood simply by breaking it into component parts.
One of the students most transformed by that book was in the room the year it was published. Mary Whiton Calkins had been granted special, informal permission to attend Harvard seminars—Harvard would not yet enroll women—and by 1890 she was the sole remaining student in James’s graduate seminar, the men having drifted away one by one until James was, in effect, tutoring her privately. James sat on the committee that unanimously found she had met every requirement, but Harvard’s governing authorities refused to award her the degree because the university didn’t grant PhDs to women. It wasn’t the last time James’s judgment about a promising line of inquiry would outpace the institutions around him.
“Is it not time that this superstition should be abandoned? . . . Miss Calkins is a person of remarkable ability and has already done work in our laboratory which would do credit to any of our advanced students.”
William James and Josiah Royce, letter to the President and Fellows of Harvard College (May 19, 1890)
Alongside his academic psychology, James spent decades as a serious investigator of psychical research—telepathy, trance states, and mediumship. He became a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884. Over many years, he repeatedly sat with and investigated the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper, whom he called his “white crow,” reasoning that one apparently genuine case was enough to challenge the claim that every medium was simply a fraud. He remained uncertain about what her performances actually proved, considering telepathy and ordinary information-gathering alongside spirit communication. James was no credulous believer; he dismissed most physical mediums as engaged in outright trickery. But he insisted the phenomena deserved serious, evidence-based study rather than reflexive dismissal, and he said so publicly and often.
This did not sit well with colleagues trying to build psychology’s scientific credibility. James McKeen Cattell, editor of Science, complained in print that James’s authority in the field opened up other psychologists to the risk of being dragged along by association, writing that while the field acknowledged his leadership, “we cannot follow him into the quagmires.”
Historians studying the period have since argued that efforts to expel psychical research from psychology’s territory were less a straightforward triumph of science over superstition than a form of professional boundary-drawing—but at the time, James’s involvement was a genuine liability for a discipline eager to be taken seriously. It’s interesting to note that both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung admired Principles, and Jung’s admiration may have reflected a sense of kinship: his own family history included mediumship and “strange occurrences” and he shared James’s willingness to take the uncanny seriously as data rather than dismissing it outright (see “Forever Mysterious: Forever Jung).
James’s later career moved further from the laboratory and into philosophy—pragmatism, radical empiricism, and The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, a study of conversion, mysticism, and the psychology of belief that returned, from a far wider evidentiary base, to questions his own crisis had made personally urgent decades earlier. He retired from Harvard in 1907 and died in 1910, having shaped, directly or by argument, many of the psychologists who would define the discipline’s first American generations, Calkins among them.
While William gave “stream of consciousness” its enduring psychological meaning in Principles, Henry, meanwhile, had already been experimenting in The Portrait of a Lady with ways of rendering a character’s interior life through perspective, perception and thought. The brothers corresponded for years about memory and consciousness, and scholars have long noticed affinities between William’s psychological vocabulary, Henry’s increasingly inward fiction and the literary experiments of later modernists. Whether either brother directly borrowed from the other is harder to prove than the fact that, for most of their adult lives, they were thinking about many of the same problems from two different rooms in the same house.
James never fully resolved the tension between the empirical psychologist and the philosopher who suspected the world held more than laboratories could measure. It is perhaps fitting that the man who once doubted psychology could be a science at all became one of the principal reasons it did—just not, in every respect, on the terms he might have chosen.
Key References
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (1935).
Paul J. Croce, “A Mannered Memory and Teachable Moment: William James and the French Correspondent in the Varieties,” William James Studies (2009).
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Krister Dylan Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (2017).
Henry James, Jr. (ed.), The Letters of William James, Volume 1 (1920).
Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1998).
Andreas Sommer, “Psychical Research and the Origins of American Psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino,” History of the Human Sciences (2012).
Stuart Vyese, “William James and the Psychics,” Skeptical Inquirer (2018).
Harvard University, Department of Psychology, faculty history pages: “William James” and “Mary Whiton Calkins.”
