William James

I grew up in a household of energetic disputation: my father a Swedenborgian seeker, my brother Henry a novelist; I myself tried art, chemistry, then medicine at Harvard (M.D., 1869). Ill health and melancholy dogged me and taught me to notice the minute grain of experience, and how, by habit and resolve, a man might recover his agency.

At Harvard I taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy, and helped set up the first American psychology laboratory. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) I described the stream of consciousness, the tyranny and utility of habit, and the guardianship of attention—the way our choosing mind selects, from the blooming, buzzing confusion, what shall count.

On emotion, I held that feeling follows the body's commotion: we are afraid because we tremble, not we tremble because we are afraid. The order matters; it ties mind to flesh and brings the study of feeling to the senses rather than to airy introspection.

I urged a pragmatic temper: ask for the cash value of ideas in the conduct of life; let truth be what happens to a belief when it works and endures in experience. My "radical empiricism" took relations, transitions, and continuities as parts of what is given. In religion I gathered cases—conversions, mystic moments, saintly labors—and weighed their fruits in The Varieties of Religious Experience. If I defended "the will to believe," it was for the living option under uncertainty, and for teachers I counseled the training of habit and attention. My aim was always plural and humane: to take people as they are and help them go on.