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PHILOSOPHIES : ANCIENT AND MODERN
WILLIAM JAMES
PHILOSOPHIES
ANCIENT &> MODERN
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By kind permission of Mrs. Sears.
THE PHILOSOPHY
OF
WILLIAM JAMES
BY
HOWARD V. KNOX
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1914
PKEFACE
For reasons of space this little study of William
James's philosophy has had to restrict itself to
the essential core of his doctrine, and to omit
many sides of his singularly rich and sympathetic
personality. Moreover, I felt that James was so
supremely excellent a writer that a summary of
his philosophy would be best given so far as pos-
bible in his own incomparable language. I have
accordingly aimed largely at effective selection, and
at stringing together his own expositions of his
most important doctrines, with a minimum of
explanatory comment.
But I had a further reason for letting James
thus speak for himself. The dazzling brilliance of
his style, his wonderful ability to write popularly
and vividly, the simplicity and directness with
which he goes to the heart of every problem, and
his modest disclaimers of systematic finality, have
combined to render it difficult for professional
philosophers to attend to the technical content of
vi PKEFACE
his arguments. It seemed important, therefore,
to show how those very philosophic contentions
which have been denounced as most revolutionary
are actually contained and technically justified in
the great Principles of Psychology, which have been
universally admired and acclaimed as a classic.
When the main drift of that work is properly
understood, the organic unity of James's teaching
becomes manifest. It seems charitable to suppose,
therefore, that those critics who have complained
of the * merely popular ' character of James's
philosophy have not troubled to acquaint them-
selves with the contents of his magnum opus.
HOWAED V. KNOX.
Oxford,
January, 1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1
I. Introduction ....
II. The General Function of Consciousness
III. Habit
IV. Personality and Continuity .
V. Will
VI. Will — continued ....
VII. Utility and the Survival of Beliefs
VIII. Belief and Value
IX. The Practical Value of Theory and the
Theoretic Value of Practice
8
25
32
41
49
67
75
94
vii
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WILLIAM
JAMES'S WORKS
The Principles of Psychology, 1891.
Psychology (Textbook), 1892.
The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philo-
sophy, 1897.
Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objections to the Doc-
trine, 1898.
Talks to Teachers on Psychology ; and to Students on Some
of Life's Ideals, 1899.
Tlie Varieties of Eeligious Experience : A Study in Human
Nature, 1902. Being the Gifford Lectures delivered in
Edinburgh in 1901-1902.
Pragmatism : A New Name for Some Old Ways of Think-
ing, 1907.
The Meaning of Truth : A Sequel to Pragmatism, 1909.
A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester
College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, 1909.
Some Problems of Philosophy (posthumous), 1911.
Memories and Studies, 1911.
Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912. This contains the
remainder of James's occasional articles, ranging from
1884 to 1905, but does not represent his latest views.
IX
x WILLIAM JAMES
SOME BOOKS, ETC., ON JAMES.
La Philosophie de William James. By Th. Flournoy.
Saint-Blaise : Foyer Solidariste, 1911. An admirable
book, which gives special prominence to the bearings of
James's philosophy on religion.
William James. By Emile Boutroux. Paris : Librairie
Armand Colin, 1911.
The same. Translated into English by E. and B. Hender-
son. London : Longmans, Green and Co., 1912.
Introduction (by M. Henri Bergson) to Tie Pragmatisme
(a French translation of Pragmatism). Paris: Ernest
Flammarion, 1911.
William James. By Professor B. B. Perry, in the Harvard
Graduates' Magazine, December, 1910. Contains a
short biography.
William James and his Message. By Professor L. P.
Jacks, in the Contemporary Review, January, 1911.
In Memory of William James By Dr. W. McDougall, in
The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,
Part 62.
William James and his Philosophy. By H. V. Knox, in
Mind, April, 1913.
WILLIAM JAMES
CHAPTEE I
INTRODUCTION
William James (1842-1910) is probably the greatest,
certainly the freshest and most original, thinker
America has so far produced. And the times into
which he was born were such as to stimulate to
the full his natural genius. He was born late
enough thoroughly to appreciate the significance
for human thought of the great scientific move-
ment of the nineteenth century, which culminated
in the triumph of Darwinism in biology (1859) ;
and yet early enough to enjoy the instruction of
one of the greatest naturalists of the older genera-
tion — of Louis Agassiz — of whom he said : " The
hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the differ-
ence between all possible abstractionists and all
livers in the light of the world's concrete fulness,
that I have never been able to forget it. Both
kinds of mind have their place in the infinite
design, but there can be no question as to
1
2 WILLIAM JAMES
which kind lies the nearer to the divine type of
thinking."*
In virtue of his position, and helped no doubt by
the circumstances of parentage and training, which
brought him into intimate contact with the religious
and artistic, as well as with the scientific aspects
of life,t he was the first thinker to realize the full
significance of the Darwinian biology. He did not
conceive it superficially, merely as the last blow
struck by science at religion ; he perceived that it
was not only fatal to the old beliefs about the
fixity of species, and the crude supernaturalism
and false Platonism of which that belief was the
main support, but also that it cast a profound
doubt on the final adequacy of the mechanistic
philosophy from which it seemed to spring, and
of the metaphysical prejudice that the new was
nothing but a disguised form of the old. And,
above all, he perceived that the characteristically
Darwinian principle of progress by individual varia-
tion must profoundly affect our judgment of the
value of the individual ; while, in equal measure,
the belief in the real kinship of all living creatures
must quicken our powers of vital sympathy. That
* Memories and Studies, p. 14 /.
t His father became a Swedenborgian, and he himself for
a time took art to be his vocation.
INTKODUCTION 3
strong sense of individual values, which is, perhaps,
James's most striking mental characteristic, was
without doubt native to him, and must have found
expression under any circumstances ; but the
advent of Darwinism gave to his mind the precise
scientific cue that it required. For of all the
pre-Darwinian prejudices that had masqueraded in
the guise of ' logical principles,' none was more
inveterate than the ' axiom ' that with individual
differences science, as such, had no concern ; that
such differences were not merely unaccountable,
but literally of no account. Thus James was
opportunely helped to recognize that the artist's
sympathy, which not only lingers lovingly on the
concrete, but can see with another's eyes, is a
scientific and philosophical, as well as an aesthetic,
asset — provided always that it is the aim of science
and philosophy to know the concrete reality of
things. The real foundation of James's greatness,
both as a psychologist and as a philosopher, lay
in this keen realization that every new outlook on
life, every personal predilection, has an inner value
which only " a certain blindness in human beings"
prevents most of us from appreciating. The
humblest creature has its special way of laying
hold on reality, which constitutes for it a revela-
tion that may be withheld from ourselves.
4 WILLIAM JAMES
"Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we
are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this
world ; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fond-
ness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes
life significant for the other ! — we to the rapture
of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and
lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and
art. . . ."
" The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the
root of the matter and to possess no truth. The
subject judged knows a part of the world of reality
which the judging spectator fails to see, knows
more while the spectator knows less ; and wherever
there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision,
we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels
the less."*
" Living in the open air and on the ground, the
lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the
level line. . . . The savages and children of
nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much
superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead,
along these lines ; and could they write as glibly
as we do, they would read us impressive lectures
on our impatience for improvement, and on our
blindness to the fundamental static goods of life."t
* Talks to Teachers, p. 230/. f Ibid.,?. 258.
INTRODUCTION 5
As an illustration of James's own readiness to
find wisdom in unlikely quarters, take the follow-
ing : " An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance
once said in my hearing : * There is very little
difference between one man and another ; but what
little there is, is very important.' This distinc-
tion seems to me to go to the root of the matter." *
The importance of individuals is evidently a
very democratic principle, and James was a true
American in holding fast to it. But his democratic
faith rests, not on the figment of a natural equality
of all men, but on a deep psychological insight into
their infinite variety and personal uniqueness. He
perceived that the community has an interest in
allowing wide scope for experiments in living that
may lead to salutary innovations. Hence he made
room also for the apparently opposite principle
of hero-worship.
The region of individual variation "is the forma-
tive zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race's
average, not yet a typical hereditary and constant
factor of the social community in which it occurs.
It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the
tree in which all the year's growth is going on.
Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which
stands inert and belongs almost to the inorganic
* The Will to Believe, p. 256 /.
6 WILLIAM JAMES
world. The active ring, whatever its bulk, is
elementary. If individual variations determine its
ups and downs and hair-breadth escapes and twists
and turns, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the
study of these in favour of the average ! On the
contrary, let us emphasize these, and the import-
ance of these ; and in picking out from history our
heroes, and communing with their kindred spirits,
in imagining as strongly as possible what differences
their individualities brought about in this world,
while its surface was still plastic in their hands,
and what whilom feasibilities they made impossible
— each one of us may best fortify and inspire what
creative energy may lie in his own soul." *
The creative energy of the individual ! This is
the dominant note of James's psychology, and it is
carried forward into his philosophy. It is, in fact,
the vital principle that makes of his psychology
and philosophy a truly organic whole, whose co-
herence, unlike the so-called ' perfect coherence '
of the absolutist * system,' does not exclude the
possibility of growth either in knowledge or in
reality. His interest in investigating the most
general principles of the human consciousness is
not that of ' reducing ' individual uniqueness to its
average expression, but that of exploring the field
* Op. cit., pp. 258 and 260/. (abridged).
INTKODUCTION 7
within which this creative energy arises. In
psychology, then, where others had carelessly
assumed it was ' unscientific ' to see anything but
an ' iron system of law ' which mocks our aspira-
tions and our unquenchable sense of moral freedom
and responsibility, James found a vindication for
the deep reality of human endeavour. Personality,
which philosophers had naively assumed to be the
source of error only, he discovered to be the foun-
tain also of truih and of reality. God, whom
theologians (Calvinists) had sought to exalt by
contrasting His "eternal bliss," "omniscience,"
and " omnipotence," with the miserable estate of
His " creatures," he invited us to welcome as man's
Great Coadjutor in the warfare against all things
evil. He has thus provided a rational alternative
to the protean Fatalism which, under the name of
Materialism in science, of Absolute Idealism in
philosophy, and of Predestination in theology, had
been held up for our admiration as the necessary
goal of enlightened Keason. Eightly, therefore, has
he been called* "the last great Liberator of the
Human Spirit."
* In the dedication of Dr. F. C. S. Schiller's Formal
Logic.
CHAPTEE II
THE GENERAL FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The importance of James's work in psychology is
two-fold. It was immediately recognized by
psychologists as directly revolutionizing their
science, and, though philosophers have even now
only begun to recognize this, it put quite a new
complexion on the question of the relation of
psychology to philosophy. For the * Critical '
studies which had in appearance so sharply
differentiated psychology from philosophy — if,
indeed, they allowed psychology any right to exist
at all — were now seen to be based on psychological
preconceptions which James, as a psychologist, dis-
avowed and overthrew.* This, fortunately, absolves
us from entering here on the futile abstract ques-
tion of the relation of psychology in general to
philosophy in general. We have only to consider
the relation of James's psychology to the new
philosophy which it inaugurates.
* See infra, pp. 34-40, and cf. Mr. D. L. Murray's Prag-
matism, chap. ii. (in the present series).
8
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 9
James once made the remark, in speaking of
Spencer,* that " everyone who writes books or
articles knows how he must flounder until he hits
upon the proper opening. Once the right begin-
ning found, everything follows easily and in due
order. If a man, however narrow, strikes even by
accident into one of these fertile openings, and
pertinaciously follows the lead, he is almost sure
to meet truth in his path. Some thoughts act
almost like mechanical centres of crystallization
facts cluster of themselves about them."
The "fertile opening," into which James himself
struck, consists primarily in a special application
to animal and human consciousness of the
Darwinian conception of biological utility. The
secret of Darwin's scientific success was his firm
grasp of the principle that a genuine explanation
of biological phenomena can only be given in bio-
logical terms ; and that, more particularly, an
explanation of organic evolution must be couched
in terms of the interest of the organism.
Now, "the pursuance of future ends, and the
choice of means for their attainment, are the mark
and criterion of the presence of mentality in a
phenomenon." t By connecting this with the
* Memories and Studies, p. 123 /.
t Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 8,
10 WILLIAM JAMES
Darwinian standpoint, the sciences of biology and
psychology can be rendered essentially continuous.
If, however, we start with the fixed idea that it is
peculiarly ' scientific ' to explain physical events
solely in terms of matter and motion, or ether and
motion, or motion pure and simple, we then must,
as a simple matter of intellectual tactics, disavow
our own spiritual activity in the manufacture of
these recondite and uncanny theories, and somehow
contrive to get rid of the idea that consciousness
really counts for something in the world of nature.
Or, again, we may simply wish to bring this
1 mechanical hypothesis,' or bundle of hypotheses,
to the final test. In either case we raise the
question whether the so-called intelligent behaviour
of an organism, which seems to betray the presence
of mind, is really produced by mind ; or whether
such outward behaviour can be wholly and suffi-
ciently ■ accounted for ' by the physical and
chemical processes that take place in the brain
and nervous system generally. This question,
important as it clearly is for any philosopher
not wholly careless of the concrete, is, in its
first intention, a question of scientific method and
of scientific fact. It is the question whether
(a) physiology must, in principle, be completely in-
dependent of psychology, and {b) whether scientific
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 11
experience confirms this postulate. The affirmative
answer, which yields the theory of 'automatism,'
or ' parallelism,' was in James's early days almost
universally, and is still commonly, adopted by the
physiologists, who, however, have not always in
this matter been fully alive to the difference be-
tween methodological assumption and scientific
verification — i.e., between a scientific programme
and a scientific achievement.
It is a curious anomaly in scientific history,
explicable doubtless as a reaction from the excesses
of Paley-theology, that Darwinism, which is steeped
in the idea of the interest of the organism, and
which should therefore by rights have stimulated
to a profounder study of the nature of purpose,
should de facto have at first emphasized the
tendency to proscribe the idea of conscious purpose
as wholly 'unscientific.'* Because the purposive-
ness which is manifest in bodily structure and in
admittedly unconscious behaviour need not by the
man of science be referred to the conscious agency
of an external deity, the road seemed open for a
denial that conscious efficacy is to be found any-
where. Whereas, before Darwin, ' unconscious
purpose' seemed self- contradictory ; after Darwin
it seemed, on the one hand, interpretable as meaning
* This does not apply to Darwin himself.
12 WILLIAM JAMES
simply progressive adaptation, and on the other to
be the only kind of purpose that science could
ultimately admit. And yet such a view runs pro-
foundly counter to the moving spirit of Darwinism.
For in this view consciousness is functionless, and
therefore biologically meaningless. Nor can it, by
way of philosophical compensation, be regarded as
the vehicle of ' disinterested knowledge ' ; it must
be regarded rather as the vehicle of gratuitous self-
deception, seeing that in practice it is impossible
for us to divest ourselves of the conviction that our
deliberations and personal plans really make some
difference in the world of nature.
It was left to James to discover that there is
nothing to be gained either scientifically, philo-
sophically, aesthetically, or practically, by this
grand epistemological postulate of the fundamental
and thorough-going uselessness of all knowledge.
And he began by discovering that the automaton-
theory (which had at first captivated his own
imagination), though professing to be strictly
scientific, was put forward " on purely a priori and
^asi-metaphysical grounds." In a footnote of
great biographical interest he tells us that " the
present writer recalls how, in 1869, when still a
medical student, he began to write an essay show-
ing how almost everyone who speculated about
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 13
brain -processes illicitly interpolated into his account
of them links derived from the entirely hetero-
geneous universe of Feeling. . . . The writing was
soon stopped, because he perceived that the view
which he was upholding against these authors was
a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of
its reality. Later it seemed to him that whatever
proofs existed really told in favour of their view."*
Elsewhere he says : "In view of the strange
arrogance with which the wildest materialistic
speculations persist in calling themselves ' science,'
it is well to recall just what the reasoning is, by
which the effect-theory of attention is confirmed.
It is an argument from analogy, drawn from rivers,
reflex actions, and other material phenomena where
no consciousness appears to exist at all, and
extended to cases where consciousness seems the
phenomenon's essential feature. The consciousness
doesn't count, these reasoners say ; it doesn't exist
for science, it is nil ; you mustn't think about it at
all. The intensely reckless character of all this
needs no comment. It is making the mechanical
theory true per fas ant nefas. For the sake of that
* Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 130 n. It is in-
structive that when James had satisfied himself that the
mechanical theory was unsupported by concrete fact, he took
no interest in proving the writers he mentions to have been
inconsistent.
14 WILLIAM JAMES
theory we make inductions from phenomena to
others that are startlingly unlike ; and we assume
that a complication which Nature has introduced
(the presence of feeling and of effort, namely) is
not worthy of scientific recognition at all. Such
conduct may conceivably be wise, though I doubt
it ; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical,
it cannot seriously be called." *
As regards the " positive reasons why we ought
to continue to talk in psychology as if conscious-
ness had causal efficacy," James points outf that
" the particulars of the distribution of conscious-
ness point to its being efficacious " ; that " con-
sciousness grows the more complex and intense the
higher we rise in the animal kingdom. From this
point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the
other organs, which maintain the animal in the
struggle for existence; and the presumption, of
course, is that it helps him in some way in the
struggle just as they do." He proceeds to show in
what way consciousness may be of bodily use, in
view of the defects which make the nervous system
" need just the kind of help that consciousness
would bring provided it were efficacious."
* Op. cit., vol. i., p. 454.
+ Op. cit., vol. i., p. 138 /. (The quotations have been
slightly abridged.)
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 15
"The study," he says, "of the phenomena of
consciousness which we shall make throughout the
rest of this book will show us that consciousness is
at all times a selecting agency. The item empha-
sized is always in close connection with some
interest felt by consciousness to be paramount at
the time. The dilemma in regard to the nervous
system seems to be of the following kind. We may
construct one which will react infallibly and
certainly, but it will then be capable of reacting to
very few changes in the environment — it will fail
to be adapted to all the rest. We may, on the
other hand, construct a nervous system potentially
adapted to respond to an infinite variety of minute
features in the situation ; but its fallibility will
then be as great as its elaboration. We can never
be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the
appropriate direction. All this is said of the brain
as a physical machine pure and simple. Can con-
sciousness increase its efficiency by loading its
dice ? Such is the problem.
" Loading its dice would mean bringing a more
or less constant pressure to bear in favour of those
of its performances which make for the most
permanent interests of the brain's owner ; it would
mean a constant inhibition of the tendencies to
stray aside.
16 WILLIAM JAMES
" Well, just such pressure and such inhibition
are what consciousness seems to be exerting all the
while. And the interests in whose favour it seems
to exert them are its interests, and its alone —
interests which it creates, and which, but for it,
would have no status in the realm of being what-
ever. We talk, it is true, when we are Darwinizing,
as if the mere body that owns the brain had
interests ; we speak about the utilities of its various
organs, and how they help or hinder the body's
survival ; and we treat the survival as if it were an
absolute end, existing as such in the physical
world, a sort of actual should-be, presiding over the
animal and judging his reactions, quite apart from
the presence of any commenting intelligence out-
side. We forget that in the absence of some such
superadded, commenting intelligence (whether it
be that of the animal itself, or only ours or
Mr. Darwin's) the reactions cannot be properly
talked of as 'useful' or 'hurtful' at all. Con-
sidered merely physically, all that can be said of
them is that if they occur in a certain way survival
will, as a matter of fact, prove to be their incidental
consequence. In a word, survival can enter into a
purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis
made by an onlooker about the future. But the
moment you bring a consciousness into the midst,
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17
survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer
is it, * if survival is to occur, then so and so must
brain and other organs work.' It has now become
an imperative decree : ' Survival shall occur, and
therefore organs must so work!' Real ends appear
for the first time now upon the world's stage. The
conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive
form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it
in many idealistic schools, modern as well as
ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychological, as the
remainder of this book will show. Every actually
existing consciousness seems to itself, at any rate, to
be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its
presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of
cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, dis-
cerning which facts further them and which do not.
" Now let consciousness only be what it seems to
itself, and it will help an unstable brain to com-
pass its proper ends. The movements of the brain
per se yield the means of attaining these ends
mechanically, but only out of a lot of other ends,
if so they may be called, which are not the proper
ends of the animal, but often quite opposed. The
brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of
no certainties. But the consciousness, with its
own ends present to it, and knowing also well
which possibilities lead thereto and which away,
2
18 WILLIAM JAMES
will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the
favourable possibilities and repress the unfavour-
able or indifferent ones.
" Thus, then, from every point of view, the circum-
stantial evidence against that theory [of automatism]
is strong. A priori analysis of both brain-action
and conscious action show us that if the latter were
efficacious, it would, by its selective emphasis, make
amends for the indeterminateness of the former ;
whilst the study a posteriori of the distribution of
consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we
might expect in an organ added for the sake of
steering a nervous system grown too complex to
regulate itself. The conclusion that it is useful is,
after this, quite justifiable."
In a section specially devoted to the subject of
Selection, James further points out that conscious-
ness "is always interested more in one part of its
object than in another, and welcomes and rejects,
or chooses, all the while it thinks. To begin at the
bottom, what are our very senses themselves but
organs of selection? Out of what is in itself an
undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of
distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by
attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world
full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt
changes, of picturesque light and shade.
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19
" Helmholtz says that we notice only those
sensations which are signs to us of things. But
what are things ? Nothing but special groups of
sensible qualities which happen practically or
aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore
give substantive names, and which we exalt to this
exclusive status of independence and dignity. But
in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dust-
wreath on a windy day is just as much of an
individual thing, and just as much or as little
deserves an individual name, as my own body
does.
"And then, among the sensations we get from
each separate thing, what happens? The mind
selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations
to represent the thing most truly, and considers
the rest as its appearances, modified by the con-
ditions of the moment. Thus perception involves
a twofold choice. Out of all present sensations
we notice mainly such as are significant of absent
ones; and out of all the absent associates which
these suggest we again pick out a very few to stand
for the objective reality par excellence. We could
have no more exquisite example of selective
industry.
M That industry goes on to deal with the things
thus given in perception. A man's empirical
20 WILLIAM JAMES
thought depends on the things he has experienced,
but what these shall be is to a large extent deter-
mined by his habits of attention. . . .
" If, now, we ask how the mind proceeds
rationally to connect them [i.e., objects], we find
selection again to be omnipotent. All reasoning
depends on the ability of the mind to break up the
totality of the phenomenon reasoned about into
parts, and to pick out from among these the
particular one which, in our given emergency, may
lead to the proper conclusion. The man of genius
is he who will always stick in his bill at the right
point, and bring it out with the right element —
1 reason ' if the emergency be theoretical, ' means '
if it be practical — transfixed upon it.
"If, now, we pass to its aesthetic department, our
law is still more obvious. Any natural subject will
do if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon
some one feature of it as characteristic, and sup-
press all merely accidental items which do not
harmonize with this.
" Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of
Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme.
An act has no ethical quality whatever, unless it
be chosen out of several all equally possible. The
ethical energy par excellence has to go farther
and choose which interest out of several, equally
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 21
coercive, shall become supreme. The problem
with the man is less what act he shall now choose
to do than what being he shall now resolve to
become.
" Looking back, then, over this review, we see
that the mind is at every stage a theatre of
simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists
in the comparison of these with each other, the
selection of some, and the suppression of the rest
by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of atten-
tion. The mind, in short, works on the data it
receives very much as a sculptor works on his
block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there
from eternity. But there were a thousand different
ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank
for having extricated this one from the rest. Just
so the world of each of us, howsoever different our
several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the
primordial chaos of sensations which gave the
mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.
We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind
things back to that black and jointless continuity
of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms
which science calls the only real world. But all
the while the world we feel and live in will be that
which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative
strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like
22 WILLIAM JAMES
sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of
the given stuff. My world is but one in a million
alike embedded, alike real to those who may
abstract them. How different must be the worlds
in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab !"*
The following, then, are the salient points in
James's theory of the relation between conscious-
ness and life. It is a theory which does not reduce
psychology to biology, but, on the contrary, shows
the necessity of expanding the conception of life
to include consciousness.
1. By directly connecting cognition with action,
James vindicates its biological utility, as against
the adherents of the ' automaton-theory.' Cog-
nition ceases to be biologically meaningless.
2. By showing that cognition and volition are
interpenetrative, he finally supplants the old
faculty- psychology, which * explained ' the mind
as a congeries of independent ' powers.' Mind
becomes an organic unity of function.
3. His explanation of the biological function of
cognition flows from an entirely novel theory of
its psychological nature. Knowledge is instru-
mental just because it does not passively ' repro-
duce ' a pre-existent scheme, but presents us with
alternative possibilities, from which we select in
* Op. cit., vol. i., pp. 284-289 (abridged).
FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 23
accordance with oar personal interests. Mind
becomes an instilment of choice.
4. Though consciousness exists in the first place
for the satisfaction of bodily needs, it can minister
to these only in so far as they are consciously
felt wants. Hence its emergence entails a new kind
of vital need, namely, the need of conscious satis-
faction, which, again, is the only need that is such
in any but a metaphorical sense. Consciousness as
a vital factor thus raises life to a higher denomina-
tion than that of merely physical life.
5. Since the environment to which an organism
consciously reacts is the environment as it exists
for that organism's consciousness, and since the
environment as so viewed is the product of
selective elimination on the part of the conscious-
ness concerned, it follows that conscious selection
creates the known world in precisely the same sense
in which ' natural selection ' creates the species.
"Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of
attending to things, what sort of a universe he
shall appear to himself to inhabit " (vol. i., p. 424).
To sum up so far : Darwinism ivithout material-
ism is the keynote of James's psychology. Con-
sciousness is the realm of real ends, and in the
making and fulfilment of these ends it contributes
to the making of reality. Mind's destiny is not
24 WILLIAM JAMES
to be a ' disinterested ' spectator of ready-made
existence, but to be an active participant in the
shaping of the future. For the * sensationalism '
of the older psychologists, which is the expression
in psychology of the intellectualist bias, James sub-
stitutes what, to mark the contrast, may be desig-
nated as a 'voluntarism.' But this does not
mean that he replaces an independent ' faculty ' of
thought or sensation by an equally independent
1 faculty ' of will. It means that ' disinterested
knowledge ' is biologically a monstrosity, compar-
able not so much to the winged Pegasus as to a
molluscous vertebrate.
CHAPTER III
HABIT
In the last chapter we saw that James's innovations
in psychology dissent from the general trend of
scientific thought in his time as to the function of
consciousness. But his dissent was prompted by
his prof o under appreciation of the scientific value of
Darwinism. He saw that Darwinism, instead of
enthroning mechanism as a universal principle, in
reality demanded a remodelling of the fashionable
mechanical interpretation of consciousness. He
saw that if we are to embrace consciousness in the
evolutionary scheme, we must give up the idea that
knowledge must be useless. He faced the dilemma —
either the Darwinian principle is inapplicable to
animal and human consciousness, or that conscious-
ness must be an originative factor in the world ;
and he boldly chose the latter alternative. But to
adopt this alternative is finally to discard the pre-
Darwinian implications of the word ' evolution ' as
the opposite of ' epigenesis ' — i.e., as a denial of the
possibility of real novelty. For James, the intro-
25
26 WILLIAM JAMES
duction of real novelty is the essential function of
consciousness,* and to get it he shrank as little
from recognizing the reality of ' chance ' as Darwin
did from postulating ' accidental variations.'
The most important distinction, it follows, in
animal behaviour is that between repetition and
the original solution of practical problems. Never-
theless, habit is obviously of enormous importance
to animal welfare, and this seems to bring us back
to purely physical laws. " The laws of Nature are
nothing but the immutable habits which the
different elementary sorts of matter follow in their
actions and reactions upon each other." t The
difference is that, while inanimate nature and
unconscious organisms (if such there really are)
simply have habits, conscious beings are enabled to
form new habits in their individual lifetime. More-
over, the more thoroughly alive a creature is, the
less rigid are its 'habits.' Both habit-making
and habit-breaking are contrasted with the
mechanical happenings of inanimate nature.
We are creatures of habit, not merely because
habits are, or should be, useful, but also because
" habit diminishes the conscious attention with
which our acts are performed," and thus sets
consciousness free for further conquests, whether in
* Cf. infra, p. 65/. t Principles, vol. i., p. 104.
HABIT 27
the direction of forming more habits, or of coping
with situations too intricate for habit's office.*
The more habitual an action grows, the more
ingrained it becomes in the nervous system; con-
sciousness is ever, so to speak, delegating to
subordinates (which it has itself trained) whatever
matters can be dealt with in a routine way. In his
chapter on Habit, however, James deals not only
with this thought-economizing capacity of habit,
but also with the biological and ethical need for
the formation of good habits rather than bad ; for
the semi-automatic character of habit does not
automatically insure that the habitual action shall
be goody either for the individual or for society.
It is highly characteristic of James that he makes
no apology for the " very natural transition to the
ethical implications of the law of habit." t It seems
to him as natural to study the ' laws of mind '
with a view to self-control, as it is to study the
1 laws of nature ' with a view to controlling
physical forces. More so, indeed, for self-control
is at the root of all active control whatsoever. For
James, therefore, psychology is not a blank gazing
at the * inexorable ' flow of mental events ; it is a
means for perfecting the purposes of which our
conscious life is compact; it is itself an integral
* Op. city vol. i., p. 113 f. t Op. city vol. i., p. 120.
28 WILLIAM JAMES
part of our purposeful thinking activity. This
attitude is made possible for him by the fact that
he abstains from assuming that in order to under-
stand purpose we must treat it as a delusion. If
there is one thing more than another that explains
the genesis of James's philosophy, it is this. This
rare and refreshing attitude, and veritable stroke
of genius, emancipates psychology from theDry-as-
dusts who can see no connection between the
problems of psychology and of real living. Its full
significance will appear in the sequel,* but mean-
while we may quote the following :
" If the period between twenty and thirty is the
critical one in the formation of intellectual and
professional habits, the period below twenty is
more important still for the fixing of personal
habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and
pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly
ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth
transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the
nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by
the associations of his growing years. Hardly
ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in
his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentle-
man born. The merchants offer their wares as
* See especially p. 57 /., and chap. ix.
HABIT 29
eagerly to him as to the veriest ' swell,' but he
simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible
law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his
orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and
how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get
the things they wear will be for him a mystery till
his dying day.
"The great thing, then, in all education, is to
make our nervous system our ally instead of our
enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions
and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For
this we must make automatic and habitual, as early
as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and
guard against the growing into ways that are likely
to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard
against the plague. The more of the details of our
daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody
of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind
will be set free for their proper work. There is no
more miserable human being than one in whom
nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom
the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every
cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day,
and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects
of express volitional deliberation. Full half the
time of such a man'^goes to the deciding or
regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained
30 WILLIAM JAMES
in him as practically not to exist for his conscious-
ness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet
ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin
this very hour to set the matter right."*
u A third maxim may be added to the preceding
pair : t Seize the very first possible opportunity to
act on every resolution you make, and on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the
direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is
not in the moment of their forming, but in the
moment of their producing motor effects that
resolves and aspirations communicate the new
* set ' to the brain. ... A tendency to act only
becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to
the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions
actually occur, and the brain * grows ' to their use.
Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling
evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse
than a chance lost ; it works so as positively to
hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking
the normal path of discharge. There is no more
contemptible type of human character than that of
the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who
* Op. cit., vol. i., p. 121 /.
+ The others are : (1) " We must take care to launch our-
selves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible."
(2) "Never suffer :an exception to occur till the new habit is
securely rooted in your|life."
HABIT 31
spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and
emotion, but who never does a manly concrete
deed."*
One hardly knows whether to admire more the
moral or the psychological insight of passages like
this.
* Principles, vol. i., p. 124 f.
CHAPTER IV
PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY
In passing to the " study of the mind from within,"
in chapter ix. of the Principles, James notes the
following as fundamental characters in the thought-
process :
1. " Every thought tends to be part of a personal
consciousness.
2. " Within each personal consciousness thought
is always changing.
3. "Within each personal consciousness thought
is sensibly continuous.
4. " It always appears to deal with objects inde-
pendent of itself.
5. "It is interested in some parts of these
objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes
or rejects — chooses from among them, in a word —
all the while."*
With the last of these we have already dealt in
Chapter II. This chapter we must devote to the first
* Principles, vol. i., p. 225.
32
PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 88
three., which are most intimately connected. The
fourth will be dealt with in Chapters VII. and VIII.
First, as to personality.
"The only states of consciousness that we
naturally deal with are found in personal con-
sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's
and you's. Each of these minds keeps its own
thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering
between them. No thought even comes into direct
sight of a thought in another personal conscious-
ness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible
pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary
psychic fact were not thought or this thought or
that thought, but my thought, every thought being
owned. . . . The breaches between such thoughts
[belonging to different personal minds] are the most
absolute breaches in nature. . . .* The universal
conscious fact is not * feelings and thoughts exist,'
but ' I think ' and ' I feel.' No psychology, at any
rate, can question the existence of personal selves.
The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret
the nature of these selves as to rob them of their
worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas,
* Later (1909), James was inclined to modify this extreme
view, chiefly, it would seem, as the result of his experiences
as a ' psychical researcher.' See Memories and Studies,
pp. 201-206 ; and cf. Principles, vol. i., p. 367.
3
34 WILLIAM JAMES
says somewhere, in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excite-
ment, that, misled by certain peculiarities which
they display, we 'end by personifying' the pro-
cession which they make, such personification
being regarded by him as a great philosophic
blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder
if the notion of personality meant something
essentially different from anything to be found in
the mental procession. But if that procession be
itself the very 'original ' of the notion of personality,
to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is
already personified. There are no marks of per-
sonality to be gathered aliunde, and then found
lacking in the train of thought. It has them
already, so that to whatever further analysis we
may subject that form of personal self-hood under
which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain,
true that the thoughts which psychology studies
do continually tend to appear as parts of personal
selves."*
The subjects of continuity and change in con-
sciousness may be taken together, for it is con-
tinuity of change, or consciousness as a moving
continuum, that James is most solicitous about.
This feature of consciousness, which James was
* Principles, vol. i. ; p. 226 /.
PEKSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 35
the first to urge, is sublimated into a metaphysical
idea of the first rank in the philosophy of Bergson.*
James's vindication of conscious continuity rendered
obsolete all previous abstract discussion of the
relation of thought to time, though professed
philosophers are only beginning to perceive this.
Presumably, therefore, its importance is not easy
to make clear. James himself subsequently sum-
marized his view as follows :
" The conjunctive relation that has given most
trouble to philosophers is the co-conscious transition,
so to call it, by which one experience passes into
another when both belong to the same self. About
the facts there is no question. My experiences and
your experiences are ' with ' each other in various
external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours
pass into yours, in a way in which yours and mine
never pass into one another. Within each of our
personal histories, subject, object, interest, and
purpose, are continuous, or may be continuous.
Personal histories are processes of change in time,
and the change itself is one of the things immediately
experienced. * Change ' in this case means con-
tinuous as opposed to discontinuous transition.
* James's view first appeared in an article " On Some
Omissions of Introspective Psychology " (Mind, January,
1884). Bergson's Donnees Immediates date from 1889.
36 WILLIAM JAMES
But continuous transition is one sort of a con-
junctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist
means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of
all others, for this is the strategic point, the
position through which, if a hole be made, all the
corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical
fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding
fast to this relation means taking it at its face
value, neither less nor more ; and to take it at its
face value means first of all to take it just as we
feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract
talk about it, involving words that drive us to
invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize
their suggestions and to make our actual experience
again seem possible."
We should note that James is here referring to
Kantian and Anglo-Hegelian ' explanations ' of the
* possibility of experience,' and is not taking con-
tinuity in the highly conceptualized sense which
has been constructed by some modern mathema-
ticians.
" What I do feel simply, when a later moment of
my experience succeeds an earlier one, is that,
though they are two moments, the transition from
the one to the other is continuous. Continuity here
is a definite sort of experience — just as definite as
is the discontinuity experience which I find it
PEKSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 37
impossible to avoid when I seek to make the
transition from an experience of my own to one
of yours.*
"Practically to experience one's personal con-
tinuum in this living way is to know the originals
of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to know
what the words stand for concretely, to own all
that they can ever mean. [Cf. supra James's
criticism of the attempt to depersonalize person-
ality.] But all experiences have their conditions ;
and over-subtle intellects, thinking about the facts
here, and asking how they are possible, have ended
by substituting a lot of static objects of conception for
the direct perceptual experiences. The result is that
from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive
experience has been discredited by both schools,
the empiricist leaving things permanently disjoined,
and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
[his?] absolutes or substances, or whatever other
fictitious agencies of union they [he ?] may have
employed. From all which artificiality we can be
saved by a couple of simple reflections : first, that
conjunctions and separations are, at all events,
* Cf Radical Empiricism, p. 42 : For a radical empiricism
11 the relations that connect experiences must themselves be
experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced
must be accounted as ' real' as anything else in the system."
38 WILLIAM JAMES
co-ordinate phenomena, which, if we take experi-
ences at their face value, must be accounted equally
real; and, second, that if we insist on treating
things as really separate when they are given as
continuously joined, invoking, when union is
required, transcendental principles to overcome
the separateness we have assumed, then we ought
to stand ready to perform the converse act. We
ought to invoke higher principles of disunion, also,
to make our merely experienced disjunctions more
truly real."*
This criticism, which remains up to the present
unanswered, lays the axe to the tap-root of
'transcendental idealism.' For once the reality
of continuity is admitted, all need for assuming
either a ' Soul-substance ' to be the ' support,' or
transcendental Ego to be the ' presupposition,' of
consciousness, disappears.
" Our ' Thought' — a cognitive phenomenal event
in time — is, if it exists at all, itself the only Thinker
which the facts require. The only service that
transcendental egoism has done to psychology has
been by its protests against Hume's ' bundle '-
theory of mind. But this service has been
ill-performed ; for the Egoists themselves, let
them say what they will, believe in the bundle,
* Essays in 'Radical Empiricisms p. 47 /.
PEESONALITY AND CONTINUITY 39
and in their own system merely tie it up with their
special transcendental string, invented for that
use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this mirac-
ulous tying or ' relating, 1 the Ego's duties were
done." Of its far more important duty of choosing
some of the things it ties, and appropriating them,
to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a
word. . . .
" The literature of the Self is large, but all its
authors may be classed as radical or mitigated
representatives of the three schools we have named
— substantialism, associationism,t or transcenden-
talism. Our own opinion must be classed apart,
although it incorporates essential elements from all
three schools. There need never have been a quarrel
between associationism and its rivals if the former
had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse
of thought [cf Bergson's " Chaque mouvement est
* A still more fatal flaw is that the Idealists, in their hurry
to 'explain' the transcendental 'possibility of knowledge,'
have made progress in knowledge impossible. See infra,
P- 72/.
f The fundamental thesis of ' associationism,' that the
concrete facts of mental life can be adequately ' explained '
by the mechanical operation of the 'laws of association,' is
so obviously and so completely annihilated by James's demon-
stration of the selective function of consciousness, that I have
not deemed it necessary to refer directly to associationism
at all.
40 WILLIAM JAMES
indivisible "], and the latter been willing to allow that
* perishing ' pulses of thought might recollect and
know."*
After this fashion did James endeavour to remove
the metaphysical cataract that had so long blinded
men to the realities of their immediate experience.
* Principles, vol. i., p. 369 f.
CHAPTER V
WILL
In James the transition from psychology to the
larger problems of philosophy appears to occur on
the question of Free Will. His philosophy avows
itself a free- will philosophy , just as his psychology
is voluntaristic ; and for the same reason — viz.,
that he is a true Darwinian, a champion of real
novelty.* But James actually proceeds by raising
the question, How can we pass from the recogni-
tion of the reality and importance of Will to the
belief in Freedom? It is chiefly because psy-
chology thus conducts directly and inevitably to the
free-will problem, that psychology is for James
something more than a mere branch of ■ natural
science ' ; while it is because this problem concerns
the ultimate function of human consciousness
that philosophy cannot cut loose from psychology.
And finally it is because the attempt to solve the
free-will problem by dint of ' pure reason ' begs the
* Cf. infra, p. 65/.
41
42 WILLIAM JAMES
question in the interest of the deterministic alterna-
tive, that for James the play of * pure reason ' is
literally play, and inadequate to the serious
business of life.
Since the free-will problem forms one of the
nodal points wherein psychology and philosophy
inosculate, James is, in his Principles, confronted
with an awkward crux of method. How is he
even to state the problem in psychological terms,
when the solution thereof must take him far
beyond the limits of psychology as a natural
science — the limits within which alone psychology
can lead an autonomous existence ? We must
appreciate this methodological difficulty if we are
to grasp James's position in the Principles.
Before reaching his problem, James has im-
pugned the scientific status of the automaton
theory.* He has shown that it is dogmatic and
metaphysical, and that we are under no logical
obligation to accept it. Now, it is true that to
challenge the credentials of that theory is not
enough to establish the reality of freedom. In the
first place, we may arbitrarily and frankly adopt
automatism as a metaphysical theory ; and in the
second place, we may reject it and still remain
determinists. For it will still at least seem possible
* Cf. chap, ii., especially p. 12 /.
WILL 43
to maintain that within the universe ' as a whole,'
conceived in terms of the rival theory of Interac-
tion — i.e., of causal reciprocity between psychical
and physical events — not Freedom, but Necessity
obtains.* James himself explicitly allows the logical
possibility of such a position. t But though auto-
matism is not convertible with determinism, it is
the only form in which determinism can be sharply
opposed to indeterminism, and it is the only form
which appears even remotely susceptible of scien-
tific proof. Hence, to show how arbitrary is the
automaton theory, though we do not thereby prove
the truth of indeterminism, does set us logically
free to embrace this alternative, if it should appeal
to us on emotional or practical grounds.
James therefore maintains that the question
whether volition or attention (for " volition is
nothing but attention") does or does not involve
a " principle of spiritual activity " " is metaphysical
as well as psychological, and is well worthy of all
the pains we can bestow on it. It is, in fact, the
pivotal question of metaphysics, the very hinge on
which our picture of the world shall swing from
* Such a position is assumed, e.g. (though not expressly
argued), by Mr. W. McDougall in his important treatise on
Body and Mind.
■f Principles, vol. i. , pp. 448 and 451
44 WILLIAM JAMES
materialism, fatalism, monism [note the association
of these nominally different doctrines !], towards
spiritualism, freedom, pluralism — or else the other
way."*
" The whole feeling of reality, the whole sting
and excitement of voluntary life, depends on our
sense that in it things are really being decided from
one moment to another, and that it is not the dull
rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable
ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and
history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be
an illusion. As we grant to the advocate of the
mechanical theory that it may be one, so he must
grant to us that it may not. And the result is
two conceptions of possibility, face to face, with no
facts definitely enough known to stand as arbiter
between them. Under these circumstances, one
can leave the question open whilst waiting for
light, or one can do what most speculative minds
do, that is, look to one's general philosophy to
incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do
so without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse
a similar privilege to the believers in a spiritual
force. I count myself among the latter, but as
my reasons are ethical, they are hardly suited for
introduction into a psychological work. The last
* Op. cit., vol. i., p. 448.
WILL 45
word of psychology here is ignorance, for the
* forces ' engaged are certainly too delicate and
numerous to be followed in detail." *
This quotation plainly hints at what James
regards as the real problem. And later he repeats
that "the question of free will is insoluble on
strictly psychologic grounds," and refers us to an
ethical discourse on " The Dilemma of Deter-
minism," t permitting himself only "a few words
about the logic of the question."
" The most that any argument can do for deter-
minism is to make it a clear and seductive concep-
tion, which a man is foolish not to espouse so long
as he stands by the great scientific postulate that
the world must be one unbroken fact, and that
prediction of all things without exception must be
ideally, even if not actually, possible. It is a moral
postulate about the Universe — the postulate that
ivhat ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be
fated, but that good ones must be possible in their
place — which would lead one to espouse the contrary
view. But when scientific and moral postulates
war thus with each other, and objective proof is not
to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for
scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary
* Op. cit., vol. i., p. 453 /.
t Now included in The Will to Believe.
46 WILLIAM JAMES
choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined,
it would seem only fitting that the belief in its
indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from
amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first
deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never
to hope for any other method of getting at the
truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this
particular truth will therefore probably be open to
us to the end of time, and the utmost that a
believer in free will can ever do will be to show
that the deterministic arguments are not coercive.
That they are seductive, I am the last to deny ;
nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep
the faith in freedom, when they press upon it,
upright in the mind."*
James, then, even in the Principles, points to the
conclusion that there is not, strictly speaking, any
* Op. city vol. ii., p. 573 /. The position which James
here takes up in developing the 'logic of the question' of
free will is exactly that which he afterwards expressed, in
more generalized form, in his essay on The Will to Believe.
If the numerous critics who fell foul of that doctrine had
taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the general
tenor of James's views on the subject of will as explained in
his Principles, and had interpreted the doctrine in the light
of this, its original application, we might have been spared
such curiously inept objections as that James gives every
man full licence to believe whatever he likes on no evidence
at all.
WILL 47
' question of fact ' involved in the free-will contro-
versy at all. For the issue is raised, inter alia, of
how the existence of volition as a psychical fact
should modify our conception of the nature of ' fact '
in general. Can 'fact,' in the end, be independent of
will ? Is the distinction between what is and what
ought to be ultimately irreducible ? Is the future,
in rerum natura, as irrevocably fixed as the past ?
In a word, can we, without begging the question as to
the ultimate nature of reality, absolutely separate the
realms of Logic and Ethics? No less than this is
involved in the free-will question ; and James is
clearly aware of it. The free-will problem he saw,
as none had seen before him, brings all the philo-
sophical disciplines to a focus, and cannot, there-
fore, be reduced to a mere question of psychological
1 fact,' any more than it can be dismissed as
merely metaphysical. And his distinction between
' logically coercive ' proof and the moral right to
believe will eventually lead to a thorough revision
of the notion of ' logical coerciveness ' itself.*
Consequently, in apparently seeking to give a
psychological formulation of the problem, James
* James might also have pointed out that since deter-
minism, equally with indeterminism, can only be embraced
through an arbitrary act of choice, it is afflicted with an
internal incoherence, from which the rival theory is for-
tunately free
48 WILLIAM JAMES
must not be understood as attempting to reduce
the problem to purely psychological terms. He is
merely trying to discover how far it falls within the
limits of psychology as a ' natural science ' — i.e.,
as a science dealing with 'facts,' and taking its
conception of ' fact ' in the relatively uncritical
way appropriate to science as distinguished from
philosophy. So understanding him, and contenting
ourselves, so far as this book is concerned, with
his interim solution* of the larger problem, we
will in our next chapter note the more important
and original points in his psychological theory of
will.
* " A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago
been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no
new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments
which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I
know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground ;
not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent,
but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two
parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will
imply " {Will to Believe, p. 145).
CHAPTER VI
will — continued
James's theory will best be given almost entirely in
his own words :
" An anticipatory image of the sensorial conse-
quences of a movement, plus (on certain occasions)
the fiat that these consequences shall become
actual, is the only psychic state which introspection
lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary
acts. There is no introspective evidence whatever
of any still later or concomitant feeling attached to
the efferent discharge. The various degrees of
difficulty with which the fiat is given form a com-
plication of the utmost importance to be discussed
farther on."* [I.e., there really is such a thing as
an effort of will ; but this real effort must not be
confounded with a purely hypothetical and useless
'feeling of innervation,' or discharge of nervous
energy. We must note, however, in this passage,
as throughout James's whole chapter on Will, a
* Principles, vol. ii., p. 501.
49 4
50 WILLIAM JAMES
certain vagueness in his use of the word, in
that he extends it to acts performed without
any 'fiat,' and as a simple result of unimpeded
attention to an idea. At the same time, it must
be admitted that attention itself, being essentially
selective, does contain an element of choice ; so that
it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between
* effortless ' attention and * express consent.']
" The entire content and material of our con-
sciousness — consciousness of movement, as of all
things else — is thus of peripheral origin, and came
to us in the first instance as through the peripheral
nerves. If it be asked what we gain by this sen-
sationalists conclusion, I reply that we gain, at any
rate, simplicity and uniformity. In the chapters
on Space, on Belief, on the Emotions, we found
sensation to be a much richer thing than is
commonly supposed ; and this chapter seems at
this point to fall into line with those. Then, as
for sensationalism being a degrading belief, which
abolishes all inward originality and spontaneity,
there is this to be said, that the advocates of
inward spontaneity may be turning their backs on
its real citadel, when they make a fight on its
behalf for the consciousness of energy put forth in
the outgoing discharge. Let there be no such
consciousness; let all our thoughts of movement
WILL 51
be of sensational constitution ; still, in the empha-
sizing, choosing, and espousing of one of them
rather than another, in the saying to it, * Be thou
the reality for me,' there is ample scope for our
inward initiative to be shown. Here, it seems to
me, the true line between the passive materials
and the activity of the spirit should be drawn. It
is certainly false strategy to draw it between such
ideas as are connected with the outgoing and such
as are connected with the incoming neural wave "
(p. 517/.).
11 The first point to start from in understanding
voluntary * action, and the possible occurrence of
it with no fiat or express resolve, is the fact that
consciousness is in its very nature impulsive. . . .
Movement is the natural immediate effect of feeling,
irrespective of what the quality of the feeling may be.
It is so in reflex action, it is so in emotional expres-
sion, it is so in the voluntary life. Ideo-motor
action [i.e., action following immediately on the
idea without ' express consent '] is thus no paradox,
to be softened or explained away. It obeys the
type of all conscious action in which a special fiat
is involved" (p. 526/.).
"We are now in a position to describe what
happens in deliberate action when the mind is the
* See observation on p. 49/,
52 WILLIAM JAMES
seat of many ideas related to each other in
antagonistic or in favourable ways. One of the
ideas is that of an act. By itself this idea would
prompt a movement. Some of the additional con-
siderations, however, which are present to con-
sciousness block the motor discharge, whilst others,
on the contrary, solicit it to take place. The
result is that peculiar feeling of inward unrest
known as indecision. . . . When finally the
original suggestion either prevails and makes the
movement take place, or gets definitely quenched
by its antagonists, we are said to decide, or to utter
our voluntary fiat in favour of one or the other course.
The reinforcing and inhibiting ideas meanwhile
are termed the reasons or motives by which the
decision is brought about" (p. 528/.). Volition,
therefore, in the strict sense, is choice from among
presented alternatives ; and in its most typical form
takes place as the resolution of a mental conflict.
James then proceeds to sketch the types of
decision, of which for our present purposes only
the last need be mentioned.
"In the fifth and final type of decision, the
feeling that the evidence is all in, and that reason
has balanced the books, may be either present or
absent. But in either case we feel, in deciding, as
if we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the
WILL 53
beam : in the former case by adding our living
effort to the weight of the logical reason which,
taken alone, seems powerless to make the act dis-
charge ; in the latter by a kind of creative contri-
bution of something instead of a reason which does
a reason's work. The slow, dead heave of the will
that is felt in these instances makes of them a
class altogether different subjectively from all the
preceding classes. What the heave of the will
betokens metaphysically, what the effort might
lead us to infer about a will-power distinct from
motives, are not matters that concern us yet.
Subjectively and phenomenally, the feeling of effort,
absent from the former decisions, accompanies
these" (p. 534).
" The existence of the effort as a phenomenal
fact in our consciousness cannot, of course, be
doubted or denied. Its significance, on the other
hand, is a matter about which the gravest difference
of opinion prevails. Questions as momentous as
that of the very existence of spiritual causality, as
vast as that of universal predestination or free will,
depend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes
essential that we study with some care the con-
ditions under which the feeling of volitional effort
is found " (p. 535).
Then follows a discussion of the difference
54 WILLIAM JAMES
between the healthy and the unhealthy will.
Speaking of the * obstructed will,' James says :
" In Chapter XXI. ... it was said that the
sentiment of reality with which an object appealed
to the mind is proportionate (amongst other things)
to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here we
get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas,
objects, considerations, which (in these lethargic
states) fail to get to the will, fail to draw blood,
seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The
connection of the reality of things with their
effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet
been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life
comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is
ruptured which normally should hold between
vision of the truth and action, and that this
pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to
certain ideas " (p. 546/.).
" We now see at one view when it is that effort
complicates volition. It does so whenever a rarer
and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize
others of a more instinctive and habitual kind ; it
does so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are
checked, or strongly obstructive conditions over-
come. . . . Now, our spontaneous way of conceiving
the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an
active force adding its strength to that of the
WILL 55
motives which ultimately prevail. When outer
forces impinge upon a body, we say that the
resultant motion is in the line of least resistance or
of greatest traction. But it is a curious fact that
our spontaneous language never speaks of volition
with effort in this way. Of course, if we proceed
a priori and define the line of least resistance as
the line that is followed, the physical law must
also hold good in the mental sphere. But vtefeel,
in all hard cases of volition, as if the line taken,
when the rarer and more ideal motives prevail, were
the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of
coarser motivation were the more pervious and
easy one, even at the very moment when we refuse
to follow it. He who under the surgeon's knife
represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself
to social obloquy for duty's sake . . . speaks of
conquering and overcoming his impulses and
temptations. But the sluggard, the drunkard, the
coward, never talk of their conduct in that way or
say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety,
conquer their courage, and so forth. . . . And if a
brief definition of ideal or moral action were
required, none could be given which would better
fit the appearances than this : It is action in the
line of greatest resistance." The effort "appears
adventitious and indeterminate in advance. We
56 WILLIAM JAMES
can make more or less as we please, and if we
make enough, we can convert the greatest mental
resistance into the least. Such, at least, is the
impression which the facts spontaneously produce
upon us" (p. 548/.)-
"We have now brought things to a point at
which we see that attention with effort is all that
any case of volition [in the strict sense] implies.
The essential achievement of the will, in short, when
it is most * voluntary,' is to attend to a difficult object
and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is
the fiat; and it is a mere physiological incident
that when the object is thus attended to, immediate
motor consequences should ensue. . . . Effort oj
attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will "
(p. 561/.).
The final statement of the psychological problem
runs thus :
"If we admit that our thoughts exist, we ought
to admit that they exist after the fashion in which
they appear, as things, namely, that supervene
upon each other, sometimes with effort and some-
times with ease ; the only questions being, Is the
effort where it exists a fixed function of the object
[of the idea], which the latter imposes on the
thought ? or is it such an independent ' variable '
that with a constant object more or less of it may
be made ?
WILL 57
" It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as
if, even with an unchanging object, we might make
more or less as we choose. If it be really indeter-
minate, our future acts are ambiguous or unpre-
destinate ; in common parlance our wills are free.
If the amount of effort be not indeterminate, but
be related in a fixed manner to the objects them-
selves, in such wise that whatever object at any
time fills our consciousness was from eternity bound
to fill it then and there, and compel from us the
exact effort, neither more nor less, which we bestow
upon it — then our wills are not free, and all our
acts are foreordained. The question of fact in the
free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It
relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or
consent which we can at any time put forth. Are
the duration and intensity of this effort fixed
functions of the object, or are they not ?" (p. 570/.).
On the * question of fact,' then, James's position
is very definite. But I believe that he would have
done better to trace the emergence of free will
farther back, to the point where active consent
emerges, irrespective of the amount, or even the
quality, of effort. In a previous passage * James
does, in fact, explicitly assign to consent the im-
portance that he here assigns to ' effort.' My sug-
* Principles, vol, ii., p. 518, quoted sujpra, pp. 50-51,
58 WILLIAM JAMES
gestion is that in departing from that position he is
committing a strategical error similar to that which
he deprecates in those who pin their faith on the
' feeling of innervation.' *
James should, and I think would, if he had taken
full advantage of his own innovations, have main-
tained squarely that in the last resort Freedom and
Will are synonymous. It is plain that by ' effort,'
in the passage last quoted, James means, more
particularly, painful effort. Consent with ' effort,'
in this sense, is no doubt the most striking self-
assertion of freedom; but it occurs merely when
the embraced alternative is in any respect envisaged
as disagreeable, or perhaps positively repulsive.
The existence of real choice — whether with effort or
with enthusiasm — in presence of real alternatives,
is, surely, the essential thing to establish. Will is
choice ; and if the choice is real, then the will is free.
The ' question of fact,' then, if it can be properly
so called, is simply this : Is the act of will really
what it seems to be to the agent himself in the act
of willing ? Is, or is not, will to be taken at what
James calls its ' face-value '?t Determinist meta-
* Principles, vol. ii., p. 518, quoted supra, pp. 50-51.
t Taking the fundamental aspects of consciousness at their
1 face-value' constitutes the essence of what James (in his later
use of the term) calls radical empiricism. Cf. supra, p. 86.
WILL 59
physicians, out of regard for the * unity' of the
universe, and determinist psychologists, out of
regard for the abstract 'law of causation,' both
assume unhesitatingly that will must not be so
taken. But what does this denial really amount
to ? In thus asserting the a priori impossibility of
freedom, determinists have not merely begged the
question ; they have also committed themselves to
a most peculiar interpretation of the expression
1 a Eational Universe.' For by this denial they
have gratuitously converted will itself, and, indeed,
1 finite consciousness ' in general, into a hope-
lessly unintelligible l appearance.' And for this
reason : If there is no real choice, will drags
thought with it in becoming, biologically, a
meaningless superfluity. We are not to believe
that our will can perform the work which it
believes itself to be performing; and yet no one
has been able to suggest any other biological purpose
that it might fulfil. The conception of a function-
less trill is what Determinism therefore stands for,
if it means anything at all; and yet will, as the
exercise of choice, is, as James has conclusively
shown, just the functional aspect of human intelligence.
In condemning freedom, therefore, Determinism
has literally reduced will to a nonentity, and in
so doing it has really condemned ' finite conscious-
60 WILLIAM JAMES
ness ' in toto. Nor can the situation be even verbally
redeemed by the purely metaphysical (in the very
worst sense of that word) interpretation of human
consciousness as the ' reproduction ' or ' self -revela-
tion ' of Reality. For a reproduction of reality is,
on monistic or deterministic principles, precisely
what our consciousness is not*
In other words, under the guise of denying the
reality of freedom, determinists have in effect
asserted that the human consciousness in general,
and will in particular, represent a wild outbreak of
impotent irrationality — and the greater the impo-
tence of the consciousness, the profounder the irra-
tionality of the outbreak — within the ' universe '
whose absolute rationality they professed to vindi-
cate. Such is the logical nemesis of refusing to
take the willing-experience at its face-value on the
strength of the easy-going assumption that ration-
ality and individual freedom must be antagonistic
principles. It would appear on the whole simpler,
and perhaps more rational, to regard the theory oj
Determinism as an irrational outbreak on the part
of certain * finite centres of consciousness,' than
to regard * finite consciousness ' as breaking up
the whole scheme of a would - be ' rational '
* This last point will be more fully brought out in our
final chapter.
WILL 61
Universe. To dichotomize man into agent and
spectator (a spectator, too, not of reality, but of
* appearance'), to set these two eternally at cross-
purposes, and then arbitrarily to identify ' Keason '
with the spectator rather than with the agent —
can this really be the last word of philosophic
enlightenment and the highest achievement of
philosophic ' unification ' ?
In all James wrote the immediate context is all-
important. If we take the Principles as a whole
as the relevant context here, and if we bear in mind
the methodological difficulty previously alluded to,*
I think we may fairly claim that the suggestions
just made should rank as a legitimate interpretation
of James's real meaning. At the very least this
interpretation is thoroughly in harmony with his
general outlook. At no stage of his development
did James himself, we must remember, feel that
he had finally plumbed the depths of these
ultimate questions. He was not himself so faith-
less to the principles of the open door and the open
mind of which his whole philosophy is such an
eloquent defence. Speaking in 1904 of "the
urgent problems of activity," he makes an admis-
sion, rare indeed among philosophers, who com-
* P. 42.
62 WILLIAM JAMES
monly pretend that philosophy excels science
because it must (however absurdly) claim finality.
" So far," he says, "ami from suggesting any
definite answer to such questions that I hardly yet
can put them clearly."*
But to return to James's own account of will.
After discussing the "logic of the question," t he
adds these remarks on the scientific postulate of
causation :
"What, quite as much as the [alleged] incon-
ceivability of absolutely independent variables,
persuades modern men of science that their efforts
must be predetermined, is the continuity of the
latter with other phenomena whose predetermina-
tion no one doubts. Decisions with effort merge so
gradually into those without it that it is not easy to
say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort
merge again into ideo-motor, and these into reflex,
acts ; so that the temptation is almost irresistible
to throw the formula which covers so many cases
over absolutely all. Where there is effort, just as
where there is none, the ideas themselves which
furnish the matter of deliberation are brought
before the mind by the machinery of association."
[But, as James has previously pointed out, the
* Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 188 /.
t Supra, p. 45 /.
WILL 63
* laws of association ' cannot account for the actual
course of our thoughts even in reverie. " Always
some ingredient is prepotent over the rest. In
subjective terms, we say that the prepotent items
are those which appeal most to our interest."* And
interest is through and through selective.] " Eeally
both effort and resistance are ours, and the identifi-
cation of our self with one of these factors is an
illusion and a trick of speech [according to the
deterministic view]. I do not see how anyone can
fail (especially when the mythologic dynamism of
separate ' ideas ' ... is translated into that of
brain-processes) to recognize the fascinating sim-
plicity of some such view as this. Nor do I see
why for scientific pur-poses one need give it up even
if indeterminate amounts of effort really do occur.
Before their indeterminism science simply stops.
She can abstract from it altogether then ; for in the
impulses and inhibitions with which the effort has
to cope there is already a larger field than she can
ever practically cultivate. Her prevision will never
foretell, even if the effort be completely predes-
tinate, the actual way in which each individual
emergency is resolved. Psychology will be Psycho-
logy, and Science Science, as much as ever (as
much and no more) in this world, whether free
* Principles, vol. i., pp. 571-572.
64 WILLIAM JAMES
will be true in it or not. Science, however, must
be constantly reminded that her purposes are not
the only purposes, and that the order of uniform
causation which she has use for, and is therefore
right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider
order, on which she has no claims at all " (p. 574/.).
In other words, determination, though a postu-
late of absolute ideal predictability in events, can
never in practice be actually traced. So that
Indeterminism, even if taken as covering the whole
field of selective activity, cannot conflict with
scientific practice, but only with a metaphysical, or
quasi-metaphysical, ideal. James is, therefore,
thoroughly justified in this pungent comment on
Spencer: "Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's
* psychical changes either conform to law, or they
do not. If they do not, this work, in common with
all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no
science of psychology is possible,' are beneath
criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other
1 works on the subject,' treats of those general
conditions of possible conduct, within which all
our real decisions must fall, whether their effort be
small or great. However closely psychical changes
may conform to law, it is safe to say that individual
histories and biographies will never be written in
advance, no matter how ' evolved ' psychology may
WILL 65
become " (p. 576 n.). And, again, speaking of the
"caricatures," in deterministic literature, "of the
kind of supposition which free will demands," he
points out that we must distinguish " between the
possibles which really tempt a man, and those
which tempt him not at all. Free will, like
psychology, deals with the former possibles ex-
clusively " (p. 577 n.).
An important quotation from The Experience of
Activity* may conclude this chapter : " The only
1 free will ' I have ev6r thought of defending is the
character of novelty in fresh activity-situations A If
an activity-process is the form of a whole ' field of
consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is
not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly
admitted), but has its elements unique (since in
that situation they are all dyed in the total), then
novelty is perpetually entering the world,i and what
happens there is not pure repetition, as the
dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires.
Activity-situations come, in short, each with an
original touch." \
* See A Pluralistic Universe, p. 391 n. This essay is
republished also in Essays in Radical Empiricism.
f Italics mine.
\ Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 145 : " Towards
this issue of the reality or unreality of the novelty that
5
66 WILLIAM JAMES
Such a declaration points forward to Bergson's
' Creative Evolution,' but the novelty it demands
entered the scientific world (rather unobtrusively)
with Darwin's * spontaneous variation.'
appears, the pragmatic difference between monism and
pluralism seems to converge. That we ourselves may be
authors of genuine novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of
free will." And Pragmatism, p. 257: "The essential con-
trast [between pragmatism and rationalism] is that for
rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all
eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and
awaits part of its complexion from the future." (James puts
this sentence in italics.)
CHAPTER VII
UTILITY AND THE SURVIVAL OF BELIEFS
The order of the Principles is not quite systematic,
and hardly brings out the close connection which
existed in James's thought between acts of belief
and of will.* But the root-idea in James's account
of judgment is that belief, like will, is "a manifes-
tation of our active nature." Belief "in its inner
nature is a sort of feeling more allied to emotion
than to anything else. ... It resembles more
than anything what in the psychology of volition
we know as consent. . . . What characterizes both
consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic
agitation through the advent of an idea which is
inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the
exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is
the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence
* Cf. t e.g., Principles, vol. ii., p. 321 : " Will and Belief,
in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the
Self, are two names for one and the same psychological
phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one
are questions which arise concerning the other."
67
68 WILLIAM JAMES
the states of consent and belief, characterized by
repose on the intellectual side, are both intimately
connected with subsequent practical activity."*
In other words, belief, as a function of the whole
man, exists for the sake of action.
Now, prior to this recognition of the intimate
psychical connection between belief and action, it
seemed easy to draw a hard-and-fast line between
the psychology of belief or ' cognition ' and logic ;
just as, by assuming that in psychology choice must
be treated as an illusion, it seemed easy to draw a
hard-and-fast line between the psychology of
volition and ethics. For the psychologist, as such,
seemed to be concerned only with belief as a
subjective affection, and not at all with the dis-
tinction between true belief and false belief. That
distinction, therefore, as involving the relation
between mind and reality at large, belonged wholly
to logic and metaphysics.
But when belief is recognized as strictly a
function of the organism, and when we observe
that this function is to establish harmonious
relations between the organism and the circum-
ambient reality, or environment, it becomes im-
possible to maintain so simple a distinction between
psychology and logic. For belief, taken quite
* Principles, vol. ii., p. 283/.
UTILITY AND SURVIVAL 69
abstractly, simply qua belief, has not the slightest
biological meaning. Broadly speaking, it is only
true beliefs that are useful for life. Knowledge,
indeed, is power; but error spells impotence and
disaster.
More precisely, the modern psychologist, just
because he is also a biologist, is interested, not in
consciousness as a theoretic puzzle, but in con-
sciousness as an element in intelligent behaviour.
From this standpoint he must distinguish between
beliefs that make for efficiency and those that do
not. Taken thus concretely, thought inevitably
seems an instrument for individual and active
adaptation to the world we live in. It is therefore
in indissoluble connection with the Darwinian
notions of utility and survival - value that the
distinction between real truth and real error
becomes relevant to psychology. ■ Truth,' func-
tionally interpreted, is that which subserves the
organism's purposes, and ■ error ' is that which
does not. Whatever * truth ' may be * in itself,'
truth as applicable to life is what we literally must
have, or die. Thus vital utility is the only criterion
which the living organism itself can either desire
or afford to apply in the actual business of living.
But the utility must, of course, be a felt utility, in
order to be a real guide in action.
70 WILLIAM JAMES
In all this, we are not laying down the law as to
what ' absolute truth' must be from some supra-
mundane and 'logically disinterested' point of
view — a point of view which must inevitably give
rise to the further questions whether such * truth '
is desirable, and, if desirable, attainable by man.
We are simply pointing out that there is a kind of
truth which is accessible to man, and that this kind
of truth is not a luxury, but a necessity. This,
however, is enough to give psychology admission
to the preserves of logic and metaphysics. So far
as knowledge is beneficial, the problem of the
1 possibility of knowledge ' is ipso facto solved :
that is to say, it is solved by the recognition of
what ' knowledge ' means for the conscious
organism.
It is quite consistent with his view of the place
of consciousness in life in general, and more par-
ticularly in human life, that James does not regard
that alone as beneficial which furthers mere
physical existence. There is, indeed, a physical
basis for the pyramid of vital needs. But a living
organism that has more than material existence
also has, or may have, more than material needs.
What, in James's view, constitutes the continuity
between these other, spiritual, needs and the basic,
material, needs, is that both kinds connect with
UTILITY AND SUKVIVAL 71
behaviour or conduct of some sort.* In this way,
as we have already seen, the principle of utility,
which at first was erroneously taken as of purely
materialistic tendency, not only allows us, as no
merely metaphysical principle does, to substi-
tute autonomy for automatism, but also bridges
the gap between the physical and the spiritual
life.
The next step is that the organism's activity is
not confined to adjusting itself to a merely given
environment. Even from a merely external point
of view, the organism is also busied in adjusting
the environment to itself. Man, more particularly,
has made the actual physical world that he now
lives in a very different thing from what it was
when he first made his appearance on the scene.
The physical environment into which we have
been born is as much a man-made as a ' natural '
environment. So much is quite obvious. But still
more important is the ' subjective ' manipulation
to which the ■ environment ' is subjected by the
process of conscious selection. This selection, just
because it is purposive, is not merely arbitrary ; it
is always experimental. But so far as the experi-
ment is successful, it actually creates the world as that
* Cf., e.g., "Keflex Action and Theism" in The Will to
Believe, and infra, pp. 91-93.
72 WILLIAM JAMES
exists for consciousness. This is what, even more
than his discovery of the principle of continuity in
consciousness, so sharply differentiates James's
empiricism from that of the older empiricists, from
Locke to Spencer, who always sought to explain
knowledge as the passive ' reproduction ' of an
'independent order of nature.' For these older
empiricists, ' learning by experience ' meant the
hoarding of sense - impressions ; and anything
beyond this was not fact, but 'fiction/ as Hume
expressly maintains. But, for James, 'learning
by experience ' means learning by experiment ; and
' pure fact ' is the greatest fiction of all. In the
extension of knowledge, thought does not simply
lean on experiential data; it leads the way, and
the function of experience is chiefly to confirm or
reject postulates which passive experience and the
'laws of association' can never automatically
generate. The difference between these two views
corresponds exactly with the difference between the
Darwinian and Spencerian views as to the main
factors in organic evolution.*
On the other hand, what chiefly distinguishes
James's view, both from the so-called ' Critical
* All this is very fully set forth in the remarkable chapter
on " Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience " which
concludes the Principles.
UTILITY AND SUBVIVAL 73
Philosophy' of Kant,* and from the 'Objective
Idealism' of the English Idealists (neo-Kantians
or neo-Hegelians, as they are indifferently called),
is that James is not so intent on explaining the
' possibility of knowledge ' as to overlook the
necessity of allowing for the possibility of real and
effective criticism.
His conception of the nature of 'knowledge,'
while it precludes the severance of ' knowledge '
from 'reality,' does not exclude either the possi-
bility of progress in knowledge or of development
in reality. Just because James adopts the common-
sense view which regards thought as a temporal
and personal process, the ' constructive activity of
thought ' in which he believes is for him no violent
metaphor, but a living reality ; and the construction
does not exclude re-construction. Contrariwise, in
the hands of the 'Idealists,' for whom thought is
essentially ' timeless,' " The Reality coalesces with
the connected manifold, the Psychologist with the
Ego, knowing becomes ' connecting,' and there
results no longer a finite or criticizable, but an
' absolute ' Experience, of which the Object and the
Subject are always the same. . . . This ' solip-
sistic ' character of an Experience conceived as
* For James's relation to Kant, apart from the English
versions (or perversions) of his teachings, see infra, p. 81 /.
74 WILLIAM JAMES
absolute really annihilates psychology as a dis-
tinct body of science,"* and with it the reality,
and even the possibility, of human knowledge.
We see, therefore, that, in the favourite phrase
of Histories of Philosophy, James may be said to
' mediate ' between Hume and Kant. But the
1 mediation ' bears a wonderful resemblance to
the act of knocking their heads together; and it
clearly supersedes them both.
* Principles, vol. i., p. 366.
CHAPTER VIII
BELIEF AND VALUE
In the last chapter of the Principles James makes
very clear a distinction that is implicit in his earlier
chapters — the distinction, namely, between the origin
and survival of beliefs, or between conscious experi-
ment and experimental confirmation. A belief to
be taken up at all must in some way or other
appeal to us ; it must connect with our emotional
nature and our vital needs. But since beliefs do
not provide us with mere ■ objects of contem-
plation,' and are genuine in proportion to their
driving power in action, it follows that only those
can survive which do actually fulfil the hopes in
which we embraced them. James's view may be
summarily stated as the theory that what deter-
mines the survival of beliefs is an inter- play be-
tween conscious selection and natural selection.
That is clearly what the view of experience as
experimentation, taken in conjunction with the
" paramount reality of sensations,"* necessarily
* Principles, vol. ii., p. 299/.
75
76 WILLIAM JAMES
entails. We make the environment to fit ; but it
is the obligation to cut our coat according to our
cloth that gives us a chance of really using our
brains. The further consideration, however, must
not be overlooked, that while, on the one hand,
experimental ' success ' may not be final, on the
other hand, experimental ■ failure ' need not be
so either. There is, in fact, nothing from which
we learn so much as from our mistakes. If we
survive the failure of a vital experiment, we can
try again on other lines ; and if we don't survive
it, our fellows may profit by the vicarious experi-
ence. This is notoriously true even of animals like
wolves and foxes.
Out of these considerations arises what we may
call the Question of Value. What sort of end, or
ends, beyond the primary one of physical existence
— with which the " paramount reality of sensa-
tions " is most intimately connected — does human
thought seek to compass ? And what sort of
results can we acquiesce in ? This is the question
which James first brings to light and then sets
himself to answer in his chapter on "The Percep-
tion of Eeality." His chief points seem to be
these :
Our system of beliefs as a whole, the reality that
we seek, must be such as to satisfy our whole con-
BELIEF AND VALUE 77
crete nature, and not that impossible abstraction
called the 'pure intellect.' We do, indeed, seek
unity. But the unity that we are really interested
in is not a cold, ' cosmic unity,' but a unification of
our personal self, which will allow free play to all
the component parts of our nature, without reducing
any one of them to the level of mere illusion. That
is what constitutes James's anti-intellectualism.
What satisfies one man will not, in all its detail,
satisfy another. That is what constitutes James's
individualism. This, however, is not an anti-social
force. For if agreement is the conservative element
in social life, in the agreement to differ — i.e., to
allow each man to try his own vital experiments at
his own risk — lies the only hope of social progress
through the adoption of what turn out to be
salutary innovations.* Even in the case of such
sharply contrasted categories as criminal and saint,
we must not forget that the criminal of one genera-
tion — the man, e.g., who furnishes aid and comfort
to a runaway slave — may be the moral hero of
the next ; even as the saint of yesterday — the man,
* Cf., e.g., Memories and Studies, p. 318 : "The notion
that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is
now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind
does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors,
great or small, and imitation by the rest of us — these are the
sole factors active in social progress."
78 WILLIAM JAMES
e.g., who elects to spend his life perched on a
pillar — may be the moral lunatic of to-day. Society
must, of course, in each generation decide what
degree and what manner of individual initiative to
allow ; but it makes this decision at its own risk.
Thus James's individualism provides for the prac-
tice of toleration a rational basis which is not to
be found in the rival and wholly sterile conception
of ' absolute truth.'
Whatever kind or degree of unity we ' find ' in
Nature is made by our own exertions. That is
what constitutes James's activism or voluntarism.*
The constructive work of intelligence, however, is
* To Hume, and not to Kant, belongs the credit of having
first seen that the ' uniform order ' of Nature is not an
original datum of experience, but an intellectual construction.
Neither of these writers, however, deemed the world so
constructed to be fully real. Hume held that the result of
mental manipulation must be 'fiction,' and Kant i that we
know only ■ phenomena/ and not things as they really are
in themselves. The difference between these two general
theories of ■ knowledge ' is not very appreciable. Nor is it
very easy to understand why Kant should be represented
as having ' answered,' rather than echoed, Hume as regards
the status of the principle of causality. But it appears to be
a cardinal doctrine of the idealistic faith that what in Kant
is ennobling and splendid insight, in Hume is degrading
1 scepticism.' The only real answer to Hume lies in that
revaluation of mental manipulation that James has effected.
Gf. Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 200-202.
BELIEF AND VALUE 79
not achieved at one stroke, and is certainly not yet
completed, if it ever will be. "In a simple and
direct way these questions cannot be answered at
all." [I.e., they cannot be answered a priori.] "The
whole history of human thought is but an unfinished
attempt to answer them. For what have men been
trying to find out since men were men but just
those things : ' Where do our true interests lie —
which relations shall we call the intimate and real
ones — which things shall we call living realities
and which not?'"* That is what constitutes
James's progressivism or evolutionism.
Hence there can be no a priori guarantee that
' all will come right in the end.' Kisk cannot be
eliminated from the spiritual any more than from
the physical life. As in the physical life we must
have courage, so in the spiritual life we need faith.
This last point, which constitutes what we may call
James's 'fideism,' being of a more specially ethical
character, is not directly brought out in the
Principles. It is developed in some of his later
writings,! but its full meaning can only be properly
appreciated if we have grasped its psychological
foundation. This is, perhaps, why James's critics
* Principles, vol. ii., p. 299.
t Especially in the essay " Is Life Worth Living?" in The
Will to Believe.
80 WILLIAM JAMES
have generally failed to appreciate the fact that
James steadily refuses to confound moral confidence
with ' logical certitude.' To accuse James of
irrationalism because he thus justifies acts of faith
is as if one were to accuse a soldier of stupidity
because, in performing some deed of valour, he
could have had no guarantee that he would both
succeed in his venture and come out of it alive.
There certainly are people who flatter themselves
that they are much too sensible to risk their lives
in that way, or to act, in issues of life and death,
on anything short of * reasonable certainty.' But
the eminent reasonableness of their attitude does
not prevent others from calling them by an exceed-
ingly unpleasant name. And, as James has pointed
out, where act we must, our confidence that we shall
succeed may itself be a main factor in procuring
our success.*
" There is really no scientific or other method by
which men can steer safely between the opposite
dangers of believing too little or of believing too
much. To face such dangers is apparently our
duty, and to hit the right channel between them is
the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not
follow, because recklessness may be a vice in
soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached
* Will to Believe, p. 59.
BELIEF AND VALUE 81
to them. What should be preached is courage
weighted with responsibility — such courage as the
Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show
after they had taken everything into account that
might tell against their success, and made every
provision to minimize disaster. I do not think
that anyone can accuse me of preaching reckless
faith. I have preached the right of the individual to
indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. 2 * I
have discussed the kinds of risk ; I have contended
that none of us escape all of them ; and I have only
pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than
to act as if we did not know them to be there." t
In regard to all the foregoing points, James, as
bents his psychological standpoint, is, so to speak,
proceeding from within outwards. Starting from
the apergu that thought is the intellectual aspect of
the will to live, he in effect asks what characteristics
and what possibilities * reality ' must offer us in
order to get itself accepted by us, and in order to
make the difficult business of living seem worth
while. This, finally, is what constitutes James's
' anthropocentrism ' or * relativism.' There is an
unmistakable analogy between this general position
and the * Copernican revolution ' which Kant
believed himself to have effected in philosophy.
* Italics mine. t Will to Believe, Preface, p. xi.
6
82 WILLIAM JAMES
With this difference— that James's avowedly
psychological standpoint not only makes the
thought-process a real process in time, and thereby
makes real progress possible, but also saves him
from the theoretically and practically ruinous
divorce between the 'theoretical' and the 'prac-
tical ' reason, in which Kant's philosophy culmin-
ates, and collapses.
A highly important corollary, as to the relation of
logic to psychology, follows from James's treatment
of the distinction between ' real ' and ' unreal.'
The primary concern of the logician is neither
with that purely formal ' reality ' which every
object of consciousness possesses, and in which the
distinction between ' real ' and ' unreal ' has not
yet emerged, nor with the ' real world ' which we
all naively and uncritically take for granted as
distinct from 'unreality,' until we consider the
need and difficulty of effectively distinguishing the
one from the other. What he really has to eluci-
date is just the distinction itself between the ' real '
and the ' unreal.' And in order to do this he has
to catch both ' reality ' and ' unreality ' in the
making — i.e., in that midway position between
(a) merely presented object or suggestion, and
(b) object definitely accepted as real or rejected as
unreal, wherein the whole process of thinking and
BELIEF AND VALUE 83
of conscious experiment^*/ goes on. But this is
simply the psychological method of dealing with
the thinking process. We have already seen * that
the psychologist must take cognizance of the dis-
tinction between truth and error ; and now it ap-
pears that the psychological method, which treats
thought as a personal and temporal process, does
not merely allow us to deal with the cognate dis-
tinction of ' real ' and * unreal,' it is the only
method that enables us to do so. Hence, instead of
logic being sharply differentiated from psychology
(as absolutists have fondly imagined) by possessing
a monopoly in this fundamental distinction, it turns
out that to abstract from time and personality is to
abstract also from the consideration of judgment as
true-or-false. A ' logic ' that * emancipates ' itself
from psychology, therefore, will be a ' logic ' which,
in repudiating its raisou d'etre, sinks to the level of a
mere grammatical exercise. Thus, by bringing out,
in his chapter on * The Perception of Keality,' the
thoroughly psychological character of the distinc-
tion between the * real ' and the ' unreal,' James
is laying the foundations of a real logic that is
to deal with the problems of real knowing. The
history of 'logic,' before James, is simply the
trail of its weary wanderings in the infruc-
* P. 69/.
84 WILLIAM JAMES
tuous deserts of formalism and verbalism.* Now
at last logic is brought definitely within sight of
the promised land of real knowledge, which the
mere men of science who, fortunately for them-
selves, knew not 'logic' have for centuries been
quietly cultivating. At the same time that he
rescues logic from formalism, James makes clear
the impossibility of defining psychology as the
science of the ' subjective ' in any sense that
simply excludes the 'objective.' The extracts we
now give will illustrate also the psychological
impossibility of correlating real objectivity with
* pure intellectuality ' — i.e., with intellect purged
of emotional interest :
" The total world of which the philosophers must
take account is . . . composed of the realities plus
the fancies and illusions. Two sub-universes at
least, connected by relations which philosophy tries
to ascertain ! Eeally there are more than two
sub-universes of which we take account, some of us
of this one, and others of that. For there are
various categories of illusion and of reality, and
alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error
confined to single individuals), but still within the
* Even Mill, keenly as he felt the defects of formalism,
fell a victim to it in his ■ inductive logic. 5 See Dr. F. C. S.
Schiller's Formal Logic, p. 261 /.
BELIEF AND VALUE 85
world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by
the complete philosopher), there is the world of
collective error, there are the worlds of abstract
reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal
relations, and there is the supernatural world.
The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds
more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing
with one of them, forgets for the time being its
relations to the rest. The complete philosopher
is he who seeks not only to assign to every given
object of his thought its right place in one or other
of these sub- worlds, but he also seeks to determine
the relation of each sub-world to the others in the
total world which is." *
" Every object we think of gets at last referred
to one world or another of this or of some similar
list. . . . Each world, whilst it is attended to, is real
after its own fashion, only the reality lapses with
the attention.
" Each thinker, however [note how concretely
James speaks, and avoids * the ' generalized mind] ,
has dominant habits of attention ; and these
practically elect from among the various worlds some
one to be for him the world of ultimate realities.
From this world's objects he does not appeal.
Whatever positively contradicts them must get into
another world or die. . . .
* Principles, vol. ii„ p. 291.
86 WILLIAM JAMES
"In all this the everlasting partiality of our
nature shows itself, our inveterate propensity to
choice. For, in the strict and ultimate sense of
the word existence, everything which can be
thought of at all exists as some sort of object,
whether mythical object, individual thinker's
object, or object in outer space and for intelligence
at large. . . . The mere fact of appearing as an
object at all is not enough to constitute reality.
That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God ;
but what we need is practical reality, reality for
ourselves; and to have that an object must not
only appear, but it must appear both interesting
and important. The worlds whose objects are
neither interesting nor important we treat simply
negatively, we brand them as unreal.
" In the relative sense, then, the sense in which
we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in
which one thing is said to have more reality than
another, and to be more believed, reality means
simply relation to our emotional and active life.
This is the only sense which the word ever has in
the mouths of practical men. . . .
" The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the
absolute or the practical point of view, is thus sub-
jective, is ourselves. As bare logical thinkers, with-
out emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever
BELIEF AND VALUE 87
objects we think of, for they are really phenomena,
or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more.
But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, ive give
what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to
whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to
WITH A WILL. . . .
" We reach thus the important conclusion that
our own reality , that sense of our own life which we at
every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for
our belief. ... As Descartes made the indubitable
reality of the cogito go bail for the reality of all
that the cogito involved, so we all of us, feeling our
own present reality with absolutely coercive force,
ascribe an all but equal degree of reality, first to
whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of
personal need, and second to whatever further
things continuously belong with these. . . .
" The world of living realities as contrasted with
unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered
as an active and emotional term. . . . Whatever
things have intimate and continuous connection tvith
my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt.
Whatever things fail to establish this connection
are things which are practically no better for me
than if they existed not at all."*
" The merely conceived or imagined objects
* Op. cit, vol. ii., pp. 293-298,
88 WILLIAM JAMES
which our mind represents as hanging to the
sensations (causing them, etc.), filling the gaps
between them, and weaving their interrupted chaos
into order, are innumerable. Whole systems of
them conflict with other systems, and our choice of
which system shall carry our belief is governed by
principles which are simple enough, however subtle
and difficult may be their application to details.
The conceived system, to pass for true, must at least
include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by
explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more.
The system which includes the most of them, and
definitely explains, or pretends to explain, the most of
them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail. It is needless to
say how far mankind still is from having excogi-
tated such a system. But the various materialisms,
idealisms, and hylozoisms show with what industry
the attempt is for ever made. It is conceivable
that several rival theories should equally well
include the actual order of our sensations in their
scheme, much as the one-fluid and two-fluid
theories of electricity formulated all the common
electrical phenomena equally well. The sciences
are full of these alternatives. Which theory is, then,
to be believed ? That theory will be most generally
believed which, besides offering us objects able to
account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also
BELIEF AND VALUE 89
offers those which are most interesting, those which
appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and
active needs. So here, in the higher intellectual
life, the same selection among general conceptions
goes on which went on among the sensations them-
selves. . . .
"A philosophy whose principle is so incom-
mensurate with our most intimate powers as to
deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to
annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even
more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the
enemy than the eternal Void ! This is why
materialism will always fail of universal adoption,
however well it may fuse things into an atomistic
unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future
eternity. For materialism denies reality to the
objects of almost all the impulses which we most
cherish. The real meaning of the impulses, it says,
is something which has no emotional interest for
us whatever. But what is called extradition is
quite as characteristic of our emotions as of our
sense. Both point to an object as the cause of the
present feeling. What an intensely objective
reference lies in fear! In like manner an
enraptured man, a dreary-feeling man, are not
simply aware of their subjective states; if they
were, the force of their feelings would evaporate.
90 WILLIAM JAMES
Both believe there is outward cause why they
should feel as they do : either, ' It is a glad world !
how good is life !' or, ' What a loathsome tedium
is existence !' Any philosophy which annihilates
the validity of the reference by explaining away its
objects, or translating them into terms of no
emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to
care or act for. This is the opposite condition
from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought
home to consciousness, it produces a kindred horror.
In nightmare we have motives to act, but no
power ; here we have powers, but no motives. A
nameless Unheinlihkeit comes over us at the
thought of there being nothing eternal in our
final purposes, in the objects of those loves and
aspirations which are our deepest energies. The
monstrously lop-sided equation of the universe and
its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of
cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lop-
sided equation of the universe and the doer. We
demand in it a character for which our emotions
and active propensities shall be a match. Small
as we are, minute as is the point by which the
Cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one
desires to feel that his reaction at that point
is congruous with the demands of the vast
whole, that he balances the latter, so to speak,
BELIEF AND VALUE 91
and is able to do what it expects of hira. But his
abilities to * do ' lie wholly in the line of his
natural propensities. As he enjoys reaction with
such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admira-
tion, earnestness, and the like; and as he very
unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or
doubt — a philosophy which should legitimate only
emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave
the mind a prey to discontent and craving.
"It is far too little recognized how entirely the
intellect is built up of practical interests. The
theory of Evolution is beginning to do very gocd
service by its reduction of all mentality to the type
(f reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a
fleeting moment, a cross- section at a certain point
of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon.
In lower forms of life no one will pretend that
cognition is anything more than a guide to appro-
priate action. The germinal question concerning
things brought for the first time before conscious-
ness is not the theoretic ' What is that ?' but the
practical ' Who goes there ?' or rather, as Horwicz
has admirably put it, ' What is to be done T —
' Was fang' ich an V In all our discussions about
the lower animals the only test we use is that of
their acting as if for a purpose. Cognition, in
short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And
92 WILLIAM JAMES
although it is true that the later mental develop-
ment, which attains its maximum through the
hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a
vast amount of theoretic activity over and above
that which is immediately ministerial to practice,
yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced,
and the active nature asserts its rights to the
end. . . .
"If we survey the field of history and ask what
feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of
the human mind, display in common, we shall find,
I think, simply this : that each and all of them
have said to the human being, * The inmost nature
of the reality is congenial to powers which you
possess.'
" In se and per se the universal essence has hardly
been more defined by any of these formulae than by
the agnostic x; but the mere assurance that my
powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it,
but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in
some way recognize their reply, that I can be a
match for it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices
to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given
above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope
for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which
should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in
an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our
BELIEF AND VALUE 93
emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism,
whose solving word in all crises of behaviour is
1 All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme,
for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestruct-
ible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that
impulse will be widely successful in spite of incon-
sistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of
expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and
will invent one if one be not given him."*
In short, beliefs which a man cannot live with
he has no option but to discard ; beliefs he cannot
live without he must find reasons to adopt. These
too are corollaries from Darwinism, which philo-
sophic theories must assimilate if they themselves
are to live.
* Op. cit, pp. 311-315.
CHAPTEE IX
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THEORY AND THE
THEORETIC VALUE OF PRACTICE
If it be asked why so much space has been devoted
to the psychology of James, the answer is simple.
The revolution that James's philosophy effects con-
sists precisely in breaking down the barrier between
philosophy and psychology. Hence, his Principles
of Psychology is by far the most truly philosophical
work that he has produced ; and, in fact, all his
subsequent work consists in popularizing and
applying his psychological discoveries. He has
neither reduced metaphysics to psychology, nor
dissolved psychology in metaphysics. Nor, again,
has he anywhere indulged in the intellectual game
of deducing a priori what must ' necessarily ' be
the relation between these two disciplines. What
he has done is to transform the whole philosophic
outlook by restoring to psychology a vast territory
which in virtue of the traditional distinction between
metaphysics and psychology it fell to neither of
94
THEOEY AND PKACTICE 95
these to explore. Since metaphysics and psy-
chology between them laid claim to the whole realm
of Reality, this particular territory had been auto-
matically made to appear as the locus of mere
subjective illusion. But the territory in question
is that of real life and action; it is the home of
human personality and will.
Whether this new world, of which James was
the philosophic Columbus, is to be assigned to
psychology or to philosophy, or whether a new
name should be found for such virgin soil, to disso-
ciate its cultivators from the intellectual scandals
of the past, need not now be definitely decided.
We may retain, provisionally and without preju-
dice, the verbally honorific name of ' philosophic '
for any inquiry into the nature of reality that
cannot conveniently be designated as * purely
scientific'
Using the word 'philosophy' in this inten-
tionally vague sense, which alone will enable us
to include, e.g., Hegel's speculations concerning the
causes of the moon's sterility in the same field of
study with James's defence of the freedom of the
will, we may delineate James's philosophy as
follows : It essentially consists in the discovery
that, under cover of an assumed distinction between
philosophy and psychology, all the most vital
96 WILLIAM JAMES
questions of philosophy — questions concerning the
nature of truth, of freedom, and of the meaning
of life — have been either burked or begged — and
begged, moreover, in the interests of no one but
the sceptic and the pessimist. For what purported
to be purely rational deductions about reality
turn out to be nothing but the unfolding of the
implications latent in this arbitrary distinction, or
else ingenious attempts to disguise these implica-
tions. When once one has detected the trick of this
intellectual legerdemain, one can no longer doubt
the greatness of James's contribution to philosophy.
The intellectualist tradition which James con-
troverts attains its apogee, or maximum remoteness
from anything that has meaning for denizens of
the earth, in the 'monism' that claims the title
of Absolute or Objective Idealism. This system
had, when James began to write, attained such a
pitch of academic orthodoxy that any dissentient
was promptly told he was * no philosopher.' It
required therefore no small degree of courage to
declare : "I myself have come, by long brooding
over it [i.e. the antithesis of monism and pluralism],
to consider it the most central of all philosophic
problems, central because so pregnant. I mean by
this, that if you know whether a man is a decided
monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know
THEOEY AND PEACTICE 97
more about the rest of his opinions than if you
give him any other name ending in ist. To believe
in the one or in the many, that is the classification
with the maximum number of consequences." *
For this monism, the essence of rationality con-
sists in conceiving the universe as a rigid logical
system, or (in James's phrase) as a 'block-universe,'
in which every part is determined through-and-
through by its relation to the whole. In such a
system the distinction between past, present, and
future is avowedly illusory, and altogether irrele-
vant to the central core of reality. So far as mun-
dane events are allowed to have reality — and how
far they have any is treated as a trivial and
almost frivolous question, on which serious philo-
sophy is under no obligation to make up its mind —
future events are just as real, and just as fixed as
the whole past. So far as the historical process is
real, it is the ' progressive revelation ' or ' mani-
festation ' (illuminating phrase !) of what in its
* Pragmatism, p. 129. Gf. Some Problems of Philosophy,
p. 114/. : "The alternative between pluralism and monism
... is the most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy,
although it is only in our time that it has been articulated
distinctly. Does reality exist distributively or collectively in
the shape of eaches, everys, anys, eithers, or only in the
shape of an all or whole ? Pluralism stands for the dis-
tributive, monism for the collective form, of being."
7
98 WILLIAM JAMES
essential ' logical ' nature is a perfect and timeless
Whole.
The direct and intentional result of this monistic
view, is to reduce to a sheer illusion that power of
individual initiative which each of us seems to him-
self to possess. It is an illusion bound up with
the equally illusory sense of distinct personality
with which every sane human being is incurably
afflicted. Yet even the philosopher who officially
deplores this distressing superstition does not
pretend to set it aside in his daily life. He merely
admits that his * theory ' is at war with his
practical needs. In his own eyes, however, this
admission must confirm, rather than invalidate,
the * theory.' For, ex vi dejinitionis, * pure ' theory
not only need not, but must not, be influenced by
practical considerations. The more unequivocally,
then, a * theory ' reduces practice to illusion, the
more fitting shrine does it become for philosophic
1 truth.'
The protests of practice, therefore, affect the
absolutist not at all. And if once we allow this
disjunction between theory and practice (which has
disastrously dominated philosophy since the time
of Aristotle), and identify reason with 'pure
theory,' we can never hope to vanquish Absolutism
by purely ' rational ' or ■ theoretic ' argument. For
THEORY AND PRACTICE 99
Absolutism is in very truth the objectification of
this idea of 'pure theory.' To a mind so steeped
(however unconsciously) in the traditions of Formal
Logic as is the mind of the absolutist, to attack
the theory must seem to be attacking Reason itself.
If the monistic principle really is the 'presuppo-
sition ' of rational knowledge, then merely to
question it is to be guilty of self-contradiction.
Thus monism, all the more because it is prac-
tically intolerable, seemed to be theoretically irre-
pressible.
Hence, as James points out, " the world's one-
ness has generally been affirmed ... as if any-
one who questioned it must be an idiot. The
temper of monists has been so vehement as almost
at times to be convulsive. . . . The theory of the
Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of
faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The
One and All first in the order of being and of
knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all
lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how
could it allow of any mitigation of its inner
rigidity ? The slightest suspicion of pluralism,
the minutest wiggle of independence of any one
of its parts from the control of the totality, would
ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees — as well
might you claim absolute purity for a glass of
100 WILLIAM JAMES
water because it contains but a single little cholera
germ. The independence, however infinitesimal,
of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute
as fatal as a cholera germ." *
But if Absolute Idealism thus easily survives, as
a ' theory,' any conflict with our practical interests,
it is not so easy, once the illusions of practice have
been systematically discounted, to discover what
positive significance that theory retains. For what
thus survives is not the concrete vision of all reality
which we were promised at the outset, but just the
magic word ■ Universe.' That the world is * some-
how ' (i.e., inexplicably) ■ one,' turns out to be the
sole content of ' metaphysic' Thus Absolutism, if
judged by its performance and not by its professions,
shrivels to a bare negation of the reality alike of
human knowledge and of freedom.} If, in perusing
any idealistic work, we skip all the preliminary
subtleties about the * necessary conditions of the
possibility of knowledge,' the perfect * rationality
of the real,' the absurdity of the conception of the
* Unknowable,' and so forth, and turn expectantly
* Pragmatism, p. 159 /.
t Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 139 : " Possi-
bility, as distinguished from necessity on the one hand, and
from impossibility on the other, is an essential category
of human thinking. For monism, it is a pure illusion."
[Italics mine.]
THEOKY AND PRACTICE 101
to the final revelation of reality as it really is, all it
ever comes to is something of this sort :
" The consummation of the infinite aim consists
merely in removing the illusion which makes it
seem yet unaccomplished. Good and absolute
goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the
world, and the result is that it needs not wait upon
us, but is already . . . accomplished. It is an
illusion under which we live. ... In the course of
its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by
setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action
consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has
created."*
The Idea, then, succeeds in undeceiving Itself,
But not us. Our humble role is merely to form a
screen on which the illusion shall continue for ever
to be displayed, in order that the Infinitely Knowing
Absolute may enjoy the exquisite triumph of seeing
through it ! Such is the Idealist's final definition
of 'perfect rationality,' such the fulfilment of
his promise to make reality transparent to our
intelligence.
* Hegel, quoted by James in A Pluralistic Universe,
p. 51 /. Of the English Idealists, Mr. F. H. Bradley has
been most commended for the scholarly thoroughness with
which he reduces the world we live in and its inhabitants to
1 mere appearance,' leaving to the Absolute the whole credit
of reconstituting Eeality ' somehow.'
102 WILLIAM JAMES
It follows, however, that in its own queer way
Absolutism has anticipated James's humanistic
protest : to admit a radical contrast between the
human and the absolute 'point of view' is to
admit that in actual human knowledge "you can't
weed out the human contribution." James has
therefore only to repeat what his Psychology had
already established, and to point out that "our
nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms,
and in the theories we build them into, the inner
order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human
considerations, intellectual consistency being one of
them. Mathematics and logic themselves are
fermenting with human rearrangements: physics,
astronomy, and biology follow massive cues of
preference. We plunge forward into the field of
fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and
we have made already ; these determine what we
notice ; what we notice determines what we do ;
what we do again determines what we experience ;
so from one thing to another, although the stubborn
fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is
true of it seems from first to last to be largely a
matter of our own creation." *
Nothing of all this can be denied by Idealists.
Only, what James, in common with the man of
* Pragmatism, p. 254/.
THEORY AND PRACTICE 103
action and the scientist, calls ' truth,' the Idealist
insists on calling ' illusion ' — precisely because it
is the embodiment of characteristically human
aims and achievements. James's contention, on
the other hand, is that there is nothing in the
' nature of truth ' that compels us to keep * truth '
as a name for something that we can ex hypothesi
never know. In his view, to be verified by man
is the essential function of truth, in the only sense
in which truth can be an object of man's rational
desire. What is in essence incapable of entering
the human consciousness can have for us no truth
nor even meaning. " True ideas are those that we
can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.
False ideas are those that we can not. That is the
practical difference it makes to us to have true
ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for
it is all that truth is known-as." *
This pragmatic view has been denounced by
Idealists, almost in the same breath, as being both
purely commercial and purely sceptical. The
reader must judge for himself as to which of the
two opposing theories of Absolutism and Humanism
best deserves the name of Scepticism; as also
whether the two counts of this indictment can be
consistently combined by the soi-disant believers in
* Pragmatism, p. 201.
104 WILLIAM JAMES
the * perfect coherence ' of truth. And, finally, he
should ask himself why a doctrine which maintains,
as Humanism maintains against Absolutism, that
human ideals must really count in the making of
reality, is regarded as low and spiritually degrading.
Is it not, rather, clear that Humanism, by ques-
tioning the absolutist notion of ' truth,' and break-
ing down the distinction between 'theory' and
'practice,' vindicates the reality of that whole
world of life and action which Absolutism had
contemptuously dismissed as ' mere appearance ' ?
Which is in truth the nobler destiny — to take an
active part in the real shaping of an as yet un-
certain future, or to contemplate, at an infinite
distance, the Absolute's beatific vision of bogus
existence in hallucinatory time ?
We can now trace how the pre-Jamesian con-
ception of ' psychology ' had played into the hands
of Absolutism and Materialism. At first sight it
might seem that psychology, with its particular
concern, not with the totality of things, but with
the ' individual mind,' was naturally apt to supply
the pluralistic antidote to the monistic excesses of
Absolutism.
And, in fact, for Locke, who was practically the
first (since Protagoras) to conceive that the human
understanding was a worthy subject of human
THEOKY AND PEACTICE 105
study, the interest of the study lay in its providing
a critical check on the human propensity towards
fruitless * speculation ' and meaningless dogmatism.
For Locke, psychology and philosophy are truly one.
But, unfortunately, Locke, though his aims were
avowedly humanistic and practical, fell into the
snare of regarding pure passivity as the only source
for our knowledge of physical reality. When, there-
fore, Hume showed that sensations, simply as such,
could never reveal anything beyond themselves, it
seemed an unavoidable conclusion that psychology,
at any rate, was restricted to what is purely ■ sub-
jective.' As against this pure ' subjectivity,' it
became the aim of philosophy to vindicate for its
subject-matter an equally pure * objectivity ' — with
what result we have already seen.
Thus, for the sake of a sharp distinction between
the ' subjective ' and the ■ objective,' philosophy
and psychology were torn apart. Psychology
became a * natural science,' dealing solely with
the observable concatenations of ' subjective ' phe-
nomena, and loftily forbidden to inquire into their
cognitive or practical value; while philosophy
became so ' objective ' as to cease to have any
significance whatever for human beings. Through
the gap thus artificially created, the whole ' world
of practical realities,' in James's phrase, slipped
106 WILLIAM JAMES
out of sight and out of mind altogether — so far as
either the psychologist or the philosopher was con-
cerned. For the psychologist had become as
ambitious in his own way as the philosopher in
his, to be ' purely theoretical ' and undisturbed in
his intellectual contemplation by * merely practical '
considerations. James's philosophic achievement,
as has been already said, consists in restoring to
us our own world, by conceiving consciousness as
essentially a means of action and adaptation.
James started with the apergu that the world of
practical realities is what we, as living organisms,
are primarily interested in ; and his psychological
studies, undertaken without any subjectivistic bias,
further revealed to him that the most recondite and
apparently ' disinterested ' theories ultimately de-
rive whatever meaning they possess from their
applicability to this world. And when once we
have got so far, we can hardly avoid taking the
decisive step of regarding successful application
within this world of practical realities as the touch-
stone of truth. Such is the inner meaning of
James's * pragmatic theory of truth.'
That this theory raises, as well as solves, pro-
blems, James was well aware : pragmatism could
hardly itself claim exemption from the common
lot of man made theories, or spring, incorrigibly
THEOKY AND PKACTICE 107
perfect, from its creator's brain. At the same
time, before a pragmatist can admit any problem
as genuine rather than verbal, he must satisfy
himself as to its effective or pragmatic meaning.
Pragmatism, moreover, alone among philosophies
contains within itself the promise and potency of
its own development, for it alone refuses to make
of knowledge a unique exception to the evolutionary
process. This indwelling spirit of pragmatism —
this abiding sense of the progressiveness and human
relevance of knowledge — a sense deeper and wider
than any specific doctrine in which it may clothe
itself— is what James seems pre-eminently to mean
by Humanism.
" As I apprehend the movement towards
humanism, it is based on no particular discovery
or principle that can be driven into one precise
formula, which thereupon can be impaled upon a
logical skewer. It is much more like one of those
secular changes that come upon public opinion
over-night, as it were, borne upon tides • too full
for sound or foam,' that survive all the crudities
and extravagances of their advocates. Such have
been the changes from aristocracy to democracy,
from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to
pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways
of understanding life — changes of which we all
108 WILLIAM JAMES
have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes
to such changes the method of confutation by-
single decisive reasons, showing that the new view
involves self - contradiction, or traverses some
fundamental principle. This is like stopping a
river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed.
Eound your obstacle flows the water and 'gets
there all the same.' In reading [a certain critic] ,
I am not a little reminded of those Catholic
writers who refute Darwinism by telling us that
higher species cannot come from lower, because
minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of
transformation is absurd, for it implies that species
tend to their own destruction, and that would
violate the principle that every reality tends to
persevere in its own shape. The point of view is
too myopic, too tight and close to take in the
inductive argument. You cannot settle questions
of fact by formal logic. . . .
" The one condition of understanding humanism
is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop
rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least
resistance ' on the whole.' . . . For humanism,
conceiving the more * true ' as the more ' satis-
factory ' (Dewey's term) has to renounce sincerely
rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour
and finality. It is in just this temper of renuncia-
THEOKY AND PKACTICE 109
tion, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepti-
cism, that the spirit of humanism essentially
consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by
a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught
we know, may fail in any given case ; and what is
1 more ' satisfactory than any alternative in sight
may to the end be a sum of 'pluses and minuses,
concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior
corrections and improvements a maximum of the
one and a minimum of the other may some day be
approached. It means a real change of heart, a
break with absolutistic hopes [despair, rather,
James should have said] when one takes up this
view of the conditions of belief."*
It is in passages like this that James's greatness
is displayed. But they reveal his weakness as well
as his strength. The complacency with which
intellectualists took for granted that their (theo-
retical) renunciation of all other interests secured
to them a monopoly of intellect, the practical
emptiness of their ' theoretically ' perfect ' sys-
tems,' bred in James such a horror of logic-
chopping and system-making, that even in the
privacy of his own mind he seems to have shrunk
from pressing home the dialectical advantage
* Essays in Eadical Empiricism, p. 245/.
110 WILLIAM JAMES
secured by his discovery — for such it really was —
of the arbitrary and question-begging nature of the
antithesis between theory and practice. He took
up, instead, the pragmatically magnificent, but
formally untenable, position of refusing to bow
the knee to a * Reason ' which was as much at
war with the needs of organic as of moral life. He
has left it to his disciples to show that the ' Logic '
which he contemned was hopelessly vitiated by the
intrinsic looseness and incoherence of its thought.*
In any case, a rational reformer can as little hope,
and need as little care, to escape the charge of
blaspheming Reason, as a religious reformer the
charge of blaspheming the Deity. But James's
attempt to avoid verbal disputation by speaking
to his adversaries in their own vocabulary only
had the effect of still further hardening their
hearts and encouraging them in their accusations
of irrationalism.t
* The defects of rationalistic 'logic have now been set
out in full in Dr. F. C. S. Schiller's Formal Logic. But the
reconstruction of logic on the basis of the principle that
1 meaning lies in application ' owes its inception to Mr.
Alfred Sidgwick.
t James himself eventually recognized that the mildness
of his controversial methods presumed too much alike on the
"Christian charity" and the "secular intelligence" of his
opponents. See Preface to The Meaning of Truth, pp.
viii-x.
THEOKY AND PKACTICE 111
This rather natural, if also rather unintelligent,
misunderstanding does not seem, however, to be
the main source of the hatred that James has
inspired in professional philosophers. They con-
ceive his philosophy as an attack upon their
dignity and status, because it brings philosophy
down from the clouds to earth, and places living
above ' reflecting ' — or, rather, regards reflecting
as only one, rather queer, way of living, to be
justified ultimately, if at all, only in the degree in
which it unifies, not the * universe,' but human
interests and activities. The academic mind will
always resent any doubt as to whether the
academic life is its own justification, and the
1 highest ' that any mind can possibly conceive.
And to crush such doubts it loves to fashion its
Absolute very much in the image of a Professor of
Logic.
So the struggle between Humanism and Abso-
lutism is likely to rage for some time yet — in
philosophic circles. But outside these the issue
cannot be in doubt. The human spirit will never
assimilate the abstruse and empty abstractions of
which academic philosophy grows ever fonder as it
grows more specialized. If, therefore, philosophy
refuses to re-humanize itself in the spirit of James,
it will deservedly perish from its neglect of human
112 WILLIAM JAMES
interests. If ' Logic,' unreformed and unrepentant,
insists on severing itself from Life, then Life will
gladly let it go. Nor can the kind of ' theory '
that claims to be independent of practice with any
consistency make complaint if practice retorts by
insisting that the independence must be mutual.
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