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Walsh
Philosophy
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WILLIAM JAMES
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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN
HUMAN NATURE. GifEord Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 190 1-
1902. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans,
Green & Co. 1902.
PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINK-
ING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York,
London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1907.
THE MEANING OF TRUTH : A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM." 8vo.
New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co.
1909.
A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THE
PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, Lon.
don, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1909.
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN IN-
TRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York, London, Bom-
bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 191 1.
THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR
PHILOSOPHY. i2mo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:
Longmans, Green & Co. 1897.
MEMORIES AND STUDIES. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and
Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 191 1.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., 8vo. New York:
Henry Holt & Co. London: Macmillan & Co. 1890.
PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE. i2mo. New York: Henry
Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1892.
TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS
ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. i2mo. New York : Henry Holt
& Co. London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1899.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE
DOCTRINE. i6mo. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 1898.
THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, with an
Introduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown 8vo. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. 1885.
WILLIAM JAMES
BY
EMILE BOUTROUX
RE DE l'iNSTITDT
TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND EDITION
BY
ARCHIBALD AND BARBARA HENDERSON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO
FOURTH AVENUE & SOth STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1912
COPYRIGHT. 1912
BY LONGMANS. GREEN, AND CO.
THE- PLIMPTON- PRESS
[W-D-O]
NO&WOOD • MASS • U • S • A
INTRODUCTION
Tl
HE illustrious American philosopher.
Professor William James, lost to his coun-
try and the world on August 26th, 1910,
was so remarkable as a man, aside from
his doctrines, that it would be of the greatest
interest to study for its own sake his inner
life, his soul, his character, his wit, his
conversation and his style, — in a word, his
personality. May his brother whom he
loved so tenderly, and upon whom to his
last hour he lavished an admirable devotion
— may the great writer, Henry James, with
all his tenderness, his power of analysis
and his art, paint this cherished portrait!
It would materially assist us in compre-
hending the doctrine of the philosopher.
For whereas, in certain men, the personality
and the work are so actually separable
that in order to understand the one it is
necessary, if not to ignore at least to dis-
regard the suggestions afforded by the
[v]
INTRODUCTION
other ^ with William James it is quite the
reverse. He taught that a philosophy has
its root in life, not in the collective or
impersonal life of humanity, in his view
the abstraction of the schools, but in the
concrete life of the individual, the only
life which really exists. And just as the
flower separated from its stalk is not slow
to wither, so James thought that philosophy,
even in its boldest speculations, should
maintain its bond with the soul of the thinker
if it is not to degenerate into an empty
assemblage of words and of concepts^ de-
void of all real content.
If, for our part, we can make no pre-
tensions to give new life to the fine image
of William James, let us at least try to
observe some features of his physiognomy;
above all, let us yield ourselves gladly to
the vivid impression which his personality
of itself produced upon everyone who came
in contact with it, so that we may communi-
cate with him sympathetically and by that
means in some measure read his inward
soul.
[vi]
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction v
Life and Personality of William
James 3
Philosophy of William James ... 19
I. Psychology 19
II. Religious Psychology .... 41
III. Pragmatism 56
IV. Metaphysical Views .... 82
V. Pedagogy 94
Conclusion 114
[vii]
WILLIAM JAMES
LIFE AND PERSONALITY OF
WILLIAM JAMES
W,
ILLIAM JAMES was born in New
York City, January 11th, 1842. He
was the eldest son of the Rev. Henry
James of Boston, famous both as theo-
logian and as writer. In outward appear-
ance he bore a striking resemblance to
his father. The Rev. Henry James ex-
hibited a curious combination of gaiety
and gravity, keen thought and great
depth of feeling, with a turn for quip
and jest. These traits were found in
equal measure in his son William.
The interests of the Rev. Henry James
were principally confined to religious
questions. In these matters, he was
an ardent disciple of the great Swedish
savant, Swedenborg.
The point of departure for these famous
doctrines which held so much interest
for Kant, was the conviction — a con-
[3]
WILLIAM JAMES
viction which Swedenborg had reached
from a study of the animal kingdom —
of the existence of a constant mutual
influence between the mental and the
material, between the spiritual and the
natural. From that point, Swedenborg,
by the study of religion as described in
the Scriptures, had risen to the idea of
a relation between terrestrial beings and
the beings of the spiritual world, with
the resultant possibility of knowing di-
rectly reUgious truths, and from this
knowledge deriving a purified Chris-
tianity as a foundation for the New
Jerusalem.
During his early years William James
was deeply impressed by his father's
teachings. Not only did he acquire a
remarkable aptitude for analysis, but
he saturated himself so thoroughly with
the Swedenborgian spirit that he seems
to have preserved throughout his life a
secret predilection for the doctrines of
the great mystic.
Wilham James's course of studies was
not a very methodical one. His father
[4]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
having gone to live for a time in Europe,
William James early familiarized him-
self with European languages and culture.
He received instruction from special tu-
tors in London and Paris. In 1857-8,
he attended the college of Boulogne-sur-
Mer; and in 1859-60 he studied in the
University of Geneva. Then during the
winter of 1860-61 he studied painting,
under the direction of WilKam M. Hunt,
at Newport, Rhode Island.
But the taste for science was upper-
most in his nature. In 1861, at the age
of nineteen, he entered the Lawrence
ScientiiSc School at Harvard. For two
years he studied chemistry and anatomy
there. Then in 1863 he entered the
Harvard Medical School. Although he
purposed taking the doctorate in medi-
cine, he did not confine himself to pur-
suit of the ordinary course of study. In
April, 1865, with Louis Agassiz, he took
part in the Thayer Expedition to Brazil,
and remained there more than a year.
During the winter of 1867-8 he studied
physiology at the University of Berlin,
[5]
WILLIAM JAMES
then worked with Agassiz at the Harvard
Museum of Coraparative Zoology. In
1869, he took his doctorate in medicine
at Harvard. Until 1872 he continued
to work according to his fancy, assum-
ing no professional obHgations, partly
because of his ill-health, partly because
of his intellectual curiosity, his eagerness
for varied knowledge, to say nothing of
a certain instinctive repugnance to official
duties.
In 1872, at Harvard, began Wilham
James's academic career, which was to
run its whole course at the same university.
He started as an instructor in physiology.
Then, from 1873 to 1876, he was an
instructor in anatomy and physiology.
Beginning in 1875, he offered to graduate
students a course dealing with the rela-
tions between physiology and psychology.
He directed the experimental researches
in a room in the Lawrence Scientific
School: this was, we may say, the first
psychological laboratory estabhshed in
America. In 1879-80, he gave his first
real course in philosophy, which was
[6]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
entitled : The Philosophy of Evolution, At
that time he had given up the teaching
of anatomy and physiology.
In 1880 he became assistant professor
of philosophy. Several years later, in
1884 to be exact, he took part in the
establishment of the American Society
for Psychical Research. In 1885, he
was made professor of philosophy, and
in 1889 he took the chair of psychology.
During this period he wrote his great
work. Principles of Psychology (1890),
in two large volumes, the importance of
which was at once recognized through-
out the entire world. This sufficed to
assure him a foremost place in the his-
tory of the philosophic movement of our
time. In 1892 he pubUshed an abridg-
ment of this work. Psychology, Briefer
Course, or A Text-Book of Psychology,
which still further added to his re-
nown and influence, and was soon widely
adopted as a manual of psychology in
the American colleges and universities.
In 1892 he abandoned the direction of
the psychological laboratory, and in 1897
[7]
WILLIAM JAMES
exchanged his title of professor of psy-
chology for that of professor of philoso-
phy, which he was to retain to the end of
his life. His famous article, The Will to
Believe, appeared in 1896. And his col-
lected lectures entitled Talks to Teachers
on Psychology and to Students on some
of Life's Ideals, which immediately won
extraordinary success, and even to-day
is eagerly read throughout the world,
dates from 1899.
It was in this very year, 1899, that
his health, always delicate, underwent a
change for the worse. An excess of fa-
tigue, doubtless caused by an excursion in
the Adirondacks, brought on a weakness
of the heart which kept him away from
his university during the years 1899-1901.
Nevertheless, the period extending from
this time until his death was probably
the most productive and most brilliant of
his entire career. In 1901 and 1902, as
lecturer on the Gifford Foundation, he
gave at the University of Edinburgh his
famous course of lectures upon The
Varieties of Religious Experience, which,
[8]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
when published in 1902, was the signal
for a noteworthy movement of ideas in
the domain of rehgious psychology, and
for the second time exhibited William
James as a pioneer.
In 1906 and in 1907, at the Lowell
Institute in Boston, and at Columbia
University, New York, he gave some
lectures on "Pragmatism" which, pub-
lished in 1907, likewise created a very
great sensation.
Finally, at the general request of pro-
fessors and pupils, he devoted himself
to the task of assembling his ideas and
presenting them in their logical co-ordi-
nation, in a manual or Text-Book similar
to the one he had written to embody his
psychology. He had written only one
part of this work when he set out for
Europe, for the purpose of consulting
specialists as to the state of his health,
which had grown worse.
In spite of the fact that during this
trying and painful voyage the gravity of
his illness became more and more appar-
ent, William James continued to lavish
[9]
WILLIAM JAMES
upon his friends, just as if he were in his
normal condition, the treasures of his
mind and heart.
Immediately upon his return to
America, to the country village of Cho-
corua in New Hampshire, he had an
attack of heart failure; and after linger-
ing about a week he died on August 26,
1910, at the age of 68.1
*
The life of Professor James was entirely
devoted to studying, experimenting, ob-
serving, reading, reflecting, investigating,
instructing, talking and writing. He knew
1 The principal works of William James are: articles
published in the Critiqiie Philosophique of Renouvier,
Paris, 1870, 1880, 1881; Principles of Psychology, 2
vols., 1890; Psychology, Briefer Course {A Text-Book
qf Psychology), 1892, a work translated into French
by E. Baudin and G. Bertier under the title: Pricis de
Psychologies 1909; The Will to Believe and other Essays
in Popular Philosophy, 1897, some of which essays
appeared in French translation in the Critique Philoso-
phique; Human Immortality, Two supposed Objections,
to the Doctrine, 1897; Talks to Teachers on Psychology,
and to Students on Life's Ideals, 1899, the first part of
which has been translated into French by L. S. Pidoux,
[10]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
a great deal, thanks to his Hvely intellec-
tual curiosity, his powerful and precise
memory, his knowledge of languages, his
love of books, and his innumerable asso-
ciations in every country. But he appre-
ciated only the judgments immediately
drawn from observation of realities and
constantly controlled by this same obser-
vation. He regarded as negligible any
formula which could not be translated
into a fact of experience. One word was
constantly upon his hps, expressing that
with the title, Causeries pSdagogiqueSy Lausanne and
Paris, 1909; The Varieties of Religious Experience, A
Study in Human Nature, being the Gifford Lectures on
Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh, in 1901-1902,
1902, a work translated into French by Frank Abauzit,
with the title: V Experience religieuse, 1906; Pragma-
tism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking,
1907; A Pluralistic Universe, Hibbert Lectures at Man-
chester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy,
1909; a French translation of this work, by Le Brun and
Paris, appeared in 1910, entitled, why we cannot
imagine: Philosophic de V Experience; The Meaning
of Truth, a Sequel to ^' Pragmatism,'^ 1909; in addition,
a great number of magazine articles, notably in Mind,
The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods, The Philosophical Review, The Princeton
Review, The Harvard Graduates* Magazine, Scribner's
Magazine, The Forum, The Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, Science, The Nation, etc.
[11]
WILLIAM JAMES
mode of thought which he especially
prized: the word direct. He rather en-
joyed hurUng facts, brutal experience,
life, common sense, those ordinary, com-
mon and familiar things so dear to
Pascal, into the midst of the scholarly
systems, the lofty phrases, the sacro-
sanct traditions of the scholastic, ancient
and modern.
Among those students who flocked to
his lectures, many came chiefly to obtain
ready-made answers in view of their ex-
aminations; but he took no pains to
satisfy them. With all the fine freshness
of his vivacity and verve, he gave his
audience the result of his researches and
of his personal reflections upon the prob-
lems which absorbed him, without so
much as recalling the existence of an
academic programme. To illustrate, one
of his hearers one day interrupted him
with these words: ''To be serious, for a
moment."
This very clever and eloquent pro-
fessor "professed" as little as possible.
He was incapable of binding himseK by
[12]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
the rules of official pedagogy. He threw
into his speech his ceaselessly active
thought, his ardent soul, his whole being.
Whether he taught in his own class room
or lectured outside, whether he conversed
familiarly with his friends, the spontane-
ity of his discourse was always arresting.
Everything he said was full of pith
and suggestion, and he never expressed
himself in a conventional, abstract and
impersonal way. His ideas left his brain
thoroughly alive and impregnated with
his personality; the most unexpected,
ingenious, and amusing expressions fell
naturally from his lips and fixed them-
selves in the minds of his hearers, who
were at once surprised, charmed, and
inspired to think for themselves. There
was never a more perfect illustration
of the too frequently quoted saying of
Pascal: "We are delighted when we ex-
pect to see an author and find a man."
He wrote just as he talked. Was
there, in his case, any great diflFerence
between the two occupations.^ In read-
ing his works, we seem to hear him speak.
[13]
WILLIAM JAMES
In the arrangement of his ideas, there is
that same subtle order, free and Uvely —
Pascal's "the order of the heart" — more
profound and possibly truer than the gross
and palpable order of geometric demon-
stration. There is the same picturesque,
personal language, full of ingenuities and
suggestive images. There is the same
vivacity, the same vigour of attack and
of argument. There is also a superior
elegance, marvellous mixture of knowl-
edge, precision, nicety, force, natural-
ness, grace, and a sort of abandon.
Consequently, this profound and trust-
worthy thinker is, without exerting him-
self to that end, an author, an artist, one
of the glories of American literature as
well as of its philosophy. And among
other merits, his works possess this rare
attribute: they are read.
The hfe bodied forth so directly by
this learning and these works is, in its
extreme simplicity, one of incomparable
moral richness.
While certain thinkers devote them-
selves to transforming immediate realities,
[14]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
along with the passions, the conflicts
and the gropings which they involve,
into pure ideas, abstract, rigid and im-
passable, and to observing in some fashion
changing things in the guise of changeless
eternity, for William James ideas, as such,
possess meaning and value in direct pro-
portion to the measure of life that they
retain; and every activity of his mind is
a cordial participation in the emotions,
the labours, and the present tasks of his
country and of humanity. He does not
merely give expression, as an exception-
ally well informed man and subtle critic,
to his views upon the conditions of his
great philosophic problems, such as the
methods and the significance of science,
the relations between science and religion,
education, the value of suffering, con-
flict and war, the ideal form of human
life. In his own mind he sees himself
actually facing alternatives evoked by
these questions, and he deals with and
resolves these questions with all the
force of his being, as everyone does when
he feels that a question concerns himself,
[15]
WILLIAM JAMES
and not merely other people. Hence
the personal and sympathetic note of his
words. He moved the souls of his ques-
tioners, because he spoke from his own
soul.
Moreover he brought to the study of
the problems of life exceptional virility
and loftiness of view. He had a proud
and courageous soul; and this pride was
founded upon a simple trust in the in-
junctions of morality and the generous
enthusiasms of religion. He had the
instinct for sympathy and love, for
sacrifice, for the asceticism which disci-
plines the will, for the heroism consecrated
to the ideal. He had little taste for
protestations of zeal and devotion, and
would doubtless have preferred rude
frankness to amiable complacency. He
would rather have ventured to recall Al-
ceste than Philinte. But if he gave freely
of himself only to the truly "scious,"^ he
showed an infinitely affectionate, atten-
tive and delicate kindness toward those
whom he counted his friends. In that
» See p. 61.
[16]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY
charming residence in Irving Street, which
he himself had planned, a large and
simple wooden house in the colonial
style, surrounded by lawn and trees,
like the greater number of the dwelling
places in Cambridge, the prevailing at-
mosphere of the James family was one
of very cordial hospitality, as well as
of intelhgence, wit, frankness, intimacy,
outspokenness, work, zest, and earnest.
Such were the conditions in his own
family last spring (1910) when Professor
James, who in his capacity of physician
had followed the course of his malady,
decided as a last resort on visiting Paris
to consult a distinguished specialist.
Neither then nor later, during the period
when his sufferings were redoubled and
the future grew darker from day to day,
did his original humour, his spiritual vi-
vacity, his interest in the present, his in-
exhaustible courtesy, ever fail him. He
doubtless beheved that the mind was
stronger than the agents which destroy
the organism. And he believed that, to
men of good will, death itself could not be
[17]
WILLIAM JAMES
otherwise than good. The most excru-
ciating suffering, the impatient call of
death, wrung from him no complaint,
no word or sign of discouragement. To
the end he was the man of thought, of
faith and of energy, not admitting that
our brief wisdom sets any bounds to
possibiKty, and beheving that it depends
upon us to contribute, by our personal
effort, here below and perhaps hereafter,
to the conservation and development of
the moral and spiritual forces of the
universe.
[18]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
Wn^LIAM JAMES
PSYCHOLOGY
A HE point of departure for the philo-
sophic researches of WilKam James is
found in his studies in anatomy and physi-
ology. By profession as well as by doc-
trine, he prosecuted these studies accord-
ing to a strictly experimental method.
It was precisely this disposition to take
experience as his only guide which
induced him to overleap the boundaries
of physiology and to enter the domain
of psychologic research, in which he was
destined to distinguish himself.
As a physiologist studying the actions
of Hving beings, he readily admits that
a great number of these actions may
be satisfactorily explained by considering
[19]
WILLIAM JAMES
them as automatic and mechanical ner-
vous reactions, responding immediately
to external excitations. These actions,
in fact, are sensibly identical for like
excitations. But, on the other hand,
certain actions are met with in living
beings which differ profoundly from those
mentioned above. These, like the former,
tend in a general way to the preservation
of individuality, but under the same
excitation, they are distinct and not to
be foreseen. A frog deprived of its
higher centres reacts like a machine.
But a frog which retains these centres
reacts in a spontaneous way.
Shall we admit that this spontaneity
is only apparent, and that in reality the
reflex is no less mechanical in the sec-
ond case than in the first .^ Such an
interpretation can be regarded only as
arbitrary.
Truth to tell, we do not accurately
know whether the slightest reflex, with
its property of aiming at the preserva-
tion of life, is not actually, at bottom,
reducible to pure mechanism. And when
[20]
PSYCHOLOGY
the explanation which satisfies the physi-
ologist coincides exactly with reality,
why should not all the reflexes, without
exception, be referred back to these
elementary reflexes?
But, although I can identify the higher
reflexes with the lower only by question-
able arguments and by means of unjusti-
fiable metaphysical hypotheses, I find,
in experience itself a fact which at once
furnishes me with the desired explana-
tion: it is the idea, the phenomenon
which, notably in the human being, is
interpolated between the excitation and
the reaction. If I want to remain on
experimental ground, I must make place
in the theory of reflexes for the idea, as
well as for the nerves which suflSce to
explain these lower reflexes sensibly. I
must explain, scientifically, the actions
of animals, as the case demands, now
by simple organic movements, now by
the intervention of an idea.
Can this observation fail to open a
new chapter of physiological science?
It is advisable to model science upon
[21]
WILLIAM JAMES
realities, and not to model realities upon
this or that condition of our science
posited a priori. The idea which in
animals and in particular in man is
strikingly characterized by the fact that
it is perceived by a consciousness, could
not be known at all if we were dependent
solely upon the physiologist's mode of
cognition. The experience by which we
grasp it differs, not superficially but
radically, from sense experience, which
sufl5ces for the study of life pure and
simple. It is, properly speaking, psy-
chological experience, a mode of cognition
the distinct reality of which has been
admirably elucidated by Locke, Berkeley,
John Stuart Mill, and the modern psy-
chologists.
And yet, in order to define this experi-
ence more scientifically, would it not be
well, after acknowledging its existence, to
form a conception of it as far as possible
by analogy with physical experience, and
to suppose that its purpose, after dis-
closing certain simple elements in the
soul, is to examine how these latter, by
[22]
PSYCHOLOGY
combination, produce complex phenom-
ena which we are aware of? Such a
psychological atomism was the postulate
of the so-called associationist doctrine,
which for a long time seemed in the
ascendant. But in recent years, notably
in Scotland and in France, grave object-
ions have been raised against the analogy
that this doctrine establishes between
psychic relations and mechanical rela-
tions. Associationism is an effort to
find, in the domain of consciousness, a
type of relation which resembles New-
tonian attraction. But are we not in
danger of letting the essential feature
of the psychic fact escape us if we impose
on it, a priori, the form of the elementary
facts of the material world?
One of the most vigorous and success-
ful adversaries of associationism was
William James. He never tired of show-
ing that the atomistic hypothesis, which
posits impenetrable elements literally ex-
terior to each other and fundamentally
immutable, in no way conforms to the
nature, essentially shaded, complex, pene-
[23]
WILLIAM JAMES
trable, fluid and individual, of the exist-
ences made known to us by psychological
experience. That is to say, under the
name of states of consciousness, associa-
tionism considers imaginary entities, arti-
ficially detached from psychic reality,
elaborated according to a type which
relates to another order of phenomena,
and does not consider the life of the soul
itself on the side of its truly specific and
original quality.
Supposing, then, that associationism
must be abandoned, does it follow, on
the other hand, that we must return to
the substance of the spiritualist school,
as the principle of the unity which,
basically, enters into psychic multi-
plicity?
This solution, too, is insuflacient. Like
the associationists' atom of conscious-
ness, the substance of the spiritual-
ist school is nothing more than a
creature of the reason, unknown to
experience. And the homogeneous uni-
versality which characterizes it, renders
it unfit to explain whatever actually
[24]
PSYCHOLOGY
is fluid and capable of novelty in psy-
chic experience.
The conclusion to be reached is that
introspection is and remains the fit and
necessary method for psychology. But
in order for this process to be really
productive, it must be carried out in
some specific way which, so far, has not
been accurately or completely defined.
It must be directed in such a way as to
grasp something more than the multiple
without unity, the object of the physico-
psychological experience of the associa-
tionists, or the one without the multiple,
the object of the alleged intuition of the
spiritualistic metaphysicians. The true
introspection is the living synthesis, the
intimate fusion, the concrete unity of
these two methods. It has for its object
the actual, the immediate datum of
consciousness. But this datum is neither
a state of consciousness in juxtaposition
to other states, like things situated in
space, nor an ego one and identical,
comparable to a mathematical unity;
it consists in the total content, at once
[25]
WILLIAM JAMES
distinct and indistinct, finite and infinite,
one and multiple, of a certain individual
consciousness, taken at a given moment
of its existence. And the very idea of an
isolated moment is itself a fiction: for con-
sciousness is a current in perpetual motion.
The stream of consciousness: that is the
least inappropriate mode of designating
it.
Such, in fine, is psychological experi-
ence; it comes to coincide with conscious-
ness itself. It is not a pincushion to stick
events into, nor is it a numerical collection
of elements, in regard to which unity
and individuality would be only epi-
phenomena; it is a multiple unity and
a single multiplicity, an entity essentially
individual and alive. And to consider
its manifestations irrespective of its life
and its individuality is to consider some-
thing other than the thing in question.
This unity is not made from multiplicity,
for we cannot obtain it by means of
synthesis. The multiple may result from
it, but can neither precede nor produce
it. Such is, in some sort, the case of
[26]
PSYCHOLOGY
thought in relation to words: we can
translate thought into words; we cannot,
with words, make a thought.
Psychological experience, thus deter-
mined, being as real as physical expe-
rience, the psychology which shall be
built up by this means will be entitled
to the name of natural science, the same
title as that given to the sciences of life
which deal with physical experience.
What use, however, will psychology
make of the method suited to its ends.'^
Will it confine itself to describing the
phenomena discerned by introspection,
without attempting in any way to ex-
plain them?
To stop at the mere description of phe-
nomena is not to do scientific work; and
to restore the entities of the spiritualistic
metaphysicians would be much better
than to cut oneself oflF from all investiga-
tion of the laws and causes of phenomena.
But just as it is impossible to consider
physical experience as the only experi-
ence which science can vouch for, it
[27]
WILLIAM JAMES
would be no less artificial to isolate
psychic experience from physical experi-
ence. The concrete and real experience
which our datum as such represents
shows us states of consciousness condi-
tioned, and that directly, by certain ac-
tivities of the cerebral hemispheres. This
testimony cannot be invalidated by the
data peculiar to consciousness. Up to a
certain point, then, psychology might
apply itself to the task of giving a true
explanation of the phenomena starting
from the supposition of a constant cor-
relation between cerebral states and psy-
chic states. Whenever this expedient
proves convenient, nothing will prevent
it from calling to its aid associationism,
which has been constructed in just such
a way as to establish a symmetrical
relation between the psychic and the
physical.
But it is important to observe that if,
in James's case, psychology at many
points resumes a method which at first
it seemed to proscribe, it does so by
modifying its meaning in conformity
[28]
PSYCHOLOGY
with its own principles. In the psy-
chology of concrete and total conscious-
ness, psycho-physical parallelism is no
longer a principle but an hypothesis, an
artifice; it is a partial and fictitious
representation of the nature of things,
in a word, a language the value of which
we shall test in trying to make use of it
as a method of explanation. The human
mind can neither think nor even perceive,
save by means of presumptions and
hypotheses: its aflSrmations signify that
the instruments it has forged, the bodies
it has constructed, have served it many
times before in its dealings with reality.
Furthermore, in a vital and direct
psychology like that of James, the postu-
late of parallelism takes on a new signifi-
cance. For experience shows us not
only the action of the physical upon the
moral, but also, no less clearly, the action
of the moral upon the physical. Thus
it may very well happen that the cerebral
state, on which a psychic state depends,
is not itself purely physical in its origin.
Our separation of the mechanical from
[29]
WILLIAM JAMES
the conscious does not exist in nature.
Consider, on the one hand, a certain
psychic reflex, obviously spontaneous;
and, on the other hand, an elementary
reflex which seems to be a purely mechani-
cal phenomenon. Nature offers us im-
perceptible transitions from one to the
other. And in substance, the most
reasonable hypothesis is that originally
all the nervous centres without exception
responded to excitations in a sponta-
neous and intelligent way, but that, as
the result of a certain evolution, the
nervous centres showed differentiation,
some exhibiting higher, some lower de-
velopment than is to be found in the
primitive being.
Once, then, in possession of the principle,
the point of view and the method adapted
to the purpose, psychology may unhesi-
tatingly call upon the assumptions and
the postulates of the biological and
physical sciences, since in the world of
reality there no longer remain any sharp
distinctions between things, and the psy-
chical, in fact, merges into the physical.
[30]
PSYCHOLOGY
The principles of the physical sciences
will undergo complete transformation
through contact with psychology. Their
materialism will fade away, their mech-
anism will quicken, their determinism will
grow pliant.
* *
Having thus defined the conditions for
the transition from physiology to psy-
chology, William James for a long time
devoted all his attention to the latter
science. He dealt with it for its own
sake, adopting the method and the point
of view which exactly suited him. In
every investigation he forced himself
not to consider things merely from the
outside or from a biased standpoint,
not to confine himself to interpretation
by means of concepts formed to grasp
and classify other objects, but to take
his stand at the centre of the realities
that he wished to understand, to look
phenomena full in the face, and to study
them as directly and at as close quarters
[31]
WILLIAM JAMES
as he possibly could. The work that he
has accomplished in this domain is so
considerable and original, so constantly
in contact with living reality, that it
will very certainly last through the ages,
as one of the decisive events in the
historical development of science. It is
the restoration, after the reign of asso-
ciationism, of introspective psychology
upon new foundations.
According to James, the subject of
psychology is the life of personal con-
sciousness. This life has two character-
istics : in the first place, it is a teleological
activity, a choice of means in view of the
realization of an end; furthermore and
in the second place, its aim is, properly
speaking, the preservation of those parts
of its content in which it takes an interest,
and the elimination of all others.
Such is the dual fundamental fact. To
place this fact in its physical environment,
that is to say, first of all, in the brain,
to describe all its phases and all its forms,
and to connect them with their physio-
logical conditions: this is the immense
[32]
PSYCHOLOGY
task undertaken in the Principles of
Psychology (1890), for a good part of its
extent, and in the Briefer Course (1892).
These are rigorously scientific works, in
form as well as in substance, in a very-
real way envisaging psychology as a
natural science, and at the same time
very easy-going in traversing the precise
and subtle subjects involved, very lively,
very elegant, very captivating, agreeable
and invigorating reading for a man of
the world, no less than an indispensable
working instrument for the specialist.
Read, in the Briefer Course, the chapter
on Habit, or the end of the chapter on
Will, and you will have to confess with
delighted surprise that, just as the philoso-
pher always considers his material in the
totality of its content, so the man, even
in the most technical treatise, unfailingly
puts all of himself into his task, — his
imagination, and his heart, as well as his
intelligence and his knowledge.
Among the numerous original features
of the works of William James, one of
the most celebrated is the theory of emo-
[33]
WILLIAM JAMES
tion, considered as the effect, and not
the cause, of its organic expression. ^
According to the actual order of things,
James points out, we must not say that
we weep because we feel sad, but we
must say that we are sad because we
weep. Emotion does not result from
efferent nerve currents, but solely from
afferent currents. It is nothing but the
feeling induced in us by reactions, motor,
visceral, and circulatory, consequent upon
the perception of the object. The in-
duced state of consciousness does not
immediately follow the representative
state of consciousness; certain corporeal
modifications intervene, and it is the
feeling of these modifications which con-
stitutes emotion. The principal proof
given by James is that we cannot imagine
» This theory is known as the James-Lange theory.
In reality James began to publish his views on this
question in Mind, in 1884; the Danish physiologist
Lange» unaware of James's work, set forth the same
doctrine, in 1885, in a book entitled: Ueber die Gemiits-
bewegungen. — In the Annales de la SociitS linnienne
de Lyon, t. LVIII, 1911, M. Nayrac shows that about
1830 two French doctors. Ph. Dufour and P. Blaud,
had outlined a similar theory.
[34]
PSYCHOLOGY
what would remain of emotion if we
eliminated the totality of concomitant
organic reactions.
It is clear that James constructs and
defends his theory without for a moment
inquiring whether it proves or invahdates
the truth of materialism. He seeks an
explanation which agrees with experience,
and he seeks nothing else. It is the
province of modern science, by means of
proximate causes, to discover explanations
which are both instructive and useful
without having to touch upon questions
which involve general principles.
It by no means follows, however, that
William James, as a philosopher, is in-
different to the metaphysical question
evoked by his theory. On the contrary,
in his subsequent reflections upon the
explanation of emotion by afferent cur-
rents, he raises the question whether
this view can properly be taxed with
materialism. In the first place, it is not
every species of emotion, but crude and
violent emotions, which are here con-
sidered. Possibly certain delicate emo-
[35]
WILLIAM JAMES
tions, such as the esthetic and moral
emotions, are caused in some other way.
The value of an emotion, then, resides
in its own nature, and not in its mode of
production. If some emotion is, in itself,
a profound fact, pure, noble and spiritual,
it remains so whether or not it consists
in the feeling of certain visceral modi-
fications. To explain the appearance of
a phenomenon is not to suppress it.
But that is not all. The physiological
theory of emotion springs from certain
somatic phenomena, and does not need
to inquire whether these phenomena, in
their turn, have a purely bodily cause.
It is enough to affirm that, where they
are present, emotion appears. But all
psychological phenomena cannot be ex-
plained in this way without raising the
question of the origin, mechanical or
extra-mechanical, of their somatic con-
ditions. The phenomenon of attention,
for example, if one fathoms it, leads the
psychologist to consider it possible for
psychical action, as such, to add some-
thing new to the forces actually present
[36]
PSYCHOLOGY
in the individual. It may indeed happen,
in certain cases, that consciousness itself
contributes to produce and determine the
psychological substratum which condi-
tions its operation.
Psychology overlaps physiology. The
subject-matter of the latter which, to
the physiologist, seems a complete and
absolute whole, is nothing more than a
part, and not an isolable part, in the eyes
of the psychologist, who sees it take
form, by a contingent differentiation
and fixation, from a vaster and more
mobile reality furnished by conscious-
ness. Does that mean that psychology
attains ultimate and absolutely true
reality, where things reveal themselves
exactly as they are.^^
If physiology has its postulates, which
rest upon psychological foundations, psy-
chology in its turn cannot boast that it
admits only that which it proves and com-
prehends by means of its own data. In
[37]
WILLIAM JAMES
a word, psychology is in a situation anal-
ogous to that of the other sciences. It
is created by the aid of elements of which
it has from the outset adequate knowl-
edge, being given the tasks which these
elements impose upon it. In this sense,
its postulates have all the necessary
clearness and certainty. Thus an as-
tronomer may advance up to a certain
point in the explanation of the celestial
phenomena by admitting that the sun
revolves around the earth. But, in pro-
portion as the field of his researches is
enlarged, it becomes clear that such an
accepted axiom was after all only a
postulate, and that even the meaning of
this postulate must be modified, if we
wish it to apply to a profounder and
vaster reality.
In the last analysis, the data of psy-
chology are these two : first, the effective
existence of thoughts and of feelings,
according to the terms we employ to
designate our transitory states of con-
sciousness; second, the knowledge, by
means of these states of consciousness, of
[38]
PSYCHOLOGY
certain realities other than these states
themselves.
There can be no doubt that the psy-
chologist may cultivate a considerable
portion of his field without questioning
these postulates, merely contenting him-
self with the possession of a reasonably
clear if not a distinct definition; but on
the other hand the investigator, deter-
mined to follow reality wherever it may
lead, may one day find himself facing
such questions as these: the relation of
consciousness to the brain, the relation
of mental states to their objects, the
mobile character of consciousness, the
relation of states of consciousness to an
understanding subject. Not only can
he not resolve these problems by the
aid of the only resources which physio-
logical and psychological data, so de-
fined, furnish him, but the very solutions
which he has obtained with reference
to the more directly accessible matters
now appear to him only abstract and
relative.
Thus we see that the condition of
[39]
WILLIAM JAMES
psychology is analogous to that of physi-
ology. If the latter carries its researches
far enough, it sees rising before it some
day enigmas which are beyond its powers
of solution. In like manner, psychology
undoubtedly offers a wide field as a purely
natural science. But in the course of
its progress an hour strikes when, if it
wishes to explain facts in respect to their
most distinctive quality, it finds itself
compelled to enlarge its boundaries and
to touch upon higher questions — the
questions called metaphysical. It re-
quires courage to say it: the Galileo or
the Lavoisier of psychology, the man
who shall unveil the truly fundamental
principle, if he is ever to appear, will be
a metaphysician.
Can experience, the sole source of our
knowledge, suffice to meet the crisis of
such an evolution?
[40]
n
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
L HE scholar who has dealt with no
form of experience but the physical, readily
imagines that this is the only possible form.
But the psychologist who, not burdening
himself a priori with researches upon
the conditions of knowledge, settles by
fact, as did Diogenes, the problem of
possibiHty, and from the outset deals
with psychological experience, perceives,
when he comes to reflect later upon this
experience, that by very reason of its
distinctive and original quality it is no
less real than physical experience, is
naturally allied to it, and moreover is
not reducible to it. There are then two
sorts of experience: why might there not
be three? Does the second, added to the
first, exhaust the content of reality?
Amid the infinite variety of phases
[41]
WILLIAM JAMES
which human consciousness can offer,
there is one which appears pecuHarly
paradoxical: the one called alteration
of personality. How can consciousness,
the distinctive traits of which are unity
and continuity, undergo transformation
or subdivision into several more or less
heterogeneous egos, simultaneous, suc-
cessive, or alternative? Phrase it as we
may, to profess to confine ourselves to
the clear and convenient doctrine of a
personal consciousness always identical
with itself, circumscribed and closed,
would be to condemn ourselves to consider
the alterations of personality as purely
illusory appearances. The evidence of
definitions pales before the evidence of
facts on this point; and psychology has
resigned itself to the admission that
beyond the ego acutely conscious of itself,
lies a more or less considerable mass of
psychic elements susceptible of gravitat-
ing around the ego, or perhaps of organiz-
ing themselves on their own account into
consciousnesses more or less distinct
from the primary consciousness.
[42]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
Now, SO long as we are dealing with
certain pathological phenomena, in which
the personality primarily appears to be
weakened or mutilated, the hypothesis of
a simple disintegration of consciousness
may seem to suffice; and those psychol-
ogists wedded to the principle of the
clear consciousness do not despair of
deriving, from the latter, the total content
of the obscure and marginal conscious-
ness. Truth to tell, we may question
whether those who profess to support
this claim are not sometimes deceived
as to the value of their explanations, just
as in the case of the physiologist who
hopes to reduce the inferior reflexes
entirely to mechanism. But it becomes
wholly impossible, apparently, to be
satisfied with an explanation drawn from
normal psychology, an analysis of per-
sonal consciousness, when we are dealing
with certain alterations of personality,
in which the latter exhibits itself, not
merely modified, but immeasurably mag-
nified and transfigured, as in the evo-
lution of religious souls. And if we
[43]
WILLIAM JAMES
wish to test the explanation of these
phenomena by the only principles with
which normal psychology deals, we are
compelled either to deny the facts, or else
to mutilate or distort them.
Now, just as the psychologist, suffo-
cating in the prison in which physiology
confined him, has opened up an immense
field of study by deliberately positing
the existence of a specifically psycholog-
ical experience, so it may be that, in
taking up his position at the centre of
the religious life, in place of looking at it
from without like the anatomist dissecting
a corpse, he may recognize the distinct
existence of a third sort of experience, the
truly religious experience.
It is important to consider that such
a psychic phenomenon, which we are
unable to construct with the discrete
multitude of elements that condition it,
may readily be explained if we admit
the reality of that special form of existence
we call consciousness — like the case of
the simple physical phenomenon of mo-
tion, which we are forced to deny if we
[44]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
admit only arithmetic discontinuity, but
which becomes at once possible and real
if we posit as valid the experimental
intuition of the continuum. Given these
examples, it would be anti-philosophic,
in the face of certain phenomena that
the principles of our established sciences
do not suflSce to explain, to refuse to
seek new paths, and to hazard new
hypotheses.
The alterations of personality that the
religious life offers us were in their turn
studied directly by William James from
the point of view of the religious soul
itself. This study is found in his cele-
brated work: The Varieties of Religious
Experience, A Study in Human Nature,
published in 1902.
Pathology, which often throws light
on the study of the normal being by
isolating and exaggerating some of its
functions, has thrown into still clearer
view a strange faculty of human con-
sciousness : the faculty, peculiar to certain
subjects, of entering into communica-
tion with other consciousnesses, which
[45]
WILLIAM JAMES
more or less mingle with, and sometimes
even replace, the original consciousness.
In these phenomena, the consciousness
no longer perceives exterior objects, as
it does in physical experience; it is no
longer enclosed within the Umits of a
given ego, as happens in psychological
experience pure and simple: it enters
into other egos and yields itself to their
influence.
This faculty, which apparently illness
does not cause but merely develops and
determines so as to make it evident, is,
according to James, the psychic basis
of the religious life. Not that religion
is in itself morbid. Shall we say that
attention is a morbid phenomenon be-
cause certain nervous maladies over-excite
it, and bring into prominence certain
of its properties? The earth is not the
plant. Its products depend upon the
seeds which it receives. But it is clear
that, if religion is to become a phase of
human life, man must be capable of it.
According to James, the property of the
human soul which fits it for receiving
[46]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
religious impression is that very one
which is brought into prominence, through
its exaggeration, by the pathological
facts of alteration of personality, that is,
the possible abolition of the impenetra-
bihty which, in the ordinary life, charac-
terizes the consciousness of the individual.
Religion, viewed no longer merely in
its psychological aspect but in its indi-
vidual reality, is essentially a certain
life-form of the individual consciousness
in which the ego feels itself modified to
its very depths. It is an experience in
the sense of the verb "to experience,"
which means not to verify in a dry way
a thing which takes place outside of us,
but to try, feel, live in one's own person
this or that mode of existence: a sense
of the word exactly corresponding to that
of the German erleben. It is an experi-
ence which varies essentially with the
individual, and in which the individual
element cannot be suppressed without
causing the religious character to dis-
appear at the same time. If the syn-
thetic action of an ego, present as a
[47]
WILLIAM JAMES
whole in each one of its manifestations,
characterizes the psychological conscious-
ness, the radical modification of a given
personality is the essence of the rehgious
phenomenon. In consequence, there does
not exist a religious experience as such,
capable of appearing identical in the case
of all men, as with scientific experience.
That which alone effectively counts for
a philosophy starting from realities and
not from abstract concepts, is the indi-
vidual varieties of religious experience,
that is to say, of the religious life.
Among the themes suited to this
experience may be noted: the essential
and unquenchable joy of the soul; the
cure of moral and physical maladies
effected by abandoning oneself to the
all-powerful divine goodness; the feeling
of sin and of moral suffering, as deter-
mined by certain causes of which in spite
of all our efforts we have learned nothing;
the soul divided against itself, feeling
within it the struggle of conflicting per-
sonahties which it cannot reconcile; con-
version which, either sudden or gradual,
[48]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
substitutes for a given personality a
totally different and incomparably su-
perior personality; sanctity which brings
out in man a superhuman and enduring
perfection; the mystic spiritual life in
which man, while remaining himself, is
conscious of living the same life as God;
prayer which through superhuman means
modifies the current of our feelings and
of events.
Among these varied phenomena, the
individual is aware of entering into rela-
tion with certain powers, as conscious
and personal as itself, but immeasurably
superior in nature. He testifies that,
while he experiences religious emotion,
his life is transformed, magnified, en-
nobled, animated with an enthusiasm, a
capacity for heroism, and a confidence in
success, — feehngs of which he was, of
himself, incapable. And he is naturally
led to consider as a true consciousness
and personahty akin to his own, that
being who thus understands him, reaUzes
him, succors him, heals him, and creates
within him a new personality.
[49]
WILLIAM JAMES
Such is the religious consciousness;
it is the human consciousness endowed
with the conviction that it is communi-
cating with God.
At the same time it communicates
with other consciousnesses. Incapable
among themselves of comprehending, of
understanding, of truly communing with
each other, so long as they believe only
in themselves, men once turned to God
may, in Him, love and commune with
one another. To those whom the divine
grace has not touched, the universe offers
only strangers, outside the inner circle
of friendship. To the religious soul,
every creature is a friend who, as God
does, enters within that inner circle.
For religion brings us in touch with the
depths of souls, makes us familiar with
them; and, at bottom, all human beings
desire God, goodness and love.
If, then, psychological experience al-
ready has a range of perception far
vaster than that of physical experience,
religious experience in its turn transcends
psychological experience. The former
[50]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
merely embraces the total content of a
finite ego, of a personality thrown back
upon itself; religious experience sees this
personaKty develop and grow in grace,
thanks to the relation of identification
and communion existing between it and
higher personalities.
Irreducible to psychological experience,
IS religious experience properly separable
from it? Is one superposed upon the
other from without, like one storey upon
another; or are these two experiences
encased, the one within the other, like
the tubes of a telescope?
There is, it would seem, some relation
between religious experience and psycho-
logical experience, like the relation of the
latter to physical experience; the two
experiences partly overlap. Just as reflex
action is, at bottom, a phenomenon at
once physiological and psychical, in the
same way consciousness, which appears
to itself like a closed sphere, in reality
possesses a medial region between the
individual ego and the other egos.
[51]
WILLIAM JAMES
For a long time scholars have recog-
nized the existence of a margin, around
some centre or focus of consciousness —
a margin the bounds of which cannot be
measured, and in which float elements
of lesser and lesser consciousness, sus-
ceptible of being projected, under the
action of attention, into the full light
of the focal consciousness. But to-day
our knowledge of the ego does not stop
there. One must regard as fundamental
the discovery, definitely established in
1886, of a field of consciousness actually
lying beyond this margin of the personal
consciousness. The learned and pro-
found psychologist Myers has described
as "subhminal" this consciousness be-
yond consciousness, which connects itseK
up with the central ego through the in-
termediary of the marginal region. The
existence of this subliminal ego is attested
by the number of ideas which the cen-
tral ego encounters in its field of observa-
tion, and which it cannot, in any way,
connect with its personal experience.
Such are the intuitions of genius; such
[52]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
the metaphysical postulates of our physi-
cal or psychological experience; such,
for example, the notion of a true reality,
answering to our subjective soul-states,
the notion of a correspondence between
our ideas and things, enabling us to
elevate our ideas to the status of
knowledge.
But this subliminal ego is well adapted
to explain the characteristics of the
religious consciousness. In it is eflFaced,
shall we say, reduced little by little to
vanishing undulations, the circle origi-
nally fixed which the individual draws
about itself, and within which it claims
to be self-sufficing and isolated from the
universe. And in this open and hos-
pitable region, diverse consciousnesses
may enter into each other, lower con-
sciousnesses may unite themselves with
higher, even to the divine consciousness
itself.
Let us consider, then, a certain religious
phenomenon, the reality of which all
might be tempted to deny, because we
judge it not as superior, but as contrary,
[53]
WILLIAM JAMES
to the nature of the human ego — the
phenomenon of conversion. For one who
admits the existence of the subHminal
ego, this phenomenon, without ceasing
to be supernatural, becomes compatible
with the natural conditions of our psychic
existence. Religious conversion is, in
this sense, perhaps a sudden irruption,
perhaps a slow infiltration, through the
central part of the consciousness, of a
mass of impressions which are born in
the subliminal region and which, through
their intensity or through the confident
surrender of the ego, succeed in breaking
down the barriers within which the latter
was confined. Hence a displacement of
the soul-focus, a change of orientation
of the will and feeling.
There is, moreover, according to this
doctrine, a continual transition of truly
psychological experience to religious ex-
perience, as of physical experience to
psychological experience. And psycho-
logical experience is embodied in rehgious
experience, as is physical experience in
psychological experience.
[54]
RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
Having thus come, in following the
progress of a definite mode of experience,
to the discovery of a deeper experience,
we perceive it for the first time in a new
light. The physiological becomes, for
the psychologist, a part, artificially sepa-
rated and congealed, of the infinitely
complex and mobile current of conscious-
ness. Similarly the psychic, pure and
simple, the experience at the heart of
an impenetrable consciousness, becomes,
for one who places himself in the centre
of the religious consciousness, the acci-
dental and superficial manifestation of
an ego which, according to its true
essence, is capable of entering into the
vast and sympathetic communion of
personalities. Under the appearance of
the fixed laws and of the rigid determina-
tion of matter, there is the flux of
consciousness; beneath the conscious-
nesses, distinct from each other, of indi-
viduals, there is the mutual interpenetra-
tion of consciousnesses, coexisting with
their individuality in the sphere of the
spiritual and the divine.
[55]
m
PRAGMATISM
I
T would seem that in committing our-
selves to this third kind of experience,
to this contact with the deep reahty
which religion secures us, it ought to be
possible for us to grasp the metaphysical
problems, whatever they are, involved
in the postulates of the physical sciences,
and in those of psychology as a natural
science. But is it permissible to engage
at the outset in such a research?
The philosophy of James is distin-
guished from the greater number of
modern philosophical systems by this
very remarkable trait: in contradistinc-
tion to the injunction of Kant, it refuses
to begin with the criticism of our means
of knowledge. It throws itself directly
in medias res. It aspires to prove the
possibility of knowledge by creating it.
[56]
PRAGMATISM
In fact, it determines its task in each
domain in such a way that it need hardly
fear the reproach of temerity. That
physiology, in spite of the postulates
which it involves, may be treated as a
positive science is a fact which no one
to-day would care to contest. Similarly,
it seems, a psychology which strictly
forbids any incursion into the domain of
metaphysics, and which, discarding the
investigation of causes so-called, aims
only at being hypothetically explanatory,
can scarcely arouse objections. In reli-
gious psychology itself, as his book upon
the varieties of individual religious experi-
ence (omitting the postscript) presents
it, the object of the author is only to
analyse and explain phenomena empiri-
cally from the point of view of the
religious consciousness itself. Who would
deny the validity of such researches?
To seize, to describe and to co-ordinate
experience as such, without pronouncing
upon its relation to reality in itself, can-
not be an inadmissible temerity.
But again, is it indeed a question of the
[57]
WILLIAM JAMES
acquisition of knowledge pure and simple
if, in the light of religious experience, we
undertake to discover what is at the
bottom of the postulates of psychology
and physiology; if, not content with
grasping the relations of facts among
themselves, we attack the redoubtable
problems of the original cause and of the
phenomena which the sciences discard
as transcendent and insoluble? Is it,
moreover, strictly true that religious
psychology, normal psychology and physi-
ology claim only to describe and co-ordi-
nate appearances without concerning
themselves in the least about objective
certainty? Physiology, for its part, pur-
ports to be a form of knowledge in all the
force of the term, that is to say, really
to know and explain. And psychology,
not only natural but religious as well,
confident also in its postulates, does not
seriously admit that its descriptions and
explanations have literally only a sub-
jective value. However that may be,
to search, as the philosopher early and
late is drawn to do, into the meaning and
[58]
PRAGMATISM
the value of those postulates themselves,
is to commit ourselves, if we wish to
proceed methodically and circumspectly,
to treat of the relations of our concep-
tions to existence and to truth: that
is to say, of the critical problem itself.
At the point which we have reached, it
is no longer possible to shirk this problem.
The philosophy of experience, like the
others, sees at a certain point of its course
this stumbHng-block, as Kant called it,
barring its road.
The view which William James took
on this matter he designated by a name
which the American philosopher, Charles
Sanders Peirce, employed in 1878, in
connection with the same class of ideas:
the name of Pragmatism. Not that
WiUiam James considered Pragmatism
a modern invention. His work on this
doctrine is entitled: Pragmatism, a New
Name jor some Old Ways of Thinking,
And in this connection he places under
the patronage of Socrates, Aristotle,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and John Stuart
Mill the work of his colleagues, Dewey,
[59]
WILLIAM JAMES
F. C. S. Schiller, and their followers. But
what he considered only fragmentary
in the case of his predecessors has
become, or tends to become, as he says,
a general orientation of philosophic
thought.
The question of the value of experience
is a very embarrassing one. In dealing
with physical experience, being given a
materially practical object, we know
quite well what we are aiming at in this
domain when we say that the object's
value is established by a comparison of
our assertions with facts, as with a
measure existing outside ourselves. But,
on the other hand, if we are dealing with
the psychological idea of consciousness,
it is quite a different matter. Where
is now the duality of idea and fact, of
subject and object, which appears in-
volved in the idea of true knowledge?
One wiUingly admits that the identity
of subject and object which characterizes
consciousness is precisely what gives to
its evidence a unique and unassailable
value. But it is vain to attribute a
[60]
PRAGMATISM
distinctively scientific character to an
un verifiable aflSrmation; and, after all,
we do not in the least degree know what
are, in essence and effect, the states of
which we have consciousness. The term
consciousness, which signifies knowledge
of self, and which supposes, besides, an
understanding subject corresponding to
the object understood, expresses in reality
only a postulate. Sciousness is the term
which ought to be used to designate
the phenomenon correctly. Sciousness:
that is to say a modification of the think-
ing subject grasped in a purely subjective
fashion. But who can prove that such
a knowledge has any real value .^^
Much less, then, does the religious con-
sciousness contain within itself the proof
of the reality of its objects. How are
we to verify, that is, to compare with an
immediate perception of things, the idea
which the believer conceives of the cause
of his inner transformation, since the
cause cannot in any degree be dissociated
from the subjective feeling of this trans-
formation? The threefold division of
[61]
WILLIAM JAMES
experience doubtless corresponds to ex-
terior phenomena. But is this anything
else than an indication of the more and
more complicated problems which con-
front science, questions which it might
deem itself actually incapable of deaUng
with, but which, however difficult, should
not lead us to an abandonment of the
mechanistic method of explanation, which
would be nothing less than suicidal.
Not only, then, is the question of the
value of experience inevitable, but any
clear solution seems possible only by the
reduction of the second and third forms
of experience to the original physical
experience.
William James proceeds in this matter
as in all others; he goes from the known
to the unknown, from the .easy to the
difficult, these words being understood,
moreover, in their common and vulgar
acceptation.
What is the necessary and sufficient
condition in the physical order, that an
idea be received as true? Since science
[62]
PRAGMATISM
is fundamentally experimental, an idea
scientifically true is no longer an idea
considered as the portrait resembling the
thing which it represents; it is the con-
ception of a formula which tells us what
we ought to expect when we affirm that
a certain phenomenon exists. The law
of faUing bodies signifies that if I release
the body which I hold in my hand, I
shall see it on the earth- at the end of a
certain time determinable a priori. How
does this phenomenon operate intrinsi-
cally, of what actions is it the result,
what is really its cause? Science answers
these questions only up to a certain
point and then only apparently. Sooner
or later it finds itself in the presence of a
law which is not contained in any more
general law, and which has no other
significance than to indicate a certain
constant conjunction of sensible per-
ceptions.
In what, then, exactly, according to
science, does the truth of an idea consist .f^
It consists wholly in the faculty of
adapting the thought of man to reality.
[63]
WILLIAM JAMES
An idea is a prediction. It says : If
you are placed in a certain set of condi-
tions you will see certain phenomena
take place. The true idea is the one
which predicts truly: which, put to the
test, keeps its promise. The true idea
is the one which pays, which guarantees
a work remunerative, which, applied,
gives us the desired hold upon reality.
The truth of an idea, then, is not
determined by its origin, sensible or
rational, nor by its logical relation to
this or that principle; it only depends
upon its results. The truth of an idea
is constituted by its workings. True signi-
fies verified or verifiable, nothing less,
nothing more.
And since verification is necessarily
an action, the action, of some one, verity
is not an entity suspended in the void;
it is a proof, made or capable of being
made by certain individuals; it is a
certain satisfaction, susceptible of being
experienced by beings such as a human
person.
There are, moreover, various objects
[64]
■^
i
PRAGMATISM
about which man may desire this satis-
faction. He may wish to adapt himself
to things from a physical point of view;
the true idea in this case aims at a ma-
terial modification of things, and tells
us what sensible perception must be given
in order that a certain other may be pro-
duced. Man may desire to represent to
himself more easily and conveniently,
in a manner better adapted to the
tendency of his intelligence, the relations
of a certain set of phenomena one to
another; this desire is met by scientific
theory. We should sum up faithfully
enough the necessary and suflScient con-
ditions of a true idea by defining it as
follows: an idea which has the property
of adapting us, mentally or physically,
to some reality. ''What meaning indeed
can an idea's truth have, save its power of
adapting us either mentally or physically
to a reality?'' ^
If one wishes, in a word, to designate
the doctrine of knowledge which, for
1 The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods, Dec. 3, 1908, p. 692.
[65]
6
WILLIAM JAMES
the philosopher, disengages itseK from
the scrutiny of science, it seems, accord-
ing to James, that it should be called
pragmatism (from TrpSy/xa, action), as
opposed to conceptualism, or abstract
rationalism. Science, indeed, subordinates
ideas to facts, and not facts to ideas.
To science, reality is not a function of
truth: truth is a function of reality.
Facts truly real always come back,
in the last analysis, to observable man-
ifestations of some human action.
K such is the criterion of the true
idea, can one say that this takes place
in psychological and religious experience,
as it incontestably takes place in the
domain of physical experience?
Early in his career, the attention of
William James was directed to this
fundamental problem. One of his first
philosophic writings was a letter which
he addressed in French to the editors of
the Critique Philosophique, in 1878, under
the title: Some considerations upon the
objective method. He denied the claim
[66]
PRAGMATISM
that truth could be judged according
to some abstract concept and not by the
Kving and real experience of man himself.
He agreed on this point, he stated, with
the philosophic principles professed by
his good friends Renouvier and Pillon,
and he took pleasure in testifying to this
agreement in the dedication of his Princi-
ples of Psychology (1890): "To my dear
friend Frangois Pillon, as a token of
affection and an acknowledgment of what
I owe to the Critique Philosophique.''
The views propounded by James in
1878 became more and more confirmed
in his opinion by reflection. Why, he
demanded, should the true idea, as
defined by pragmatism, be excluded from
psychic experience and from reUgious
experience as such? In fact, the employ-
ment of certain psychic or religious
means may lead to the desired result
quite as well as the employment of purely
physical means. One movement may
be produced by another movement, but
on the other hand an idea or even a
movement may, as experience teaches
[67]
WILLIAM JAMES
US, be produced by an idea. We have
no need, in order to know whether a
certain idea is efficacious, to revert to the
physical conditions, doubtless indeter-
minable in their totality, of the produc-
tion of this idea; it is sufficient to consider
it in itself. Here, where the idea is
present, a certain phenomenon appears;
there, where it is absent, the phenomenon
does not take place. What more do we
require in order to recognize the idea
as the cause of the phenomenon? The
idea of a certain end to be pursued
awakens in me activities which, if this
idea had not intervened, would have
remained dormant. Such a religious be-
lief increases and augments my energy
extraordinarily or even cures an illness
of my body. Are not these facts pre-
cisely analogous to the service rendered
by a physical formula to one who wishes
to perform a material work.'^
There is even this difference in favour
of the religious idea, that while the sci-
entific idea can be only the proof of a
relation pre-existing in nature, religious
[68]
PRAGMATISM
belief can itself create the connection
which it aflSrms. Faith is a force: it
cures, exalts, engenders, by its own virtue,
when all physical means fail. There
are cases where the idea verifies itself
by that alone which it is.
We should not, then, reserve to physical
experience the monopoly of the true
idea. If we understand the word Truth
in its really scientific sense, we find that
the true idea is encountered likewise in
psychological experience and even in
religious experience.
Certain people, however, interpose ob-
jections. It is not legitimate, they con-
tend, to identify the verification of which
an idea is susceptible in psychologic and
religious matters with that which it
receives in a scientific matter. In one
case it is the experience of all which
affirms the faithfulness of an idea to its
promises and its fidelity; in the other it
is only an experience more or less particu-
lar and individual. Science is us; con-
sciousness, rehgion, is only me. How
can the same value be attributed to
[69]
WILLIAM JAMES
universal experience and to individual
experience? Scientific experience is ob-
jective experience, experience in itself.
It grows and becomes fixed, thanks to a
critical labour which disengages a totality
of ideas from individual impressions and
exists by itself henceforth as a distinct
reality, imposing itself upon the indi-
vidual consciousness. Religious experi-
ence on the contrary is experience purely
and irremediably subjective; it is experi-
ence, not as substantive, but as verb:
to experience; it is the individual actually
experiencing this or that impression which
he himself perhaps will not experience,
will not be able to experience to-morrow.
One, in a word, is knowledge, the other
is only feeling.
Within the pragmatic argument, more-
over, they add, a sophistry is hidden.
The true idea, according to pragmatism,
is an idea which verifies itself. Nothing
truer than this definition. But the idea
verifies itself because it is true; it is not
true because it verifies itself. The verifi-
cation is the sign, not the cause, of the
[70]
PRAGMATISM
verity. Pragmatism confounds the order
of things with the order of the operations
which we go through in order to know
them. Certainly an idea for us only
becomes true when we have been able
to verify it. But in itself it was, before
any examination, intrinsically true or
false. The radii of a circle did not wait
to be equal until we knew them to be so.
The verification has only been able to
bring into prominence a quality of the
idea which pre-existed in it. And every
effort of science tends to discover and
disengage the truth, eternally existing,
not to form out of the objective elements
of experience a truth always equally
relative and illusory. Either pragma-
tism, then, is without value, or it pre-
supposes the very theory of truth which
it claims to replace.
Such are the objections which many
oppose to pragmatism. They clearly
betray certain metaphysical prejudices
as well as certain habits of mind con-
tracted passively rather than inevitably
under the influence of scientific research.
[71]
WILLIAM JAMES
Truth, it is often supposed, implies a
value, not subjective but objective. A
true idea is not only true for me, it is
true in itself. And in what then can
this property consist if not in the relation
of the idea to an object fixed and absolute,
an object which may reside within the
idea or outside it, but which necessarily
distinguishes itself from the idea so far
as it is mine, and even from the idea so
far as it is verified by my experience or
by the experience of all men.^^ The true
idea, it is concluded, can only remain
true through conformity to its object.
The pragmatism of William James
makes no difficulty about accepting this
formula; but for him it is true of this
definition as of the general concept of
truth: it represents, not a dogma to
subscribe to, but a problem to solve,
and to solve empirically.
In what, precisely, does the object, the
norm of the true idea, consist.^ It may
be conceived in two ways. According
to certain philosophers who voluntarily
call themselves intellectualists or rational-
[72]
PRAGMATISM
ists, this object would be something
eternal, absolutely definite, immutable,
intelligible in itself and by itself. In
other words, it would be the truth itself,
as a thing in itself. Thus the intelleetu-
ahst doctrine may be summed up in
these terms: the true idea is that which
conforms to truth. Irreproachable affir-
mation ! But how do we know that there
exists such a static and dead truth as that
which this maxim supposes if it is not a
pure tautology, and what means have we
of verifying its existence .f* The sort of
science sought here, in any case, cannot
be furnished by experience, and James
professes to believe only in experience.
It is proper, then, to inquire whether
the object which the true idea necessarily
supposes may not be something quite
different from the transcendent truth
of the intellectualists.
In fact, another conception is possible,
namely that of common sense, in the
view of which the object to which our
ideas must conform is not a truth outside
of things, unseizable and problematic,
[73]
WILLIAM JAMES
but the reality itself in so far as
it is given by experience. It is with
this reality, properly defined, that the
pragmatism of James concerns itself;
it is in reality pure and simple that he
finds the source both of the existence and
of the properties of the idea, without
excepting its capacity of being true.
Knowledge, in the exact sense of the
word, is not, for him, anything ready-
made and pre-existing of which our
experience offers only a copy, more or
less rough and unfaithful. Living experi-
ence is, itself, the original and direct
contact of the mind with reality. Knowl-
edge, correctly so-called, only comes after;
it is the result of a work wrought by the
mind upon experience, following the sug-
gestions of experience itself. Without
allowing ourselves to be cheated by the
formulas which we invent in order to
sum up this experience, we can only
seek the real in that which is the most
immediately present to us.
For, if it is indeed this reality, and not
some phantom of truth in itself which
[74]
PRAGMATISM
constitutes the object to which our ideas
must relate themselves in order to be
true, there is no doubt that our moral
and religious beliefs cannot be true in
the same degree as the affirmations of
science. Science is a sure and powerful
means of action upon the real; but
psychic forces, moral and religious, per-
mit us no less to measure ourselves with
it and to make it ours. Science has
given to the human race telegraphy,
electricity, the diagnosis and cure of
certain maladies. Religion gives to some
men serenity, peace, moral power, the
cure of evils, even physical ones recalci-
trant to scientific treatment; or again,
a faith, an ardour and an enthusiasm
which transform the personality to its
very depths and which confer upon it
an extraordinary power over itself and
over the spirit of other men.
Arrived at this point of his argument,
William James took account of the
philosophy of Henri Bergson; and he
was struck by the fact that certain
[75]
WILLIAM JAMES
parts of this philosophy could lend sup-
port to his own theory. He maintained
that intellectual and conceptual knowl-
edge, of which positive science is the most
perfect example, is not original and
equivalent to the real, but derived and
relative. Yet how is this derivation
brought about .^ An important question,
for a proposed explanation becomes much
more probable when it shows, not only
that two terms are bound together but
also how the transition may be made
from one to the other.
But, while WiUiam James had left
this problem in the dark, Bergson, start-
ing from the principle that the immediate
data of consciousness are essentially con-
tinuous, indistinct and mobile, and con-
sequently incapable of being adequately
represented by concepts the essence of
which is discontinuity and fixity, ex-
plained exactly how, in order to satisfy
our practical needs in a spatial world,
the understanding, in applying to the
purely qualitative data of consciousness
those forms of quantity, homogeneity
[76]
PRAGMATISM
and immutability which it bears within
itself, forms a group of conveniently
handled objects which are precisely those
which science applies itself to grasping,
defining and classifying.
Thus, starting from another point,
and occupied with other problems, Henri
Bergson upon a leading question arrived
at views analogous to those of James,
and, by the development which he gave
them, very conveniently completed the
theory of the American professor. What
could be more significant than such a
chance encounter! Wilham James was
gratified and took pride in it, and gladly
called attention to it in the Hibbert
lectures given in Manchester College,
Oxford, in 1909.
The thought of James, however, follows
its own course, which is not identified
with the progress of Bergson's philosophy.
To Bergson, if the understanding alters
any subject given through immediate
experience, it is because it makes
for the practical. With James, if
intellectual knowledge is inadequate, it
[77]
WILLIAM JAMES
is because, being accommodated to
the conditions of a practice of a purely
material sort, it is ill-adapted to pure
practice, which would be the direct
action of soul upon soul. Besides, if
intellectual knowledge is, to Bergson,
derived and not original, it is because
it contains certain elements which appear
foreign to the immediate and purely
intuitive data of consciousness; these
in fact are reduced to durance in them-
selves, isolated, not only from space but
from time itself. For James it is exactly
the degree of complexity and of richness
of experience which measures the degree
of its authenticity. Experience abso-
lutely immediate and intuitive would be
total experience.
In this way the doctrine of William
James concerning the relation of reahty
to experience is rounded out. Our ex-
perience differs from the real, its object,
in so far as it is concerned with a partial
and incomplete experience, beyond which
we may aim at an experience at once
deeper and broader. But in proportion
[78]
PRAGMATISM
as we comprehend more things we are
so much the better able to put each of
them in its place, to consider it in all its
relations, and thus to arrive at a just
conclusion; which amounts to saying
that we are still nearer the point of view
of the real itself.
Religious experience, which is of all
experience the deepest, the broadest and
the richest, gives us a glimpse of this
pre-eminent reahty. Fully concrete, the
truly real is a relation existing not only
between concepts but between persons,
not only between things mutually ex-
terior and pushing their way about
among each other like marbles, but
between free beings, communicating in-
teriorly among themselves by action.
Im Anfang war die Tat^
But if it is true, that among all our
modes of knowledge this total experience
to which religious experience tends to
approximate alone coincides with the
truly real, it follows that the objectivity
of which the other forms of experience
^In the beginning was the deed. Goethe, Faust, I.
[791
WILLIAM JAMES
have possessed themselves is, at bottom,
only their relation to religious experience.
In so far as the personal and relatively
closed consciousness finds in a conscious-
ness open to the action of other conscious-
nesses the explanation of its own nature,
it may legitimately be considered as a
reality. In so far as the sciences of
matter receive from psychological ex-
perience certain principles which account
for their own experience, in so far are
they other than an abstract classification
of images without originals.
The objectivity of the sciences and
that of psychology depends, then, upon
the objectivity of religious experience,
far from the former being conceived as
alone effective and true. And the real
world, seen under its true aspect, if it is
in conformity to the idea under which
the sciences conceive it, is, above all, in
its very foundation, whatever the moral
and rehgious life of the soul proves and
makes it. The soul is freedom itself,
and this freedom is the root of existence
and of experience. Experience lays hold
[80]
PRAGMATISM
of what is, what happens. For nothing
in the universe is ready-made. Every-
where and always the universe is in the
making. The humblest consciousness
which, through confidence and sympathy,
joins other consciousnesses in the search
for better things, collaborates with God,
in this world of which he is a citizen, to
create loftier destinies.
[81]
IV
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
UAMES calls the doctrine in which his
pragmatism results Radical Empiricism.
He does not claim that this conclusion
is its necessary outcome. Pragmatism
is essentially a method, consisting in
interpreting all concepts in terms of
action; the philosophic doctrine to which
the employment of this method shall
lead is not predetermined. With our
author the result obtained is the con-
ception of an experience which, while
remaining living and individual, becomes
more and more comprehensive, and which
in proportion as it is broader tends more
and more to constitute, in itself alone,
the being itself. Total immediate experi-
ence and truly objective reality are one;
such is the principle.
It follows from this that the meta-
[82]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
physical problems involved in the theories
of the positive sciences do not necessarily
transcend our power of comprehension.
Experience itself, well directed, allows
us to approach metaphysics.
It was, then, in perfect accord with his
experimental researches that James, par-
ticularly after he had studied the con-
ditions of knowledge, should have applied
himself to the study of various problems
which, in the general opinion, belong to
this form of speculation.
In 1897, having been commissioned to
give at Harvard the lecture upon human
immortality instituted by Miss Caroline
Haskell IngersoU, Professor James treated
the subject according to his largely
empirical method and brought to it
certain original ideas.
What, he queried, is the great objection
which is opposed to the possibihty of
human immortaUty? It is that thought
is a function of the brain. Nothing truer,
[83]
WILLIAM JAMES
as William James the physiologist freely
admits. But what does the word S'^nc-
Hon here imply?
One of the ideas by means of which
we define this word is that of production.
When we say that light is a function of
the electric circuit, or that it is a function
of the waterfall to furnish power, we
understand thereby that one of the two
phenomena produces the other. In a
case of this kind, there is no doubt that
the disappearance of the cause entails
that of the effect. But is this the only
sense of the word function known to us.f*
The physical world itself offers any
number of cases where the function of
an agent is not productive but simply
transmissive. Such is the function of a
lens in relation to hght. But what is
to prevent our believing that the brain,
instead of creating thought, is simply the
channel through which it is transmitted
from a spiritual world into our material
world? Nothing, moreover, runs counter
to the view that in the spiritual world
itself our individuality has its true and
[84]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
lasting foundation. But if this is the
case, it is of sUght importance if the brain
be disintegrated; spiritual individuality
would not be aflfected by that, but would
exist in the world where it has its origin,
not, it would appear, without preserving
some modifications received during its
earthly existence.
Physiology cannot prove these things;
but no more can it contradict them. Its
only legitimate conclusion in these mat-
ters is the Ignorabimus of Dubois-Rey-
mond.
On the other hand, a great number of
the facts of psychological experience, such
as men have observed in all times,
notably those which that profound psy-
chologist Frederic W. H. Myers with all
the scholar's care has explained in his
articles in the Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, and in his cele-
brated book. Human Personality and
its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) —
these facts tend to show that our
psychic hfe is effectively susceptible of
transcending the capacity of our brain,
[85]
WILLIAM JAMES
and that in certain cases, at least, this
organ is really only an organ of trans-
mission and not an agent of production.
Thus it is that certain cases of religious
conversion, of providential direction in
answer to prayer, of instantaneous cure,
of premonition, of apparitions at the
moment of death, of clairvoyant visions
or impressions, of mediumistic power,
unexplainable by the intrinsic properties
of the brain, become intelligible, if the
brain is an organ of communication
between our world and another.
If, then, the immortality of the human
individual cannot be considered as demon-
strated, it must be acknowledged that
for any man who relies only upon
experience and who follows it wherever
it leads, the principal objection that
may be urged against it is no longer
valid.
The celebrated work. The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), shows us
James venturing, in a postscript or appen-
dix, upon the evidence of his deepest and
[86]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
most intimate personal experience, to
crown his distinctively scientific beliefs
with the super-beliefs of a religious and
metaphysical character. Such are the
belief in the reality of the good and
powerful being whom the religious call
God; the belief in a spiritual relation
between this being and ourselves; even
the belief in a direct action of this being,
and of spiritual powers in general, upon
the details, as well as the whole of the
phenomena, of our universe.
* *
The next to the last work published by
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
(1909), treats of monistic idealism, of
Hegel, of the empirical pantheism of
Fechner, of the relation of the one and the
many according to Bergson, of the conti-
nuity of experience, of God as a perfect
being, of our beliefs as elements of reality;
all subjects of a metaphysical character.
From one end of this work to the other
a very strict sense of the fundamental
[87]
WILLIAM JAMES
identity of experience and reality is evi-
dent, and, at the same time, the effort to
persuade the individual to break through
the barriers which separate his own
consciousness from the consciousness of
other beings.
Philosophy, we are told, is a thing of
passionate vision rather than of logic;
for logic can only find, after the event,
reasons to explain the ideas of the
vision.
James sets to work to convict of im-
potence and of nulHty the Absolute of
the Idealists, which is not felt and lived,
but dialectically constructed by our un-
derstanding. How can this artificial con-
cept, void of reality, influence our conduct
and our condition .^^
On the other hand he accepts cordially,
from the philosophy of the celebrated
psycho-physicist, Theodor Fechner, the
concrete doctrine of an Earth-Soul, as
a pragmatic substitute for the abstract
One of the Idealists. Reduced to their
own power alone, as Fechner points out,
our consciousnesses could not disclose
[88]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
themselves to each other. One individual
in his primitive condition is impervious to
another. But through the action of higher
powers, themselves fundamentally united
with the divine consciousness, our indi-
vidual consciousnesses may enter into
relations one with another — may mu-
tually inter-penetrate, love and under-
stand each other. Fechner has clearly
seen that it is essential from the moral
point of view, but unintelligible from
the physical, that a man should surmise
what is within another man and interest
himseK therein. The respective relation
of diverse individuals to a superior con-
sciousness furnishes the solution of this
troublesome problem.
Are we, however, in the earthly life
itself, asks James, as completely strangers
one to another as Fechner believes .^^ Do
we live in this world, do we die, neces-
sarily alone .'^ We are irremediably alone,
it is true, if we consent to think only
with our senses and our intellect. But
as Henri Bergson has clearly seen, there
is within us another way of touching
[89]
WILLIAM JAMES
reality than through sensible and dialectic
experience. An intuition exists through
which two beings, instead of shutting
themselves up in their respective indi-
vidualities like epicurean atoms, may
inter-penetrate without becoming identi-
fied with each other. "All is one," said
Pascal, " one is the other, like the Trinity."
The God in whom we can unite ourselves
one to another, who has the power to
cure the natural blindness of our soul
with regard to the inwardness of other
souls, — this God of love and of inteUi-
gence is not far from us, he is within us.
The connection which the Idealist-in-
tellectuahsts vainly hoped to impose
upon things from outside by means of
abstract and inert formulas, we find
sketched, imitated in the things them-
selves, if behind their apparent relation
of pure juxtaposition we know how, by
a profounder, more direct experience, to
grasp their relations of inter-conjunction,
of mutual participation, finally of intimate
fusion.
Now the continuous stream of con-
[90]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
sciousness, attentively observed, oflfers
us something quite different from fixed
and respectively homogeneous elements
juxtaposed one to another. It is when,
separated more or less from feeling, and
as it were relaxed, it retards its natural
movement, as happens especially in scien-
tific experience, that the thought sees
before it the semblances of discretely
multiple substances. In its true and
normal Kfe, where there is feeling as
well as intelligence, the consciousness is
animated by a rapid movement, and it
perceives, not substances, but perpetual
and changing transitions, an intimate
combination of qualities, and not distinct
entities. This arithmetical multipUcity
is only found in inert things, imagined by
a mind limited to thought alone; it is
absent from the concrete mind, from
which the real being, finally, is not to
be distinguished.
The more we force ourselves to see
things in a natural way, and not to use
our eyes like a rude microscope or tele-
scope, the more we see that beings are
[91]
WILLIAM JAMES
one with their relations — relations which
are fundamentally of a metaphysical
nature, which unite without assimilating,
and which allow individuahty and plu-
rality, indispensable conditions of our
experience and of our existence, to exist
conjointly with the tendency toward the
harmony and living union which belong
to the perfect existence.
The essential pluralism of things is
thus more credible than their absolute
reduction to unity. God himself may
be conceived as a person who does not
exclude the existence of other persons.
Need it be said, now, that these things
are, purely and simply, that is to say that
in their essence they are, once for all,
eternally and immutably all that they
may and should be? Would the supreme
formula, the principle of necessity, that
is to say universal identity which science
dreams of, be the measure of the complete
being?
Judging by concrete and real experi-
ence, such a doctrine is inadmissible.
For, according to this experience, the
[92]
METAPHYSICAL VIEWS
being is essentially living, self -producing,
self -creating; it is not exposed to our
notice for all eternity like an object
ready-made in a shop. Even our beliefs
and our eflForts are factors in its history,
which is its substance. We are the
friends and the collaborators of God.
It depends upon us in a certain measure
to render habitable or uninhabitable the
world in which we live. And in the
same measure as we have brought about
the triumph of the principles of sympathy,
of understanding of the feelings and
ideas of others, of justice rendered all
intentions, of disinterestedness, of beauty,
of heroism, and of devotion to ideal
causes, this principle will survive.
[93
PEDAGOGY
E'
iVERY system of philosophy explic-
itly or implicitly ends in a doctrine
of education. William James, for his
part, considered empty and futile any
assertion which did not signify a certain
direction given to human conduct. But
it seems that, for our philosopher, the
question of education presents a particu-
lar importance. Education is distinc-
tively the phenomenon in which the
transformation is made from theory to
practice. It is in modifying men that
ideas may determine certain changes
in the course of events. But if Ameri-
cans in general desire above all things
not to be slaves of the accepted, not to
limit themselves to conformity, but to
make use of it, William James in particu-
lar, for even stronger reasons, possesses
[94]
PEDAGOGY
this same mental disposition, since his
philosophy depends upon the eternal
incompleteness of things, and upon the
possibility that faith and human will
may play a role in their history.
The problem of education is not, for
James, a simple application of theoretic
science. It is the natural and logical, but
also original, consequence of the theory.
In fact the general result to which his
philosophy leads is the effective value
assured to the notion of possibility.
There is, according to him, both within
and without man, an infinity of real
possibilities. The problem thus pre-
sented to the thinker consists on the
one hand in knowing how he must go
to work in order to awaken, develop
and render useful those possibiHties in
themselves latent ; and on the other hand,
in knowing what possibilities amid this
infinite multitude it is expedient to select
and in what sense it is expedient to direct
their development. But, man being the
creature in whom, for us, the transition
from the possible to the real begins, the
[95]
WILLIAM JAMES
problem is, before all things, the problem
of human education.
The very reason which, with James,
makes the pedagogical problem the nat-
ural conclusion of philosophic research,
determines the exact relation of pedagogy
to the theoretic judgments upon which
it depends.
In the greater number of systems,
whatever they may be, pedagogy tends to
become reduced to a mechanical applica-
tion of the principles proposed by the
corresponding theoretical sciences. In
vain we descant upon the difference
between science and art. Failing a cor-
rect principle, art, in fact, sees itself
bandied about between chance and the
tyranny of rules. With James, art is
fundamentally a difiPerent thing from
science; it is more comprehensive. Every
theoretical judgment, every concept, is
an extract, a part, more or less imper-
fect, of some reality; the product of art
is a reality. In the light of the formulas
which indicate certain conditions for its
realization, the hving work contains some-
[96]
PEDAGOGY
thing really new, irreducible, unknow-
able a priori by pure theory. And no
longer does it reduce itself to a chance
mixture of concepts, to an issue, an
empty hypothesis imagined in order to
confer a semblance of creative power
upon the mechanism, and in this way
render it capable of giving to certain
things an air of originality. There exist
real beings, effectively individual and
active, who, in realizing their powers by
means of actualities, overstep the bounds
of science, without, for all that, abandon-
ing themselves to the caprices of chance.
On the other hand, there is no conflict
between the ideal order pursued by the
active subject, and the real order where
original action must come in. Natural
laws are barriers which the subject could
not overleap with impunity, but on this
side of those barriers a place always
remains open for free action.
Yet if pedagogy depends upon science,
particularly upon psychology, it is neither
a simple appHcation of science, nor is it
a practice given over in its distinctive
[97]
8
WILLIAM JAMES
part to fantasy and caprice; it is in the
true sense of the word an art, using science
with intelligence and with freedom.
* *
William James's pedagogy has the re-
markable characteristic of not propound-
ing in the beginning the problem of an
end. Do we know a priori if our being
has any destination, if any duty is
imposed upon our will.^ For one who
believes only in experience, the only
legitimate point of departure is the
reahty which first strikes our attention.
And this reahty, in the order of the
psychic life, is the dependence of the
soul upon the bodily mechanism. While
Plato and Aristotle give the first place
to the rational part of the human
spirit, the psychology of James gives
this place to the active part, and accord-
ingly makes biology the basis of psy-
chology.
Human education, then, should be
above all things mechanical. It con-
[98]
PEDAGOGY
sists, in this sense, in developing in the
individual certain habits, in employing
therefor, according to the instructions of
science, all appropriate means.
The habits, the acquisition of which
is most necessary, are evidently those
which relate to the conservation and
the normal development of the organism
and of the psychic functions.
But it is important to observe that
man has the faculty of acquiring a mass
of habits of which originally he did
not possess a single rudiment. It is
useful for him to acquire a great variety
of habits. Every habit is a power, and
the more powers a man has at his disposal,
the more capable he is of various activ-
ities, the more fully he will live. We
may then lay down this fundamental
maxim: no acquisition without reaction;
no impression without correlative ex-
pression. Everything taught to a pupil
is to be for him the point of departure
of a certain habit, is to determine in his
organism a certain display of activity.
On the other hand, it is important
[99]
WILLIAM JAMES
that these habits should be possibiUties,
powers at the service of man, not fataU-
ties which tyrannize over him. The edu-
cator must take care, then, to maintain
in the soul the suppleness, the power
of adaptation, of change, of acquisi-
tion, of experiment which is its privilege.
The very multiplicity and diversity of
habits will contribute to render them
more tractable.
In seeing James begin thus by setting
up an automaton in order to induce in
it, through the influence of the physical
upon the psychic, certain mental deter-
minations, Pascal's famous exhortation
is recalled: "Act always as if you beUeve;
take the holy water and have masses
said; naturally that will make you
believe and stupefy you."
But in spite of the resemblance, the
difference is great. Pascal considers the
case of a man whose reason leads him
to believe and who nevertheless cannot
do so. The obstacle, according to him,
is in the passions which prevent the heart
obeying the reason. He seeks, therefore,
[100]
PEDAGOGY
the means of subduing these passions,
and of restoring to itself the mind which
had allowed itself to be led astray by
their seduction. He utilizes, in this sense,
the influence of acts upon feehngs. The
habit of material obedience reacting upon
the desires of the heart will render it docile
and at the same time draw away the
mind, which it has deluded, from its
stupid contentment with itself and its
pretentious subtleties.
Contrary to Pascal, James in this
first phase of education recognizes man
only as automaton. He does not indicate
the method of employing the automaton
so as to make the heart execute the com-
mand of the reason; he only aims at
giving to the human automaton all the
plasticity, power and perfection of which
it is capable, precisely in so far as it is
automaton. There are within it cer-
tain potentialities, certain latent forces.
The only question, so far, is to know how
these potentialities may be awakened
from their sleep and brought to the state
of organic forces, immediately capable
[101]
WILLIAM JAMES
of psychic effects. It is a question of
the creation of psychic faculties, as
numerous and as varied as possible.
What moral tendencies ought to be
sought for elsewhere? Has the human
life any other purpose than its own
preservation and the unbridled exercise
of its powers? At this point these prob-
lems do not yet arise, and James presents
them only if experience leads him to
do so.
The mechanical training of the organ-
ism and of the activity is, however, only
the first stage of education.
In fact, a training which has in view
the human spirit, neither is nor can be
an entirely mechanical operation con-
stituting in itself alone something final
and complete. Who says consciousness
says election, choice with the view of adap-
tation; and no sooner does a phenomenon
take a psychological form than it con-
tains something other than the mechan-
ical resultant of its material conditions.
[102]
PEDAGOGY
But from the very fact that conscious-
ness selects as soon as it begins to exert
itself, it tends to select in a more and
more suitable way. For it makes use,
in this case, of another instrument than
experience and instinct pure and simple.
This instrument is the idea. Thanks
to the idea, or mental representation of
a determined state of consciousness and
of its habitual results, the ego can transfer
by association, to some useful act which
leaves it indifferent, the interest which
at the time attaches itself to some other
act, and thus procure for its power of
selection a new ease and suppleness.
Now, encountering thus, beyond the
mechanism, the idea in the human soul,
an educator open to the suggestions of
experience will make use of this different
kind of instrument in order to increase
the power and excellence of the human
being.
The idea makes some very remarkable
operations possible. It permits us, first:
to preserve the traces of the past; second:
to represent to ourselves some new phe-
[ 103 ]
WILLIAM JAMES
nomenon which is so far only a possibihty;
third : to employ the resources bequeathed
us by the past in order to realize this
novelty.
The idea is thus the connecting link
between the old and the new, between
conservation and creation. By its means,
man, freed from physiological fatality,
makes use of the psychic mechanism,
that first stage of conscious life, for the
realization of a form of superior existence.
What was an obstacle becomes a means.
It is thus that in considering the power,
not only of the organism, but of the idea,
that is to say in enlarging its field of
observation, in going from the part to
the whole, we see the whole react upon
the part, and so are led to correct the
conception of the human spirit as the
exclusive consideration of the part had
been able to suggest it. The role which
the idea plays in our life teaches us that
the physiological mechanism is in no way
inflexible, that it shows, on the contrary,
a certain suppleness, and that it may,
in some measure, modify itself so as to
[104]
PEDAGOGY
offer the requisite material conditions for
a broader and higher hfe.
Thus, reasoned and intellectual edu-
cation is added naturally to the phys-
iological and mechanical. The former
teaches man to dominate the physical
mechanism. It should also teach him
to maintain the freedom of his intelligence
with regard to a new mechanism, truly
intellectual, which, following the natural
course of things, tends to become fixed
and to oppose this freedom.
William James calls old-fogyism some-
thing like encrustation, the spontaneous
malady of intelligence which it is impor-
tant to prevent or to combat if we desire
this faculty to fulfil effectively its func-
tion as intermediary between preserva-
tion and progress.
The concepts present in our intelli-
gence at a given moment are so many
moulds which permit it to receive and to
understand the objects offered to it. But
in order that we may in some measure re-
alize the true nature of these new objects
offered us, and in order that we may be
[ 105 ]
WILLIAM JAMES
able to derive from what we see certain
new ideas, it is necessary not only that
we should choose concepts best suited to
the given objects, but in addition, that
we should subject the concepts them-
selves to modifications demanded by
certain objects for which they have
not been constructed. The old fogy is
a man who has lost control over his
concepts; he no longer knows how to
bend and adapt them; he applies them
as they are to the objects which he
wishes to consider; and consequently, he
understands the new only in reducing it
to the old, that is to say, in denying it.
If, consequently, he forms a philosophic
theory of his state of mind, he tends to
admit as legitimate in the order of con-
sciousness only science properly so called,
that is, the reduction of the unknown to
the known, of the possible to the given,
of the future to the past; and he considers
illusory the existence of art and of action
which imply the creation of something
irreducible to the given. Old-fogyism,
says James, is the habit of mind which
[106]
PEDAGOGY
we laugh at in old men; they understand
only themselves, and speak only of them-
selves. But, upon closer inspection, we
find that this state may appear at any
age. There are young and tender fogies
who are in no way behind hardened old
men in their inability to understand any-
thing which disarranges their ideas.
Intellectual education is essentially the
preventive treatment for fogyism; it
teaches us to enrich the mind with the
greatest possible number of widely useful
concepts, and at the same time to main-
tain intact and virgin, so far as possible,
the faculty of adapting these concepts,
the expression of the past, to the new
objects which constitute the interest of
the future.
Such is the second phase of education;
to the possibihty of determining in accord-
ance with what is already realized, it
adds the possibility of determining in
accordance with purely ideal ends. This
extension of possibilities is the fruit of
[ 107 ]
WILLIAM JAMES
the idea, the nature of which is inter-
mediary between what is and what may
be.
Is this second the last phase? If it
were we ought to content ourselves with
searching for the new, for love of the new
as such, without trying to make a choice
between novelties. The idea, in itself, is
indifferent to the issues entrusted to it; it
casts in the mould of the given, and learns
to realize alike the evil and the good,
the erratic and the ingenious, the just
and the unjust. But is action for action's
sake the supreme end? Can we not,
ought we not, seek to determine the
objects toward which action should tend
if it aspires to possess that perfection
of which, in man's case, it is capable?
To this problem which intellectual
education itself leads us to propose is
related a notion which we find present
in our consciousness in regard to every
one of our actions: the notion of value.
The directing of the will toward those
things which have a true value is the
third phase in human education; it is,
[108]
PEDAGOGY
properly speaking, the education of action,
or moral education.
The point of departure for this educa-
tion is the effort to cure a sort of con-
genital malady of human nature: the
blindness of every consciousness to that
which goes on in the consciousness of
others. This is a subject which William
James had greatly at heart, and which
he treated with contagious enthusiasm in
his celebrated lecture to students: "On
a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"
(Talks to Teachers, etc., p. 229). We
judge others by ourselves; we do not
understand them. We misjudge the
motives for their actions, their way of
looking at life, the ideal which they
honour and dream of incorporating in
their lives. We assume that they are
wholly found in the phrases which they
declaim, in order to speak as we do or to
assert themselves before the world accord-
ing to the fashionable barbarism, as if
they themselves dared reveal, or could
even see clearly, the secret movements
of their own hearts.
[109]
WILLIAM JAMES
Man is both better and worse than
he asserts. It would be a much more
interesting thing than we imagine to
put ourselves sometimes in the place of
others. We should realize, besides, that
truth, that goodness, are things too great,
too rich in various elements, to be en-
compassed by a single individual, and
that thus a real value may be found in
feelings and conceptions which differ
from our own. The tolerance which
we owe our fellow creatures is not a
condescension, a reprieve indulgently
accorded those who do not think as we
do in order that they may correct them-
selves; it is a strict duty and a necessity.
Tolerance is a wrong term; we ought
to say sympathy; it is the opening of
the eyes of consciousness; it is the recog-
nition of the value which belongs to the
personaUties of others in the very ways
in which they differ from our own; it is,
in fine, the communion of consciousnesses
in the common effort to realize an ideal
which is beyond the power of a single
individual, and which calls for as many
[110]
PEDAGOGY
workers as possible. The monistic point
of view is a strange one for little indi-
viduals like ourselves; the universe in
which we live and in which we have the
opportunity not only to develop and en-
rich ourselves, but to know, to act and
to create, is a pluralistic universe.
What is it then, exactly, that we ought
to seek out, love and aid in the conscious-
ness of others.'^ For it is not enough to
wish something other than ourselves in
order to wish as we ought. Is it possible
to determine with any precision what
really constitutes moral value, what
gives human life its worth? To describe
in an adequate fashion the proposed
object of our activity is a contradictory
enterprise, since such an operation sup-
poses that the object in question contains
only what is already seen, and in conse-
quence would be an object, not of action,
but of intellection pure and simple.
But it should be possible to trace some
sketch of it if our liberty is anything but
caprice and chance.
For two things are certain. In order
[111]
WILLIAM JAMES
that a human Hfe may be appreciated
by a consciousness which takes value for
its criterion, this Hfe must, in the first
place, exhibit what is called virtue, that
is, courage, self-denial, purity of inten-
tion, perseverance, good-will. In the
second place, it must be consecrated to
the pursuit of an ideal worthy of the
name.
And a third condition must be added
to these: that these two conditions
themselves be intimately united. Nei-
ther one nor the other, taken separately,
can make a great life; virtue with-
out an ideal cannot aspire to the name
of heroism; the merely ambitious man
displays virtue, and some scoundrels
are capable of self-denial; nor does the
mere conception of an ideal suffice to
ennoble man. What a disparity between
thought and deed! And are not our
thoughts within us rather than our very
selves .f^
The thing which gives value to life
is virtue, in so far as it is employed to
serve a great cause; it is man giving
[1121
PEDAGOGY
himself, devoting himself, to the reaUza-
tion of something really higher than
himself.
And now shall we continue to inquire
what, precisely, constitutes this higher
form of existence which we call the ideal,
and what are, in truth, the modes of
activity which we call virtues? Cer-
tainly it is justifiable to continue to
propose these questions, but it is not the
province of a philosophy of experience and
of action to seek to give a final answer,
as a scientific rationalism would do.
Life is, and remains, a problem, infinite
as itself, and which it alone can progres-
sively resolve.
[113]
CONCLUSION
W]
HILE he was preparing to make
this voyage to Europe, his last hope,
the voyage from which he was to re-
turn, alas! only to die, William James
applied himself to the composition of a
resume of the whole of his philosophy
for the use of students, a book universally
desired, which he had meant to entitle.
Introductory Text Booh for Students in
Metaphysics, I read in Professor Perry's
excellent article (The Harvard Graduates'
Magazine, December, 1910) that through-
out the cruel sufferings, the terrible
emotions which marked this journey.
Professor James, who had taken with
him the papers relative to this book,
worked at it incessantly, and returned
home having made great progress. And
I learn from Harvard that the work will
appear in the Spring of 1911 under the
[114]
CONCLUSION
title, Some Problems of Philosophy ^
He deals specifically with certain meta-
physical problems: the Being, Percept
and Concept, the One and the Many, the
problem of novelty, faith and the right
to believe. The style, in spite of the
haste of its preparation, is more than ever
frank, simple and beautiful. How grate-
ful we ought to be to the master for this
last benefit; for he alone could have
written this universally desired resume.
For our part, the slightest article of
this genial writer appears so rich in facts
and suggestions, so directly derived in
all its parts from intercourse with things
themselves, so charged with thoughts
and curious expressions upon which we
would like to meditate at leisure, that,
constrained to make a choice, we ask
ourselves at every step if the views which
we leave alone are not even more interest-
ing than those which we take up. The
student who rudely called Professor
^ Published, with title given above, and a sub-title,
A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophyy in April,
1911, by Longmans, Green and Co.
[115]
WILLIAM JAMES
James to order because he forgot to
supply him with material for his examina-
tion was right. James ignored, or rather
he condemned, the art of transforming
the mental activity, personal and in-
cessant in his own nature, into industrial
products bought ready-made and given
up to others untouched save by the
finger tips. He called ''bald-headed and
bald-hearted" those students without an
inner life, without vigour and without
enthusiasm, who neither think nor investi-
gate, and who, in order to cut a figure at
graduation, clothe their brains in rags
of knowledge like a wig on an empty
skull.
This is the first very remarkable trait of
James's philosophy; it is anti-academic,
anti-official, anti-scholastic; it is ad-
dressed to all, it speaks the language of
all.
This external characteristic is itself
the result of an important inner char-
acteristic. WiUiam James does not take
his point of departure in the concepts
elaborated by former philosophers in
[116]
CONCLUSION
order to submit them to a new elabora-
tion and to form some unpublished com-
bination of them. Even more than in
the books of philosophers he read in the
book of nature and of science, and in
the great book of the world and in him-
seK. "Concrete, solid, thick," that is to
say, full of living reality : these were the
words he employed to designate concep-
tions worthy of interest. "Abstract,"
in his tongue, implied the idea of the facti-
tious, the academic, the futile.
At this time, when philosophy seems
to be going through a critical period,
notably because of its more and more
direct intercourse with the positive
sciences, the shining example given by
James, of a thought which, persuaded
that it is not sufficient unto itself, plunges
eagerly into reality, into science, into
life, there to refresh and rejuvenate itself,
is one, it would seem, to arouse universal
attention.
It is clear, moreover, that William
James, disrespectful critic of great sys-
tems, does not propose for his own part
[117]
WILLIAM JAMES
to create a new system. I do not ven-
ture to say that he would have subscribed
to Emerson's splendid words: "With con-
sistency a great soul has simply nothing
to do." But it is certain that a logical
contradiction scandalized him less than
an idea under which it seemed to him
impossible to place a fact. At bottom
he did not in the least scorn logical
unity, but he placed it before the mind
as a goal, and not behind as a thing given.
In his opinion we do not know a 'priori
whether a logical unity exists in things,
but we seek to see it and to put it there.
Only the result can show in what measure
the universe realizes or can realize it.
On the other hand, it is very diflScult to
affirm that what appears contradictory
from one point of view will remain so
for one who can rise to a higher point of
view. It seems contradictory to say
that the mind acts upon matter, and mat-
ter upon the mind. This view, however,
answers faithfully enough to our first
experience, and it is advisable to admit
it at least provisionally. But perhaps a
[118]
CONCLUSION
more profound experience is capable of
weakening, of dissolving even this appar-
ent contradiction.
The philosophy of James is essentially
free. It goes boldly forward with ex-
perience as its only guide. The result
of his investigation is very remarkable.
He starts from science as if it were in
itself all knowledge, and the very develop-
ment of science finally leads in his opinion
to a type of speculation which at first
appeared to be excluded by its own
method, viz., metaphysics. Psychology
effects the transition.
Hence an original conception of the
relations of metaphysics and science.
Metaphysics cannot exist without science;
it lives by it. But science can neither
abolish nor absorb metaphysics; the lat-
ter possesses in the presence of science
its principle and its own reality, like the
living creature in the presence of the
substances by which it is nourished.
Several individuahty and collective soli-
darity — such is, on the one hand and
[119]
WILLIAM JAMES
on the other and under various interpreta-
tions, the condition for science and for
metaphysics.
The essential idea of James's meta-
physics is the identification of reahty
with the broadest, completest, most pro-
found and most direct experience; that
is to say, with the most intimate Ufe of
consciousness.
Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlosseriy
Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist tot,^
This Swedenborgian doctrine seems
to inform the whole of James's work.
The metaphysical problem is that of
the relations, not of phenomenon to phe-
nomenon, or of concept to concept, but
of being to being. The blindness with
which we are afl3icted in this world in
regard to the inner personality of other
men is not incurable. There are, for
those who know how to open the eyes
of the mind, certain relations other than
the external and mechanical relations of
impenetrable atoms. There are truly
* The Spirit- World is not closed: your mind is closed,
your heart is dead.
[120]
CONCLUSION
inward relations. Religious experience
lays hold on this profound communion.
Metaphysics consists in taking an in-
creasing cognizance of the world called
super-natural, where individuality par-
takes of soUdarity, and in connecting it
more and more directly with this immedi-
ate and material world, where the feeling
of our immediate needs is able to con-
vince us that our destiny reveals itself in
its entirety. And in considering things
under this aspect, metaphysics contrib-
utes to make them so.
A philosophy very coherent, after all,
and one which becomes clearer and clearer
as it develops. Perhaps upon one point,
however, the thought of James was still
in process of definition.
If, apparently, he chose as his device
the formula of Faust, Im Anfang war die
Tat, "In the Beginning was the Deed,"
we may ask what, after all, in his eyes, is
this action, the origin of things? What
[121]
WILLIAM JAMES
are these spiritual relations between con-
sciousnesses, the ultimate basis and in-
imitable model of the physical relations
which our sensible consciousness per-
ceives? Do not love and will alone
enter there to the exclusion of the intel-
lect? If this is true, should it not be
said that they are themselves only deeds
whose whole superiority over physical
deeds is reduced to their being more
inward and more primitive? Are these
relations simply data, that is to say, in
any final sense, fortuitous and irrational?
It would be necessary to consider them
so, if the power of co-ordination which
we call reason had no other mode of exist-
ence than this static understanding, the
chief pretensions of which James has
combated with so much vigour. Judging
by his language on this point, we might
believe at times that reason itself, in the
totality of its manifestations and in its
very essence, is reduced to have no other
object than the Absolute, the One and
Unchanging. Reason in that case would
be exclusively abstract; and considered
[122]
CONCLUSION
as the norm of a thought which aims at
grasping the concrete, it can only be a
proKfic source of error.
It is noteworthy, however, that, dissatis-
fied, as philosopher, with those relations
to which science confines itself, in so far as
these relations connect things only super-
ficially, and consequently are themselves,
so far, only brute facts, James has sought
with increasing curiosity beneath these
mechanical solidarities for solidarities as-
similated, validated, corroborated and ver-
ified by the inner and conscious thought
of human beings — in a word, then, for
more truly intelligible ones. It would not,
therefore, seem contrary to the underly-
ing trend of his philosophy to admit, be-
hind the static reason of the dialecticians,
behind the ready-made list of immutable
categories, a living and concrete reason,
having to do, not with mere empty con-
cepts, but with actual beings, and desir-
ous not only of unity, of immutabihty
and of necessity, but also and above all,
of free harmony and inward communion.
An interpretation which finally brings
[123]
WILLIAM JAMES
James' philosophy into the great classic
tradition. For it was, indeed, a reason
superior to the pure logical understand-
ing, or Sidvoia, this vov<s of Plato and
Aristotle, to which belonged, along with
intelligibility, intelligence, causality and
life. Certainly the Greek philosophy
has for its main object the fixation of
the changing, the assemblage of the
multiple, by subjecting them to deter-
minate and stable ends. In this philoso-
phy, moreover, an initiative and an
activity of spirit awaken which, while
distinguishing themselves from the logical
and empty One, are not in the least to
be confounded with the fortuitous and
automatic evolution of matter. And it is
in developing these views, following the
neo-platonist, Plotinus, that the moderns,
under the influence of Christianity, dis-
engage and exalt more and more the
creative power which rules the very ends
of the world and from which these ends
derive their existence, their cohesion,
their almost mathematical connection,
their relative necessity and fixity.
[124]
CONCLUSION
Now if this creative power must be
conceived as superior to logical reason
which, like everything fixed, represents
only one moment of the life of things,
seen from the outside and artificially
fixed, there is nothing to prevent its
being itself reason, reason supple and
alive, eminently analogous to the reason,
at once theoretical and practical, sponta-
neous and controlled, that we find within
ourselves. If reason, distinguished from
action in a purely logical sense, accord-
ing to the sole principles of identity and
of contradiction, is no more than a
table of inert categories; and if action,
also reduced to pure concept, degenerates
into blind change, fortuitous and material :
reason and activity — conceived just as
they are given us in our own experience,
as penetrable one with another and sus-
ceptible of becoming one — essentially
share each other's nature. As reason is
related to activity, so activity is related
to reason.
Therefore, to say, with William James,
Im Anfang war die Tat, is not to signify,
[125]
WILLIAM JAMES
" In the Beginning was the Deed," to the
exclusion of the reason. Whilst admitting
this formula, nothing prevents our main-
taining the great principle of Descartes
who also professed the free creation of
the truth: "We should not conceive any
preference or priority between the under-
standing of God and His will. "
[126]
I
