In 1869 James took his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Poor health restricted his activities, but in 1872 he became an instructor in physiology at Harvard. In addition, during the 1870s his interest in psychology was growing, and he began to teach that subject in 1875, the same year in which he founded the world's first psychological laboratory. By 1879 James was also teaching philosophy at Harvard. In 1890, after twelve years of work, he published his first major work, the two-volume Principles of Psychology. This ground-breaking book helped to define the young science.
Philosophy occupied James's attention during the last twenty years of his life, most of which were spent at Harvard. A gifted writer and an eloquent speaker, James was much in demand for lectures at home and abroad. His Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1901�1902 became his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience in which he sought to reconcile empiricism with religious faith. Another lecture series, this time at the Lowell Institute in Boston during the winter of 1906�1907, led to Pragmatism.
James was well known for a philosophy that emphasized the following themes: human consciousness is selective; it concentrates on some things and ignores others. Ideas and beliefs are essentially guides for organizing and structuring our experience. One cannot prove finally whether human action is free or determined, but there are good reasons, especially moral ones, for believing that human action involves freedom. Psychological factors affect one's religious experience, or the lack of it, and such experience is best evaluated in terms of its moral quality. Pragmatism consists of two parts; first, it is a method for the determination of meaning; second, it is a theory about the nature of truth. The truth or falsity of a judgment, its agreement or disagreement with reality, depends on obtaining or failing to obtain corroboration of the expectations that follow from the judgment in question.
James's pragmatism was controversial because it denied that truth is static and eternal. The true, James argued, is what works, what is expedient or useful. His critics found such claims dangerously ambiguous, for James seemed to overlook the idea that beliefs could be useful or expedient without being true. James's pragmatism, his critics argued, reduced truth to subjective opinion. James replied to these criticisms by stressing how important it is to test the beliefs and theories that we think are true. The veracity of beliefs or theories, he maintained, involves their being expedient or useful over "the long run" and "on the whole." No doubt James used words that left him open to charges of unwarranted subjectivism, and it is not clear whether or not he put all those indictments to rest. Nevertheless, he insightfully challenged conventional traditions about truth that were not as evident as they were assumed to be.
James sometimes summed up his philosophy by calling it meliorism, a temperament that he derived from and encouraged within American experience. Meliorism amplified three ideas implied, if not explicitly stated, by his philosophy's definitive themes and by pragmatism in particular. First, change and open-endedness characterize existence. Human experience, in particular, is forever new and never duplicates itself exactly. Our world is far from finished. It is the moving, growing result of interaction between human beings and their environment.
Second, freedom pervades human existence. Entailing ambiguity and risk, freedom means that human beings are incomplete and forced to struggle for identity and meaningful ways of living. Although success is never guaranteed, freedom means opportunity. Human decisions affect the world and what humanity's place within it will be. Human initiative can move the world toward ideal ends.
Third, the human heart beats with hope. No starry-eyed optimist, James knew that evil haunts existence and that life smells of death. Still, James had no use for pessimism. In a world of freedom, hope springs eternal. Hope means that the past and present are not good enough and that the future can be better.
James applied his meliorism in "The Moral Equivalent of War," which denied that human nature and history are structured deterministically. War has plagued human life, but James's essay contended that war is not inevitable; it can even be eliminated. Although pacifism was one of James's ideals, he also realized that at least two major obstacles oppose it. First, as horrible as war is, it magnifies powerful goals. Defending one's country against threats or extending its influence through military superiority can be compelling causes for many people. Second, a militaristically oriented lifestyle and even war itself provide demanding tests that require and produce courage, discipline, communal spirit, and endurance�virtues a nation must possess, James agreed, to assure its health.
While acknowledging how formidable those two perspectives could be, James protested against the naive and romanticized views of war on which they depended. Instead, he defended the moral equivalent of war by arguing that there are ample opportunities to cultivate the best ideals of a militaristic lifestyle by declaring war on human suffering, poverty, disease, and injustice. Anticipating the formation of agencies such as the Peace Corps, James believed that victory in humanitarian battles would be not only the best defense for everything that human beings rightly hold dear but also could lead to the abolition of war itself.
Victorian Period and the Gilded Age
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Emory University: William James
University of Virginia Hypertext Archives: William James
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "James, William" (by John K. Roth), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=88 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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