Psychical Research

By the time The Principles of Psychology was published in 1890, insuring James’s reputation in psychology, he had published more than a dozen articles in philosophical journals.

Read More
- Some of these pieces, such as “Are we Automata?” “The Laws of Habit,” and “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology”—the essay that presented the notion of the “stream of thought”--show James working out ideas for The Principles. Other articles, such as “The Knowing of Things Together,” regarding the unity of consciousness, and “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” which introduces James’s definition of pragmatism, reveal his transition to the philosophical issues that would dominate the last two decades of his life: faith, truth, morality, and the tensions between idealism and empiricism, monism and pluralism.
  
  As a public philosopher, James spoke out on political and social issues ranging from restrictions on the licensing of physicians to Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy. War, for any reason, seemed to James deplorable, but not inevitable if there were a “moral equivalent” to harness men’s aggressive instincts for constructive ends.
  
  James published his most famous works late in his career: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1906), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Although he was an elegant and compelling writer, he often inspired confusion among his professional colleagues. The concepts of pragmatism and radical empiricism, especially, daunted many readers, and James confided to his close friends Charles Strong and Ferdinand Canning Schiller that he felt misunderstood. In a tattered manila envelope, he carried the manuscript for a final work that he hoped would clarify his ideas, once and for all. Some Problems of Philosophy (2) (3) was published posthumously in 1911, completed by his student Horace Kallen.

In this section

	WJ. Letter to James Jackson Putnam. [10 March 1898].	WJ. [The moral equivalent of war]. Autograph manuscript and typescript with revisions, [1910].

	(digital only) WJ. Truth, reality, etc. Autograph manuscript and printed sheets, undated.	WJ. Pragmatism. Autograph manuscript, ca. 1904.

	Charles Strong. Photograph, undated. From the James family album.	[List of manuscripts and books prized by William James]. Manuscript in the hand of Alice H.G. James, undated.

	Ferdinand Canning Schiller. Photograph, undated. From the James family album.	Envelope for Some problems of philosophy, inscribed by WJ, “my unfinished book.”

	WJ. [Some problems of philosophy] Autograph manuscript and typescript (all with revisions and corrections by WJ), 1909-1910.	Henry James III. Memorandum [on the manuscripts for Some problems of philosophy] Autograph manuscript, 22 April. 1911.

	WJ. Letter to Henry James. Keene Valley, 8 September 1907.	William James. Alice Boughton, photographer. Photograph, 1907.

	[Harvard Psychological Laboratory, students measuring the time required for various mental tasks, Dan Hall.] Albumen photograph, 1892.