William James (1842–1910) was a founding figure of American psychology and philosophy. He founded functionalism, the view that mental processes should be understood by what they are for, not what they are made of.
A longtime Harvard professor, James wrote the field-defining Principles of Psychology (1890) and originated the James-Lange theory of emotion and the theory of self.
Biography
Early Life William James was born in New York City as the oldest of Henry James and Mary Walsh’s five children (Goodman, 2009).
As a child, he traveled to Europe multiple times with his parents. These early trips paved the way for 13 more journeys throughout his life, and left him fluent in both German and French (Nubiola, 2011).
In 1858, his family settled in Newport, Rhode Island, where James began to serve as an artistic apprentice in the studio of William Morris Hunt.
He quickly abandoned the artistic route. Three years later, he entered Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School, known today as the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, or SEAS (Goodman, 2009).
Three years later, in 1864, James joined the Harvard School of Medicine to study chemistry and anatomy.
Throughout his life, James suffered from various physical ailments and was tone-deaf (Sacks, 2008). He also experienced neurasthenia, a medical condition characterized by fatigue, headache, and irritability, and endured periods of depression.
Due to his illnesses and a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, James’ medical school studies were interrupted multiple times.
Nevertheless, he graduated and earned his MD in 1869, although he never practiced medicine (Goodman, 2009).
During these years at Harvard Medical School, James studied physiology in great depth. This foundational knowledge shaped his eventual psychological framework.
Academic Career
William James remained at Harvard after his student years, becoming an instrumental figure there as a professor for the rest of his career.
James had taught a course on vertebrate physiology in the years before. In 1875, he taught one of the college’s first psychology courses, titled “The Relations Between Physiology and Psychology,” and created its first experimental psychology demonstration laboratory.
James was the founder of the Harvard psychology department and is known as the father of American psychology.
As a Harvard faculty member, James taught courses and conducted laboratory research on sensation and perception during the first half of his career.
James also supervised Harvard’s first doctorate in psychology, earned by G. Stanley Hall in 1878, and engaged in several debates with other prominent scholars.
After his retirement in 1907, James remained active in academia. He published Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (James, 1907) among other works. It laid out the philosophical case for pragmatism, and his views on truth, knowledge, reality, and religion.
James’s philosophical views shaped his psychology, and his psychology shaped his philosophy in turn.
Pragmatism
In 1870, William James and the logician Charles Sanders Peirce founded the school of American Pragmatism (Hookway, 2008).
Pragmatism holds that philosophical topics, such as knowledge, language, meaning, belief, and science, are best understood by their practical use.
James classified philosophers by temperament. He called them “tough-minded” (empirical, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, skeptical) or “tender-minded” (rationalistic, intellectualistic, optimistic, religious, assertive) (Goodman, 2009; James, 1907).
The role of the pragmatist is to serve as a mediator between these two extremes.
“Pragmatism asks its usual question: ‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?
How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’” (James, 1907).
James’ belief in pragmatism subsequently shaped his perspective on the right to believe, religion, free will, and the meaning of life.
The Right to Believe
James believes in the right to believe. That is, under certain circumstances, we have the right to believe that future, unknown outcomes will occur so as to help bring about those outcomes.
In other words, “a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming” (James, 1896).
An example of this is crossing an icy ledge with death as the alternative. You cannot know whether you will make it across, but believing you can may itself help you succeed (Goodman, 2009).
Similarly, James holds that we can choose to believe without objective justification. We do this naturally, he argued, when crossing the icy ledge, and when holding moral or political ideas (Pomerleau, 2014).
Although a belief may lack objective support, it can still hold pragmatic value, whether that means holding certain political values, following a moral code, or believing in God.
Religion
William James also had a strong perspective on religion. His interest lay not in religious institutions or specific doctrines, but in the spiritual experience religion brings about (Goodman, 2009).
James applies the same logic that justifies believing in certain ideas, morals, or political standpoints to believing in God.
He posits that one’s salvation depends on believing in God, in advance of any proof that God actually exists (Goodman, 2009; James, 1896). So, even in the absence of any objective justification, there is still utility in holding this belief.
However, James does not require belief in a monotheistic God to connect with religion. He defines religion broadly, as the experiences of humans insofar as they feel related to anything they consider divine (James, 1902; Pomerleau, 2014).
Regardless of the unique religious experience, its purpose is to connect us with a greater reality that is not otherwise accessible (Goodman, 2009).
Thus, James believes there is more to reality than our natural world (James, 1902; Pomerleau, 2014). He holds that each person has a soul, existing in some form of a spiritual universe.
This soul is the main actor in that greater reality, leading us to act as we do in the physical world (Richardson, 2007).
In pragmatist terms, religion functions as a way to access what lies beyond the tangible world, in pursuit of salvation.
Free Will
James believes in free will. He supports indeterminism: the idea that some possibilities are not fully dictated by the rest of reality (James, 1896; Pomerleau, 2014).
From a practical standpoint, indeterminism helps to render life worth living by understanding the agency we have in our actions and choices. Indeterminism also allows us to hold others responsible for their actions to maintain order in society.
Consider a man who murders his wife: a deterministic approach holds that his actions were simply “supposed to be that way.”
An indeterministic approach instead sees his actions as motivated by his own will. This lets us recognize the evil in the act, and assign the punishment it deserves (James, 1896; Pomerleau, 2014).
Lastly, William James believed the meaning of life could be reduced to one word: happiness, the motivating factor that causes us to act and survive (James, 1896; Pomerleau, 2014).
He views evolution to be an advancement towards maximizing happiness, the sole purpose of living.
James’s most lasting contribution to this debate was a distinction between hard and soft determinism. Both positions agree that behavior is caused. The real question, he argued, is what kind of cause is doing the work: the true opposite of “caused” is “random,” not “free.”
If an action’s immediate cause is a person’s own conscious, purposeful mental life, James held, it counts as free, rational, and voluntary in every sense that matters for morality and law. This holds even though the action is fully caused.
This compatibilist move, soft determinism, remains one of psychology’s most widely cited positions on free will.
A Shift to Psychology
But even beyond his endeavors in the philosophical world was James devoted to the world of psychology.
Widely called the “father of American psychology,” William James made many notable contributions to the field, shaping how future psychologists and scholars would see the world.
James defined psychology as the conscience of the mental life because he thought that consciousness is what makes mental life possible. He sought to discover the utility of human consciousness and how it is fundamental to survival.
He was the first to coin the phrase “stream of consciousness,” describing mental life as continuously flowing rather than built from separate parts: “it is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (James, 1890).
James held that this stream has four core properties.
- Personal: it is always someone’s experience, never a free-floating sensation.
- Continuous: it never stops and restarts, even across the gap of sleep.
- Changing: no state of mind, once gone, exactly recurs.
- Selective: it always picks out some things to attend to and ignores others.
Before a baby learns to sort that confusion into objects and categories, James wrote, the world appears as a single “blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1890), his most quoted image for raw, unsorted experience.
William James saw this stream of consciousness not as a thing but as a process or function. Just as breathing is what the lungs do, conducting conscious mental life is what the brain does (Hunt, 1920).
James’ interest in the function of consciousness led him to develop one of the most foundational theories of psychology: that of functionalism.
Functionalism (vs. Structuralism)
Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern psychology, developed the first school of psychology, that of structuralism.
Structuralism focuses on breaking mental processes down into their most basic components (Freedheim, 2010). To study these elements, researchers used introspection, a process of analyzing one’s own mental state (Schultz & Schultz, 2015).
Functionalism formed as a reaction to structuralism, and denied the value of introspection. It focused instead on the biological purpose of human consciousness, not the inner workings of thought.
Structuralism tried to understand the individual steps of going to the supermarket: leaving the house, walking to the store, choosing ingredients, paying. Functionalism instead asked why we go to the store at all, because we need food to survive.
Functionalism is concerned with explaining the function or purpose of certain forms of behavior, namely that of consciousness or our internal mental states. This theoretical perspective on psychology sought causal relationships between internal states (such as being happy) and external behaviors (such as laughter).
Functionalism was heavily influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwin, however, focused on the evolution of a species through natural selection of physical traits, the survival of the fittest.
James was preoccupied with the evolutionary value, or function, of specific behaviors and mindsets.
His classic text, The Principles of Psychology (James, 1890), used the phrase “evolutionary psychology.” He argued that certain behaviors operate like instincts: inherited predispositions to respond to specific stimuli in adaptive ways.
A key example of an instinct is that of the sneeze. We are predisposed to respond to a nasal irritant with a rapid blast of air (Kenrick, 2019). That is the adaptive value of a sneeze.
In the same vein, James theorized that the mind’s complex processes evolved because of their life-preserving value. To understand those processes, he argued, one had to ask what functions they perform (Hunt, 1920).
The Function of Consciousness
James came to understand consciousness as a process that lets us weigh past, present, and future together. This lets us plan ahead and adapt our behavior to current circumstances (Hunt, 1920).
James (1890) argued against the structuralist position that states consciousness could be broken into constituent parts.
Coining the phrase “stream of consciousness”, James proposed that mental life is a unity that flows and changes (thus consciousness is a continuum).
The function of consciousness, put simply, is to ensure survival. We have evolved to be conscious beings because we would otherwise cease to exist.
Unlike Wundt, James spent his years asking why consciousness exists at all, not what it is made of.
Although functionalism is generally not in practice today, this school of thought greatly influenced psychology, such as the development of behaviorism and applied psychology.
James-Lange Theory of Emotion
Consciousness was not the only mental concept that functionalism investigated. Similarly, James was interested in emotions and how and why our minds perceive stimuli in certain ways.
James first proposed the James-Lange theory of emotion in an 1884 paper, arguing that an event triggers a physiological reaction, which we then interpret. According to this theory, emotions are caused by our interpretations of these physiological reactions (James, 1884, 1890).
Only after interpreting a physiological reaction, or arousal, can a person experience emotion. If the arousal goes unnoticed, or gets no thought at all, no emotion follows.
To experience emotion, we must go through a series of steps:
- Perception of a stimulus or situation.
- Bodily changes result from the perception of a situation.
- Recognition of bodily changes produces subjective feelings or emotions.
According to this theory, people feel sad because they cry, and likewise they feel happy because they smile.
The following year, Danish physiologist Carl Lange independently proposed a related but narrower theory, focused specifically on changes in blood-vessel activity. Because the two views were so similar, the combined theory is now called the James-Lange theory of emotion.
However, this theory was not met without criticism. Many psychologists and scholars pushed back on the idea that physical reactions map onto a single, corresponding emotion.
For instance, an increased heart rate could suggest fear, excitement, anger, or another emotion (Vianna et al., 2006). The emotions differ, but the physical response is the same, raising the question of how we interpret our bodily signals.
This question led psychologists to further examine the function of emotion, devising new theories to explain how and why we feel the way we do.
Theory of Self
William James’s Theory of Self postulates that the self comprises two parts: the ‘I’ and the ‘Me.’
The ‘I’ is the subjective self: the part that thinks, acts, and knows what a person has experienced and accomplished (Pomerleau, 2014).
The ‘Me’ is the objective self: everything a person can reflect on as their own, including thoughts, feelings, social roles, and how others see them. James’s theory emphasizes this dynamic, social side of the self-concept.
Take the statement “I know it was me who ate the cookie.” Here, the “Me” is the empirical self, the one who did the acting. The “I” is the self capable of thinking and reflecting on it (Cooper, 1992).
The ‘I’ is a pure ego: it provides continuity between past, present, and future. This lets us experience a consistent, individual identity, one built on the stream of consciousness that James first defined (Hunt, 1920).
Although the “I” self cannot be further divided, the “Me” can be further broken down into three sub-categories: a material, social, and spiritual self.
- The material self consists of what belongs to a person, such as the body, family, clothes, or money.
- The social self marks who you are in a specific social situation. We tend to change our actions, thoughts, emotions, words, and mannerisms based on the current social situation or the people with whom we are interacting.
For example, we act differently at work than with friends, or when talking to a boss rather than a coworker.
- Finally, our spiritual self is who we are at our core, including our personality, values, and conscience. Our spiritual self typically remains relatively stable throughout our lifetime (Green, 1997).
Together, these aspects form the self: the conscious entity capable of experiencing physiological responses, emotions, and thoughts.
James’s theories on the self paved the way for decades of research into identity and self-concept.
Critical Evaluation of James’s Psychology
James built his psychology almost entirely from introspection, wide reading, and philosophical argument rather than laboratory experiments. This gave him extraordinary range, but it also left many of his specific claims untested by direct evidence.
Strengths and Limits of James’s Method
Where later researchers have tested James’s ideas directly, the verdict has usually been “partly right, more complicated than he thought,” rather than outright confirmation or rejection.
Ideas closer to a descriptive framework than a testable mechanism, such as the stream of consciousness and the tripartite self, have proved more durable. Later psychologists built precise tools inside the categories James first proposed, rather than discarding them.
James’s functionalism also outlasted Wundt’s structuralism as a research programme. John B. Watson’s 1913 behaviorist manifesto rejected private conscious experience as unfit for a science that demanded public, replicable observation, and behaviorism dominated American psychology for roughly the next 40 years.
Functionalism’s guiding question, what a mental process is for, survived that eclipse. It later re-emerged as the organizing question of evolutionary and cognitive psychology.
Contemporary Research
The James-Lange theory’s most influential challenge came four decades after James first proposed it, from physiologist Walter Cannon.
Cannon (1927) drew on comparative physiology, neuroanatomy, and the timing of bodily responses to argue that bodily signals are neither specific, fast, nor precisely sensed enough to account for felt emotion on their own.
He proposed instead, with physiologist Philip Bard, that a subcortical brain relay sends signals to the cortex and the body at the same time and independently of one another (see the Cannon-Bard theory).
Neither position survived intact. Modern evidence supports neither extreme: bodily feedback is not sufficient to create emotion alone, but it is not irrelevant either.
Barrett and Simmons (2015) reviewed the predictive-coding research on interoception, the brain’s sensing of the body’s internal state, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
They concluded that feeling a bodily state is generated largely top-down. Brain regions issue running predictions about the body’s expected state, and incoming bodily signals mainly correct those predictions when they are wrong, rather than being read out fresh in the moment as James assumed.
This reframes James’s arrow from body to brain as partly circular. The brain’s expectations help shape what bodily signals are even taken to mean, while still keeping James’s core insight that emotion is fundamentally bodily.
Works Published
As a philosopher and theorist, James seldom relied on empirical experiments to validate or inspire his views. Rather, he drew upon all his reading in both philosophical and physiological psychology.
James spent time in Europe from 1882 to 1883. He visited universities, attended laboratory sessions and lectures, talked to countless leading psychologists, and gathered reports and clinical studies of abnormal minds (Hunt, 1920).
James relied on observation and the intellect of colleagues and other scholars to develop this powerful school of thought. Fittingly, he also relied on his own mind, the very entity that fascinated him.
As a famous philosopher and psychologist, James was the author of many academic books.
The following is a list of some of his most influential works:
- James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
- James, W. (1897). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
- James, William (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harvard University Press.
- James, William (1906). Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green and Co.
- James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
- James, W. (1907). The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
- James, W. (1909). A Pluralistic Universe . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Five Fun Facts
While it is clear that James’ notable accomplishments span far and wide, a few specific facts about this distinguished figure are worth emphasizing.
- First Teaching Lab: James established the first psychology teaching lab in the U.S. in 1875. His doctoral student G. Stanley Hall later created the first experimental psychology lab, at Johns Hopkins University (Shiraev, 2014).
- First Course: James was also the first to teach a psychology course in the U.S. (Cherry, 2020).
- Famous Godfather: Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist and philosopher, was his godfather (Taylor, 2010).
- Notable Students: His students went on to become major historical figures, including E. L. Thorndike, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and Teddy Roosevelt (Gibbon, 2018; Gooding-Williams, 2017).
- Historical Ranking: A quantitative analysis of hundreds of 20th-century psychologists ranked James 14th most eminent (Haggbloom et al., 2002).
William James left a lasting mark on both psychology and philosophy: founder of two major schools of thought, author of influential books, and a pioneering figure at Harvard.
Psychology as it exists today owes much to the path he opened.
According to William James, what was the true purpose of psychology?
According to William James, often considered the father of American psychology, the true purpose of psychology is to study the processes of consciousness and understand the functional, practical aspects of human behavior and mental processes.
He emphasized the study of individuals’ adaptation to their environment, believing that the value of any mental activity, such as consciousness, lies in its impact on behavior and the individual’s capacity to adapt and survive, hence the term “functionalism” associated with his approach.
References
Cooper, W. E. (1992). William James’s theory of the self. The Monist, 75 (4), 504-520.
Freedheim, D. K. (2010). Handbook of Psychology: Vol. I.
Gibbon, P. (2018). The thinker who believed in doing: William James and the philosophy of pragmatism. Humanities, 39.
Gooding-Williams, R. (2017). WEB Du Bois.
Goodman, R. (2009). William James. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
Green, C. D. (1997). The principles of psychology William James (1890). Classics in the History of Psychology.
Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, R., Warnick, J. E., Jones, V. K., Yarbrough, G. L., Russell, T. M., … & Monte, E. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6 (2), 139-152.
Hookway, C. (2008). Pragmatism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hunt, M. (1920). The Psychologist malgré lui: William James . The Story of psychology: http://www. des. emory. edu/mfp/hunt. html.
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York.
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York. Holt and company.
James, W. (1984). Psychology, briefer course (Vol. 14). Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green, and Co.
James, W. (1896). The will to believe: And other essays in popular philosophy . Longmans, Green, and Company.
James, W., & Katz, E. (1975). The meaning of truth (Vol. 2). Harvard University Press.
James, W., & Perry, R. B. (1943). Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Together with Four Related Essays Selected From the Meaning of Truth.
Kenrick, D. (2019). Evolutionary psychology. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/evolutionary-psychology
Nubiola, J. (2011). The reception of William James in continental Europe. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 3 (III-1).
Pomerleau, W. P. (2014). William James (1842–1910). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource.
Richardson, R. D. (2007). William James: In the maelstrom of American modernism. HMH.
Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain, revised and expanded edition. Vintage, New York, NY.
Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2015). A history of modern psychology. Cengage Learning.
Shiraev, E. (2014). A history of psychology: A global perspective. Sage Publications.
Taylor, E. (2010). William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: The true foundation for a science of consciousness?. History of the Human Sciences, 23 (3), 119-130.
Vianna, E. P., Weinstock, J., Elliott, D., Summers, R., & Tranel, D. (2006). Increased feelings with increased body signals. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 1 (1), 37-48.
