James

stopped at Avignon to see Renouvier. The lat-
ter had acquired a warm interest in his young
American disciple, many of whose articles he
translated and republished in France. In the
autumn of 1882 James visited Prague and there
made the acquaintance of Ernest Mach, whose
later books on sensation and on scientific method
so closely approached his own way of thinking;
and of Carl Stumpf, with whom he maintained
more sympathetic relations than with any other
European psychologist. In England, where he
settled for a more protracted stay, he became a
member of the circle which at that time repre-
sented the defense of the empirical tradition
against the invading Hegelianism. This circle
comprised Shadworth Hodgson, George Croom
Robertson, the editor of Mind, James Sully, Les-
lie Stephen, Frederick Pollock, Edmund Gur-
ney, and Henry Sidgwick. Of these men Hodg-
son, an acute intellect but an obscure and prolix
writer, exercised a powerful influence on James,
who was fond of coupling him with Renouvier
as one of the two foremost thinkers of his time.
Association with this group confirmed James's
inheritance and held him on the whole, despite
Continental influences in the tradition of British
empiricism. In 1889 he attended the Interna-
tional Congress of Physiological Psychology in
Paris, and still further extended his European
connections. It was here that he first met Theo-
dore Flournoy of Geneva, who became one of his
lifelong and most intimate friends.

Although The Principles of Psychology was
not completed until 1890, it began to appear in
the form of articles immediately after the proj-
ect was undertaken. In "Remarks on Spencer's
Definition of Mind as Correspondence" (Jour-
nal of Speculative Philosophy, Jan. 1878), he
emphasized the essentially active and interested
character of the human mind, an emphasis which
is the key to his entire thought. In an article
entitled, "Are we Automata?" Mind, Jan.
1879), he defended the causal efficacy of con-
sciousness against the prevailing scientific ma-
terialism; and in "The Spatial Quale" (Journal
of Speculative Philosophy, Jan. 1879) he vigor-
ously advocated the "nativistic" view, to the ef-
fect, namely, that there is an immediate impres-
sion (rather than an acquired or inferred idea)
of spatial depth. "The Feeling of Effort," con-
tributed in 1880 to the Anniversary Memoirs of
the Boston Society of Natural History, set forth
the author's view of will, in which he rejected
the prevailing doctrine of the "feeling of inner-
vation"; and adopted a position close to that of
Renquvier, according to which will is essential-
ly an act of attention by which ideas come into

James

exclusive possession of consciousness. Two arti-
cles of epoch-making importance appeared in
Mind in 1884, "On Some Omissions of Intro-
spective Psychology" and "What is an Emo-
tion?"^ The former presented for the first time
James's thorough-going rejection of associa-
tionism, his recognition of "feelings of relation,"
and his insistence on the continuity of the stream
of consciousness. The second article contained
the so-called "James-Lange Theory" (advanced
independently in the same year by James and by
the Danish psychologist, C. Lange), to the ef-
fect that emotion consists essentially in the
visceral and other organic sensations associated
with its expression. According to this view the
fundamental fact in fear, for example, is the
bodily response, internal and external, to danger,
the subjective emotion being simply the accom-
panying awareness of this response. These were
the most novel and influential of the specific
doctrines comprised in the Principles, but even
taken in the aggregate they do not account for
the book's remarkable success. This was due in
part to the fact that, owing to the author's erudi-
tion and skilful use of citation, it summed up and
will always significantly represent the state of
the science of psychology at the close of the nine-
teenth century. Furthermore, the author broke
definitely with the past and with the philosophi-
cal alliance, declaring the right and purpose of
psychology to enjoy the privileges and immuni-
ties of a special science. James was peculiarly
qualified to utter such a pronouncement because
of his physiological and clinical experience, and
because his name was publicly identified with
the scientific standpoint and method. Above all,
the book was widely read, and will always com-
mand attention, because of its style. It revealed
the author's genius for catching the elusive and
fugitive states of human experience and trans-
fixing them with a telling phrase. It was daring
in its humor, in its use of colloquial speech, and
in its picturesqueness of metaphor and illustra-
tion; so that though many doubted whether any-
thing so interesting could possibly be scientific,
nobody ignored it.

The period during which James was compos-
ing the Principles was also the period of his
greatest activity in an allied but somewhat dubi-
ous field of inquiry. Members of the group with
which he was associated in London in 1882 were
engaged at that time in the organization of the
parent Society for Psychical Research. The dis-
favor which the subject enjoyed among ortho-
dox scientists would have been sufficient to en-
list his sympathy. He was loyal to the interests
of his friends, notably Edmund Gurney, Henry

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