James

Sidgwick, and afterward Frederic Myers. Fur-
thermore, he was profoundly curious, disposed
to give all new ideas the benefit of a hearing,
and hopeful that evidence might be found which
would lend a genuinely scientific support to reli-
gious beliefs. In 1884 James participated in the
formation of an American Society for Psychi-
cal Research, and for some years he cooperated
with its secretary, Richard Hodgson, in making
investigations. In 1894-95* ne w<as president of
the English society, and he remained one of its
vice-presidents and an occasional contributor to
its Proceedings throughout his life. He credited
the movement with bringing to light the great
part played by the subconscious factor in the
mental life, and in this sense with having meta-
physical as well as psychological fruitfulness.
As to mediumistic phenomena, he took a non-
commital and speculative attitude, believing that
there were data to be explained, but questioning
the adequacy of spiritism, telepathy, and other
like hypotheses to explain them.

Before the Principles was completed James
had become weary of his task, and eager to turn
to philosophy; but the next few years were
largely occupied by a psychological aftermath.
In 1892 he published an abridged form of the
Principles, the so-called "Briefer Course" (Psy-
chology: American Science Series, Briefer
Course), which was for many years the most
popular textbook on the subject in America. In
1899 he published his Talks to Teachers on Psy-
chology, a book which not only spread the vogue
of his ideas but gave a powerful impulse to the
new subject of educational psychology. James
never ceased to read and to think about psycho-
logical subjects. To suppose the contrary is as
mistaken as to suppose that he had ever lived
without philosophy. The two interests were
parallel and intersecting, not consecutive. He re-
fused to respect barriers which he took to be
artificial, and he often followed a psychological
problem to its philosophical roots, or a philo-
sophical problem to its psychological ramifica-
tions. After the publication of the Principles
there was a shifting of emphasis in his teaching
and writing, culminating in 1897 in the change
of his title from professor of psychology to pro-
fessor of philosophy, but just as a complete ac-
count of his psychology would carry us down to
the year of his death, so a complete account of
his philosophical development would begin with
his student years in Germany.
• The central motives which actuated James's
philosophizing were the same throughout his
Hie* He was solicited on the one side by religion
a&el on the other by science. He felt the appeal

James

of both religion and science, and his central in-
tellectual compulsion was the necessity of pro-
viding for both. He was without any sectarian
affiliations, and, although he was for a time a
regular attendant at the Harvard College Chap-
el, organized and institutional worship as such
did not interest him; nor was he, as was his fa-
ther, versed in the language of traditional the-
ology. He did, however, feel, in behalf of others
even more strongly than for himself, the need of
some hopeful faith. He had, furthermore, a
nervous and emotional organization that predis-
posed him (like his father, though in a lesser de-
gree) to religious mysticism. His training, on
the other hand, was in science; and this point of
view was commended to him by exemplars who
greatly impressed him in his younger days, such
as his teacher Jeffries Wyman and Louis Agas-
siz, and his friend Chauncey Wright, a hard-
headed exponent of positivism. His first step
toward a philosophy was to reject the decrees of
science, both its pretensions and its negations.
He had too much respect for science to relish
such verbal and metaphysical stretchings of it
as the system of Spencer; and he knew it too
well to be intimidated by it. He valued his scien-
tific education as a means of delivering him from
the spell of scientific authority. Turning to the
philosophy of the schools, he was confronted by
two leading alternatives, the rationalistic-monis-
tic way of Hegel and the post-Kantians, and the
empirical-pluralistic way of Mill and the Brit-
ish empiricists. The champions of the former ob-
tained a respectful hearing, especially his Har-
vard colleague, Josiah Royce [q.v.] in earlier
years, and later F. H. Bradley of Oxford. But
though it took James many years to answer
Hegelianism, and though its ghost never ceased
to haunt him, his bias of mind and temperament
were from the beginning on the side of the em-
piricists. Mill, revered as the latest representa-
tive of the empiricist dynasty, needed to be de-
fended against himself. His system, like Hume's,
was fticurably tainted with associationism, and
on the side of metaphysics it was timid and fal-
tering. What was needed was an empiricism
that was more empirical, plus royaliste que le roi.
Such a confident and fruitful empiricism seem-
ed to have found an exponent in Shadworth
Hodgson, whose dictum that "realities are only
what they are known as," became one of James's
philosophical axioms. James applauded Hodg-
son's scrupulous avoidance of unwarranted as-
sumptions and profited by the refinement and
acuteness of his analysis of conscious experi-
ence, especially his analysis of the experience of
time. But he was repelled by his determinism,

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