Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [96]
After twelve years of research, introspection, psychologizing, and writing, James completed Principles, which had been an almost intolerable burden to him. It was a huge work—nearly fourteen hundred pages in two volumes—and unsuitable for textbook use after all. Within two years, however, he turned out an abridged textbook version. (The full-length version became known as “James” and the abridged version as “Jimmy.”) Principles was an immediate and resounding success, and had a lasting effect on the development of American psychology. Nearly sixty years later Ralph Barton Perry, professor of philosophy at Harvard, would say of it, “No work in psychology has met with such an enthusiastic reception… nor has any other work enjoyed such enduring popularity.”20
By 1892, when James completed Jimmy, he had been teaching and writing about psychology for seventeen years, and grown weary of it. From then on he turned his creative efforts toward other things: education (he lectured on the applications of psychology in the classroom and published Talks to Teachers in 1899); the practical results of different kinds of religious experience (The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared in 1902); and philosophy (Pragmatism, published in 1907, established him as a leading American thinker).
He did, however, continue to write popular treatments of some of the ideas he had advanced in Principles and to keep up with psychological developments. In 1894 he was the first American to call attention to the work of the then obscure Viennese physician Sigmund Freud, and in 1909, though ailing, he went to Clark University to meet Freud on his only visit to the United States and to hear him speak.
Ever the nonconformist, James was willing to explore forms of psychology outside accepted scientific bounds. He took a keen interest in spiritualism and “psychical” phenomena, considering them an extension of abnormal psychology; closely followed the efforts of psychical researchers; attended séances; and in 1884 founded the American Society for Psychical Research. He once made a pact with a dying friend to sit outside his room after his death and wait for a communication from the Beyond; none came. James coupled an open-minded attitude toward such subjects with an insistence on solid scientific evidence; late in life he concluded, “I find myself believing that there is ‘something in’ these never ending reports of psychical phenomena, although I haven’t yet the least positive notion of the something… Theoretically, I am no further than I was at the beginning.”21
From 1898 on, James had a personal reason to be interested in the afterlife. That year, at fifty-six, he overtaxed his heart while climbing in the Adirondacks, and thereafter had chronic heart trouble. His health gradually worsened; he resigned from Harvard in 1907, wrote two of his most important works of philosophy in the next three years, and died in 1910, at sixty-eight. John Dewey said of him at that time, “By common consent he was far and away the greatest of American psychologists. Were it not for the unreasoned admiration of men and things German, there would be no question, I think, that he was the greatest psychologist of his time in any country—perhaps of any time.”22
Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer
James had something to say about every topic within psychology, as known in his day, but his chief influence was due to the following handful of his concepts:
Functionalism: This is the label usually applied to Jamesian psychology. Unlike the New Psychologists, who maintained that higher mental processes are assembled in each individual from simple elements, James held that the higher processes were developed over the ages by evolution because of their adaptive value. He was seventeen when Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared (1859), twenty-nine when The Descent of Man was published (1871), and was impressed by both. It seemed clear to him that the mind’s complex processes had evolved because of their life-preserving functions, and that to understand