William James (1842 -1910)
William James - summarized biography
William James (January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Carl Jung and Benito Mussolini.
William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long.
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.
Influential in the young sciences of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.
Without ignoring James' contributions to psychology and philosophy, this page focuses mostly on his work in the field of religion.
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William James (1842-1910) was a distinguished American psychologist. In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote: “One may say, truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness.”
What is a “mystical state of consciousness?” James notes that the words “mysticism” and “mystical” are often used as pejorative referencing things regarded as vague, overly-sentimental and/or wooly-minded.
But “mystical state of consciousness,” he believes, can usefully refer to a precise state of mind and an experience which he finds to have 4 characteristics:
1. Ineffability. A mystical experience defies expression and words cannot fully relate it to others. It must be experienced directly to be fully understood, and the mystical experience cannot be directly transferred to others. Can a person who cannot see understand blue? he asks.
2. A Noetic Quality. Although mystical states are similar to states of feeling, they also seem to those who experience them to be states of knowledge, too. They are experienced as states that allow direct insight into depths of truth that are unplumbed by our mere intellects. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, and they carry with them what James describes as “a curious sense of authority.”
“These two characteristics will entitle any state to be called mystical in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found,” he writes. These two additional characteristics are:
3. Transiency. Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half and hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Memory of them is imperfect, but when they recur they are immediately recognized, and from one recurrence to another there is a development in the mystic of a deepening and increasingly rich inner life.
4. Passivity. James writes that in mystical states of consciousness, “the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” Mystical experience is a form of self-transcendance, and the mystic will often say that she or he has merged with something greater and that what we experience as “will” is also merged with that greater One. St. Teresa of Avila: a drop of rain falling into a great ocean (fresh water into salt water, but once merged, how can they be distinguished?)
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