William James said the first psychology lecture he ever heard was his own
William James wanted to be a painter, trained as a doctor, and drifted into psychology, he said, by a sort of fatality, with no formal instruction at all. He went on to write a 1,200-page classic that took twelve years, and to found pragmatism, arguably America's most influential philosophy.
Born at the Astor House hotel in New York on 11 January 1842, James was the eldest son of a wealthy Swedenborgian theologian; his brother Henry became the novelist and his sister Alice a noted diarist. Childhood trips to Europe began a habit of travel that eventually added thirteen more journeys, and he grew fluent in French and German. He apprenticed with the painter William Morris Hunt before his father pushed him toward medicine.
His twenties were hard. He suffered trouble with his eyes, back, stomach and skin, and long spells of depression diagnosed as neurasthenia. A trip up the Amazon with the naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1865 ended after eight months of seasickness and a mild case of smallpox. A stay in Germany from 1867 to 1868, taken in search of a cure, convinced him his real interest was philosophy and psychology.
Harvard became his home for nearly his whole career. He taught its first experimental psychology course in 1875 to 1876, rose to full professor in 1885, and counted Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein among his students, who remembered his kindness and lack of arrogance. With Charles Sanders Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes he argued ideas in the informal Metaphysical Club from 1872. He also led psychical research societies and opposed the American annexation of the Philippines.
The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, portrayed the mind as purposeful and selective. His pragmatism judged ideas by their fruits rather than their roots. A famous example asks whether a man circling a tree goes round a squirrel that keeps dodging to the far side; the answer, James said, depends on what practical meaning of round you intend. He died of heart failure at Chocorua, New Hampshire, on 26 August 1910.
Source: William James
