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 PHILOSOPHIES : ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES
 
 PHILOSOPHIES 
 
 ANCIENT 6r> MODERN 
 
 Small crown 8vo., is. net each (by post is. 2d. each). 
 
 BERGSON. By Joseph Solomon. 
 
 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY. By A. AV. Benn. 
 
 STOICISM. By Professor St. George Stock. 
 
 PLATO. By Professor A. E. Taylor. 
 
 SCHOLASTICISM. By Father Rickaby, S.J. 
 
 HOBBES. By Professor A. E. Taylor. 
 
 LOCKE. By Professor Alexander, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 COMTE AND MILL. By T. W. Whittaker. 
 
 HERBERT SPENCER. By W. H. Hudson. 
 
 SWEDENBORG. By Frank Sewall, M.A., D.D. 
 
 NIETZSCHE. By Anthony M. Ludovici. 
 
 SCHOPENHAUER. By T. \V. Whittakk. 
 
 BERKELEY AND SPIRITUAL REALISM. By 
 Professor Campbell Fraser, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 
 EPICURUS, NEOPLATONISM, Etc. By Pro- 
 fessor A. E. Taylor. 
 
 RATIONALISM. By G. M. Robertson, M.P. 
 
 PRAGMATISM. By D. L. Murray. 
 
 London: CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd. 
 10 Orange Street W.C.
 
 {Circa 1908.) 
 
 By kind permission of Mrs. Sears.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 OF 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 BY 
 
 HOWARD V. KNOX 
 
 LONDON 
 CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. 
 
 1914
 
 PREFACE 
 
 For reasons of space this little study of William 
 James's philosophy has had to restrict itself to 
 the essential core of his doctrine, and to omit 
 many sides of his singularly rich and sympathetic 
 personality. Moreover, I felt that James was so 
 supremely excellent a writer that a summary of 
 his philosophy would be best given so far as pos- 
 sible in his own incomparable language. I have 
 accordingly aimed largely at effective selection, and 
 at stringing together his own expositions of his 
 most important doctrines, with a minimum of 
 explanatory comment. 
 
 But I had a further reason for letting James 
 thus speak for himself. The dazzling brilliance of 
 his style, his wonderful ability to write popularly 
 and vividly, the simplicity and directness with 
 which he goes to the heart of every problem, and 
 his modest disclaimers of systematic finality, have 
 combined to render it difficult for professional 
 philosophers to attend to the technical content of
 
 vi PKEFACE 
 
 his arguments. It seemed important, therefore, 
 to show how those very philosophic contentions 
 which have been denounced as most revolutionary 
 are actually contained and technically justified in 
 the great Principles of Psychology, which have been 
 universally admired and acclaimed as a classic. 
 When the main drift of that work is properly 
 understood, the organic unity of James's teaching 
 becomes manifest. It seems charitable to suppose, 
 therefore, that those critics who have complained 
 of the ' merely popular ' character of James's 
 philosophy have not troubled to acquaint them- 
 selves with the contents of his magnum opus. 
 
 HOWAED V. KNOX. 
 
 Oxford, 
 January, 1914.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Introduction .... 
 
 II. The General Function of Consciousness 
 
 III. Habit ..... 
 
 IV. Personality and Continuity 
 
 V. Will 
 
 VI. Will continued .... 
 
 VII. Utility and the Survival of Beliefs 
 
 VIII. Belief and Value 
 
 IX. The Practical Value of Theory and the 
 Theoretic Valuk of Practice 
 
 PAG E 
 
 1 
 
 25 
 32 
 
 4i 
 49 
 
 07 
 
 94 
 
 vu
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WILLIAM 
 JAMES'S WORKS 
 
 The Principles of Psychology, 1891. 
 
 Psychology (Textbook), 1892. 
 
 TJie Will to Believe, and Oilier Essays in Popular Philo- 
 sophy, 1897. 
 . Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objections to the Doc- 
 trine, 1898. 
 
 Talks to Teachers on Psychology ; and to Students on Some 
 of Life's Ideals, 1899. 
 . Tlie Varieties of Religious Experience : A Study in Human 
 Nature, 1902. Being the Gifford Lectures delivered in 
 Edinburgh in 1901-1902. 
 
 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Think- 
 ing, 1907. 
 
 The Meaning of Truth : A Sequel to Pragmatism, 1909. 
 
 A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester 
 College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, 1909. 
 
 Some Problems of Philosophy (posthumous), 1911. 
 Memories and Studies, 1911. 
 
 , Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912. This contains the 
 remainder of James's occasional articles, ranging from 
 1884 to 1905, but does not represent his latest views. 
 
 ix
 
 x WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 SOME BOOKS, ETC., ON JAMES. 
 
 La Philosophic de William James. By Th. Flournoy. 
 
 Saint-Blaise : Foyer Solidariste, 1911. An admirable 
 
 book, which gives special prominence to the bearings of 
 
 James's philosophy on religion. 
 William James. By Emile Boutroux. Paris : Librairie 
 
 Armand Colin, 1911. 
 The same. Translated into English by E. and B. Hender- 
 son. London : Longmans, Green and Co., 1912. 
 Introduction (by M. Henri Bergson) to Le Pragmatisme 
 
 (a French translation of Pragmatism). Paris: Ernest 
 
 Flammarion, 1911. 
 William James. By Professor B. B. Perry, in the Harvard 
 
 Graduates' Magazine, December, 1910. Contains a 
 
 short biography. 
 William James and his Message. By Professor L. P. 
 
 Jacks, in the Contemporary Revieiv, January, 1911. 
 In Memory of William James By Dr. W. McDougall, in 
 
 The Proceedings of +he Society for Psychical Research, 
 
 Part 62. 
 William James and his Philosophy, By H. V. Knox, in 
 
 Mind, April, 1913.
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 CHAPTEK I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 William James (1842-1910) is probably the greatest, 
 certainly the freshest and most original, thinker 
 America has so far produced. And the times into 
 which he was born were such as to stimulate to 
 the full his natural genius. He was born late 
 enough thoroughly to appreciate the significance 
 for human thought of the great scientific move- 
 ment of the nineteenth century, which culminated 
 in the triumph of Darwinism in biology (1859) ; 
 and yet early enough to enjoy the instruction of 
 one of the greatest naturalists of the older genera- 
 tion of Louis Agassiz of whom he said: "The 
 hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me the differ- 
 ence between all possible abstractionists and all 
 livers in the light of the world's concrete fulness, 
 that I have never been able to forget it. Both 
 kinds of mind have their place in the infinite 
 design, but there can be no question as to 
 
 1
 
 2 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 which kind lies the nearer to the divine type of 
 thinking."* 
 
 In virtue of his position, and helped no doubt by 
 the circumstances of parentage and training, which 
 brought him into intimate contact with the religious 
 and artistic, as well as with the scientific aspects 
 of life,t he was the first thinker to realize the full 
 significance of the Darwinian biology. He did not 
 conceive it superficially, merely as the last blow 
 struck by science at religion ; he perceived that it 
 was not only fatal to the old beliefs about the 
 fixity of species, and the crude supernaturalism 
 and false Platonism of which that belief was the 
 main support, but also that it cast a profound 
 doubt on the final adequacy of the mechanistic 
 philosophy from which it seemed to spring, and 
 of the metaphysical prejudice that the new was 
 nothing but a disguised form of the old. And, 
 above all, he perceived that the characteristically 
 Darwinian principle of progress by individual varia- 
 tion must profoundly affect our judgment of the 
 value of the individual ; while, in equal measure, 
 the belief in the real kinship of all living creatures 
 must quicken our powers of vital sympathy. That 
 
 * Memories and Studies, p. 14/. 
 
 t His father became a Swedenborgian, and he himself for 
 a time took art to be his vocation.
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 strong sense of individual values, which is, perhaps, 
 James's most striking mental characteristic, was 
 without doubt native to him, and must have found 
 expression under any circumstances ; but the 
 advent of Darwinism gave to his mind the precise 
 scientific cue that it required. For of all the 
 pre-Darwinian prejudices that had masqueraded in 
 the guise of ' logical principles,' none was more 
 inveterate than the ' axiom ' that with individual 
 differences science, as such, had no concern ; that 
 such differences were not merely unaccountable, 
 but literally of no account. Thus James was 
 opportunely helped to recognize that the artist's 
 sympathy, which not only lingers lovingly on the 
 concrete, but can see with another's eyes, is a 
 scientific and philosophical, as well as an aesthetic, 
 asset provided always that it is the aim of science 
 and philosophy to know the concrete reality of 
 things. The real foundation of James's greatness, 
 both as a psychologist and as a philosopher, lay 
 in this keen realization that every new outlook on 
 life, every personal predilection, has an inner value 
 which only " a certain blindness in human beings" 
 prevents most of us from appreciating. The 
 humblest creature has its special way of laying 
 hold on reality, which constitutes for it a revela- 
 tion that may be withheld from ourselves.
 
 4 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 " Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we 
 are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this 
 world ; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fond- 
 ness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes 
 life significant for the other ! we to the rapture 
 of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and 
 lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and 
 art. . . ." 
 
 " The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the 
 root of the matter and to possess no truth. The 
 subject judged knows a part of the world of reality 
 which the judging spectator fails to see, knows 
 more while the spectator knows less ; and wherever 
 there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, 
 we are bound to believe that the truer side is the 
 side that feels the more, and not the side that feels 
 the less."* 
 
 " Living in the open air and on the ground, the 
 lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the 
 level line. . . . The savages and children of 
 nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much 
 superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, 
 along these lines ; and could they write as glibly 
 as we do, they would read us impressive lectures 
 on our impatience for improvement, and on our 
 blindness to the fundamental static goods of life." 1" 
 
 * Talks to Teachers, p. 230/. f Ibid., p. 258.
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 As an illustration of James's own readiness to 
 find wisdom in unlikely quarters, take the follow- 
 ing : " An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance 
 once said in my hearing : ' There is very little 
 difference between one man and another ; but what 
 little there is, is very important.' This distinc- 
 tion seems to me to go to the root of the matter."* 
 
 The importance of individuals is evidently a 
 very democratic principle, and James was a true 
 American in holding fast to it. But his democratic 
 faith rests, not on the figment of a natural equality 
 of all men, but on a deep psychological insight into 
 their infinite variety and personal uniqueness. He 
 perceived that the community has an interest in 
 allowing wide scope for experiments in living that 
 may lead to salutary innovations. Hence he made 
 room also for the apparently opposite principle 
 of hero-worship. 
 
 The region of individual variation " is the forma- 
 tive zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race's 
 average, not yet a typical hereditary and constant 
 factor of the social community in which it occurs. 
 It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the 
 tree in which all the year's growth is going on. 
 Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which 
 stands inert and belongs almost to the inorganic 
 * The .Will to Believe, p.i256/.
 
 6 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 world. The active ring, whatever its bulk, is 
 elementary. If individual variations determine its 
 ups and downs and hair-breadth escapes and twists 
 and turns, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the 
 study of these in favour of the average ! On the 
 contrary, let us emphasize these, and the import- 
 ance of these ; and in picking out from history our 
 heroes, and communing with their kindred spirits, 
 in imagining as strongly as possible what differences 
 their individualities brought about in this world, 
 while its surface was still plastic in their hands, 
 and what whilom feasibilities they made impossible 
 each one of us may best fortify and inspire what 
 creative energy may lie in his own soul." * 
 
 The creative energy of the individual ! This is 
 the dominant note of James's psychology, and it is 
 carried forward into his philosophy. It is, in fact, 
 the vital principle that makes of his psychology 
 and philosophy a truly organic whole, whose co- 
 herence, unlike the so-called ' perfect coherence ' 
 of the absolutist ' system,' does not exclude the 
 possibility of growth either in knowledge or in 
 reality. His interest in investigating the most 
 general principles of the human consciousness is 
 not that of ' reducing ' individual uniqueness to its 
 average expression, but that of exploring the field 
 
 * Op. cit., pp. 258 and 260/. (abridged).
 
 INTBODUCTION 7 
 
 within which this creative energy arises. In 
 psychology, then, where others had carelessly 
 assumed it was ' unscientific ' to see anything but 
 an ' iron system of law ' which mocks our aspira- 
 tions and our unquenchable sense of moral freedom 
 and responsibility, James found a vindication for 
 the deep reality of human endeavour. Personality, 
 which philosophers had naively assumed to be the 
 source of error only, he discovered to be the foun- 
 tain also of truih and of reality. God, whom 
 theologians (Calvinists) had sought to exalt by 
 contrasting His "eternal bliss," "omniscience," 
 and " omnipotence," with the miserable estate of 
 His " creatures," he invited us to welcome as man's 
 Great Coadjutor in the warfare against all things 
 evil. He has thus provided a rational alternative 
 to the protean Fatalism which, under the name of 
 Materialism in science, of Absolute Idealism in 
 philosophy, and of Predestination in theology, had 
 been held up for our admiration as the necessary 
 goal of enlightened Reason. Rightly, therefore, has 
 he been called* "the last great Liberator of the 
 Human Spirit." 
 
 * In the dedication of Dr. F. C. S. Schiller's Formal 
 Logic.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE GENERAL FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 The importance of James's work in psychology is 
 two-fold. It was immediately recognized by 
 psychologists as directly revolutionizing their 
 science, and, though philosophers have even now 
 only begun to recognize this, it put quite a new 
 complexion on the question of the relation of 
 psychology to philosophy. For the ' Critical ' 
 studies which had in appearance so sharply 
 differentiated psychology from philosophy if, 
 indeed, they allowed psychology any right to exist 
 at all were now seen to be based on psychological 
 preconceptions which James, as a psychologist, dis- 
 avowed and overthrew.* This, fortunately, absolves 
 us from entering here on the futile abstract ques- 
 tion of the relation of psychology in general to 
 philosophy in general. We have only to consider 
 the relation of James's psychology to the new 
 philosophy which it inaugurates. 
 
 * See infra, pp. 34-40, and cf. Mr. D. L. Murray's Prag- 
 matism, chap. ii. (in the present series). 
 
 8
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 9 
 
 James once made the remark, in speaking of 
 Spencer,* that " everyone who writes books or 
 articles knows how he must flounder until he hits 
 upon the proper opening. Once the right begin- 
 ning found, everything follows easily and in due 
 order. If a man, however narrow, strikes even by 
 accident into one of these fertile openings, and 
 pertinaciously follows the lead, he is almost sure 
 to meet truth in his path. Some thoughts act 
 almost like mechanical centres of crystallization 
 facts cluster of themselves about them." 
 
 The "fertile opening," into which James himself 
 struck, consists primarily in a special application 
 to animal and human consciousness of the 
 Darwinian conception of biological utility. The 
 secret of Darwin's scientific success was his firm 
 grasp of the principle that a genuine explanation 
 of biological phenomena can only be given in bio- 
 logical terms ; and that, more particularly, an 
 explanation of organic evolution must be couched 
 in terms of the interest of the organism. 
 
 Now, "the pursuance of future ends, and the 
 choice of means for their attainment, are the mark 
 and criterion of the presence of mentality in a 
 phenomenon."! By connecting this with the 
 
 * Memories and Studies, p. 123 /. 
 
 t Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 8.
 
 10 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 Darwinian standpoint, the sciences of biology and 
 psychology can be rendered essentially continuous. 
 If, however, we start with the fixed idea that it is 
 peculiarly ' scientific ' to explain physical events 
 solely in terms of matter and motion, or ether and 
 motion, or motion pure and simple, we then must, 
 as a simple matter of intellectual tactics, disavow 
 our own spiritual activity in the manufacture of 
 these recondite and uncanny theories, and somehow 
 contrive to get rid of the idea that consciousness 
 really counts for something in the world of nature. 
 Or, again, we may simply wish to bring this 
 ' mechanical hypothesis,' or bundle of hypotheses, 
 to the final test. In either case we raise the 
 question whether the so-called intelligent behaviour 
 of an organism, which seems to betray the presence 
 of mind, is really produced by mind ; or whether 
 such outward behaviour can be wholly and suffi- 
 ciently ' accounted for ' by the physical and 
 chemical processes that take place in the brain 
 and nervous system generally. This question, 
 important as it clearly is for any philosopher 
 not wholly careless of the concrete, is, in its 
 first intention, a question of scientific method and 
 of scientific fact. It is the question whether 
 (a) physiology must, in principle, be completely in- 
 dependent of psychology, and {b) whether scientific
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 11 
 
 experience confirms this postulate. The affirmative 
 answer, which yields the theory of ' automatism,' 
 or ' parallelism,' was in James's early days almost 
 universally, and is still commonly, adopted by the 
 physiologists, who, however, have not always in 
 this matter been fully alive to the difference be- 
 tween methodological assumption and scientific 
 verification i.e., between a scientific programme 
 and a scientific achievement. 
 
 It is a curious anomaly in scientific history, 
 explicable doubtless as a reaction from the excesses 
 of Paley-theology, that Darwinism, which is steeped 
 in the idea of the interest of the organism, and 
 which should therefore by rights have stimulated 
 to a profounder study of the nature of purpose, 
 should de facto have at first emphasized the 
 tendency to proscribe the idea of conscious purpose 
 as wholly ' unscientific.'* Because the purposive- 
 ness which is manifest in bodily structure and in 
 admittedly unconscious behaviour need not by the 
 man of science be referred to the conscious agency 
 of an external deity, the road seemed open for a 
 denial that conscious efficacy is to be found any- 
 where. Whereas, before Darwin, ' unconscious 
 purpose ' seemed self- contradictory ; after Darwin 
 it seemed, on the one hand, interpretable as meaning 
 * This docs not apply to Darwin himself.
 
 12 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 simply progressive adaptation, and on the other to 
 be the only kind of purpose that science could 
 ultimately admit. And yet such a view runs pro- 
 foundly counter to the moving spirit of Darwinism. 
 For in this view consciousness is functionless, and 
 therefore biologically meaningless. Nor can it, by 
 way of philosophical compensation, be regarded as 
 the vehicle of ' disinterested knowledge ' ; it must 
 be regarded rather as the vehicle of gratuitous self- 
 deception, seeing that in practice it is impossible 
 for us to divest ourselves of the conviction that our 
 deliberations and personal plans really make some 
 difference in the world of nature. 
 
 It was left to James to discover that there is 
 nothing to be gained either scientifically, philo- 
 sophically, aesthetically, or practically, by this 
 grand epistemological postulate of the fundamental 
 and thorough-going uselessness of all knowledge. 
 And he began by discovering that the automaton- 
 theory (which had at first captivated his own 
 imagination), though professing to be strictly 
 scientific, was put forward " on purely a priori and 
 (jMasi-metaphysical grounds." In a footnote of 
 great biographical interest he tells us that " the 
 present writer recalls how, in 1869, when still a 
 medical student, he began to write an essay show- 
 ing how almost everyone who speculated about
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 13 
 
 brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his account 
 of them links derived from the entirely hetero- 
 geneous universe of Feeling. . . . The writing was 
 soon stopped, because he perceived that the view 
 which he was upholding against these authors was 
 a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of 
 its reality. Later it seemed to him that whatever 
 proofs existed really told in favour of their view."* 
 Elsewhere he says : "In view of the strange 
 arrogance with which the wildest materialistic 
 speculations persist in calling themselves ' science,' 
 it is well to recall just what the reasoning is, by 
 which the effect-theory of attention is confirmed. 
 It is an argument from analogy, drawn from rivers, 
 reflex actions, and other material phenomena where 
 no consciousness appears to exist at all, and 
 extended to cases where consciousness seems the 
 phenomenon's essential feature. The consciousness 
 doesn't count, these reasoners say ; it doesn't exist 
 for science, it is nil ; you mustn't think about it at 
 all. The intensely reckless character of all this 
 needs no comment. It is making the mechanical 
 theory true per fas aut nefas. For the sake of that 
 
 * Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 130 n. It is in- 
 structive that when James had satisfied himself that the 
 mechanical theory was unsupported by concrete fact, he took 
 no interest in proving the writers he mentions to have been 
 inconsistent.
 
 14 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 theory we make inductions from phenomena to 
 others that are startlingly unlike ; and we assume 
 that a complication which Nature has introduced 
 (the presence of feeling and of effort, namely) is 
 not worthy of scientific recognition at all. Such 
 conduct may conceivably be wise, though I doubt 
 it ; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical, 
 it cannot seriously be called." * 
 
 As regards the "positive reasons why we ought 
 to continue to talk in psychology as if conscious- 
 ness had causal efficacy," James points outj that 
 " the particulars of the distribution of conscious- 
 ness point to its being efficacious " ; that " con- 
 sciousness grows the more complex and intense the 
 higher we rise in the animal kingdom. From this 
 point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the 
 other organs, which maintain the animal in the 
 struggle for existence ; and the presumption, of 
 course, is that it helps him in some way in the 
 struggle just as they do." He proceeds to show in 
 what way consciousness may be of bodily use, in 
 view of the defects which make the nervous system 
 " need just the kind of help that consciousness 
 would bring provided it were efficacious." 
 
 * Op. cit, vol. i., p. 454. 
 
 + Op. cit., vol. i., p. 138 /. (The quotations have been 
 slightly abridged.)
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 15 
 
 "The study," he says, "of the phenomena of 
 consciousness which we shall make throughout the 
 rest of this book will show us that consciousness is 
 at all times a selecting agency. The item empha- 
 sized is always in close connection with some 
 interest felt by consciousness to be paramount at 
 the time. The dilemma in regard to the nervous 
 system seems to be of the following kind. We may 
 construct one which will react infallibly and 
 certainly, but it will then be capable of reacting to 
 very few changes in the environment it will fail 
 to be adapted to all the rest. We may, on the 
 other hand, construct a nervous system potentially 
 adapted to respond to an infinite variety of minute 
 features in the situation ; but its fallibility will 
 then be as great as its elaboration. We can never 
 be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the 
 appropriate direction. All this is said of the brain 
 as a physical machine pure and simple. Can con- 
 sciousness increase its efficiency by loading its 
 dice ? Such is the problem. 
 
 " Loading its dice would mean bringing a more 
 or less constant pressure to bear in favour of those 
 of its performances which make for the most 
 permanent interests of the brain's owner ; it would 
 mean a constant inhibition of the tendencies to 
 stray aside.
 
 16 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 " Well, just such pressure and such inhibition 
 are what consciousness seems to be exerting all the 
 while. And the interests in whose favour it seems 
 to exert them are its interests, and its alone 
 interests which it creates, and which, but for it, 
 would have no status in the realm of being what- 
 ever. We talk, it is true, when we are Darwinizing, 
 as if the mere body that owns the brain had 
 interests ; we speak about the utilities of its various 
 organs, and how they help or hinder the body's 
 survival ; and we treat the survival as if it were an 
 absolute end, existing as such in the physical 
 world, a sort of actual should-be, presiding over the 
 animal and judging his reactions, quite apart from 
 the presence of any commenting intelligence out- 
 side. We forget that in the absence of some such 
 superadded, commenting intelligence (whether it 
 be that of the animal itself, or only ours or 
 Mr. Darwin's) the reactions cannot be properly 
 talked of as ' useful ' or ' hurtful ' at all. Con- 
 sidered merely physically, all that can be said of 
 them is that if they occur in a certain way survival 
 will, as a matter of fact, prove to be their incidental 
 consequence. In a word, survival can enter into a 
 purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis 
 made by an onlooker about the future. But the 
 moment you bring a consciousness into the midst,
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 
 
 survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer 
 is it, ' if survival is to occur, then so and so must 
 brain and other organs work.' It has now become 
 an imperative decree : ' Survival shall occur, and 
 therefore organs must so work !' Real ends appear 
 for the first time now upon the world's stage. The 
 conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive 
 form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it 
 in many idealistic schools, modern as well as 
 ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychological, as the 
 remainder of this book will show. Every actually 
 existing consciousness seems to itself, at any rate, to 
 be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its 
 presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of 
 cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, dis- 
 cerning which facts further them and which do not. 
 " Now let consciousness only be what it seems to 
 itself, and it will help an unstable brain to com- 
 pass its proper ends. The movements of the brain 
 per se yield the means of attaining these ends 
 mechanically, but only out of a lot of other ends, 
 if so they may be called, which are not the proper 
 ends of the animal, but often quite opposed. The 
 brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of 
 no certainties. But the consciousness, with its 
 own ends present to it, and knowing also well 
 which possibilities lead thereto and which away, 
 
 2
 
 18 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the 
 favourable possibilities and repress the unfavour- 
 able or indifferent ones. 
 
 " Thus, then, from every point of view, the circum- 
 stantial evidence against that theory [of automatism] 
 is strong. A priori analysis of both brain-action 
 and conscious action show us that if the latter were 
 efficacious, it would, by its selective emphasis, make 
 amends for the indeterminatencss of the former ; 
 whilst the study a posteriori of the distribution of 
 consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we 
 might expect in an organ added for the sake of 
 steering a nervous system grown too complex to 
 regulate itself. The conclusion that it is useful is, 
 after this, quite justifiable." 
 
 In a section specially devoted to the subject of 
 Selection, James further points out that conscious- 
 ness " is always interested more in one part of its 
 object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, 
 or chooses, all the while it thinks. To begin at the 
 bottom, what are our very senses themselves but 
 organs of selection ? Out of what is in itself an 
 undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of 
 distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by 
 attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world 
 full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt 
 changes, of picturesque light and shade.
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 
 
 " Helmholtz says that we notice only those 
 sensations which are signs to us of things. But 
 what are things ? Nothing but special groups of 
 sensible qualities which happen practically or 
 aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore 
 give substantive names, and which we exalt to this 
 exclusive status of independence and dignity. But 
 in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dust- 
 wreath on a windy day is just as much of an 
 individual thing, and just as much or as little 
 deserves an individual name, as my own body 
 does. 
 
 "And then, among the sensations we get from 
 each separate thing, what happens? The mind 
 selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations 
 to represent the thing most truly, and considers 
 the rest as its appearances, modified by the con- 
 ditions of the moment. Thus perception involves 
 a twofold choice. Out of all present sensations 
 we notice mainly such as are significant of absent 
 ones ; and out of all the absent associates which 
 these suggest we again pick out a very few to stand 
 for the objective reality par excellence. We could 
 have no more exquisite example of selective 
 industry. 
 
 " That industry goes on to deal with the things 
 thus given in perception. A man's empirical
 
 20 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 thought depends on the things he has experienced, 
 but what these shall be is to a large extent deter- 
 mined by his habits of attention. . . . 
 
 " If, now, we ask how the mind proceeds 
 rationally to connect them [i.e., objects], we find 
 selection again to be omnipotent. All reasoning 
 depends on the ability of the mind to break up the 
 totality of the phenomenon reasoned about into 
 parts, and to pick out from among these the 
 particular one which, in our given emergency, may 
 lead to the proper conclusion. The man of genius 
 is he who will always stick in his bill at the right 
 point, and bring it out with the right element 
 ' reason ' if the emergency be theoretical, ' means ' 
 if it be practical transfixed upon it. 
 
 "If, now, we pass to its aesthetic department, our 
 law is still more obvious. Any natural subject will 
 do if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon 
 some one feature of it as characteristic, and sup- 
 press all merely accidental items which do not 
 harmonize with this. 
 
 " Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of 
 Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. 
 An act has no ethical quality whatever, unless it 
 be chosen out of several all equally possible. The 
 ethical [energy par ^excellence has to go farther 
 and choose which interest out of several, equally
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 21 
 
 coercive, shall become supreme. The problem 
 with the man is less what act he shall now choose 
 to do than what being he shall now resolve to 
 become. 
 
 " Looking back, then, over this review, we see 
 that the mind is at every stage a theatre of 
 simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists 
 in the comparison of these with each other, the 
 selection of some, and the suppression of the rest 
 by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of atten- 
 tion. The mind, in short, works on the data it 
 receives very much as a sculptor works on his 
 block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there 
 from eternity. But there were a thousand different 
 ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank 
 for having extricated this one from the rest. Just 
 so the world of each of us, howsoever different our 
 several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the 
 primordial chaos of sensations which gave the 
 mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. 
 We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind 
 things back to that black and jointless continuity 
 of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms 
 which science calls the only real world. But all 
 the while the world we feel and live in will be that 
 which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative 
 strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like
 
 22 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of 
 the given stuff. My world is but one in a million 
 alike embedded, alike real to those who may 
 abstract them. How different must be the worlds 
 in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!"* 
 The following, then, are the salient points in 
 James's theory of the relation between conscious- 
 ness and life. It is a theory which does not reduce 
 psychology to biology, but, on the contrary, shows 
 the necessity of expanding the conception of life 
 to include consciousness. 
 
 1. By directly connecting cognition with action, 
 James vindicates its biological utility, as against 
 the adherents of the ' automaton-theory.' Cog- 
 nition ceases to be biologically meaningless. 
 
 2. By showing that cognition and volition are 
 interpenetrative, he finally supplants the old 
 faculty-psychology, which ' explained ' the mind 
 as a congeries of independent ' powers.' Mind 
 becomes an organic unity of function. 
 
 8. His explanation of the biological function of 
 cognition flows from an entirely novel theory of 
 its psychological nature. Knowledge is instru- 
 mental just because it does not passively ' repro- 
 duce ' a pre-existent scheme, but presents us with 
 alternative possibilities, from which we select in 
 
 * Op. cit., vol. i., pp. 284-289 (abridged).
 
 FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 23 
 
 accordance with our personal interests. Mind 
 becomes an instrument of choice. 
 
 4. Though consciousness exists in the first place 
 for the satisfaction of bodily needs, it can minister 
 to these only in so far as they are consciously 
 felt wants. Hence its emergence entails a new kind 
 of vital need, namely, the need of conscious satis- 
 faction, which, again, is the only need that is such 
 in any but a metaphorical sense. Consciousness as 
 a vital factor thus raises life to a higlier denomina- 
 tion than that of merely physical life. 
 
 5. Since the environment to which an organism 
 consciously reacts is the environment as it exists 
 for that organism's consciousness, and since the 
 environment as so viewed is the product of 
 selective elimination on the part of the conscious- 
 ness concerned, it follows that conscious selection 
 creates the known world in precisely the same sense 
 in which ' natural selection ' creates the species. 
 " Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of 
 attending to things, what sort of a universe he 
 shall appear to himself to inhabit " (vol. i., p. 424). 
 
 To sum up so far : Darwinism without material- 
 ism is the keynote of James's psychology. Con- 
 sciousness is the realm of real ends, and in the 
 making and fulfilment of these ends it contributes 
 to the making of reality. Mind's destiny is not
 
 24 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 to be a ' disinterested ' spectator of ready-made 
 existence, but to be an active participant in the 
 shaping of the future. For the ' sensationalism ' 
 of the older psychologists, which is the expression 
 in psychology of the intellectualist bias, James sub- 
 stitutes what, to mark the contrast, may be desig- 
 nated as a ' voluntarism.' But this does not 
 mean that he replaces an independent ' faculty ' of 
 thought or sensation by an equally independent 
 1 faculty ' of will. It means that ' disinterested 
 knowledge ' is biologically a monstrosity, compar- 
 able not so much to the winged Pegasus as to a 
 molluscous vertebrate.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HABIT 
 
 In the last chapter we saw that James's innovations 
 in psychology dissent from the general trend of 
 scientific thought in his time as to the function of 
 consciousness. But his dissent was prompted by 
 his profounder appreciation of the scientific value of 
 Darwinism. He saw that Darwinism, instead of 
 enthroning mechanism as a universal principle, in 
 reality demanded a remodelling of the fashionable 
 mechanical interpretation of consciousness. He 
 saw that if we are to embrace consciousness in the 
 evolutionary scheme, we must give up the idea that 
 knowledge must be useless. He faced the dilemma 
 either the Darwinian principle is inapplicable to 
 animal and human consciousness, or that conscious- 
 ness must be an originative factor in the world ; 
 and he boldly chose the latter alternative. But to 
 adopt this alternative is finally to discard the pre- 
 Darwinian implications of the word ' evolution ' as 
 the opposite of ' epigenesis ' i.e., as a denial of the 
 possibility of real novelty. For James, the intro- 
 
 25
 
 26 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 duction of real novelty is the essential function of 
 consciousness,* and to get it he shrank as little 
 from recognizing the reality of ' chance ' as Darwin 
 did from postulating ' accidental variations.' 
 
 The most important distinction, it follows, in 
 animal behaviour is that between repetition and 
 the original solution of practical problems. Never- 
 theless, habit is obviously of enormous importance 
 to animal welfare, and this seems to bring us back 
 to purely physical laws. "The laws of Nature are 
 nothing but the immutable habits which the 
 different elementary sorts of matter follow in their 
 actions and reactions upon each other." t The 
 difference is that, while inanimate nature and 
 unconscious organisms (if such there really are) 
 simply have habits, conscious beings are enabled to 
 form new habits in their individual lifetime. More- 
 over, the more thoroughly alive a creature is, the 
 less rigid are its ' habits.' Both habit-making 
 and habit-breaking are contrasted with the 
 mechanical happenings of inanimate nature. 
 
 We are creatures of habit, not merely because 
 habits are, or should be, useful, but also because 
 " habit diminishes the conscious attention with 
 which our acts are performed," and thus sets 
 consciousness free for further conquests, whether in 
 
 * Cf. infra, p. 65/. t Principles, vol. i., p. 104.
 
 HABIT 27 
 
 the direction of forming more habits, or of coping 
 with situations too intricate for habit's office.* 
 The more habitual an action grows, the more 
 ingrained it becomes in the nervous system ; con- 
 sciousness is ever, so to speak, delegating to 
 subordinates (which it has itself trained) whatever 
 matters can be dealt with in a routine way. In his 
 chapter on Habit, however, James deals not only 
 with this thought-economizing capacity of habit, 
 but also with the biological and ethical need for 
 the formation of good habits rather than bad ; for 
 the semi-automatic character of habit does not 
 automatically insure that the habitual action shall 
 be good, either for the individual or for society. 
 
 It is highly characteristic of James that he makes 
 no apology for the " very natural transition to the 
 ethical implications of the law of habit." t It seems 
 to him as natural to study the ' laws of mind ' 
 with a view to self-control, as it is to study the 
 ' laws of nature ' with a view to controlling 
 physical forces. More so, indeed, for self-control 
 is at the root of all active control whatsoever. For 
 James, therefore, psychology is not a blank gazing 
 at the ' inexorable ' flow of mental events ; it is a 
 means for perfecting the purposes of which our 
 conscious life is compact; it is itself an integral 
 * Op. cit., vol. i., p. 113 f. \ Op. cit., vol. i., p. 120.
 
 28 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 part of our purposeful thinking activity. This 
 attitude is made possible for him by the fact that 
 he abstains from assuming that in order to under- 
 stand purpose we must treat it as a delusion. If 
 there is one thing more than another that explains 
 the genesis of James's philosophy, it is this. This 
 rare and refreshing attitude, and veritable stroke 
 of genius, emancipates psychology from theDry-as- 
 dusts who can see no connection between the 
 problems of psychology and of real living. Its full 
 significance will appear in the sequel,* but mean- 
 while we may quote the following : 
 
 " If the period between twenty and thirty is the 
 critical one in the formation of intellectual and 
 professional habits, the period below twenty is 
 more important still for the fixing of personal 
 habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and 
 pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly 
 ever is a language learned after twenty spoken 
 without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth 
 transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the 
 nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by 
 the associations of his growing years. Hardly 
 ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in 
 his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentle- 
 man born. The merchants offer their wares as 
 * See especially p. 57/., and chap. ix.
 
 HABIT 29 
 
 eagerly to him as to the veriest ' swell,' but he 
 simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible 
 law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his 
 orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last ; and 
 how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get 
 the things they wear will be for him a mystery till 
 his dying day. 
 
 " The great thing, then, in all education, is to 
 make our nervous system our ally instead of our 
 enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions 
 and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For 
 this we must make automatic and habitual, as early 
 as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and 
 guard against the growing into ways that are likely 
 to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard 
 against the plague. The more of the details of our 
 daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody 
 of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind 
 will be set free for their proper work. There is no 
 more miserable human being than one in whom 
 nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom 
 the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every 
 cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, 
 and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects 
 of express volitional deliberation. Full half the 
 time of such a man" goes to the deciding or 
 regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained
 
 80 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 in him as practically not to exist for his conscious- 
 ness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet 
 ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin 
 this very hour to set the matter right."* 
 
 " A third maxim may be added to the preceding 
 pair:! Seize the very first possible opportunity to 
 act on every resolution you make, and on every 
 emotional prompting you may experience in the 
 direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is 
 not in the moment of their forming, but in the 
 moment of their producing motor effects that 
 resolves and aspirations communicate the new 
 ' set ' to the brain. ... A tendency to act only 
 becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to 
 the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions 
 actually occur, and the brain ' grows ' to their use. 
 Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling 
 evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse 
 than a chance lost ; it works so as positively to 
 hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking 
 the normal path of discharge. There is no more 
 contemptible type of human character than that of 
 the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who 
 
 * Op. cit., vol. i., p. 121/. 
 
 + The others are: (1) "We must take care to launch our- 
 selves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible." 
 (2) " Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is 
 S3curely rooted in your 'ife."
 
 HABIT 31 
 
 spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and 
 emotion, but who never does a manly concrete 
 deed."* 
 
 One hardly knows whether to admire more the 
 moral or the psychological insight of passages like 
 this. 
 
 * Principles, vol. i., p. 124 f.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PEKSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 
 
 In passing to the " study of the mind from within," 
 in chapter ix. of the Principles, James notes the 
 following as fundamental characters in the thought- 
 process : 
 
 1. " Every thought tends to be part of a personal 
 consciousness. 
 
 2. " Within each personal consciousness thought 
 is always changing. 
 
 3. "Within each personal consciousness thought 
 is sensibly continuous. 
 
 4. " It always appears to deal with objects inde- 
 pendent of itself. 
 
 5. " It is interested in some parts of these 
 objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes 
 or rejects chooses from among them, in a word 
 all the while."* 
 
 With the last of these we have already dealt in 
 Chapter II. This chapter we must devote to the first 
 
 * Principles, vol. i., p. 225. 
 32
 
 PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 83 
 
 three, which are most intimately connected. The 
 fourth will be dealt with in Chapters VII. and VIII. 
 First, as to personality. 
 
 " The only states of consciousness that we 
 naturally deal with are found in personal con- 
 sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's 
 and you's. Each of these minds keeps its own 
 thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering 
 between them. No thought even comes into direct 
 sight of a thought in another personal conscious- 
 ness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible 
 pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary 
 psychic fact were not thought or this thought or 
 that thought, but my thought, every thought being 
 owned. . . . The breaches between such thoughts 
 [belonging to different personal minds] are the most 
 absolute breaches in nature. . . .* The universal 
 conscious fact is not ' feelings and thoughts exist,' 
 but ' I think ' and ' I feel.' No psychology, at any 
 rate, can question the existence of personal selves. 
 The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret 
 the nature of these selves as to rob them of their 
 worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, 
 
 * Later (1909), James was inclined to modify this extreme 
 view, chiefly, it would seem, as the result of his experiences 
 as a ' psychical researcher.' See Memories and Studies, 
 pp. 201-206; and cf. Principles, vol. i., p. 367. 
 
 8
 
 34 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 says somewhere, in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excite- 
 ment, that, misled by certain peculiarities which 
 they display, we ' end by personifying ' the pro- 
 cession which they make, such personification 
 being regarded by him as a great philosophic 
 blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder 
 if the notion of personality meant something 
 essentially different from anything to be found in 
 the mental procession. But if that procession be 
 itself the very 'original ' of the notion of personality, 
 to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is 
 already personified. There are no marks of per- 
 sonality to be gathered aliunde, and then found 
 lacking in the train of thought. It has them 
 already, so that to whatever further analysis we 
 may subject that form of personal self-hood under 
 which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, 
 true that the thoughts which psychology studies 
 do continually tend to appear as parts of personal 
 selves."* 
 
 The subjects of continuity and change in con- 
 sciousness may be taken together, for it is con- 
 tinuity of change, or consciousness as a moving 
 continuum, that James is most solicitous about. 
 This feature of consciousness, which James was 
 * Principles, vol. i., p. 226/.
 
 PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 35 
 
 the first to urge, is sublimated into a metaphysical 
 idea of the first rank in the philosophy of Bergson.* 
 James's vindication of conscious continuity rendered 
 obsolete all previous abstract discussion of the 
 relation of thought to time, though professed 
 philosophers are only beginning to perceive this. 
 Presumably, therefore, its importance is not easy 
 to make clear. James himself subsequently sum- 
 marized his view as follows : 
 
 " The conjunctive relation that has given most 
 trouble to philosophers is the co-conscious transition, 
 so to call it, by which one experience passes into 
 another when both belong to the same self. About 
 the facts there is no question. My experiences and 
 your experiences are ' with ' each other in various 
 external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours 
 pass into yours, in a way in which yours and mine 
 never pass into one another. Within each of our 
 personal histories, subject, object, interest, and 
 purpose, are continuous, or may be continuous. 
 Personal histories are processes of change in time, 
 and the change itself is one of the things immediately 
 experienced. ' Change ' in tliis case means con- 
 tinuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. 
 
 * James's view first appeared in an article " On Some 
 Omissions of Introspective Psychology " (Mind, January, 
 1884). Bergson's Donnees Immtdiates date from 1889.
 
 36 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 But continuous transition is one sort of a con- 
 junctive relation ; and to be a radical empiricist 
 means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of 
 all others, for this is the strategic point, the 
 position through which, if a hole be made, all the 
 corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical 
 fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding 
 fast to this relation means taking it at its face 
 value, neither less nor more ; and to take it at its 
 face value means first of all to take it just as we 
 feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract 
 talk about it, involving words that drive us to 
 invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize 
 their suggestions and to make our actual experience 
 again seem possible." 
 
 We should note that James is here referring to 
 Kantian and Anglo-Hegelian ' explanations ' of the 
 ' possibility of experience,' and is not taking con- 
 tinuity in the highly conceptualized sense which 
 has been constructed by some modern mathema- 
 ticians. 
 
 " What I do feel simply, when a later moment of 
 my experience succeeds an earlier one, is that, 
 though they are two moments, the transition from 
 the one to the other is continuous. Continuity here 
 is a definite sort of experience just as definite as 
 is the discontinuity experience which I find it
 
 PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 37 
 
 impossible to avoid when I seek to make the 
 transition from an experience of my own to one 
 of yours.* 
 
 "Practically to experience one's personal con- 
 tinuum in this living way is to know the originals 
 of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to know 
 what the words stand for concretely, to own all 
 that they can ever mean. [Cf. supra James's 
 criticism of the attempt to depersonalize person- 
 ality.] But all experiences have their conditions ; 
 and over-subtle intellects, thinking about the facts 
 here, and asking how they are possible, have ended 
 by substituting a lot of static objects of conception for 
 the direct perceptual experiences. The result is that 
 from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive 
 experience has been discredited by both schools, 
 the empiricist leaving things permanently disjoined, 
 and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their 
 [his?] absolutes or substances, or whatever other 
 fictitious agencies of union they [he ?] may have 
 employed. From all which artificiality we can be 
 saved by a couple of simple reflections : first, that 
 conjunctions and separations are, at all events, 
 
 * Cf. Radical Empiricism, p. 42 : For a radical empiricism 
 " the relations that connect experiences must themselves be 
 experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced 
 must be accounted as ' real ' as anything else in the system."
 
 38 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 co-ordinate phenomena, which, if we take experi- 
 ences at their face value, must be accounted equally 
 real ; and, second, that if we insist on treating 
 things as really separate when they are given as 
 continuously joined, invoking, when union is 
 required, transcendental principles to overcome 
 the separateness we have assumed, then we ought 
 to stand ready to perform the converse act. We 
 ought to invoke higher principles of disunion, also, 
 to make our merely experienced disjunctions more 
 truly real."* 
 
 This criticism, which remains up to the present 
 unanswered, lays the axe to the tap-root of 
 ' transcendental idealism.' For once the reality 
 of continuity is admitted, all need for assuming 
 either a ' Soul-substance ' to be the ' support,' or 
 transcendental Ego to be the ' presupposition,' of 
 consciousness, disappears. 
 
 " Our ' Thought' a cognitive phenomenal event 
 in time is, if it exists at all, itself the only Thinker 
 which the facts require. The only service that 
 transcendental egoism has done to psychology has 
 been by its protests against Hume's ' bundle '- 
 theory of mind. But this service has been 
 ill-performed ; for the Egoists themselves, let 
 them say what they will, believe in the bundle, 
 
 * Essays in Eadical Empiricism, p. 47 /.
 
 PERSONALITY AND CONTINUITY 39 
 
 and in their own system merely tie it up with their 
 special transcendental string, invented for that 
 use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this mirac- 
 ulous tying or ' relating/ the Ego's duties were 
 done." Of its far more important duty of choosing 
 some of the things it ties, and appropriating them, 
 to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a 
 word. . . . 
 
 " The literature of the Self is large, but all its 
 authors may be classed as radical or mitigated 
 representatives of the three schools we have named 
 substantialism, associationism,t or transcenden- 
 talism. Our own opinion must be classed apart, 
 although it incorporates essential elements from all 
 three schools. There need never have been a quarrel 
 between associationism and its rivals if the former 
 liad admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse 
 of thought [cf. Bergson's " Chaque mouvement est 
 
 * A still more fatal flaw is that the Idealists, in their hurry 
 to 'explain' the transcendental 'possibility of knowledge,' 
 have made progress in knowledge impossible. See infra, 
 p. 72/. 
 
 f The fundamental thesis of ' associationism,' that the 
 concrete facts of mental life can be adequately ' explained ' 
 by the mechanical operation of the ' laws of association,' is 
 so obviously and so completely annihilated by James's demon- 
 stration of the selective function of consciousness, that I have 
 not deemed it necessary to refer directly to associationism 
 at all.
 
 40 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 indivisible "], and the latter been willing to allow that 
 'perishing' pnhes of thought might recollect and 
 know"* 
 
 After this fashion did James endeavour to remove 
 the metaphysical cataract that had so long blinded 
 men to the realities of their immediate experience. 
 
 * Principles, vol. i., p. 369 f.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WILL 
 
 In James the transition from psychology to the 
 larger problems of philosophy appears to occur on 
 the question of Free Will. His philosophy avows 
 itself a free-will philosophy, just as his psychology 
 is voluntaristic ; and for the same reason viz., 
 that he is a true Darwinian, a champion of real 
 novelty.* But James actually proceeds by raising 
 the question, How can we pass from the recogni- 
 tion of the reality and importance of Will to the 
 belief in Freedom? It is chiefly because psy- 
 chology thus conducts directly and inevitably to the 
 free-will problem, that psychology is for James 
 something more than a mere branch of ' natural 
 science ' ; while it is because this problem concerns 
 the ultimate function of human consciousness 
 that philosophy cannot cut loose from psychology. 
 And finally it is because the attempt to solve the 
 free-will problem by dint of ' pure reason ' begs the 
 
 * Cf. infra, p. 65 /. 
 41
 
 42 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 question in the interest of the deterministic alterna- 
 tive, that for James the play of ' pure reason ' is 
 literally play, and inadequate to the serious 
 business of life. 
 
 Since the free-will problem forms one of the 
 nodal points wherein psychology and philosophy 
 inosculate, James is, in his Principles, confronted 
 with an awkward crux of method. How is he 
 even to state the problem in psychological terms, 
 when the solution thereof must take him far 
 beyond the limits of psychology as a natural 
 science the limits within which alone psychology 
 can lead an autonomous existence ? We must 
 appreciate this methodological difficulty if we are 
 to grasp James's position in the Principles. 
 
 Before reaching his problem, James has im- 
 pugned the scientific status of the automaton 
 theory.* He has shown that it is dogmatic and 
 metaphysical, and that we are under no logical 
 obligation to accept it. Now, it is true that to 
 challenge the credentials of that theory is not 
 enough to establish the reality of freedom. In the 
 first place, we may arbitrarily and frankly adopt 
 automatism as a metaphysical theory ; and in the 
 second place, we may reject it and still remain 
 determinists. For it will still at least seem possible 
 * Cf. chap, ii., especially p. 12 /.
 
 WILL 43 
 
 to maintain that within the universe ' as a whole,' 
 conceived in terms of the rival theory of Interac- 
 tion i.e., of causal reciprocity between psychical 
 and physical events not Freedom, but Necessity 
 obtains.* James himself explicitly allows the logical 
 possibility of such a position. t But though auto- 
 matism is not convertible with determinism, it is 
 the only form in which determinism can be sharply 
 opposed to indeterminism, and it is the only form 
 which appears even remotely susceptible of scien- 
 tific proof. Hence, to show how arbitrary is the 
 automaton theory, though we do not thereby prove 
 the truth of indeterminism, does set us logically 
 free to embrace this alternative, if it should appeal 
 to us on emotional or practical grounds. 
 
 James therefore maintains that the question 
 whether volition or attention (for " volition is 
 nothing but attention") does or does not involve 
 a " principle of spiritual activity " " is metaphysical 
 as well as psychological, and is well worthy of all 
 the pains we can bestow on it. It is, in fact, the 
 pivotal question of metaphysics, the very hinge on 
 which our picture of the world shall swing from 
 
 * Such a position is assumed, e.g. (though not expressly 
 argued), by Mr. W. McDougall in his important treatise on 
 Body and Mind. 
 
 | Principles, vol. i., pp. 448 and 451
 
 44 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 materialism, fatalism, monism [note the association 
 of these nominally different doctrines !], towards 
 spiritualism, freedom, pluralism or else the other 
 way."* 
 
 " The whole feeling of reality, the whole sting 
 and excitement of voluntary life, depends on our 
 sense that in it things are really being decided from 
 one moment to another, and that it is not the dull 
 rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable 
 ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and 
 history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be 
 an illusion. As we grant to the advocate of the 
 mechanical theory that it may be one, so he must 
 grant to us that it may not. And the result is 
 two conceptions of possibility, face to face, with no 
 facts definitely enough known to stand as arbiter 
 between them. Under these circumstances, one 
 can leave the question open whilst waiting for 
 light, or one can do what most speculative minds 
 do, that is, look to one's general philosophy to 
 incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do 
 so without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse 
 a similar privilege to the believers in a spiritual 
 force. I count myself among the latter, but as 
 my reasons are ethical, they are hardly suited for 
 introduction into a psychological work. The last 
 * Op. cit., vol. i., p. 448.
 
 WILL 45 
 
 word of psychology here is ignorance, for the 
 ' forces ' engaged are certainly too delicate and 
 numerous to be followed in detail." * 
 
 This quotation plainly hints at what James 
 regards as the real problem. And later he repeats 
 that "the question of free will is insoluble on 
 strictly psychologic grounds," and refers us to an 
 ethical discourse on " The Dilemma of Deter- 
 minism," t permitting himself only "a few words 
 about the logic of the question." 
 
 " The most that any argument can do for deter- 
 minism is to make it a clear and seductive concep- 
 tion, which a man is foolish not to espouse so long 
 as he stands by the great scientific postulate that 
 the world must be one unbroken fact, and that 
 prediction of all things without exception must be 
 ideally, even if not actually, possible. It is a moral 
 postulate about the Universe the postulate that 
 what ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be 
 fated, but that good ones must be possible in their 
 place which would lead one to espouse the contrary 
 view. But when scientific and moral postulates 
 war thus with each other, and objective proof is not 
 to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for 
 scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary 
 
 * Op. cit., vol. i., p. 453 /. 
 
 t Now included in The Will to Believe.
 
 46 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined, 
 it would seem only fitting that the belief in its 
 indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from 
 amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first 
 deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never 
 to hope for any other method of getting at the 
 truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this 
 particular truth will therefore probably be open to 
 us to the end of time, and the utmost that a 
 believer in free will can ever do will be to show- 
 that the deterministic arguments are not coercive. 
 That they are seductive, I am the last to deny ; 
 nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep 
 the faith in freedom, when they press upon it, 
 upright in the mind."* 
 
 James, then, even in the Principles, points to the 
 conclusion that there is not, strictly speaking, any 
 
 * Op. cit., vol. ii., p. 573 /. The position which James 
 here takes up in developing the ' logic of the question ' of 
 free will is exactly that which he afterwards expressed, in 
 more generalized form, in his essay on Tlie Will to Believe. 
 If the numerous critics who fell foul of that doctrine had 
 taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the general 
 tenor of James's views on the subject of will as explained in 
 his Principles, and had interpreted the doctrine in the light 
 of this, its original application, we might have been spared 
 such curiously inept objections as that James gives every 
 man full licence to believe whatever he likes on no evidence 
 at all.
 
 WILL 47 
 
 ' question of fact ' involved in the free-will contro- 
 versy at all. For the issue is raised, inter alia, of 
 how the existence of volition as a psychical fact 
 should modify our conception of the nature of ' fact ' 
 in general. Can 'fact,' in the end, be independent of 
 will ? Is the distinction between what is and what 
 ought to be ultimately irreducible ? Is the future, 
 in rerum natura, as irrevocably fixed as the past ? 
 In a word, can we, without begging the question as to 
 the ultimate nature of reality, absolutely separate the 
 realms of Logic and Ethics? No less than this is 
 involved in the free-will question ; and James is 
 clearly aware of it. The free-will problem he saw, 
 as none had seen before him, brings all the philo- 
 sophical disciplines to a focus, and cannot, there- 
 fore, be reduced to a mere question of psychological 
 1 fact,' any more than it can be dismissed as 
 merely metaphysical. And his distinction between 
 ' logically coercive ' proof and the moral right to 
 believe will eventually lead to a thorough revision 
 of the notion of ' logical coerciveness ' itself.* 
 
 Consequently, in apparently seeking to give a 
 psychological formulation of the problem, James 
 
 * James might also have pointed out that since deter- 
 minism, equally with indeterminism, can only be embraced 
 through an arbitrary act of choice, it is afflicted with an 
 internal incoherence, from which the rival theory is for- 
 tunately free
 
 48 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 must not be understood as attempting to reduce 
 the problem to purely psychological terms. He is 
 merely trying to discover how far it falls within the 
 limits of psychology as a 'natural science' i.e., 
 as a science dealing with ' facts,' and taking its 
 conception of ' fact ' in the relatively uncritical 
 way appropriate to science as distinguished from 
 philosophy. So understanding him, and contenting 
 ourselves, so far as this book is concerned, with 
 his interim solution* of the larger problem, we 
 will in our next chapter note the more important 
 and original points in his psychological theory of 
 will. 
 
 * " A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago 
 been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no 
 new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments 
 which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I 
 know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive 
 genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground ; 
 not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, 
 but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two 
 parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will 
 imply '' (Will to Believe, p. 145).
 
 CHAPTEE fl 
 will continued 
 
 James's theory will best be given almost entirely in 
 his own words : 
 
 " An anticipatory image of the sensorial conse- 
 quences of a movement, plus (on certain occasions) 
 the fiat that these consequences shall become 
 actual, is the only psychic state which introspection 
 lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary 
 acts. There is no introspective evidence whatever 
 of any still later or concomitant feeling attached to 
 the efferent discharge. The various degrees of 
 difficulty with which the fiat is given form a com- 
 plication of the utmost importance to be discussed 
 farther on."* [I.e., there really is such a thing as 
 an effort of will ; but this real effort must not be 
 confounded with a purely hypothetical and useless 
 ' feeling of innervation,' or discharge of nervous 
 energy. We must note, however, in this passage, 
 as throughout James's whole chapter on Will, a 
 
 * Principles, vol ii., p. 501. 
 
 49 4
 
 50 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 certain vagueness in his use of the word, in 
 that bo extends it to acts performed without 
 any ' fiat,' and as a simple result of unimpeded 
 attention to an idea. At the same time, it must 
 be admitted that attention itself, being essentially 
 selective, does contain an element of choice ; so that 
 it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between 
 ' effortless ' attention and ' express consent.'] 
 
 " The entire content and material of our con- 
 sciousness consciousness of movement, as of all 
 things else is thus of peripheral origin, and came 
 to us in the first instance as through the peripheral 
 nerves. If it be asked what we gain by this sen- 
 sationalistic conclusion, I reply that we gain, at any 
 rate, simplicity and uniformity. In the chapters 
 on Space, on Belief, on the Emotions, we found 
 sensation to be a much richer thing than is 
 commonly supposed ; and this chapter seems at 
 this point to fall into line with those. Then, as 
 for sensationalism being a degrading belief, which 
 abolishes all inward originality and spontaneity, 
 there is this to be said, that the advocates of 
 inward spontaneity may be turning their backs on 
 its real citadel, when they make a fight on its 
 behalf for the consciousness of energy put forth in 
 the outgoing discharge. Let there be no such 
 consciousness ; let all our thoughts of movement
 
 WILL 51 
 
 be of sensational constitution ; still, in the empha- 
 sizing, choosing, and espousing of one of them 
 rather than another, in the saying to it, ' Be thou 
 the reality for me,' there is ample scope for our 
 inward initiative to be shown. Here, it seems to 
 me, the true line between the passive materials 
 and the activity of the spirit should be drawn. It 
 is certainly false strategy to draw it between such 
 ideas as are connected with the outgoing and such 
 as are connected with the incoming neural wave " 
 (p. 517/.). 
 
 " The first point to start from in understanding 
 voluntary * action, and the possible occurrence of 
 it with no fiat or express resolve, is the fact that 
 consciousness is in its very nature impulsive. . . . 
 Movement is the natural immediate effect of feeling, 
 irrespective of what the quality of the feeling may he. 
 It is so in reflex action, it is so in emotional expres- 
 sion, it is so in the voluntary life. Ideo-motor 
 action [i.e., action following immediately on the 
 idea without ' express consent '] is thus no paradox, 
 to be softened or explained away. It obeys the 
 type of all conscious action in which a special fiat 
 is involved" (p. 526/.). 
 
 " We are now in a position to describe what 
 happens in deliberate action when the mind is the 
 * See observation on p. 49/.
 
 52 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 seat of many ideas related to each other in 
 antagonistic or in favourable ways. One of the 
 ideas is that of an act. By itself this idea would 
 prompt a movement. Some of the additional con- 
 siderations, however, which are present to con- 
 sciousness block the motor discharge, whilst others, 
 on the contrary, solicit it to take place. The 
 result is that peculiar feeling of inward unrest 
 known as indecision. . . . "When finally the 
 original suggestion either prevails and makes the 
 movement take place, or gets definitely quenched 
 by its antagonists, we are said to decide, or to utter 
 our voluntary fiat in favour of one or the other course. 
 The reinforcing and inhibiting ideas meanwhile 
 are termed the reasons or motives by which the 
 decision is brought about" (p. 528/.). Volition, 
 therefore, in the strict sense, is choice from among 
 presented alternatives ; and in its most typical form 
 takes place as the resolution of a mental conflict. 
 
 James then proceeds to sketch the types of 
 decision, of which for our present purposes only 
 the last need be mentioned. 
 
 " In the fifth and final type of decision, the 
 feeling that the evidence is all in, and that reason 
 has balanced the books, may be either present or 
 absent. But in either case we feel, in deciding, as 
 if we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the
 
 WILL 53 
 
 beam : in the former case by adding our living 
 effort to the weight of the logical reason which, 
 taken alone, seems powerless to make the act dis- 
 charge ; in the latter by a kind of creative contri- 
 bution of something instead of a reason which does 
 a reason's work. The slow, dead heave of the will 
 that is felt in these instances makes of them a 
 class altogether different subjectively from all the 
 preceding classes. What the heave of the will 
 betokens metaphysically, what the effort might 
 lead us to infer about a will-power distinct from 
 motives, are not matters that concern us yet. 
 Subjectively and phenomenally, the feeling of effort, 
 absent from the former decisions, accompanies 
 these" (p. 534). 
 
 " The existence of the effort as a phenomenal 
 fact in our consciousness cannot, of course, be 
 doubted or denied. Its significance, on the other 
 hand, is a matter about which the gravest difference 
 of opinion prevails. Questions as momentous as 
 that of the very existence of spiritual causality, as 
 vast as that of universal predestination or free will, 
 depend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes 
 essential that we study with some care the con- 
 ditions under which the feeling of volitional effort 
 is found " (p. 535). 
 
 Then follows a discussion of the difference
 
 54 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 between the healthy and the unhealthy will. 
 Speaking of the ' obstructed will,' James says : 
 
 " In Chapter XXL ... it was said that the 
 sentiment of reality with which an object appealed 
 to the mind is proportionate (amongst other things) 
 to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here we 
 get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, 
 objects, considerations, which (in these lethargic 
 states) fail to get to the will, fail to draw blood, 
 seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The 
 connection of the reality of things with their 
 effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet 
 been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life 
 comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is 
 ruptured which normally should hold between 
 vision of the truth and action, and that this 
 pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to 
 certain ideas " (p. 546/.). 
 
 "We now see at one view when it is that effort 
 complicates volition. It does so whenever a rarer 
 and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize 
 others of a more instinctive and habitual kind ; it 
 does so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are 
 checked, or strongly obstructive conditions over- 
 come. . . . Now, our spontaneous way of conceiving 
 the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an 
 active force adding its strength to that of the
 
 WILL 55 
 
 motives which ultimately prevail. When outer 
 forces impinge upon a body, we say that the 
 resultant motion is in the line of least resistance or 
 of greatest traction. But it is a curious fact that 
 our spontaneous language never speaks of volition 
 with effort in this way. Of course, if we proceed 
 a priori and define the line of least resistance as 
 the line that is followed, the physical law must 
 also hold good in the mental sphere. But we feel, 
 in all hard cases of volition, as if the line taken, 
 when the rarer and more ideal motives prevail, were 
 the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of 
 coarser motivation were the more pervious and 
 easy one, even at the very moment when we refuse 
 to follow it. He who under the surgeon's knife 
 represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself 
 to social obloquy for duty's sake . . . speaks of 
 conquering and overcoming his impulses and 
 temptations. But the sluggard, the drunkard, the 
 coward, never talk of their conduct in that way or 
 say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety, 
 conquer their courage, and so forth. . . . And if a 
 brief definition of ideal or moral action were 
 required, none could be given which would better 
 fit the appearances than this : It is action in the 
 line of greatest resistance." The effort "appears 
 adventitious and indeterminate in advance. We
 
 56 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 can make more or less as we please, and if we 
 make enough, we can convert the greatest mental 
 resistance into the least. Such, at least, is the 
 impression which the facts spontaneously produce 
 upon us" (p. 548/.). 
 
 " We have now brought things to a point at 
 which we see that attention with effort is all that 
 any case of volition [in the strict sense] implies. 
 The essential achievement of the will, in short, when 
 it is most ' voluntary,' is to attend to a difficult object 
 and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is 
 the fiat; and it is a mere physiological incident 
 that when the object is thus attended to, immediate 
 motor consequences should ensue. . . . Effort oj 
 attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will " 
 (p. 561/.). 
 
 The final statement of the psychological problem 
 runs thus : 
 
 "If we admit that our thoughts exist, we ought 
 to admit that they exist after the fashion in which 
 they appear, as things, namely, that supervene 
 upon each other, sometimes with effort and some- 
 times with ease ; the only questions being, Is the 
 effort where it exists a fixed function of the object 
 [of the idea], which the latter imposes on the 
 thought ? or is it such an independent ' variable ' 
 that with a constant object more or less of it may 
 be made ?
 
 WILL 57 
 
 " It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as 
 if, even with an unchanging object, we might make 
 more or less as we choose. If it be really indeter- 
 minate, our future acts are ambiguous or unpre- 
 destinate ; in common parlance our ivills are free. 
 If the amount of effort be not indeterminate, but 
 be related in a fixed manner to the objects them- 
 selves, in such wise that whatever object at any 
 time fills our consciousness was from eternity bound 
 to fill it then and there, and compel from us the 
 exact effort, neither more nor less, which we bestow 
 upon it then our wills are not free, and all our 
 acts are foreordained. The question of fact in the 
 free-will controversy is tints extremely simple. It 
 relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or 
 consent which we can at any time put forth. Are 
 the duration and intensity of this effort fixed 
 functions of the object, or are they not ?" (p. 570/.). 
 
 On the ' question of fact,' then, James's position 
 is very definite. But I believe that he would have 
 done better to trace the emergence of free will 
 farther back, to the point where active consent 
 emerges, irrespective of the amount, or even the 
 quality, of effort. In a previous passage * James 
 does, in fact, explicitly assign to consent the im- 
 portance that he here assigns to ' effort.' My sug- 
 * Principles, vol. ii., p. 518, quoted supra, pp. 50-51.
 
 58 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 gestion is that in departing from that position he is 
 committing a strategical error similar to that which 
 he deprecates in those who pin their faith on the 
 ' feeling of innervation.'* 
 
 James should, and I think would, if he had taken 
 full advantage of his own innovations, have main- 
 tained squarely that in the last resort Freedom and 
 Will are synonymous. It is plain that by ' effort,' 
 in the passage last quoted, James means, more 
 particularly, painful effort. Consent with ' effort,' 
 in this sense, is no doubt the most striking self- 
 assertion of freedom ; but it occurs merely when 
 the embraced alternative is in any respect envisaged 
 as disagreeable, or perhaps positively repulsive. 
 The existence of real choice whether with effort or 
 with enthusiasm in presence of real alternatives, 
 is, surely, the essential thing to establish. Will is 
 choice; and if the choice is real, then the will isfree. 
 
 The ' question of fact,' then, if it can be properly 
 so called, is simply this : Is the act of will really 
 what it seems to be to the agent himself in the act 
 of willing ? Is, or is not, will to be taken at what 
 James calls its ' face-value' ?t Determinist meta- 
 
 * Principles, vol. ii., p. 518, quoted supra, pp. 50-51. 
 
 t Taking the fundamental aspects of consciousness at their 
 ' face-value' constitutes the essence of what James (in his later 
 use of the term) calls radical empiricism. Cf. supra, p. 86.
 
 WILL 59 
 
 physicians, out of regard for the ' unity ' of the 
 universe, and determinist psychologists, out of 
 regard for the abstract ' law of causation,' both 
 assume unhesitatingly that will must not be so 
 taken. But what does this denial really amount 
 to ? In thus asserting the a priori impossibility of 
 freedom, determinists have not merely begged the 
 question ; they have also committed themselves to 
 a most peculiar interpretation of the expression 
 ' a Eational Universe.' For by this denial they 
 have gratuitously converted will itself, and, indeed, 
 ' finite consciousness ' in general, into a hope- 
 lessly unintelligible ' appearance.' And for this 
 reason : If there is no real choice, will drags 
 thought with it in becoming, biologically, a 
 meaningless superfluity. We are not to believe 
 that our will can perform the work which it 
 believes itself to be performing ; and yet no one 
 has been able to suggest any other biological purpose 
 that it might fulfil. The conception of a function- 
 less will is what Determinism therefore stands for, 
 if it means anything at all; and yet will, as the 
 exercise of choice, is, as James has conclusively 
 shown, just the functional aspect of human intelligence. 
 In condemning freedom, therefore, Determinism 
 has literally reduced will to a nonentity, and in 
 so doing it has really condemned ' finite conscious-
 
 60 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 ness ' in toto. Nor can the situation be even verbally 
 redeemed by the purely metaphysical (in the very 
 worst sense of that word) interpretation of human 
 consciousness as the ' reproduction ' or ' self-revela- 
 tion ' of Reality. For a reproduction of reality is, 
 on monistic or deterministic principles, precisely 
 what our consciousness is not* 
 
 In other words, under the guise of denying the 
 reality of freedom, determinists have in effect 
 asserted that the human consciousness in general, 
 and will in particular, represent a wild outbreak of 
 impotent irrationality and the greater the impo- 
 tence of the consciousness, the profounder the irra- 
 tionality of the outbreak within the ' universe ' 
 whose absolute rationality they professed to vindi- 
 cate. Such is the logical nemesis of refusing to 
 take the willing-experience at its face-value on the 
 strength of the easy-going assumption that ration- 
 ality and individual freedom must be antagonistic 
 principles. It would appear on the whole simpler, 
 and perhaps more rational, to regard the theory oj 
 Determinism as an irrational outbreak on the part 
 of certain ' finite centres of consciousness,' than 
 to regard ' finite consciousness ' as breaking up 
 the whole scheme of a would-be 'rational' 
 
 * This last point will be more fully brought out in our 
 final chapter.
 
 WILL 61 
 
 Universe. To dichotomize man into agent and 
 spectator (a spectator, too, not of reality, but of 
 'appearance'), to set these two eternally at cross- 
 purposes, and then arbitrarily to identify ' Reason ' 
 with the spectator rather than with the agent 
 can this really be the last word of philosophic 
 enlightenment and the highest achievement of 
 philosophic ' unification ' ? 
 
 In all James wrote the immediate context is all- 
 important. If we take the Principles as a whole 
 as the relevant context here, and if we bear in mind 
 the methodological difficulty previously alluded to,* 
 I think we may fairly claim that the suggestions 
 just made should rank as a legitimate interpretation 
 of James's real meaning. At the very least this 
 interpretation is thoroughly in harmony with his 
 general outlook. At no stage of his development 
 did James himself, we must remember, feel that 
 he had finally plumbed the depths of these 
 ultimate questions. He was not himself so faith- 
 less to the principles of the open door and the open 
 mind of which his whole philosophy is such an 
 eloquent defence. Speaking in 1904 of " the 
 urgent problems of activity," he makes an admis- 
 sion, rare indeed among philosophers, who com- 
 * P. 42.
 
 62 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 monly pretend that philosophy excels science 
 because it must (however absurdly) claim finality. 
 " So far," he says, " am I from suggesting any 
 definite answer to such questions that I hardly yet 
 can put them clearly."* 
 
 But to return to James's own account of will. 
 After discussing the " logic of the question,"! he 
 adds these remarks on the scientific postulate of 
 causation : 
 
 "What, quite as much as the [alleged] incon- 
 ceivability of absolutely independent variables, 
 persuades modern men of science that their efforts 
 must be predetermined, is the continuity of the 
 latter with other phenomena whose predetermina- 
 tion no one doubts. Decisions with effort merge so 
 gradually into those without it that it is not easy to 
 say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort 
 merge again into ideo-motor, and these into reflex, 
 acts ; so that the temptation is almost irresistible 
 to throw the formula which covers so many cases 
 over absolutely all. Where there is effort, just as 
 where there is none, the ideas themselves which 
 furnish the matter of deliberation are brought 
 before the mind by the machinery of association." 
 [But, as James has previously pointed out, the 
 
 * Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 188/. 
 + Supra, p. 45/
 
 WILL 63 
 
 ' laws of association ' cannot account for the actual 
 course of our thoughts even in reverie. " Always 
 some ingredient is prepotent over the rest. In 
 subjective terms, we say that the prepotent items 
 are those which appeal most to our interest."* And 
 interest is through and through selective.] " Eeally 
 both effort and resistance are ours, and the identifi- 
 cation of our self with one of these factors is an 
 illusion and a trick of speech [according to the 
 deterministic view]. I do not see how anyone can 
 fail (especially when the mythologic dynamism of 
 separate ' ideas ' ... is translated into that of 
 brain-processes) to recognize the fascinating sim- 
 plicity of some such view as this. Nor do I see 
 why for scientific purposes one need give it up even 
 if indeterminate amounts of effort really do occur. 
 Before their indeterminism science simply stops. 
 She can abstract from it altogether then ; for in the 
 impulses and inhibitions with which the effort has 
 to cope there is already a larger field than she can 
 ever practically cultivate. Her prevision will never 
 foretell, even if the effort be completely predes- 
 tinate, the actual way in which each individual 
 emergency is resolved. Psychology will be Psycho- 
 logy, and Science Science, as much as ever (as 
 much and no more) in this world, whether free 
 * Principles, vol. i., pp. 571-572.
 
 64 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 will be true in it or not. Science, however, must 
 be constantly reminded that her purposes are not 
 the only purposes, and that the order of uniform 
 causation which she has use for, and is therefore 
 right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider 
 order, on which she has no claims at all " (p. 574/.). 
 In other words, determination, though a postu- 
 late of absolute ideal predictability in events, can 
 never in practice be actually traced. So that 
 Indeterminism, even if taken as covering the whole 
 field of selective activity, cannot conflict with 
 scientific practice, but only with a metaphysical, or 
 quasi-metaphysical, ideal. James is, therefore, 
 thoroughly justified in this pungent comment on 
 Spencer : " Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's 
 ' psychical changes either conform to law, or they 
 do not. If they do not, this work, in common with 
 all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no 
 science of psychology is possible,' are beneath 
 criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other 
 ' works on the subject,' treats of those general 
 conditions of possible conduct, within which all 
 our real decisions must fall, whether their effort be 
 small or great. However closely psychical changes 
 may conform to law, it is safe to say that individual 
 histories and biographies will never be written in 
 advance, no matter how ' evolved ' psychology may
 
 WILL 65 
 
 become " (p. 576 n.). And, again, speaking of the 
 "caricatures," in deterministic literature, "of the 
 kind of supposition which free will demands," he 
 points out that we must distinguish " between the 
 possibles which really tempt a man, and those 
 which tempt him not at all. Free will, like 
 psychology, deals with the former possibles ex- 
 clusively" (p. 577 n.). 
 
 An important quotation from The Experience of 
 Activity* may conclude this chapter : " The only 
 ' free will ' I have ever thought of defending is the 
 character of novelty in fresh activity -situations. \ If 
 an activity-process is the form of a whole ' field of 
 consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is 
 not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly 
 admitted), but has its elements unique (since in 
 that situation they are all dyed in the total), then 
 novelty is perpetually entering the world,t and what 
 happens there is not pure repetition, as the 
 dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. 
 Activity-situations come, in short, each with an 
 original touch." I 
 
 * See A Pluralistic Universe, p. 391 n. This essay is 
 republished also in Essays in Radical Empiricism. 
 
 f Italics mine. 
 
 I Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 145 : " Towards 
 this issue of the reality or unreality of the novelty that 
 
 5
 
 66 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 Such a declaration points forward to Bergson's 
 ' Creative Evolution,' but the novelty it demands 
 entered the scientific world (rather unobtrusively) 
 with Darwin's ' spontaneous variation.' 
 
 appears, the pragmatic difference between monism and 
 pluralism seems to converge. That we ourselves may be 
 authors of genuine novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of 
 free will." And Pragmatism, p. 257: "The essential con- 
 trast [between pragmatism and rationalism] is that for 
 rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all 
 eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and 
 awaits part of its complexion from the future." (James puts 
 this sentence in italics.)
 
 CHAPTEE VII 
 
 UTILITY AND THE SURVIVAL OF BELIEFS 
 
 The order of the Principles is not quite systematic, 
 and hardly brings out the close connection which 
 existed in James's thought between acts of belief 
 and of will.* But the root-idea in James's account 
 of judgment is that belief, like will, is "a manifes- 
 tation of our active nature." Belief "in its inner 
 nature is a sort of feeling more allied to emotion 
 than to anything else. ... It resembles more 
 than anything what in the psychology of volition 
 we know as consent. . . . What characterizes both 
 consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic 
 agitation through the advent of an idea which is 
 inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the 
 exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is 
 the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence 
 
 * Cf., e.g., Principles, vol. ii., p. 321 : ""Will and Belief, 
 in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the 
 Self, are two names for one and the same psychological 
 phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one 
 are questions which arise concerning the other." 
 
 67
 
 68 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 the states of consent and belief, characterized by 
 repose on the intellectual side, are both intimately 
 connected with subsequent practical activity."* 
 In other words, belief, as a function of the whole 
 man, exists for the sake of action. 
 
 Now, prior to this recognition of the intimate 
 psychical connection between belief and action, it 
 seemed easy to draw a hard-and-fast line between 
 the psychology of belief or ' cognition ' and logic ; 
 just as, by assuming that in psychology choice must 
 be treated as an illusion, it seemed easy to draw a 
 hard-and-fast line between the psychology of 
 volition and ethics. For the psychologist, as such, 
 seemed to be concerned only with belief as a 
 subjective affection, and not at all with the dis- 
 tinction between true belief and false belief. That 
 distinction, therefore, as involving the relation 
 between mind and reality at large, belonged wholly 
 to logic and metaphysics. 
 
 But when belief is recognized as strictly a 
 function of the organism, and when we observe 
 that this function is to establish harmonious 
 relations between the organism and the circum- 
 ambient reality, or environment, it becomes im- 
 possible to maintain so simple a distinction between 
 psychology and logic. For belief, taken quite 
 * Principles, vol. ii. , p. 283/.
 
 UTILITY AND SURVIVAL 69 
 
 abstractly, simply qua belief, has not the slightest 
 biological meaning. Broadly speaking, it is only 
 true beliefs that are useful for life. Knowledge, 
 indeed, is power ; but error spells impotence and 
 disaster. 
 
 More precisely, the modern psychologist, just 
 because he is also a biologist, is interested, not in 
 consciousness as a theoretic puzzle, but in con- 
 sciousness as an element in intelligent behaviour. 
 From this standpoint he must distinguish between 
 beliefs that make for efficiency and those that do 
 not. Taken thus concretely, thought inevitably 
 seems an instrument for individual and active 
 adaptation to the world we live in. It is therefore 
 in indissoluble connection with the Darwinian 
 notions of utility and survival - value that the 
 distinction between real truth and real error 
 becomes relevant to psychology. ' Truth,' func- 
 tionally interpreted, is that which subserves the 
 organism's purposes, and ' error ' is that which 
 does not. Whatever ' truth ' may be ' in itself,' 
 truth as applicable to life is what we literally must 
 have, or die. Thus vital utility is the only criterion 
 which the living organism itself can either desire 
 or afford to apply in the actual business of living. 
 But the utility must, of course, be a felt utility, in 
 order to be a real guide in action.
 
 70 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 In all this, we are not laying down the law as to 
 what ' absolute truth ' must be from some supra- 
 mundane and ' logically disinterested ' point of 
 view a point of view which must inevitably give 
 rise to the further questions whether such ' truth ' 
 is desirable, and, if desirable, attainable by man. 
 We are simply pointing out that there is a kind of 
 truth which is accessible to man, and that this kind 
 of truth is not a luxury, but a necessity. This, 
 however, is enough to give psychology admission 
 to the preserves of logic and metaphysics. So far 
 as knowledge is beneficial, the problem of the 
 ' possibility of knowledge ' is ipso facto solved : 
 that is to say, it is solved by the recognition of 
 what ' knowledge ' means for the conscious 
 organism. 
 
 It is quite consistent with his view of the place 
 of consciousness in life in general, and more par- 
 ticularly in human life, that James does not regard 
 that alone as beneficial which furthers mere 
 physical existence. There is, indeed, a physical 
 basis for the pyramid of vital needs. But a living 
 organism that has more than material existence 
 also has, or may have, more than material needs. 
 What, in James's view, constitutes the continuity 
 between these other, spiritual, needs and the basic, 
 material, needs, is that both kinds connect with
 
 UTILITY AND SUEVIVAL 71 
 
 behaviour or conduct of some sort.*" In this way, 
 as we have already seen, the principle of utility, 
 which at first was erroneously taken as of purely 
 materialistic tendency, not only allows us, as no 
 merely metaphysical principle does, to substi- 
 tute autonomy for automatism, but also bridges 
 the gap between the physical and the spiritual 
 life. 
 
 The next step is that the organism's activity is 
 not confined to adjusting itself to a merely given 
 environment. Even from a merely external point 
 of view, the organism is also busied in adjusting 
 the environment to itself. Man, more particularly, 
 has made the actual physical world that he now 
 lives in a very different thing from what it was 
 when he first made his appearance on the scene. 
 The physical environment into which we have 
 been born is as much a man-made as a ' natural ' 
 environment. So much is quite obvious. But still 
 more important is the ' subjective ' manipulation 
 to which the ' environment ' is subjected by the 
 process of conscious selection. This selection, just 
 because it is purposive, is not merely arbitrary ; it 
 is always experimental. But so far as the experi- 
 ment is successful, it actually creates the world as that 
 
 * Cf., e.g., "Reflex Action and Theism" in The Will to 
 Believe, and infra, pp. 91-93.
 
 72 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 exists for consciousness. This is what, even more 
 than his discovery of the principle of continuity in 
 consciousness, so sharply differentiates James's 
 empiricism from that of the older empiricists, from 
 Locke to Spencer, who always sought to explain 
 knowledge as the passive ' reproduction ' of an 
 1 independent order of nature.' For these older 
 empiricists, ' learning by experience ' meant the 
 hoarding of sense - impressions ; and anything 
 beyond this was not fact, but 'fiction,' as Hume 
 expressly maintains. But, for James, ' learning 
 by experience ' means learning by experiment ; and 
 ' pure fact ' is the greatest fiction of all. In the 
 extension of knowledge, thought does not simply 
 lean on experiential data; it leads the way, and 
 the function of experience is chiefly to confirm or 
 reject postulates which passive experience and the 
 ' laws of association ' can never automatically 
 generate. The difference between these two views 
 corresponds exactly with the difference between the 
 Darwinian and Spencerian views as to the main 
 factors in organic evolution.* 
 
 On the other hand, what chiefly distinguishes 
 James's view, both from the so-called ' Critical 
 
 * All this is very fully set forth in the remarkable chapter 
 on " Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience " which 
 concludes the Principles.
 
 UTILITY AND SUEVIVAL 73 
 
 Philosophy ' of Kant,* and from the ' Objective 
 Idealism ' of the English Idealists (neo-Kantians 
 or neo-Hegelians, as they are indifferently called), 
 is that James is not so intent on explaining the 
 ' possibility of knowledge ' as to overlook the 
 necessity of allowing for the possibility of real and 
 effective criticism. 
 
 His conception of the nature of ' knowledge,' 
 while it precludes the severance of ' knowledge ' 
 from 'reality,' does not exclude either the possi- 
 bility of progress in knowledge or of development 
 in reality. Just because James adopts the common- 
 sense view which regards thought as a temporal 
 and personal process, the ' constructive activity of 
 thought ' in which he believes is for him no violent 
 metaphor, but a living reality ; and the construction 
 does not exclude re-construction. Contrariwise, in 
 the hands of the 'Idealists,' for whom thought is 
 essentially ' timeless,' " The Reality coalesces with 
 the connected manifold, the Psychologist with the 
 Ego, knowing becomes ' connecting,' and there 
 results no longer a finite or criticizable, but an 
 ' absolute' Experience, of which the Object and the 
 Subject are always the same. . . . This ' solip- 
 sistic ' character of an Experience conceived as 
 
 * For James's relation to Kant, apart from the English 
 versions (or perversions) of his teachings, see infra, p. 81 /.
 
 74 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 absolute really annihilates psychology as a dis- 
 tinct body of science,"* and with it the reality, 
 and even the possibility, of human knowledge. 
 
 We see, therefore, that, in the favourite phrase 
 of Histories of Philosophy, James may be said to 
 ' mediate ' between Hume and Kant. But the 
 ' mediation ' bears a wonderful resemblance to 
 the act of knocking their heads together ; and it 
 clearly supersedes them both. 
 
 * Principles, vol. i., p. 366.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 
 
 In the last chapter of the Principles James makes 
 very clear a distinction that is implicit in his earlier 
 chapters the distinction, namely, between the origin 
 and survival of beliefs, or between conscious experi- 
 ment and experimental confirmation. A belief to 
 be taken up at all must in some way or other 
 appeal to us ; it must connect with our emotional 
 nature and our vital needs. But since beliefs do 
 not provide us with mere ' objects of contem- 
 plation,' and are genuine in proportion to their 
 driving power in action, it follows that only those 
 can survive which do actually fulfil the hopes in 
 which we embraced them. James's view may be 
 summarily stated as the theory that what deter- 
 mines the survival of beliefs is an inter- play be- 
 tween conscious selection and natural selection. 
 That is clearly what the view of experience as 
 experimentation, taken in conjunction with the 
 "paramount reality of sensations,"* necessarily 
 
 * Principles, vol. ii., p. 299/. 
 75
 
 76 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 entails. We make the environment to fit; "but it 
 is the obligation to cut our coat according to our 
 cloth that gives us a chance of really using our 
 brains. The further consideration, however, must 
 not be overlooked, that while, on the one hand, 
 experimental ' success ' may not be final, on the 
 other hand, experimental ' failure ' need not be 
 so either. There is, in fact, nothing from which 
 we learn so much as from our mistakes. If we 
 survive the failure of a vital experiment, we can 
 try again on other lines ; and if we don't survive 
 it, our fellows may profit by the vicarious experi- 
 ence. This is notoriously true even of animals like 
 wolves and foxes. 
 
 Out of these considerations arises what we may 
 call the Question of Value. What sort of end, or 
 ends, beyond the primary one of physical existence 
 with which the " paramount reality of sensa- 
 tions " is most intimately connected does human 
 thought seek to compass ? And what sort of 
 results can we acquiesce in ? This is the question 
 which James first brings to light and then sets 
 himself to answer in his chapter on " The Percep- 
 tion of Eeality." His chief points seem to be 
 these : 
 
 Our system of beliefs as a whole, the reality that 
 we seek, must be such as to satisfy our whole con-
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 77 
 
 crete nature, and not that impossible abstraction 
 called the ' pure intellect.' We do, indeed, seek 
 unity. But the unity that we are really interested 
 in is not a cold, ' cosmic unity,' but a unification of 
 our personal self, which will allow free play to all 
 the component parts of our nature, without reducing 
 any one of them to the level of mere illusion. That 
 is what constitutes James's anti-intellectualism. 
 
 What satisfies one man will not, in all its detail, 
 satisfy another. That is what constitutes James's 
 individualism. This, however, is not an anti-social 
 force. For if agreement is the conservative element 
 in social life, in the agreement to differ i.e., to 
 allow each man to try his own vital experiments at 
 his own risk lies the only hope of social progress 
 through the adoption of what turn out to be 
 salutary innovations.* Even in the case of such 
 sharply contrasted categories as criminal and saint, 
 we must not forget that the criminal of one genera- 
 tion the man, e.g., who furnishes aid and comfort 
 to a runaway slave may be the moral hero of 
 the next ; even as the saint of yesterday the man, 
 
 * Cf., e.g., Memories and Studies, p. 318 : "The notion 
 that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is 
 now well known to bo the silliest of absurdities. Mankind 
 does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, 
 great or small, and imitation by the rest of us these are the 
 Bole factors active in social progress."
 
 78 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 e.g., who elects to spend his life perched on a 
 pillar may be the moral lunatic of to-day. Society 
 must, of course, in each generation decide what 
 degree and what manner of individual initiative to 
 allow ; but it makes this decision at its own risk. 
 Thus James's individualism provides for the prac- 
 tice of toleration a rational basis which is not to 
 be found in the rival and wholly sterile conception 
 of ' absolute truth.' 
 
 Whatever kind or degree of unity we ' find ' in 
 Nature is made by our own exertions. That is 
 what constitutes James's activism or voluntarism.* 
 
 The constructive work of intelligence, however, is 
 
 * To Hume, and not to Kant, belongs the credit of having 
 first seen that the ' uniform order ' of Nature is not an 
 original datum of experience, but an intellectual construction. 
 Neither of these writers, however, deemed the world so 
 constructed to be fully real. Hume held that the result of 
 mental manipulation must be 'fiction,' and Kant i that we 
 know only ' phenomena,' and not things as they really are 
 in themselves. The difference between these two general 
 theories of ' knowledge ' is not very appreciable. Nor is it 
 very easy to understand why Kant should be represented 
 as having * answered,' rather than echoed, Hume as regards 
 the status of the principle of causality. But it appears to be 
 a cardinal doctrine of the idealistic faith that what in Kant 
 is ennobling and splendid insight, in Hume is degrading 
 1 scepticism.' The only real answer to Hume lies in that 
 revaluation of mental manipulation that James has effected. 
 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 200-202.
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 79 
 
 not achieved at one stroke, and is certainly not yet 
 completed, if it ever will be. "In a simple and 
 direct way these questions cannot be answered at 
 all." [I.e., they cannot be answered a prion.] "The 
 whole history of human thought is but an unfinished 
 attempt to answer them. For what have men been 
 trying to find out since men were men but just 
 those things : ' Where do our true interests lie 
 which relations shall we call the intimate and real 
 ones which things shall we call living realities 
 and which not?'"* That is what constitutes 
 James's progressivism or evolutionism. 
 
 Hence there can be no a priori guarantee that 
 ' all will come right in the end.' Eisk cannot be 
 eliminated from the spiritual any more than from 
 the physical life. As in the physical life we must 
 have courage, so in the spiritual life we need faith. 
 This last point, which constitutes what we may call 
 James's 'fideism,' being of a more specially ethical 
 character, is not directly brought out in the 
 Principles. It is developed in some of his later 
 writings,! but its full meaning can only be properly 
 appreciated if we have grasped its psychological 
 foundation. This is, perhaps, why James's critics 
 
 * Principles, vol. ii., p. 299. 
 
 t Especially in the essay " Is Life Worth Living?" in The 
 Will to Believe.
 
 80 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 have generally failed to appreciate the fact that 
 James steadily refuses to confound moral confidence 
 with ' logical certitude.' To accuse James of 
 irrationalism because he thus justifies acts of faith 
 is as if one were to accuse a soldier of stupidity 
 because, in performing some deed of valour, he 
 could have had no guarantee that he would both 
 succeed in his venture and come out of it alive. 
 There certainly are people who flatter themselves 
 that they are much too sensible to risk their lives 
 in that way, or to act, in issues of life and death, 
 on anything short of ' reasonable certainty.' But 
 the eminent reasonableness of their attitude does 
 not prevent others from calling them by an exceed- 
 ingly unpleasant name. And, as James has pointed 
 out, where act we must, our confidence that we shall 
 succeed may itself be a main factor in procuring 
 our success.* 
 
 " There is really no scientific or other method by 
 which men can steer safely between the opposite 
 dangers of believing too little or of believing too 
 much. To face such dangers is apparently our 
 duty, and to hit the right channel between them is 
 the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not 
 follow, because recklessness may be a vice in 
 soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached 
 * Will to Believe, p. 59.
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 81 
 
 to them. What should be preached is courage 
 weighted with responsibility such courage as the 
 Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show 
 after they had taken everything into account that 
 might tell against their success, and made every 
 provision to minimize disaster. I do not think 
 that anyone can accuse me of preaching reckless 
 faith. I have preached the right of the individual to 
 indulge his personal faith at his personal risk* I 
 have discussed the kinds of risk ; I have contended 
 that none of us escape all of them ; and I have only 
 pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than 
 to act as if we did not know them to be there." t 
 
 In regard to all the foregoing points, James, as 
 befits his psychological standpoint, is, so to speak, 
 proceeding from within outwards. Starting from 
 the aperqu that thought is the intellectual aspect of 
 the will to live, he in effect asks what characteristics 
 and what possibilities ' reality ' must offer us in 
 order to get itself accepted by us, and in order to 
 make the difficult business of living seem worth 
 while. This, finally, is what constitutes James's 
 ' anthropocentrism ' or 'relativism.' There is an 
 unmistakable analogy between this general position 
 and the ' Copernican revolution ' which Kant 
 believed himself to have effected in philosophy. 
 
 * Italics mine. t Will to Believe, Freface, p. xi. 
 
 6
 
 82 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 With this difference that James's avowedly 
 psychological standpoint not only makes the 
 thought-process a real process in time, and thereby 
 makes real progress possible, but also saves him 
 from the theoretically and practically ruinous 
 divorce between the ' theoretical ' and the ' prac- 
 tical ' reason, in which Kant's philosophy culmin- 
 ates, and collapses. 
 
 A highly important corollary, as to the relation of 
 logic to psychology, follows from James's treatment 
 of the distinction between ' real ' and ' unreal.' 
 The primary concern of the logician is neither 
 with that purely formal ' reality ' which every 
 object of consciousness possesses, and in which the 
 distinction between ' real ' and ' unreal ' has not 
 yet emerged, nor with the ' real world ' which we 
 all naively and uncritically take for granted as 
 distinct from ' unreality,' until we consider the 
 need and difficulty of effectively distinguishing the 
 one from the other. What he really has to eluci- 
 date is just the distinction itself between the 'real ' 
 and the ' unreal.' And in order to do this he has 
 to catch both ' reality ' and ' unreality ' in the 
 making i.e., in that midway position between 
 
 (a) merely presented object or suggestion, and 
 
 (b) object definitely accepted as real or rejected as 
 unreal, wherein the whole process of thinking and
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 83 
 
 of conscious experimenting goes on. But this is 
 simply the psychological method of dealing with 
 the thinking process. We have already seen * that 
 the psychologist must take cognizance of the dis- 
 tinction between truth and error ; and now it ap- 
 pears that the psychological method, which treats 
 thought as a personal and temporal process, does 
 not merely allow us to deal with the cognate dis- 
 tinction of ' real ' and ' unreal,' it is the only 
 method that enables us to do so. Hence, instead of 
 logic being sharply differentiated from psychology 
 (as absolutists have fondly imagined) by possessing 
 a monopoly in this fundamental distinction, it turns 
 out that to abstract from time and personality is to 
 abstract also from the consideration of judgment as 
 true-or-false. A ' logic ' that ' emancipates ' itself 
 from psychology, therefore, will be a ' logic ' which, 
 in repudiating its raison d'etre, sinks to the level of a 
 mere grammatical exercise. Thus, by bringing out, 
 in his chapter on ' The Perception of Reality,' the 
 thoroughly psychological character of the distinc- 
 tion between the ' real ' and the ' unreal,' James 
 is laying the foundations of a real logic that is 
 to deal with the problems of real knowing. The 
 history of ' logic,' before James, is simply the 
 trail of its weary wanderings in the infruc- 
 
 * P. 69 /.
 
 84 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 tuous deserts of formalism and verbalism.* Now 
 at last logic is brought definitely within sight of 
 the promised land of real knowledge, which the 
 mere men of science who, fortunately for them- 
 selves, knew not ' logic ' have for centuries been 
 quietly cultivating. At the same time that he 
 rescues logic from formalism, James makes clear 
 the impossibility of defining psychology as the 
 science of the ' subjective ' in any sense that 
 simply excludes the ' objective.' The extracts we 
 now give will illustrate also the psychological 
 impossibility of correlating real objectivity with 
 ' pure intellectuality ' i.e., with intellect purged 
 of emotional interest : 
 
 " The total world of which the philosophers must 
 take account is . . . composed of the realities plus 
 the fancies and illusions. Two sub-universes at 
 least, connected by relations which philosophy tries 
 to ascertain ! Keally there are more than two 
 sub-universes of which we take account, some of us 
 of this one, and others of that. For there are 
 various categories of illusion and of reality, and 
 alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error 
 confined to single individuals), but still within the 
 
 * Even Mill, keenly as he felt the defects of formalism, 
 fell a victim to it in his ' inductive logic' See Dr. F. C. S. 
 Schiller's Formal Logic, p. 261/.
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 85 
 
 world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by 
 the complete philosopher), there is the world of 
 collective error, there are the worlds of abstract 
 reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal 
 relations, and there is the supernatural world. 
 The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds 
 more or less disconnectedly ; and when dealing 
 with one of them, forgets for the time being its 
 relations to the rest. The complete philosopher 
 is he who seeks not only to assign to every given 
 object of his thought its right place in one or other 
 of these sub- worlds, but he also seeks to determine 
 the relation of each sub-world to the others in the 
 total world which is." * 
 
 " Every object we think of gets at last referred 
 to one world or another of this or of some similar 
 list. . . . Each world, whilst it is attended to, is real 
 after its own fashion, only the reality lapses with 
 the attention. 
 
 " Each thinker, however [note how concretely 
 James speaks, and avoids ' the ' generalized mind] , 
 has dominant habits of attention ; and these 
 practically elect from among the various worlds some 
 one to be for him the world of ultimate realities. 
 From this world's objects he does not appeal. 
 Whatever positively contradicts them must get into 
 another world or die. . . . 
 
 * Principles, vol. ii., p. 291.
 
 8(5 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 " In all this the everlasting partiality of our 
 nature shows itself, our inveterate propensity to 
 choice. For, in the strict and ultimate sense of 
 the word existence, everything which can be 
 thought of at all exists as some sort of object, 
 whether mythical object, individual thinker's 
 object, or object in outer space and for intelligence 
 at large. . . . The mere fact of appearing as an 
 object at all is not enough to constitute reality. 
 That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God ; 
 but what we need is practical reality, reality for 
 ourselves ; and to have that an object must not 
 only appear, but it must appear both interesting 
 and important. The worlds whose objects are 
 neither interesting nor important we treat simply 
 negatively, we brand them as ?mreal. 
 
 " In the relative sense, then, the sense in which 
 we contrast reality with simple ?/reality, and in 
 which one thing is said to have more reality than 
 another, and to be more believed, reality means 
 simply relation to our emotional and active life. 
 This is the only sense which the word ever has in 
 the mouths of practical men. . . . 
 
 " The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the 
 absolute or the practical point of view, is thus sub- 
 jective, is ourselves. As bare logical thinkers, with- 
 out emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 87 
 
 objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, 
 or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. 
 But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give 
 what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to 
 whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to 
 with a will. . . . 
 
 " We reach thus the important conclusion that 
 our own reality, that sense of our own life which we at 
 every moment possess, is the idtimate of idtimates for 
 our belief. ... As Descartes made the indubitable 
 reality of the cogito go bail for the reality of all 
 that the cogito involved, so we all of us, feeling our 
 own present reality with absolutely coercive force, 
 ascribe an all but equal degree of reality, first to 
 whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of 
 personal need, and second to whatever further 
 things continuously belong with these. . . . 
 
 " The world of living realities as contrasted with 
 unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered 
 as an active and emotional term. . . . Whatever 
 things have intimate and continuous connection with 
 my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt. 
 Whatever things fail to establish this connection 
 are things which are practically no better for me 
 than if they existed not at all."* 
 
 " The merely conceived or imagined objects 
 * Op. cit., vol. ii., pp. 293-298.
 
 88 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 which our mind represents as hanging to the 
 sensations (causing them, etc.), filling the gaps 
 between them, and weaving their interrupted chaos 
 into order, are innumerable. Whole systems of 
 them conflict with other systems, and our choice of 
 which system shall carry our belief is governed by 
 principles which are simple enough, however subtle 
 and difficult may be their application to details. 
 The conceived system, to pass for true, must at least 
 include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by 
 explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more. 
 The system which includes the most of them, and 
 definitely explains, or pretends to explain, the most of 
 them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail. It is needless to 
 say how far mankind still is from having excogi- 
 tated such a system. But the various materialisms, 
 idealisms, and hylozoisms show with what industry 
 the attempt is for ever made. It is conceivable 
 that several rival theories should equally well 
 include the actual order of our sensations in their 
 scheme, much as the one-fluid and two-fluid 
 theories of electricity formulated all the common 
 electrical phenomena equally well. The sciences 
 are full of these alternatives. Which theory is, then, 
 to be believed ? That theory will be most generally 
 believed which, besides offering us objects able to 
 account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 89 
 
 offers those which are most interesting , those which 
 appeal most urgently to our (esthetic, emotional, and 
 active needs. So here, in the higher intellectual 
 life, the same selection among general conceptions 
 goes on which went on among the sensations them- 
 selves. . . . 
 
 " A philosophy whose principle is so incom- 
 mensurate with our most intimate powers as to 
 deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to 
 annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even 
 more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the 
 enemy than the eternal Void ! This is why 
 materialism will always fail of universal adoption, 
 however well it may fuse things into an atomistic 
 unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future 
 eternity. For materialism denies reality to the 
 objects of almost all the impulses which we most 
 cherish. The real meaning of the impulses, it says, 
 is something which has no emotional interest for 
 us whatever. But what is called extradition is 
 quite as characteristic of our emotions as of our 
 sense. Both point to an object as the cause of the 
 present feeling. What an intensely objective 
 reference lies in fear ! In like manner an 
 enraptured man, a dreary-feeling man, are not 
 simply aware of their subjective states; if they 
 were, the force of their feelings would evaporate.
 
 90 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 Both believe there is outward cause why they 
 should feel as they do : either, ' It is a glad world ! 
 how good is life !' or, ' What a loathsome tedium 
 is existence !' Any philosophy which annihilates 
 the validity of the reference by explaining away its 
 objects, or translating them into terms of no 
 emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to 
 care or act for. This is the opposite condition 
 from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought 
 home to consciousness, it produces a kindred horror. 
 In nightmare we have motives to act, but no 
 power ; here we have powers, but no motives. A 
 nameless Unheinlihkeit comes over us at the 
 thought of there being nothing eternal in our 
 final purposes, in the objects of those loves and 
 aspirations which are our deepest energies. The 
 monstrously lop-sided equation of the universe and 
 its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of 
 cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lop- 
 sided equation of the universe and the doer. We 
 demand in it a character for which our emotions 
 and active propensities shall be a match. Small 
 as we are, minute as is the point by which the 
 Cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one 
 desires to feel that his reaction at that point 
 is congruous with the demands of the vast 
 whole, that he balances the latter, so to speak,
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 91 
 
 and is able to do what it expects of him. But his 
 abilities to ' do ' lie wholly in the line of his 
 natural propensities. As he enjoys reaction with 
 such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admira- 
 tion, earnestness, and the like; and as he very 
 unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or 
 doubt a philosophy which should legitimate only 
 emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave 
 the mind a prey to discontent and craving. 
 
 " It is far too little recognized how entirely the 
 intellect is built up of practical interests. The 
 theory of Evolution is beginning to do very gocd 
 service by its reduction of all mentality to the type 
 c.f reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a 
 fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain point 
 of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon. 
 In lower forms of life no one will pretend that 
 cognition is anything more than a guide to appro- 
 priate action. The germinal question concerning 
 things brought for the first time before conscious- 
 ness is not the theoretic ' What is that ?' but the 
 practical ' Who goes there ?' or rather, as Horwicz 
 has admirably put it, ' What is to be done T 
 ' Was fang' ichanV In all our discussions about 
 the lower animals the only test we use is that of 
 their acting as if for a purpose. Cognition, in 
 short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And
 
 92 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 although it is true that the later mental develop- 
 ment, which attains its maximum through the 
 hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a 
 vast amount of theoretic activity over and above 
 that which is immediately ministerial to practice, 
 yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, 
 and the active nature asserts its rights to the 
 end. . . . 
 
 " If we survey the field of history and ask what 
 feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of 
 the human mind, display in common, we shall find, 
 I think, simply this : that each and all of them 
 have said to the human being, ' The inmost nature 
 of the reality is congenial to powers which you 
 possess.' 
 
 " In 8e and per se the universal essence has hardly 
 been more defined by any of these formulae than by 
 the agnostic x; but the mere assurance that my 
 powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it, 
 but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in 
 some way recognize their reply, that I can be a 
 match for it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices 
 to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given 
 above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope 
 for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which 
 should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in 
 an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our
 
 BELIEF AND VALUE 93 
 
 emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, 
 whose solving word in all crises of behaviour is 
 ' All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme, 
 for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestruct- 
 ible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that 
 impulse will be widely successful in spite of incon- 
 sistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of 
 expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and 
 will invent one if one be not given him."* 
 
 In short, beliefs which a man cannot live with 
 he has no option but to discard ; beliefs he cannot 
 live without he must find reasons to adopt. These 
 too are corollaries from Darwinism, which philo- 
 sophic theories must assimilate if they themselves 
 
 are to live. 
 
 * Op. cit., pp. 311-315.
 
 CHAPTEK IX 
 
 THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THEORY AND THE 
 THEORETIC VALUE OF PRACTICE 
 
 If it be asked why so much space has been devoted 
 to the psychology of James, the answer is simple. 
 The revolution that James's philosophy effects con- 
 sists precisely in breaking down the barrier between 
 philosophy and psychology. Hence, his Principles 
 of Psychology is by far the most truly philosophical 
 work that he has produced ; and, in fact, all his 
 subsequent work consists in popularizing and 
 applying his psychological discoveries. He has 
 neither reduced metaphysics to psychology, nor 
 dissolved psychology in metaphysics. Nor, again, 
 has he anywhere indulged in the intellectual game 
 of deducing a priori what must ' necessarily ' be 
 the relation between these two disciplines. What 
 he has done is to transform the whole philosophic 
 outlook by restoring to psychology a vast territory 
 which in virtue of the traditional distinction between 
 metaphysics and psychology it fell to neither of 
 
 94
 
 THEOEY AND PEACTICE 95 
 
 these to explore. Since metaphysics and psy- 
 chology between them laid claim to the whole realm 
 of Reality, this particular territory had been auto- 
 matically made to appear as the locus of mere 
 subjective illusion. But the territory in question 
 is that of real life and action; it is the home of 
 human personality and will. 
 
 Whether this new world, of which James was 
 the philosophic Columbus, is to be assigned to 
 psychology or to philosophy, or whether a new 
 name should be found for such virgin soil, to disso- 
 ciate its cultivators from the intellectual scandals 
 of the past, need not now be definitely decided. 
 We may retain, provisionally and without preju- 
 dice, the verbally honorific name of ' philosophic ' 
 for any inquiry into the nature of reality that 
 cannot conveniently be designated as ' purely 
 scientific' 
 
 Using the word ' philosophy ' in this inten- 
 tionally vague sense, which alone will enable us 
 to include, e.g., Hegel's speculations concerning the 
 causes of the moon's sterility in the same field of 
 study with James's defence of the freedom of the 
 will, we may delineate James's philosophy as 
 follows : It essentially consists in the discovery 
 that, under cover of an assumed distinction between 
 philosophy and psychology, all the most vital
 
 96 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 questions of philosophy questions concerning the 
 nature of truth, of freedom, and of the meaning 
 of life have been either burked or begged an J 
 begged, moreover, in the interests of no one but 
 the sceptic and the pessimist. For what purported 
 to be purely rational deductions about reality 
 turn out to be nothing but the unfolding of the 
 implications latent in this arbitrary distinction, or 
 else ingenious attempts to disguise these implica- 
 tions. When once one has detected the trick of this 
 intellectual legerdemain, one can no longer doubt 
 the greatness of James's contribution to philosophy. 
 The intellectualist tradition which James con- 
 troverts attains its apogee, or maximum remoteness 
 from anything that has meaning for denizens of 
 the earth, in the ' monism ' that claims the title 
 of Absolute or Objective Idealism. This system 
 had, when James began to write, attained such a 
 pitch of academic orthodoxy that any dissentient 
 was promptly told he was ' no philosopher.' It 
 required therefore no small degree of courage to 
 declare : " I myself have come, by long brooding 
 over it [i.e. the antithesis of monism and pluralism], 
 to consider it the most central of all philosophic 
 problems, central because so pregnant. I mean by 
 this, that if you know whether a man is a decided 
 monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know
 
 THEOEY AND PEACTICE 97 
 
 more about the rest of his opinions than if you 
 give him any other name ending in ist. To believe 
 in the one or in the many, that is the classification 
 with the maximum number of consequences." * 
 
 For this monism, the essence of rationality con- 
 sists in conceiving the universe as a rigid logical 
 system, or (in James's phrase) as a 'block-universe,' 
 in which every part is determined through-and- 
 through by its relation to the whole. In such a 
 system the distinction between past, present, and 
 future is avowedly illusory, and altogether irrele- 
 vant to the central core of reality. So far as mun- 
 dane events are allowed to have reality and hoiv 
 far they have any is treated as a trivial and 
 almost frivolous question, on which serious philo- 
 sophy is under no obligation to make up its mind 
 future events are just as real, and just as fixed as 
 the whole past. So far as the historical process is 
 real, it is the ' progressive revelation ' or ' mani- 
 festation ' (illuminating phrase !) of what in its 
 
 * Pragmatism, p. 129. Cf. Some Problems of Philosojrfty, 
 p. 114/. : "The alternative between pluralism and monism 
 ... is the most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy, 
 although it is only in our time that it has been articulated 
 distinctly. Does reality exist distributively or collectively in 
 the shape of caches, every 8, anys, eithers, or only in the 
 shape of an all or whole / Pluralism stands for the dis- 
 tributive, monism for the collective form, of being." 
 
 7
 
 98 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 essential ' logical ' nature is a perfect and timeless 
 Whole. 
 
 The direct and intentional result of this monistic 
 view, is to reduce to a sheer illusion that power of 
 individual initiative which each of us seems to him- 
 self to possess. It is an illusion bound up with 
 the equally illusory sense of distinct personality 
 with which every sane human being is incurably 
 afflicted. Yet even the philosopher who officially 
 deplores this distressing superstition does not 
 pretend to set it aside in his daily life. He merely 
 admits that his ' theory ' is at war with his 
 practical needs. In his own eyes, however, this 
 admission must confirm, rather than invalidate, 
 the ' theory.' For, ex vi definitionis, ' pure ' theory 
 not only need not, but must not, be influenced by 
 practical considerations. The more unequivocally, 
 then, a ' theory ' reduces practice to illusion, the 
 more fitting shrine does it become for philosophic 
 * truth.' 
 
 The protests of practice, therefore, affect the 
 absolutist not at all. And if once we allow this 
 disjunction between theory and practice (which has 
 disastrously dominated philosophy since the time 
 of Aristotle), and identify reason with 'pure 
 theory,' we can never hope to vanquish Absolutism 
 by purely * rational ' or ' theoretic ' argument. For
 
 THEOKY AND PRACTICE 99 
 
 Absolutism is in very truth the objectification of 
 this idea of 'pure theory.' To a mind so steeped 
 (however unconsciously) in the traditions of Formal 
 Logic as is the mind of the absolutist, to attack 
 the theory mast seem to be attacking Reason itself. 
 If the monistic principle really is the ' presuppo- 
 sition ' of rational knowledge, then merely to 
 question it is to be guilty of self-contradiction. 
 Thus monism, all the more because it is prac- 
 tically intolerable, seemed to be theoretically irre- 
 pressible. 
 
 Hence, as James points out, " the world's one- 
 ness has generally been affirmed ... as if any- 
 one who questioned it must be an idiot. The 
 temper of monists has been so vehement as almost 
 at times to be convulsive. . . . The theory of the 
 Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of 
 faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The 
 One and All first in the order of being and of 
 knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all 
 lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how 
 could it allow of any mitigation of its inner 
 rigidity ? The slightest suspicion of pluralism, 
 the minutest wiggle of independence of any one 
 of its parts from the control of the totality, would 
 ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees as well 
 might you claim absolute purity for a glass of
 
 100 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 water because it contains but a single little cholera 
 germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, 
 of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute 
 as fatal as a cholera germ." * 
 
 But if Absolute Idealism thus easily survives, as 
 a ' theory,' any conflict with our practical interests, 
 it is not so easy, once the illusions of practice have 
 been systematically discounted, to discover what 
 positive significance that theory retains. For what 
 thus survives is not the concrete vision of all reality 
 which we were promised at the outset, but just the 
 magic word * Universe.' That the world is ' some- 
 how ' (i.e., inexplicably) ' one,' turns out to be the 
 sole content of ' metaphysic' Thus Absolutism, if 
 judged by its performance and not by its jwofessions, 
 shrivels to a bare negation of the reality alike of 
 human knowledge and of freedom.^ If, in perusing 
 any idealistic work, we skip all the preliminary 
 subtleties about the 'necessary conditions of the 
 possibility of knowledge,' the perfect ' rationality 
 of the real,' the absurdity of the conception of the 
 ' Unknowable,' and so forth, and turn expectantly 
 
 * Pragmatism, p. 159/. 
 
 f Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 139 : " Possi- 
 bility, as distinguished from necessity on the one hand, and 
 from impossibility on the other, is an essential category 
 of human thinking. For monism, it is a pure illusion." 
 Italics mine.] 
 
 f
 
 THEOEY AND PRACTICE 101 
 
 to the final revelation of reality as it really is, all it 
 ever comes to is something of this sort : 
 
 " The consummation of the infinite aim consists 
 merely in removing the illusion which makes it 
 seem yet unaccomplished. Good and absolute 
 goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the 
 world, and the result is that it needs not wait upon 
 us, but is already . . . accomplished. It is an 
 illusion under which we live. ... In the course of 
 its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by 
 setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action 
 consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has 
 created."* 
 
 The Idea, then, succeeds in undeceiving Itself. 
 But not us. Our humble role is merely to form a 
 screen on which the illusion shall continue for ever 
 to be displayed, in order that the Infinitely Knowing 
 Absolute may enjoy the exquisite triumph of seeing 
 through it ! Such is the Idealist's final definition 
 of ' perfect rationality,' such the fulfilment of 
 his promise to make reality transparent to our 
 intelligence. 
 
 * Hegel, quoted by James in A Pluralistic Universe, 
 p. 51 /. Of the English Idealists, Mr. F. H. Bradley has 
 been most commended for the scholarly thoroughness with 
 which he reduces the world we live in and its inhabitants to 
 ' mere) appearance,' leaving to the Absolute the whole credit 
 of reconstituting Reality ' somehow.'
 
 102 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 It follows, however, that in its own queer way 
 Absolutism has anticipated James's humanistic 
 protest : to admit a radical contrast between the 
 human and the absolute 'point of view' is to 
 admit that in actual human knowledge "you can't 
 weed out the human contribution." James has 
 therefore only to repeat what his Psychology had 
 already established, and to point out that "our 
 nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, 
 and in the theories we build them into, the inner 
 order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human 
 considerations, intellectual consistency being one of 
 them. Mathematics and logic themselves are 
 fermenting with human rearrangements : physics, 
 astronomy, and biology follow massive cues of 
 preference. We plunge forward into the field of 
 fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and 
 we have made already ; these determine what we 
 notice ; what we notice determines what we do ; 
 what we do again determines what we experience ; 
 so from one thing to another, although the stubborn 
 fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is 
 true of it seems from first to last to be largely a 
 matter of our own creation." * 
 
 Nothing of all this can be denied by Idealists. 
 Only, what James, in common with the man of 
 * Pragmatism, p. 254/.
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE 103 
 
 action and the scientist, calls 'truth,' the Idealist 
 insists on calling ' illusion ' precisely because it 
 is the embodiment of characteristically human 
 aims and achievements. James's contention, on 
 the other hand, is that there is nothing in the 
 ' nature of truth ' that compels us to keep ' truth ' 
 as a name for something that we can ex hypothesi 
 never know. In his view, to be verified by man 
 is the essential function of truth, in the only sense 
 in which truth can be an object of man's rational 
 desire. What is in essence incapable of entering 
 the human consciousness can have for us no truth 
 nor even meaning. " True ideas are those that we 
 can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. 
 False ideas are those that we can not. That is the 
 practical difference it makes to us to have true 
 ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for 
 it is all that truth is known-as." * 
 
 This pragmatic view has been denounced by 
 Idealists, almost in the same breath, as being both 
 purely commercial and purely sceptical. The 
 reader must judge for himself as to which of the 
 two opposing theories of Absolutism and Humanism 
 best deserves the name of Scepticism ; as also 
 whether the two counts of this indictment can be 
 consistently combined by the soi-disant believers in 
 * Pragmatism, p. 201.
 
 104 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 the ' perfect coherence ' of truth. And, finally, he 
 should ask himself why a doctrine which maintains, 
 as Humanism maintains against Absolutism, that 
 human ideals must really count in the making of 
 reality, is regarded as low and spiritually degrading. 
 Is it not, rather, clear that Humanism, by ques- 
 tioning the absolutist notion of ' truth,' and break- 
 ing down the distinction between ' theory ' and 
 'practice,' vindicates the reality of that whole 
 world of life and action which Absolutism had 
 contemptuously dismissed as ' mere appearance ' ? 
 Which is in truth the nobler destiny to take an 
 active part in the real shaping of an as yet un- 
 certain future, or to contemplate, at an infinite 
 distance, the Absolute's beatific vision of bogus 
 existence in hallucinatory time ? 
 
 We can now trace how the pre-Jamesian con- 
 ception of ' psychology ' had played into the hands 
 of Absolutism and Materialism. At first sight it 
 might seem that psychology, with its particular 
 concern, not with the totality of things, but with 
 the ' individual mind,' was naturally apt to supply 
 the pluralistic antidote to the monistic excesses of 
 Absolutism. 
 
 And, in fact, for Locke, who was practically the 
 first (since Protagoras) to conceive that the human 
 understanding was a worthy subject of human
 
 THEOKY AND PRACTICE 105 
 
 study, the interest of the study lay in its providing 
 a critical check on the human propensity towards 
 fruitless ' speculation ' and meaningless dogmatism. 
 For Locke, psychology and philosophy are truly one. 
 But, unfortunately, Locke, though his aims were 
 avowedly humanistic and practical, fell into the 
 snare of regarding pure passivity as the only source 
 for our knowledge of physical reality. When, there- 
 fore, Hume showed that sensations, simply as such, 
 could never reveal anything beyond themselves, it 
 seemed an unavoidable conclusion that psychology, 
 at any rate, was restricted to what is purely ' sub- 
 jective.' As against this pure ' subjectivity,' it 
 became the aim of philosophy to vindicate for its 
 subject-matter an equally pure ' objectivity ' with 
 what result we have already seen. 
 
 Thus, for the sake of a sharp distinction between 
 the ' subjective ' and the ' objective,' philosophy 
 and psychology were torn apart. Psychology 
 became a ' natural science,' dealing solely with 
 the observable concatenations of ' subjective ' phe- 
 nomena, and loftily forbidden to inquire into their 
 cognitive or practical value ; while philosophy 
 became so 4 objective ' as to cease to have any 
 significance whatever for human beings. Through 
 the gap thus artificially created, the whole ' world 
 of practical realities,' in James's phrase, slipped
 
 106 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 out of sight and out of mind altogether so far as 
 either the psychologist or the philosopher was con- 
 cerned. For the psychologist had become as 
 ambitious in his own way as the philosopher in 
 his, to be ' purely theoretical ' and undisturbed in 
 his intellectual contemplation by ' merely practical ' 
 considerations. James's philosophic achievement, 
 as has been already said, consists in restoring to 
 us our own world, by conceiving consciousness as 
 essentially a means of action and adaptation. 
 
 James started with the apercu that the world of 
 practical realities is what we, as living organisms, 
 are primarily interested in ; and his psychological 
 studies, undertaken without any subjectivistic bias, 
 further revealed to him that the most recondite and 
 apparently ' disinterested ' theories ultimately de- 
 rive whatever meaning they possess from their 
 applicability to this world. And when once we 
 have got so far, we can hardly avoid taking the 
 decisive step of regarding successful application 
 within this world of practical realities as the touch- 
 stone of truth. Such is the inner meaning of 
 James's ' pragmatic theory of truth.' 
 
 That this theory raises, as well as solves, pro- 
 blems, James was well aware : pragmatism could 
 hardly itself claim exemption from the common 
 lot of man made theories, or spring, incorrigibly
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE 107 
 
 perfect, from its creator's brain. At the same 
 time, before a pragmatist can admit any problem 
 as genuine rather than verbal, he must satisfy 
 himself as to its effective or pragmatic meaning. 
 Pragmatism, moreover, alone among philosophies 
 contains within itself the promise and potency of 
 its own development, for it alone refuses to make 
 of knowledge a unique exception to the evolutionary 
 process. This indwelling spirit of pragmatism 
 this abiding sense of the progi-essiveness and human 
 relevance of knowledge a sense deeper and wider 
 than any specific doctrine in which it may clothe 
 itself is what James seems pre-eminently to mean 
 by Humanism. 
 
 " As I apprehend the movement towards 
 humanism, it is based on no particular discovery 
 or principle that can be driven into one precise 
 formula, which thereupon can be impaled upon a 
 logical skewer. It is much more like one of those 
 secular changes that come upon public opinion 
 over-night, as it were, borne upon tides ' too full 
 for sound or foam,' that survive all the crudities 
 and extravagances of their advocates. Such have 
 been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, 
 from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to 
 pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways 
 of understanding life changes of which we all
 
 108 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes 
 to such changes the method of confutation by 
 single decisive reasons, showing that the new view 
 involves self - contradiction, or traverses some 
 fundamental principle. This is like stopping a 
 river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. 
 Eound your obstacle flows the water and 'gets 
 there all the same.' In reading [a certain critic] , 
 I am not a little reminded of those Catholic 
 writers who refute Darwinism by telling us that 
 higher species cannot come from lower, because 
 minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of 
 transformation is absurd, for it implies that species 
 tend to their own destruction, and that would 
 violate the principle that every reality tends to 
 persevere in its own shape. The point of view is 
 too myopic, too tight and close to take in the 
 inductive argument. You cannot settle questions 
 of fact by formal logic. . . . 
 
 " The one condition of understanding humanism 
 is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop 
 rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least 
 resistance ' on the whole.' . . . For humanism, 
 conceiving the more ' true ' as the more ' satis- 
 factory ' (Dewey's term) has to renounce sincerely 
 rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour 
 and finality. It is in just this temper of renuncia-
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE 109 
 
 tion, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepti- 
 cism, that the spirit of humanism essentially 
 consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by 
 a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught 
 we know, may fail in any given case ; and what is 
 ' more ' satisfactory than any alternative in sight 
 may to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses, 
 concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior 
 corrections and improvements a maximum of the 
 one and a minimum of the other may some day be 
 approached. It means a real change of heart, a 
 break with absolutistic hopes [despair, rather, 
 James should have said] when one takes up this 
 view of the conditions of belief."* 
 
 It is in passages like this that James's greatness 
 is displayed. But they reveal his weakness as well 
 as his strength. The complacency with which 
 intellectualists took for granted that their (theo- 
 retical) renunciation of all other interests secured 
 to them a monopoly of intellect, the practical 
 emptiness of their ' theoretically ' perfect ' sys- 
 tems,' bred in James such a horror of logic- 
 chopping and system-making, that even in the 
 privacy of his own mind he seems to have shrunk 
 from pressing home the dialectical advantage 
 * Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 245/.
 
 110 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 secured by his discovery for such it really was 
 of the arbitrary and question -begging nature of the 
 antithesis between theory and practice. He took 
 up, instead, the pragmatically magnificent, but 
 formally untenable, position of refusing to bow 
 the knee to a ' Reason ' which was as much at 
 war with the needs of organic as of moral life. He 
 has left it to his disciples to show that the ' Logic ' 
 which he contemned was hopelessly vitiated by the 
 intrinsic looseness and incoherence of its thought.* 
 In any case, a rational reformer can as little hope, 
 and need as little care, to escape the charge of 
 blaspheming Reason, as a religious reformer the 
 charge of blaspheming the Deity. But James's 
 attempt to avoid verbal disputation by speaking 
 to his adversaries in their own vocabulary only 
 had the effect of still further hardening their 
 hearts and encouraging them in their accusations 
 of irrationalism.t 
 
 * The defects of rationalistic 'logic have now been set 
 out in full in Dr. F. C. S. Schiller's Formal Logic. But the 
 reconstruction of logic on the basis of the principle that 
 4 meaning lies in application ' owes its inception to Mr. 
 Alfred Sidgwick. 
 
 t James himself eventually recognized that the mildness 
 of his controversial methods presumed too much alike on the 
 "Christian charity" and the "secular intelligence" of his 
 opponents. See Preface to The Meaning of Truth, pp.
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE 111 
 
 This rather natural, if also rather unintelligent, 
 misunderstanding does not seem, however, to be 
 the main source of the hatred that James has 
 inspired in professional philosophers. They con- 
 ceive his philosophy as an attack upon their 
 dignity and status, because it brings philosophy 
 down from the clouds to earth, and places living 
 above ' reflecting ' or, rather, regards reflecting 
 as only one, rather queer, way of living, to be 
 justified ultimately, if at all, only in the degree in 
 which it unifies, not the ' universe,' but human 
 interests and activities. The academic mind will 
 always resent any doubt as to whether the 
 academic life is its own justification, and the 
 ' highest ' that any mind can possibly conceive. 
 And to crush such doubts it loves to fashion its 
 Absolute very much in the image of a Professor of 
 Logic. 
 
 So the struggle between Humanism and Abso- 
 lutism is likely to rage for some time yet in 
 philosophic circles. But outside these the issue 
 cannot be in doubt. The human spirit will never 
 assimilate the abstruse and empty abstractions of 
 which academic philosophy grows ever fonder as it 
 grows more specialized. If, therefore, philosophy 
 refuses to re-humanize itself in the spirit of James, 
 it will deservedly perish from its neglect of human
 
 112 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 interests. If ' Logic,' unreformed and unrepentant, 
 insists on severing itself from Life, then Life will 
 gladly let it go. Nor can the kind of ' theory ' 
 that claims to be independent of practice with any 
 consistency make complaint if practice retorts by 
 insisting that the independence must be mutual. 
 
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