The Principles of Psychology

Overview

Two volumes, twenty-eight chapters, about fourteen hundred pages, published in 1890 by Henry Holt, who had contracted for it in 1878 expecting delivery in two years. James apologised in the preface for the delay and described the finished thing, in a letter to his publisher, as a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and that William James is an incapable.

He was wrong about the first and being funny about the second. The book founded academic psychology in America, and James had already established the first psychology laboratory in the country at Harvard.

A second thing to know: James abridged it himself in 1892 into the Briefer Course, universally called Jimmy as against the Principles, which is called James. The abridgement is a genuine textbook, clear and much shorter, and it is what most students were given for fifty years. The full work is the one worth reading, because what gets cut is exactly the doubt, the literary richness and the philosophical argument.

The organisation is loose. Some chapters are surveys of the experimental literature of the 1880s, now of historical interest only; others are original essays that have never been superseded. James wrote them over twelve years, published many separately, and did not entirely reconcile them.

The argument

The physiological chapters. The opening third covers the brain, the functions of its parts, the reflex arc, and the general conditions of brain activity, all in terms of the neurology of 1890, which was localisationist and largely pre-neuronal. This material is dated and can be skimmed, although James’s insistence that mental life is a function of a body in an environment is not dated at all.

Habit. Chapter 4, and the one most often read on its own. James argues from the plasticity of organic matter: nervous tissue takes on the form of the activity repeated through it, so that a habit is literally a physical path of reduced resistance.

Then the consequences, delivered with unusual force. Habit is the flywheel of society, keeping the fisherman at sea in winter and the miner underground, and holding each of us in the groove our profession has made. It simplifies movement, diminishes fatigue, and makes activity possible without attention.

And then the practical advice, which is the most quoted passage in the book: make the nervous system your ally rather than your enemy, launch a new habit with as strong an initiative as possible, never suffer an exception until it is rooted, seize the first opportunity to act on a resolution, and do something difficult every day for no reason except to keep the faculty of effort alive. He ends with the warning that we are becoming walking bundles of habit, and that no evil deed is ever wholly wiped out, because the nervous system is keeping the score.

The stream of thought. Chapter 9, the philosophical centre and the source of the phrase.

James attacks the atomistic psychology he inherited, which treated mental life as built from discrete simple ideas combined by association. His five characters of thought: every thought is part of a personal consciousness; thought is always changing, and no state once gone recurs identically; it is sensibly continuous; it deals with objects independent of itself; and it is always selective.

The continuity claim is the one with consequences. There are no gaps in experience, even across sleep; a thought does not have edges. James introduces the substantive and transitive parts of the stream, the resting places and the flights between them, and argues that psychology has ignored the transitive parts because they are hard to catch: trying to observe a transition is like grabbing a spinning top to see how it moves, or turning up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.

His conclusion is that we feel relations as directly as we feel things, and that there should be a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, as readily as a feeling of blue or cold. He also describes the fringe, the halo of relations surrounding every distinct image, and the tip-of-the-tongue state as a gap that is intensely active and has a shape.

The consciousness of self. Chapter 10. James divides the empirical self into material, social and spiritual, notes that a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him, and gives his famous equation that self-esteem equals success divided by pretensions, so that one can raise it as effectively by giving things up as by achieving them.

Then the hard question of what unifies the stream, and here James refuses both the soul and the transcendental ego, proposing instead that each passing thought appropriates the previous ones, the present moment being the owner that inherits from the one before, like a herdsman taking over a herd.

Attention, memory, perception. Attention is defined in the sentence about taking possession by the mind, which is quoted so often that people forget it begins with everyone knows what attention is. James distinguishes passive from voluntary attention and says that the effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.

Memory is treated as the physiological retention of paths plus the awareness that an event belongs to one’s own past, and James reports his own experiments showing that memorising poetry does not improve general memory, an early strike against the idea of mental faculties as muscles.

The emotions. Chapter 25, and the most contested thing in the book. The James-Lange theory, named for James and the Danish physiologist Carl Lange, who published independently, holds that the bodily changes follow directly on the perception of the exciting fact and that our feeling of those changes as they occur is the emotion.

James is explicit about how strange this sounds and works through the cases: the bear, the loss of fortune, the insult. His main argument is subtractive: imagine an emotion and strip away every bodily symptom, the quickened heart, the tightened chest, the flushed face, the weak knees, and see what is left. He claims nothing is, only a cold intellectual judgement.

The theory was attacked by Cannon in the 1920s and has been revived in modified form since, and the current view is that James was partly right in ways nobody expected.

Will, and the ending. The final chapter treats voluntary action as arising from ideas of movement, since to think of a motion clearly and without a competing idea is already to begin it, and locates the will in the effort that holds one idea steady against the others. The closing pages take up determinism and conclude that psychology, as a natural science, must assume it, and that the question cannot be decided from within. James had earlier resolved the matter for himself, in a diary entry of 1870 that rescued him from a long depression, by deciding that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will.

How to read it

Do not read it front to back. It is fourteen hundred pages and much of the experimental survey is of purely historical interest.

Read chapters 4, 9, 10, 11 and 25. That is habit, the stream of thought, the self, attention and the emotions, and it is perhaps two hundred and fifty pages of the best of it.

Read the habit chapter for its advice and take it seriously. It was written as practical counsel and it holds up well against a century of research on behaviour change.

Notice the literary quality. James writes in metaphors that have entered the language, the stream, the flywheel, the fringe, and his brother Henry, the novelist, is often said to have written like a psychologist while William wrote like a novelist.

Watch the honest failures. James repeatedly reaches a point, says that psychology cannot get further, and says why. The chapter on the self ends by admitting that the metaphysical question remains, and he later abandoned the position he takes there.

Read it beside a modern textbook and see what survived. The stream of consciousness, the selectivity of attention, the role of the body in emotion, the plasticity underlying habit: these are all live. The introspective method and the localisation neurology are not.

And read chapter 9 if you care about fiction. Joyce, Woolf and Dorothy Richardson all worked in the light of this chapter, and the technique called stream of consciousness is an attempt to write what James described.

Questions it raises

• Is consciousness really continuous, or does calling it a stream import a metaphor that decides the question?
• If we are afraid because we tremble, what is fear, and can you have an emotion without a body?
• Habit is the flywheel of society and also the groove we cannot leave. Is James praising it or warning about it?
• Self-esteem as success over pretensions: is lowering the denominator a genuine solution?
• James says a thought appropriates its predecessors and that is all the self there is. Does that account for anything it needs to?
• Psychology must assume determinism and cannot settle the question. Is that a limit of the science or an evasion?