The Varieties of Religious Experience 6. Educated by tutors and at private schools in New York. Brother Henry born. Sister Alice born. Family moves to Europe. William attends school in Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer; develops interests in painting and science.
Family settles in Geneva, where William studies science at Geneva Academy; then returns to Newport when William decides he wishes to resume his study of painting. William abandons painting and enters Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. Enters Harvard School of Medicine. Returns to medical school. Suffers eye strain, back problems, and suicidal depression in the fall.
Receives M. Severe depression in the fall. Depression and poor health continue. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate course in comparative physiology. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy and physiology, but postpones teaching for a year to travel in Europe. Begins teaching psychology; establishes first American psychology laboratory. Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard.
Continues to teach psychology. Travels to Europe. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: logic, ethics, English empirical philosophy, psychological research. Develops heart problems. Becomes active member of the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. All were reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism Resigns Harvard professorship.
His partially completed manuscript published posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy. Dies of heart failure at summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. For example: The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it….
However, the objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial relations that we think: Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who] does not feel either of these objects to be situated in longitude 71 W. The flame fills its own place, the pain fills its own place; but as yet these places are neither identified with, nor discriminated from, any other places.
That comes later. For example: I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about.
There is certainly no express fiat here;… PP He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain, however, to a wide range of secular human life: A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs….
A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted WB This plurality, he writes: commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us.
Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations TT William James: Writings — New York: Library of America, He popularized pragmatism, a distinctly American way of thinking that argues we must test our beliefs and decisions by results.
In Talks to Teachers on Psychology he took the insights of psychology to the classroom. At the end of his life, he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience , legitimizing faith for an age dominated by reason and science. William James came from a distinguished and privileged family. His father, Henry, independently wealthy, was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau and wrote for the Atlantic Monthly.
Restless, he moved his family from London to Paris to Newport, introducing them to Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Stuart Mill and seeking enlightenment and the perfect education for his five children, whom he cherished. Alice James, their sister, has recently become famous for her letters and diaries, emblematic of women stifled in a patriarchal, Victorian society.
William, the oldest child and always precocious, educated himself but could not find purpose or a career. In he studied art in Newport with William Morris Hunt. He journeyed to the Amazon in with the famous scientist Louis Agassiz to collect and study fish. He studied anatomy at Harvard Medical School. Neuroses accompanied his talent and wealth. Beneath an ebullient exterior, James concealed doubt and chronic illness—a bad back, weak eyes, constipation, insomnia, and depression.
He avoided the Civil War, traveled back and forth from Europe, sank into suicidal melancholy, and sought relief with water cures, electrical currents, hypnosis, and nitrous oxide. He sought answers in books by such diverse thinkers as Thomas Carlyle and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Not until his mid 30s did he settle down and find some purpose and energy and some slight relief from his ailments.
Work and love were transformative. Charles William Eliot, president of a resurgent Harvard, offered James a job teaching anatomy in The publishing house Henry Holt gave him the contract for his psychology text. At 36 he married Alice Gibbens, a cultured, strong woman, devoted to her neurasthenic husband and the mother of their five children. You have redeemed my life from destruction. Although James was grateful for his marriage to Alice, he never remained serene. He fled to the mountains when the semesters ended and departed to Europe when his Alice gave birth.
He relapsed into melancholy and consulted psychics. As compensation for morbidness and passivity and as an antidote for recurring ill health, he commended optimism and action.
Proper habits acted upon and pursued become embedded in the brain. Our thinking is not orderly or logical but chaotic, our moods constantly and inexplicably shifting.
James tries to explain how we remember, how we associate, imagine, reason, feel, and act. He consults authorities. He becomes personal, unusual in textbooks. He offers advice on improving memory, fighting melancholy, and getting out of bed in the morning. Of course parts of Psychology are dated.
James did not know about the billions of neurons in the brain, the synapses that connect them, and neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and oxytocin. He could not peer into the brain during sexual arousal or depression.
Contemporary psychologists would be put off by his digressions and moralizing and envious of his literary flair. In the mid s James took to the road, traveling from Boston to Chicago to Colorado Springs, lecturing to thousands of teachers in an attempt to make money and to make his psychological research relevant in the classroom.
He condensed his lectures into a small book called Talks to Teachers on Psychology. He lauds the masterful connector, the imaginative associator, the instructor who seizes the right moment and sets the right example. James was optimistic about human potential but realistic about human nature. Anticipating E. Rare among Harvard professors at the time, James encouraged questions, praised without reservation, and invited students into his home.
He was patient when a young Theodore Roosevelt pontificated. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. Americans are practical and inventive, craving facts, weighing costs and benefits. For an idealistic, optimistic, utilitarian nation, James created an American philosophy, pragmatism. In , James enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School, where he delved into such topics as chemistry and physiology. He went on to study at Harvard Medical School in The following year, James took a break from his education to join Louis Agassiz's expedition to the Amazon basin.
He also spent time in Germany in to recuperate from some health woes, including back pain, sight problems and depression. After earning his medical degree in , James decided not to practice medicine. He eventually became a lecturer at Harvard University.
Initially a lecturer in physiology, James went to teach psychology and philosophy. In , James was hired to write a book on the emerging field of psychology. He took ten years to write one of the early primers on the subject, The Principles of Psychology The book influenced such other leading thinkers as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.
James became more interested in philosophical issues as his career progressed. In , he published The Varieties of Religious Experience , which is considered to be another one of his leading works.
Pragmatism further explored his philosophical beliefs.
0コメント