Memories and Studies

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Longmans, Green, 1911 - Philosophy - 411 pages
"William James (1842 1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher. Topics of his books included psychology, religious psychology, educational psychology, mysticism, and pragmatism. James played a major role is the transition from 19th century European philosophy to American philosophy. James wrote "True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse" but "all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere," Shortly before his death William James expressed the desire to collect some of his addresses and essays into one volume. Topics included are: Louis Agassiz, Address to the Emerson Centenary in Concord, Robert Gould Shaw, Francis Boott, Thomas Davidson a Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life, Herbert Spencers Autobiography, Frederick Myers Services to Psychology, Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher, On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake, The Energies of Men, The Moral Equivalent of War, Remarks at the Peace banquet, The Social Value of the College Bred, The University and the Individual, and A Pluralistic Mystic." --
 

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Page 292 - But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type/ It is but a
Page 269 - budgets of all nations show us. , , History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war
Page 280 - of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once / and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor — c.
Page 270 - motives. In the Peloponnesian war for example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Matthew Arnold. '
Page 278 - This will give Japan what her ineluctable ' vocation as a state absolutely forces her to claim, the possession of the entire Pacific Ocean; and to oppose these deep designs we Americans have, according to our author, nothing but our conceit, our ignorance, our commercialism, ourjcorruption, and our feminism. General Lea makes a minute technical
Page 290 - and this js my idea — there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted
Page 285 - pride; but it has to be confessed that the / \ / — only sentiment which the image of pacific / is capable of arous- / ing in countless -worthy breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to such a collectivity. is obvious that the United States of America as they exist to-day
Page 279 - paints may lurk in ambush for us. Ignorant as we still are of the innermost recesses of Japanese mentality, we may be foolhardy to disregard such possibilities. Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their considerations. The "Philosophic des Krieges," by SR Steinmetz is a good example.-
Page 295 - of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does,
Page 284 - of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this world's ^. // values; and instead of the fear of the Lord ' '"* and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the

About the author (1911)

William James, oldest of five children (including Henry James and Alice James) in the extraordinary James family, was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. He has had a far-reaching influence on writers and thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broadly educated by private tutors and through European travel, James initially studied painting. During the Civil War, however, he turned to medicine and physiology, attended Harvard medical school, and became interested in the workings of the mind. His text, The Principles of Psychology (1890), presents psychology as a science rather than a philosophy and emphasizes the connection between the mind and the body. James believed in free will and the power of the mind to affect events and determine the future. In The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he explores metaphysical concepts and mystical experiences. He saw truth not as absolute but as relative, depending on the given situation and the forces at work in it. He believed that the universe was not static and orderly but ever-changing and chaotic. His most important work, Pragmatism (1907), examines the practical consequences of behavior and rejects the idealist philosophy of the transcendentalists. This philosophy seems to reinforce the tenets of social Darwinism and the idea of financial success as the justification of the means in a materialistic society; nevertheless, James strove to demonstrate the practical value of ethical behavior. Overall, James's lifelong concern with what he called the "stream of thought" or "stream of consciousness" changed the way writers conceptualize characters and present the relationship between humans, society, and the natural world. He died due to heart failure on August 26, 1910.

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