Psychology: The Briefer Course

by William James

Edited and with an introduction by Gordon Allport.

Condensed and reworked from James's monumental Principles of Psychology, this classic text examines habit; stream of consciousness; self and the sense of personal identity; discrimination and association; the sense of time; memory; perception; imagination; reasoning; emotions, instincts; the will and voluntary acts; and much more. (This edition omits the outdated first nine chapters.)

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, Academia

343 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1892

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.

Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.

In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.

He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

William James’s monumental Principles of Psychology has long been on my to-read list. But I have a nasty habit of letting books scare me; and a 1,400-page textbook from 1890 was sufficiently intimidating to make me put it off indefinitely.

To warm up to the task, I decided to read a couple shorter books of James's. First, I tackled his Varieties of Religious Experience—a pioneering work on the psychology of religion, and a similarly respected classic. There’s a lot of good stuff in that book, and he makes many points neglected by other scholars of religion. Nevertheless, James’s verbosity is on full display.

Pages and pages are filled with extended quotes. Instead of sticking to the analysis, James lets himself get carried away in his fascination with altered mental states. He includes diary entrees, testimonies, and biographies of mystics from the past, all quoted in extenso. Much of it was fascinating; but much was redundant. Thus, I was led to suspect that the 1,400 page behemoth on the horizon was similarly stuffed with fluff.

The next book of his I read was Pragmatism (which is at least mercifully short). Not only was I unimpressed with that work, but I found much of it to be downright stupid. So by the end of those two books I suspected that William James's magnum opus was both bloated and bland. As a result, when I heard that William James had himself condensed his larger work of psychology into this volume, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to both lay my curiosity to rest and to avoid getting bogged down in a verbal Slough of Despond.

But my fears were misplaced. This is a big blooming buzzing brilliant book. I loved it from first to last. In fact, I fear that I’ll sound rather ecstatic when I try and describe how incredible an accomplishment this was.

The most immediate and obvious merit of this book is simply James’s eloquence. As I read, I found myself highlighting passage after passage. He was surely at the height of his powers as a writer when he put this book together. Some sections are as beautiful as anything ever written by Proust on the inner life of the mind.

Consider this quote on spacing out:

Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

If that’s not beautiful, I don’t know what is.

The next attraction of this great book is the multitude of fascinating glimpses it provides into the psychology of the past. Psychologist would perform quirky experiments on themselves, such as one psychologist who tried to simultaneously mentally multiply numbers together while reciting poetry. Some experiments were more gruesome: severing the spines of frogs and then spilling acid on them; sticking thermometers in the brains of dogs, and then holding up a piece of meat to their noses to determine whether mental excitement produces a change of temperature. James even includes a footnote detailing instructions for dissecting the brain of a cadaver. But my favorite was an experiment in which subjects were placed on a delicately balanced table, so that any slight change in weight either of their head or legs would cause the table to tip in that direction. The experimenter would then ask the subject a question, thereby causing him or her to think, which caused blood to rush to the brain, thus tipping the table. It was the original MRI.

The third and greatest attraction of this book is its enormous vastness. James manages to bring together the works of German, French, Italian, and Anglo-American thinkers; to combined cutting-edge knowledge of experimental psychology with Darwin’s ideas; to combine the long tradition of philosophy with the young (at the time) field of psychology. It’s not everyday that you see diagrams of the anatomy of the eye alongside discussions of Locke’s theory of ideas.

Unfortunately, now I sort of wish that I had just gone ahead and tackled the bigger book—sort of. (Upon finishing The Principles of Psychology James famously wrote to his publisher that it was “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W.J. is an incapable.” Of course, I disagree.) But until I read the full version, all I can do is recommend this book with all my heart. It is one of the greatest works of American literature, and one of the greatest books in the history of Western thought. A classic in every sense of the word.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Psychology Of William James

In 1890, following a twelve-year effort, the American philosopher and psychologist William James published his 1200-page "Principles of Psychology". The "Principles" is a grand work which a group of distinguished psychologists described in 1969 as "the most literate, most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligent book on psychology that has ever appeared in English on any other language." The "Principles" proved greatly influential on many philosophers, notably Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as on psychologists. Because of the length and depth of the "Principles", it proved unsuitable for classroom use by undergraduates. Thus, working rapidly in 1891, William James substantially revised and abridged his masterpiece, resulting in his "Psychology: Briefer Course" published in 1892. For many years, this book was a standard textbook in psychology, and it remains eminently worth reading as an introduction to the discipline and to James's own thought.

The "Psychology" is about one-third the length of the "Principles." It consists of approximately 40 percent new material, most of which is in the opening chapters of the book on sensation and on anatomy and physiology. The remainder of the book is an abridgment of the earlier work, with philosophical discussions, quotations from other authors, and polemical material deleted or sharply curtailed.

The "Psychology" is an accessible and endlessly fascinating book on at least three levels: first, for its insight into the science of psychology; second for the suggestive character of its discussion of the relationship between psychology (and the natural sciences)on the one hand and philosophy and religion on the other hand; third, for the eloquence of James's writing and for his passion for the ethical and active life. I will say a short word in the following three paragraphs about each of these.

At the outset, James defines psychology as "the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such." He also finds that psychology and mental activity are neurologically and physiologically based. In other words, as James writes, "the immediate condition of a state of consciousness is an activity of some sort in the cerebral hemispheres." An illustration of the physiological basis of James work is his theory of the emotions, called the James-Lange theory, in which he argued that human feelings and emotions were rooted in actions and efforts rather than, is is still frequently supposed, the other way round. Everything that James writes has an empirical, physiological cast; and yet his work is far from reductionist. For all its emphasis on physiology, James analysis of the mind begins in chapters 9 and 10 with his discussions of the "stream of consciousness" and of the nature of the "self". He uses what he describes as the analytical method to analyze the fact of consciousness into habit, emotion, instinct, reasoning, attention, and the like. He does not take a Lockean/Humean approach by attempting to derive consciousness by compounding from simple sensation.

James distinguishes the scientific approach of psychology from the questions of metaphysics of philosophy while showing their interrelations. Scientific studies are partial and rely upon evidence, while metaphysics involves an attempt to think globally. With an appealing humility, James stresses how little is fundamentally known about psychology, an observation that may still hold true today. James emphasizes the limited reach of human cognition and the selective character of all human perception. In a memorable passage, he describes the mind's attempt to abstract from reality, which he characterizes as "one big blooming buzzing Confusion." I found a Kantian tendency in much of what James says about human knowledge in the Psychology. James also emphasizes, as did Kant, the deterministic character of scientific observation and study. But James does not find the physiological character of human effort necessarily inconsistent with human free will or with the power of the individual with effort to control his or her destiny.

With all its scientific learning, the Psychology has an ethical, exhortatory tone as befitting its proposed use by students. James can be a magnificently inspiring writer. The Psychology concludes with a discussion of the will. James writes about the need to hold to the possibility of the free will in order to make an individual's life meaningful and significant. He writes at the conclusion of his chapter on the will:

"Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "Will you or won't you have it so?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. we answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it were the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!"

The edition of the "Psychology" I am reviewing here is the authoritative edition of "The Works of William James" published by Harvard University Press. Certain other editions in print omit the early chapters on sensation and should be avoided. The best source of this work for the interested reader is in volume 1 of the writings of William James, 1879-1899 published by the Library of America. It includes the Harvard text of the Principles as well as several other works of James and sells at an economical price.

Robin Friedman

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is astonishing to see that James said it all; psychology hasn't advanced one bit since this work. (Or, that's only slightly an overstatement). I wasn't expecting this; literally, it looks like most of the primary concepts and principles that are presumed by contemporary psychological research were established here, in James's work. Reading this was a very rewarding experience; one gets to the heart of key psychological insights, which still hold true today, and gets to step over all the statistical and circumstantial fluff, which dresses up contemporary works on psychology and does not add much substantial to these key insights. Moreover, James's writing is very lovely to read; he writes concisely and with beautiful, lyrical, and yet clear phrasings of complex ideas.

There are too many, diverse ideas dealt with to be summarized here. Overall, the chapters can be read independently of one another; each focuses on a psychological concept, and none requires that one grasp the ideas found in previous chapters. I will here note my favorite of James's ideas. In chapter 3 "The Self" James asks 'what is the self?' and argues that there are three primary senses by which we might understand the self: there's the material, social, and spiritual self. The social self was especially interesting for me. This is defined as the person we become (the set of habits, values, ways of expressing ourselves) when we are with persons of certain social groups. For example, I am a different person when I am with my best friend vs. colleagues; or even when I am with one particular friend, rather than another, if these friends are quite different people and are members of different social groups. James argues that when we talk about our "honor or dishonor" being at stake, we are really talking about one of our social selves being at stake, or that the values and standing of that social self are being threatened by the possibility of our engaging in behaviors that are part of an antagonistic social self. James points out that our social selves can be more or less harmonious with one another; many variables are at play in determining how cohesive they are.

In chapter 4, James deals with attention, and in chapter 17, with volition. These two concepts are closely tied. James argues that free will is a matter of attending to things voluntarily. Our actions are determined by what objects or ideas are most present or salient in our minds. Often our actions are simply determined by the objects in our surroundings, which we automatically or pre-reflectively attend to. But we can voluntarily evoke images or ideas in our minds, and these images might have "impulsive" or compelling power that can overpower that of distal, physically present objects. If we are torn between competing options, in the form of mental ideas or images or perceptions, the one that will win out will be the one that can grip our attention most forcefully.

Our deeper interests will determine the extent to which an image or perception can capture our attention. Intuitively, if an object is especially scary or delightful, or extreme on some other emotional score, it will interest us and so leap to the foreground of our awareness. But also, James points out, our longer term and deeper habits shape our interests. If we habitually practice something (e.g., if I habitually think about a certain philosophical question), objects that have value or roles relative to our habits will be most compelling, even if typically they don't evoke strong emotions.

James's account of habit is powerful, which he presents in chapter 1. James understands habit analogously to the laws of nature; as gravity ensures that unsupported objects fall, a habit to go on a morning walk will ensure that one does so every morning. James beautifully shows that the unique feature of being a human is that we can re-wire our habits. This is like creating new laws of nature, new tendencies of our bodies, emotions, and thoughts to unfold in specific ways. Habits are critical in letting us do anything at all, from remembering items to reasoning about some issue at hand. We never do any cognitive activity from scratch, but the memories that will show up, or the reasons that are available to us that will constrain our possible conclusions, are all formed on the basis of extant habits.

My only 'complaint' with this book is that most of the ideas are intuitive; very little is surprising, so there are few moments over the reading experience in which one has a sense of discovery. But this lack of 'ahah!' moments is replaced by a wealth of "OMG" moments - moments of awe and delight at how keenly, directly, or beautifully James articulates a certain idea, that was previously blurry or implicit in our understanding. While much is intuitive, much is also usually just implicit in psychological and philosophical theories of the phenomena James deals with. He makes that which is most important explicit.

This is essential reading for anyone who is interested in psychology or the mind. Also, readers interesting in the continental phenomenological tradition should read this; James was highly influential for Husserl and Heidegger, and this comes out evidently in James's overall methodological approach. A way to describe what James has done is that he is an extremely skillful and patient witness to all that happens in our field of awareness. At the time he was writing, there was little empirical science, and James's insights all come from noticing what goes on in his own experience. This is inspiring to see; it makes one want to attend to one's own experience and make discoveries similarly.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any scientific book over a century old, James' textbook on psychology is more useful as a piece of history than as a, well, textbook. Nonetheless, this is a provoking piece that sheds much light on the sciences and philosophy in the late 19th century.

[Gary Jaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

William James wrote THE text book on psychology for his time. It was a huge 2 volume set. He realized that professors and students would benefit with a more compact edition of his monumental work. This was affectionately called "Jimmy" to the 2 volume set that was "James". Many of his insights into understanding the human mind presented here are still insightful and worth recalling that he gave us these insights first. Still shines bright after all these years.

[Paul Klammer]

Bit of a slog due to lack of specific science. Well reasoned exposition that had to be incredibly difficult to bring words to. Some key ideas that still apply. Among my favorites is the recognition that psychology is not a science due to the impossibility of capturing the physical phenomenon of consciousness or any 'state' of consciousness.

[Britt-Marie]

I only read the chapter on Self as that is one of the topics I am investigating. I found the quotation that originally led me to James, but in context it really wasn't addressing what I was hoping it might.

[Rachel Trimble · Rating 1 out of 5]

Again, I had to read this book for a class, and while there are some interesting things in there, I'm still not a fan of non-fiction. It felt too much like a textbook to me.

Would Recommend?
No

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

not the easiest read, but if you focus, he has some pretty decent analysis on the human psyche

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting, however not somthing I would usually read. I like reading books like this on occasion. This was not my favorite psychology book I have ever read but it made some interesting points and was informative. My only complaint is I feel this edition can be more modernized for better understanding.

[Andrew Neuendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything psych is coming back James' way. He was right before he was wrong. Contains the killer essays, "The Stream of Consciousness" and "The Self." Build the rest of your life around these.

[Trey Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is key to seeing the importance of habituation in all of our lives.

[eesenor · Rating 5 out of 5]

James studies the "stream of consciousness", a term that he coins here.