The Imprint of James Upon Psychology

When . . . we talk of 'psychology as a natural science? we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse: It means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical eroticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms. It is, in short, a phrase of diffidence, and not of arrogance.

The Inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight.

After twelve years of arduous research and writing, James completed The Principles of Psychology in 1890. The work was at once a grand summation of previous developments and and a portent of the paths psychology would take in the twentieth century. Glimmerings of every major psychological movement of the last 70 years appear in the book. Moreover, a direct line of influence is traceable in many instances.

James did not achieve this remarkable breadth of treatment without some sacrifice. Not all of his notions are operationally verifiable, nor does he always escape self-contradiction. Yet his transgressions of the scientific ethic must not be taken too seriously. He persistently applied himself to real problems, to ones of great human import. And though James, with characteristic hospitality, would welcome the use of computer models and animal studies, he would have protested vehemently against sacrificing the fullness of life for a manageable but sterile fragment.

Role of Habit

Habit for James was the structural unit of mental life. The acquisition of a habit consisted of developing a new pathway of discharge in the brain. Even the most complex habits were viewed as merely a chain of discharges in the nerve centers--the result of a series of sensory stimuli and motor responses comprising a system of reflex paths.

The physiological terminology is now somewhat outmoded, but it afforded James a convenient basis for some of his famous pedagogical maxims. "Could the young but realize," he wrote, "how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so little scar. . . . Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work."

James considered habit the great conservative agent of society. "It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice." He felt that most personal habits, such as vocalization, pronunciation, gesture, and gait are fixed by age 20.

The period between 20 and 30, on the other hand, appeared to him as the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits.

"Already at the of 25," he wrote, "you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, and on the young minister, and on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shops,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new seat of folds.... We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, . . . for in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again."

Stream of Consciousness

Shifting metaphor, James adopted the language of the hydraulic engineer in his discussion of consciousness. He decried the practice of chopping consciousness into supposed "single ideas" with which the investigator really had no immediate acquaintance. Chains, trains, or other compounding of bits seemed inadequate as models. Consciousness is nothing jointed, he argued; it flows. Thus he preferred such metaphors as "river" or "stream."

"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relation, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. . . ."

Several years after the publication of the Principles, Gertrude Stein '97 arrived at Radcliffe. She elected to concentrate--if such a pedestrian word is proper--in psychology. Like Alice Toklas, James had great respect for her intelligence; he publicly acclaimed her the most outstanding woman student of his long teaching career.

Gertrude Stein was never one who seemed to require the services of men: her creative faculties appeared self-fecundating. But perhaps we can imbroil James in an intellectual paternity suit, nonetheless. After all, she was but a young impressionable 'Cliffie, while he had by then attained world renown. In lieu of a blood test, one need only examine the term "stream of consciousnes literature." It is astonishing how Jamesian some passages of Miss Stein's essays on the art of writing sound. Surely the extent of the dalliance is clear beyond reasonable doubt. And if we can obtain the conviction, we must congratulate the father on his splendid brood. For Gertrude Stein did not spawn just one "natural" child but an unnaturally gifted litter of literary figures. Her American progeny include, by the way, such robust bastards as Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.

Gestalt Antedated

Leaving the romantic interest for fairer game, one might turn to James's anticipations of Gestalt psychology. The torrents of impression by which the mind is inundated at every moment produce a narrow and highly select conscious experience. This struck James as extraordinary, and he marvelled at man's routine feats of selective attention.

"Thus my table-top is named square," he wrote, "after but one of an infinite number of retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles; but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness into the table's essence, for aesthetic reasons of my own." James claimed that every object is represented in some standard attitude, at some particular distance, of some typical size, and so forth. Yet each of these characteristics, which together constitute the "objectivity" of the object are naught but sensations--like all the "subjective" variations.

"The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest." This is the essence of the Gestalt doctrine of perceptual constancies. of course, in proposing such a theory, James was rejecting the passive, reactive, blank tablet model of the mind, which one associates with the Anglo-American tradition.

Theory of Emotions

Yet devotees of the more nativistic Continental psychologies should beware of immediately hailing James as a compatriot. He has had too much influence upon rival schools. Although James's own eclecticism and boundary-bursting originality preclude classification, many of his students eventually became leaders of the American functionalist movement. And tinges of behaviorism can even be spotted in some of his most famous doctrines.

An example is the James-Lange theory of the emotions. In presenting this theory James superbly displayed those gifts that brought him renown as a psychologist: novelty, lucidity, effective argumentation. "Commonsense says, we loose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis there to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble."

While listening to poetry, drama, or music, James remarked, "we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals. . . . If we abruptly see dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any particular idea of danger can arise." The vital point of the whole theory James stated thus: "If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted."

Bored by Lab Work

In his survey of the history of psychology, Gardner Murphy provides a remarkably unbiased evaluation of the doctrine and its stormy career. He concludes, "Objectors to the James theory run into the hundreds; but we have here a view destined to be of enormous influence among psychologists, the starting point for nearly all modern theory regarding the emotions, as well as the stimulus to much research."

James himself did not seek detailed experimental corroboration. Though he was instrumental in establishing one of the first psychology laboratories in the world, he quickly became bored with it. Eventually he recruited Munsterberg from Germany to take over the experimentation.

James characteristically displayed more interest in the pedagogical significance of his theory than in confirmation by precise, quantitative methods. "There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the out-ward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!"

Selfish Speculations

The notion of selfhood still contains countless perplexing problems, and no psychologist has surpassed James in surveying the topic. For several decades after the publication of the Principles there was little interest in the self. Some commentators have attributed the avoidance to the prevailing behavioristic temper, while others speculate that no one felt he could add to the Jamesian treatment of the concept. In the last twenty years concern with the self has steadily increased. Theories of existential psychiatry, the self-image, and the child's perception of his world all echo ideas originally proposed by James.

"The consciousness of Self," James wrote in summary, "involves a stream of thought, each part of which as 'I' can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as 'Me', and appropriate to these the rest. This Me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the transcendental Ego, viewed as 'out of time.' It is a thought, at each moment, different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experimental facts find their place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind."

James sadly commented on the conflict between different Me's; but, as usual, he concluded in an optimistic and morally educative fashion. His remarks provide a glimpse of the personal aims of his philosophical and psychological endeavor. "Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher.... But the thing is simply impossible.... Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereup-on become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them."

(This is the fourth in a series of articles on William James)