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More
from and about
William James
(biographical info at bottom of page) |
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The art of
being wise is knowing what to overlook. |
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Do every day
or two something for no other reason than you
would rather not do it, so that
when the hour of dire need draws
nigh, it may find you not unnerved and
untrained to stand the test.
Whenever you're in
conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between
damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
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I am done with great things
and big things, great
institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny,
invisible molecular moral forces that work from
individual to individual, creeping through the
crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or
like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if
you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments
of people's pride.
The deepest principle in human
nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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Seek out that
particular mental attribute which makes you feel
most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the
inner
voice which says, "This is the real me," and when
you have found
that attitude, follow it.
Be not afraid
of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief
will help create the fact.
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Human
beings are born into this little span of life of which the best
thing
is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their
friendships and
intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the
roadside,
expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
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To change one's life: 1. Start immediately, 2.
Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions. |
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If
you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a
past
or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a
different reality system. |
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Knowledge
about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place
in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is
another. |
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We
have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who
elects to be poor in order to simplify and save one's inner life.
If he or
she does not join the general scramble and pant with the
money-making
street, we deem that person spiritless and lacking in ambition. |
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William
James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of
physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred
page
masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich
blend of
physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that
has
given us such ideas as "the stream of thought" and the
baby's impression of the world "as one great blooming,
buzzing confusion" (PP 462). It contains seeds of
pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of
thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand
Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at
Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine,
but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as
scientific. "Some Remarks on Spencer's Notion of Mind
as Correspondence" (1878) and "The Sentiment of
Rationality" (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and
pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that
philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher's
temperament.
James hints at
his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The
Principles, but they become more explicit in The Will to
Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human
Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic
Universe (1909). James oscillated between thinking that
a "study in human nature" such as Varieties could
contribute to a "Science of Religion" and the belief
that religious experience involves an altogether supernatural
domain, somehow inaccessible to science but accessible to the
individual human subject.
James made some of his most important philosophical contributions
in
the last decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904-5
(collected
in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)) he set out the
metaphysical view
most commonly known as "neutral monism," according to
which there is one fundamental "stuff" that is neither
material nor mental. In "A
Pluralistic Universe" he defends the mystical and
anti-pragmatic view
that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, and in his
influential
Pragmatism (1907), he presents systematically a set of views about
truth, knowledge, reality, religion, and philosophy that permeate
his
writings from the late 1870s onwards.
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