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Brief Lives

William James (1842-1910)

Alistair MacFarlane takes a pragmatic look at the life of an American genius.

William James was America’s greatest psychologist, and became one of its great philosophers. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) he investigated consciousness, sensation and perception, memory, thought, emotion, attention, will, space, time and knowledge. In his studies of how we perceive time, James examined what he called ‘the specious present’: how conscious experience slips into the past whilst also yielding to an emerging future. He coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’, and famously described the stream of consciousness experienced by a new-born baby before the formation of any ability to conceptualise or make rational decisions as a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” After a study of religions in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he produced a third masterpiece, Pragmatism (1907).

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