Quote of the Day (William James, on Pragmatists)

“A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.”— American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on Why We Pray)

“The reason why we do pray…is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that ‘science’ may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect.”—American philosopher William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Quote of the Day (William James, on the Range of Emotions)

“There is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely, both as to their constitution and as to objects which call them forth.”— American philosopher William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on Religion and Errors of Fact)

“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.” — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on What ‘Makes You Feel Most Deeply and Vitally Alive’)

“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.”—American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Quote of the Day (William James, on War, ‘An Explosion of Imaginative Energy’)

“Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitements. The only relief from Habit's tediousness is periodical excitement. From time immemorial wars have been, especially for non-combatants, the supremely thrilling excitement. Heavy and dragging at its end, at its outset every war means an explosion of imaginative energy. The dams of routine burst, and boundless prospects open….

“This is the constitution of human nature which we have to work against. The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life's fireworks.”— American philosopher, psychologist, and educator William James (1842-1910), “Remarks at the Peace Banquet,” published in the Official Report of the Universal Peace Congress, held in Boston in 1904, and in The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1904

One hundred and twenty years ago this month, William James’ analysis of the psychological roots of war came amid a convulsive thrust of American power far outside the nation’s continental bounds. It was the culmination of his rising concern, since the Spanish-American War six years before, over the possibility that his fellow citizens would be embroiled in yet another overseas conflict.

Viewing the outcome of those hostilities, Secretary of State John Hay had pronounced it “a splendid little war.” Even the vast possessions in the Caribbean and in the Pacific gained by the U.S. at a cost of only 4,000 casualties, however, did not lessen James’ grave misgivings about the nation’s new imperial role.

The philosopher’s younger brothers, Wilkie and Bob, had served in the Civil War, ending up physically and emotionally wounded, respectively, in the postwar period.

Already troubled by their fate, William began to think even harder about the war fever that had swept through America again. It was a line of inquiry that Sigmund Freud would pursue, through different premises and on a worldwide scale, in his last significant work, Civilization and Its Discontents (1931).

James went on to argue in the speech and essay from which I’ve quoted that this instinct for war was so ferocious that it could only be tamped down by degrees, not abolished instantly. It was a mournful preview of what developed through the rest of the 20^th century, when technological advances spread destruction on a level that James had never seen and might not have even contemplated.

I thought of James’ speculations last night while watching, on TCM, the 1997 biopic MacArthur, starring Gregory Peck. A highlight of the movie was an extended passage from the victorious American general’s speech, a month after the dropping of atomic bombs, when the Japanese surrendered in September 1945 to conclude WWII:

“A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war….

“We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”

The philosopher and the general would shudder at more recent developments. The rise of terrorism has increased the chances of regional wars (e.g., the War on Terror) and failed states so weak that their governments are no longer in control (Somalia, Afghanistan).

Moreover, the alliance system that MacArthur deemed no longer sufficient to contain the madness of armed outbreaks. Pointing to a new “axis of autocracies” (Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran) now cooperating, foreign correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov asks, in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Has World War III Already Begun?”

Pray that the answer is no. 

Quote of the Day (William James, on Life as a ‘Mass of Habits’)

“Our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.” —American philosopher William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Quote of the Day (Alice James, on a Landmark Year for Her Literary Family)

“Within the last year [Henry] has published The Tragic Muse, brought out The American and written a play, Mrs. Vibert . . . combined with William's Psychology, not a bad show for our family! especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all.”—Alice James (1848-1892), entry for June 16, 1891, in The Diary of Alice James, edited by Henry Edel (1964)

Brothers William James and Henry James Jr. became famous in their lifetimes for their powers of observation as respectively, pioneering psychologist-philosopher and fiction writer. It took over 70 years after her death, with the publication of her diaries, for the world to know that their younger sister, Alice James, had her own penetrating vision of the world, albeit one experienced from the bed where she languished as an invalid recluse.

The diary entry above conveys her pride in her two older brothers’ literary achievement in the prior year, as well as a gallows sense of humor bordering on stoicism in the face of the declining health that finally claimed her life a year later.

Alice was the youngest child of Henry James Sr., a wealthy, one-legged philosopher whose eccentricities affected, for good and ill, the lives of his five children—perhaps none more so than his daughter.

"In our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance," Henry Jr. wrote. Irritated and uncomfortable because their father felt that women were mere appendages of men, Alice fell ill or sometimes pretended to be ill, with fainting spells or headaches. Some doctors diagnosed the underlying ailment as suppressed gout, others as “wandering womb.”

But the one applied most commonly to her (a particular favorite of male doctors of the time) was known as “neurasthenia,” a form of what European doctors saw as “hysteria.” We know recognize what she had as a depression so devastating that Alice became suicidal. “A hoop skirt is a death trap,” she would observe.

Oddly enough, perhaps because Alice finally felt she could be useful, the one period of her life when these conditions abated was when she had to care for her father when his health started to decline. But with his death in 1882, her condition worsened again.

Even confined to her bed, Alice missed little. The diary entries she began writing in 1889 (dictated to her longtime companion, Katherine Loring) were sometimes sharp, often funny, and usually unconventional.

Anglophilic Henry Jr., for instance, was astonished to discover, when Loring presented to him a copy of the diary after Alice’s death, that his sister “was really an Irishwoman.” It wasn’t simply because she ardently believed in Home Rule, but that she had assessed Britain’s role in fostering the conditions for this rising movement—and found their disclaimers of blame all too wanting:

“The behaviour of the Unionist and Tory is simply the bete carried to its supreme expression. It is truly a great misfortune for a people to be so destitute of inspiration, and so completely without honour, as to be left absolutely naked to itself. If you could read, too, the chorus going up to heaven on all sides over the love of manliness and fairness in the Briton's bosom! — those qualities of which they are always assuring the rest of the world they hold the monopoly. The Englishman, however, should not be held accountable for being mentally so abject before the Irishman; he is helpless, for there is absolutely nothing in his organization wherewith he can conceive of him, and his self-respect naturally has no other refuge save in loathing and despising him. He has no wings to his mind to bear him whither his leaden feet are inapt for carrying him; so that it is only now, at the end of seven centuries, that he is beginning faintly to divine that in Ireland, above all other lands, there are impalpable spiritualities which rise triumphant and imperishable before brutalities.”

Alice James died in 1892 of breast cancer. Although her brothers sensed her keen intellect, even they must have wondered at times what to make of her. We may be only coming to terms with her now.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on Human Differences in God’s Eyes)

“In God's eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show.”—American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), “What Makes a Life Significant?", in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1889)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on ‘The Characteristics of the Religious Life’)

“The characteristics of the religious life…[include] the following beliefs: that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; that union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; [and] that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit 'God' or 'law'—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world." — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Hope and the ‘Willingness to Live on a Chance’)

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference … between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”—American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Religion and an ‘Unseen Order’)

"Were one asked to characterise the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” —American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on the Objective of Religion)

“Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Quote of the Day (William James, on the ‘Passionate Happiness of Christian Saints’)

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”— American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)