William James Quotes on Mind
William James's two-volume Principles of Psychology (1890) presented the founding statement of American empirical psychology and remains the most influential nineteenth-century work in the philosophy of mind. The famous chapters on the stream of thought, on habit, on the self, on emotion (including the James-Lange theory that bodily expression precedes and constitutes the felt emotion), and on attention combine the introspective method with experimental data and unflinching philosophical argument. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and the radical empiricism of the late essays extend the analysis to religious states, mystical consciousness, and the metaphysics of pure experience that James proposed as an alternative to both materialism and idealism.
Quotes
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“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly. -
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
Ch. 22 -
“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean' -
Attributed to William James:
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
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“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James , vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James , vol. I, p. 147. -
“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to beli”
Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James , vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James , vol. I, p. 147. -
“Clifford's "Lectures and Essays"' (1879) in Collected Essays and Reviews (1920) pp. 138-139. Review of Lectures and Essays and Seeing and Thinking by William Kingdon Clifford , London and New York (1879). Reprinted from Nation (1879) 29 , pp. 312-313.”
But even the distant reader must allow that Clifford 's mental personality belonged to the highest possible type to say no more. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. And if in these modern days we are to look for any prophet or saviour who shall influence our feelings towards the universe as the founders and renewers