The Energies of Men , livre ebook

The Energies of Men
By
William James


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William James
William James was born on 11th January 1842 at the Astor House, in New York City, United States. His family were both wealthy and influential. His father was the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr, his uncle was the prominent novelist Henry James, and his aunt was noted diarist Alice James.
James suffered a variety of physical ailments as a youth, including problems with his eyes, back, stomach, and skin. However, he still received an excellent transatlantic education, becoming fluent in both French and German. The two trips he made to Europe as a child, set a pattern in James’ life that led to thirteen subsequent trips to the continent.
He began an apprenticeship with the artist William Morris, but decided that his calling was the world of science, and in 1861 he enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University. He then moved to Harvard Medical School in 1864 and received his M.D in 1869, although he never actually practised medicine. James spent almost his entire career at Harvard, teaching a variety of subjects, including physiology, anatomy, psychology, and philosophy. He has now become known as the “Father of American Psychology”, due to being the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. In 1890, he published The Principles of Psychology, which is considered to be a ground-breaking text in the field. In this work he outlined what is now known as the James-Lange theory of emotion (an independently formulated theory named after James and Carl Lange). In a simple example, James states that we do not see a bear, fear it, and then run. We see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. Our mind’s perception of the higher adrenaline level, heartbeat, etc., is the emotion. This had huge ramifications to the traditional view in the philosophy of aesthetics.
In 1902, he produced The Varieties of Religious Experience. He was always extremely interested in the investigation of mystical experience and was not averse to testing substances such as nitrous oxide and peyote to induce an altered mental state. Amusingly, he claimed that it was only under the influence of nitrous oxide that he understood the work of Hegel.
Another very important work by James was Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) in which he asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: any philosophical world-view is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that. This work influenced intellectual giants such as Emile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
James made a massive contribution to many fields, writing on topics such as epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. His impact on the intellectual landscape still remains today, often being quoted and cited in academic works. He died on 26th August 1910.


The Energies of Men [1] William James
We habitually hear; much nowadays of the difference between structural and functional psychology. I am not sure that I understand the difference, but it probably has something to do with what I have privately been accustomed to distinguish as the analytical and the clinical points of view in psychological observation. Professor Sanford, in a recently published ‘Sketch of a Beginner’s Course in Psychology,’ recommended ‘the physician’s attitude’ in that subject as the thing the teacher should first of all try to impart to the pupil. I fancy that few of you can have read Professor Pierre Janet’s masterly works in mental pathology without being struck by the little use he makes of the machinery usually relied on by psychologists, and by his own reliance on conceptions which in the laboratories and in scientific publications we never hear of at all.
Discriminations and associations, the rise and fall of thresholds, impulses and inhibitions, fatigue, — these are the terms into which our inner life is analyzed by psychologists who are not doctors, and in which, by hook or crook, its aberrations from normality have to be expressed.