1842–1910 · psychologist and philosopher, Harvard

illiam James trained as a physician, taught at Harvard for most of his career, and wrote the book that defined psychology in English for a generation, The Principles of Psychology (James, 1890).

what he did

The Principles ran to two volumes and took him about twelve years. It covered the brain, habit, attention, memory, emotion and the self, and argued throughout that the mind should be studied as a working function of a living animal [paraphrase, not a quotation]. Its chapter on the "stream of thought" described consciousness as continuous and always changing, rather than a sequence of separate ideas. He also proposed, at about the same time as Carl Lange in Denmark, that emotions are our perception of bodily changes, now called the James–Lange theory.

He set up one of the first rooms for psychological demonstrations in America at Harvard in the 1870s, though he was never fond of laboratory routine himself. Later he turned to philosophy: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragmatism (1907) are still read. His brother was the novelist Henry James.

why he is here

James's chapters on habit and attention are still a good description of how much of behavior runs without deliberate decision, which is the starting point of bounded rationality. His insistence that consciousness is a process, not a thing, sits behind the questions on our minds page.

The tour has a psychology hall with portraits on the walls; the frames there belong to the tour's own story. The plain tour lists them.

Primary works and sources

1. James (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

Try it yourself. [playful] Small toys on the toy shelf that show this in action:   • the Stroop box — name the ink, not the word   • the reaction box — Donders' simple and go/no-go reactions

see also

	minds — the hard problem, the Cartesian theater
	restless — another account of a mind that will not sit still
	timeline: psychophysics — James appears in 1890