William james what makes life

Receives M. Severe depression in the fall. Depression and poor health continue. Accepts offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate course in comparative physiology. Accepts an appointment to teach full year of anatomy and physiology, but postpones teaching for a year to travel in Europe. Begins teaching psychology; establishes first American psychology laboratory.

Marries Alice Howe Gibbens. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. Continues to teach psychology. Travels to Europe. Teaches psychology and philosophy at Harvard: logic, ethics, English empirical philosophy, psychological research.

Develops heart problems. Becomes active member of the Anti-Imperialist League, opposing U. All were reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism Resigns Harvard professorship. His partially completed manuscript published posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy. Dies of heart failure at summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire.

For example: The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it…. However, the objective world originally experienced is not the world of spatial relations that we think: Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin [who] does not feel either of these objects to be situated in longitude 71 W.

The flame fills its own place, the pain fills its own place; but as yet these places are neither identified with, nor discriminated from, any other places. That comes later. For example: I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them.

My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring the act about. There is certainly no express fiat here;… PP He extends his analysis beyond the religious domain, however, to a wide range of secular human life: A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs….

A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted WB This plurality, he writes: commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.

Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations TT William James: Writings — New York: Library of America, Contained in Essays in Philosophy , pp. Luckily, there was a fledgling organisation dedicated to precisely this study — James co-founded it in He joked that James would turn down the lights in a room so that the miracles could happen.

This was not some fringe organisation, but it was not altogether normal, either. One of its co-founders, G Stanley Hall, had come to Harvard to do doctoral work with James in the late s and was awarded the first psychology doctorate in the United States.

By , Hall had resigned from the organisation, concluding that parapsychology amounted to pseudoscience. But others, like James and his close friend the physician Henry P Bowditch, marshalled on into the turn of the century. In , James reflected on 25 years of ghostbusting:. Nature loves to hide. Humans like James love to seek. Despite the bafflement — or perhaps because of it — James and his fellow researchers remained pointedly, if cautiously, hopeful.

Unlike most psychics of the time, however, the members of the psychical-research society documented and published their findings. This record became the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, for members and close associates, and the Proceedings, intended for the general public. Somewhere between curiosity and suspicion was abiding hope. When James began his psychical research, he was well ensconced in the field of physiology. For James, something important was lost: the sense that a human being is more than just a bundle of perceptions and nervous reactions, and more than just a body that could disappear without a trace.

He hoped that there was something ethereal, transcendent — something even ghostly — that was free from the constraints of our physical lives. It refers, instead, to mental processes just below the threshold of consciousness that can often be felt without fully emerging. The American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once joked that James would turn down the lights in a room so that the miracles could happen.

I think that there is some truth in this. Be ready and willing. When you turn the lights down, your pupils dilate so that more light can get in. Maybe we surprise ourselves with what we can see. And maybe that is miracle enough. James, however, goes just a little farther, a little deeper, in the Varieties. Sometimes, when you turn the lights very low, you can see things more clearly. For James, for his fellow mystics such as Blood, there was a sustained comfort in this story.

B efore the Brooklyn Bridge was built, a ferry carried passengers from one side of the river to the other. Walt Whitman was often among the crowd. James occasionally sensed the sublime or the religious on his hikes in the Adirondacks or in the testament of mystics, but Whitman could tap into it on a routine basis, even on a dirty ferry ride, which most people would regard as a rather annoying commute.

Both were inexplicable and hopeful and shared:. James read and reread this poem. This was wonder, and there was enough of it to go around. It turns out that one can probably set aside the nuttier aspects of the Society for Psychical Research and still retain a Whitman-esque experience of the world, the numinous immanence of an all-too-human ferry ride.

The world is not always, or ever, exactly as it seems. A dirty ferry ride might be more than just a dirty ferry ride. There is something more — at least it is possible. However, one does not have to be careless. And, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions.

It is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a 'reserve price. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our labor.

The gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of. If be should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take our places.

He has paid high, and be must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor.

We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end. And such bard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain.

And why is this so? Is it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies.

Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures? Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,-read the records of missionary devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then, taken by itself,-no, nor all of them together,-that make such a life undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.

Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it. If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest?

These ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives.

For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and bad a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while be labored. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?

But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. See how the hard ribs. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.

Poverty makes men come very near each other,, and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God. I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God.

Let him resist the characterlessness which often goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long.

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs.

The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured-for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be out conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders.

And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none. You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop under our hands.

We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, ,ve have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it.

And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal. To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we 'have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts.

Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal,-novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another.

This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale.

Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men.

Why not satisfy the same urges with hard labor — with pick, ax, scythe, and shovel. James might bring another lesson forward into the 21st century: Leave your mind free, open, and skeptical.

Menand outlined the hopscotch schooling of James, whose father moved the family from place to place — back and forth to Europe — settling sometimes for only months in one place.

By age 13, James had already attended 10 schools. By , James was enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he quickly jumped from engineering to anatomy to natural history and finally to medicine.

A medical degree from Harvard in was the only credential James ever earned, and it was one he never used.