In 1920, he wrote Erlebtes and Erkanntes, his autobiography. A short time later, on August 31, 1920, he died.

William James

William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. His father was a rich man who spent his time entertaining the intellectuals of the time and discussing the religious mysticism of Swedenborg. This wonderful atmosphere for a bright young boy was thanks to his grandfather, an Irish immigrant with a talent for real estate investment. William was soon joined by a younger brother, Henry, who would grow up to be one of America's premier novelists. All the James children were sent to European boarding schools and travelled through all the great capitals.

At 19, after a stint as an art student, James enrolled at Harvard in chemistry, which he soon changed to medicine. He was not really interested in a career in medicine, but wanted to study the science that went with it.

In 1865, he took advantage of a marvelous opportunity to travel the Amazon River basin with the great biologist Louis Agassiz, to collect samples of new species. While there, he began to suffer from a variety of health problems. In 1867, he went to study physiology in Germany, under Helmholtz and others. He befriended several notable early German psychologists, including Carl Stumpf. On the other hand, he had little respect for Herbert Spencer, Wilhelm Wundt, G. E. Miiller, and others.

In Germany, he began to suffer from serious depression, accompanied by thoughts of suicide. In addition, he had serious back pain, insomnia, and dyspepsia. In 1869, he came back to the US to finish up his MD degree, but continued to be plagued by depression. He had been reading a book by a French philosopher named Renouvier, ""which convinced him of the power of free will. He decided to apply this idea to his own problems, and seemed to improve.

From 1871 through 1872, James was a part of «the Metaphysical Club», a group of Harvard gradsuates who met in Boston to discuss the issues of the day. Included in the club were the philosopher Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright. It was Wright who introduced the idea of combining Alexander Bain's concept of beliefs as the disposition to behave, with Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest: Ideas had to compete with each other, and the best would last. This is similar to a more recent idea called memes.

It was Peirce, on the other hand, who took Kant's idea that we can never really know the truth — that all our beliefs are maybes — and turned it into the basis for pragmatism. This is very similar to Hans Vaihinger's (1852-1933) philosophy of «as if» that so influenced Alfred Adler and George Kelly.

In 1872, James was appointed an instructor of physiology at Harvard. In 1875, he taught his first course in psychology, or «physiological psychology*, ala Wundt, and established a demonstration laboratory — the same year Wundt established his at Leipzig, and in 1876, he became an assistant professor of physiology.

In that same year, he signed on with the publisher Holt to write a psychology textbook. It was supposed to take two years — it took him 12.

In 1880, his title was changed to assistant professor of philosophy, which is where, in those days, psychology actually belonged. In 1885, he became a full professor.

In 1889, his title changed again — to professor of psychology. The next year, his book was finally published — two volumes, to be exact, titled The Principles of Psychology. In 1892, he put out a shorter version subtitled The Briefer Course, which students would refer to for the next 50 years as «the Jimmy*. Both are masterpieces of prose and were extremely popular among students of psychology.

Despite his dislike of research, he did raise the money for a new and expanded lab at Harvard, but promptly arranged to hire one of Wundt's students, Hugo Miinster-berg, to be its director. He did not supervise many graduate students, but several were quite successful in their own right, including James Angell, Edward Thorndike, and Mary Calkins, the first woman to receive a PhD in Psychology.

James had always shared his father's interest in mysticism, even in psychic phenomena. This has dampened his reputation among hard-core scientists in the psychological community, but it only endeared him more to the public. In 1897, he published The Will to Believe, and in 1902, Varieties of Religious Experience.

But James was never completely comfortable with being a psychologist, and preferred to think of himself as a philosopher. He is, in fact, considered America's greatest philosopher, in addition to being the «father» of American psychology.

He was profoundly influenced by an earlier American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, who founded the philosophy of Pragmatism. Pragmatism says that ideas can never be completely proven true or false. Rather, we should be looking to how useful an idea is — how practical, how productive. James called it the «cash value* of an idea. James popularized Pragmatism in books like Pragmatism in 1907 and The Meaning of Truth in 1909. In 1909, he also wrote A Pluralistic Universe, which was part Pragmatism and part an expression of his own beliefs in something not unlike Spinoza's pantheism.

He had retired from teaching in 1907 because his heart was not was it used to be, not since a mild attack in 1898 when climbing in upstate New York. He did meet Freud when he came to visit Boston in 1909, and was very much impressed. The next year, he went to Europe for his health and to visit his brother Henry, but soon returned to his home in New Hampshire. Two days later, on August 26, 1910, he died in his wife Alice's arms.

Several of his works were published posthumously, including Some Problems in Philosophy in 1911 and the magnificent Essays in Radical Empiricism in 1912. James' most famous students included John Dewey, the philosopher often considered the father of modern American education, and Edward Thorndike, whose work with cats opened the door to the Behaviorists.

Structuralism

The school that Wundt «founded* would come to be called Structuralism. The best way to understand it is through an analogy using language. When a linguist is faced with a text in an unknown language, there are many things he of she must do. Included primary among those things, he must find the units of the language — e.g. words, endings, sentences, etc. — and the rules for combining those units — e.g. grammar, phonetics, etc.

In the study of experience, «rules of language* would be analogous to the structure beneath experience. «Units of language* would be analogous to the irreducible pieces of experience.

Wundt and his students used an experimental version of introspection — the careful observation of one's perceptions — and outlined some pretty specific details to the method:

1. The observer must know when the experience be-
gins and ends.