James, William (1842–1910)

US psychologist and philosopher. He was among the first to take an approach emphasizing the ends or purposes of behaviour and to advocate a scientific, experimental psychology. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is one of the most important works on the psychology of religion.

In his classic Principles of Psychology (1890), James introduced the notion of the ‘stream of consciousness’ (thought, consciousness, or subjective life regarded as a flow rather than as separate bits), and propounded the theory of emotions now known as the James–Lange theory. James wrote extensively on abnormal psychology and had much to contribute to the study of the paranormal.

He was the brother of the novelist Henry James. He turned from medicine to psychology and taught at Harvard 1872–1907. Although on his own admission unsuited to experimental work, he established one of the first psychological laboratories at Harvard in 1875.

James's main philosophical ideas are set out in Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), an attempt to give an account of truth in terms of its satisfactory outcomes that owes much to the US philosopher C S Peirce's ideas on pragmatism, and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), in which he proposed that ultimate reality consists of ‘pure experience’, defining this as ‘the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection’.