In other words, the teacher points the camera and pushes the button for a snapshot or time exposure. The rest is done by setting the child to take these in by rote, by repeating rules, by watching and remembering contrived experiments. If "the mind"–which for this most practical of purposes is the pupil's mind–is imagined as a sensitive plate merely, then teaching can take the simple form of making desired impressions on the plate by attending chiefly to the choice and form of those impressions. In any such theory, the assumptions made about the human mind are fundamental and decisive. And what is more to the point of the present entry, between 18, James delivered at a number of places the Talks to Teachers, which were an offshoot of the Psychology and which constitute his important contribution to educational theory.
He pursued his research on the newest topics of abnormal psychology, he read Freud and helped bring him over for a lectureship at Clark University. To the end of the century James, despite his new goals, continued to write and lecture on the subject that had first brought him fame. Those were the great days of the Harvard department of philosophy, and during his thirty-five years of teaching James's direct influence spread over a wide range of students, as disparate as George Santayana and Gertrude Stein. In other words, the subjects for him commingled and he was always a philosophical writer and teacher. After the publication of his great book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, James's work exhibited the flowering of an intellect that had from the beginning been haunted by the enigmas of life and mind: He gave himself exclusively to metaphysics, morals, and religion.īy an oddity of academic arrangements, James was a professor of philosophy four years before he was made a professor of psychology, but nomenclature is irrelevant: His beginnings in the psychology laboratory were very soon followed by his offering of a course in philosophy. It was not long before his inquiring spirit led him to offer courses in the relations of psychology to physiology, for which he soon established the first psychology laboratory in America. in 1869 and after further study abroad began to teach anatomy and physiology. He then went abroad, where he read literature, attended university lectures, and became acquainted with the new psychology, which the Germans had made experimental and exact. He interrupted his course to spend a highly formative year as one of Louis Agassiz's assistants in the Thayer expedition to Brazil. Next he took up chemistry at Harvard, went on to study physiology in response to his interest in living things, and wound up preparing for a medical degree.
James wanted at first to become a painter, but he had the critical sense to see that his talent was insufficient. William James's own intellectual career is marked by his father's easy unconventionality, which as will be seen permitted long exploration before "settling down." Every shift in his own development is caught up in, and contributory to, his mature work. His original ideas on religion and society won no acceptance in his day, but they have been found important by modern scholars, and they certainly influenced the two geniuses who were his sons, William the philosopher and Henry the novelist. could devote himself to study and did so. He was the eldest son of Henry James Sr., son of the original William James who had emigrated from Ireland to this country and made a fortune. He studied in Germany and was fluent in both German and French, and his family circumstances were propitious. William James was in a favored position for adding something unique to the movement: He possessed the American experience as his birth-right and was early acclimated to European ways, British and Continental.
Every academic discipline and every art was involved in the change and, in each, thinkers of uncommon scope laid the foundation for the new systems of ideas on which the twentieth century still lives. In the company of Nietzsche, Dilthey, Renouvier, Bergson, Mach, Vaihinger, and Samuel Butler, he led the revolt against orthodox scientism, Spencerism, and materialism and contributed to that enlargement of outlook that affected the whole range of feeling and opinion and has since earned the name of Neo-Romanticism. He was a philosophical genius–the greatest that America has produced–who touched upon every department of life and culture and who ranks as a chief architect of the reconstruction in Western thought that took place in the 1890s. But James was not merely a scientist in psychology and a proponent of scientific rigor in moral philosophy, including education.
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