William James

William James was born in New York in 1842, the eldest son of the theologian Henry James Sr. and brother of the novelist Henry James. After studying painting and then medicine, and passing through a long period of depression, he began teaching at Harvard in 1872, first physiology, then psychology and philosophy. His Principles of Psychology (1890) helped to found psychology as a science, and introduced the idea of the “stream of thought”.

In 1901 and 1902 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. Drawing on the personal documents of saints, mystics and converts, he studied religion as lived experience rather than doctrine, and judged it by its fruits in life. His lectures on mysticism remain the starting point of the modern study of the subject.

He was a founder of pragmatism, the view that the meaning and truth of ideas lie in their practical consequences, and of “radical empiricism”, which holds that relations are as real as things and that pure experience is neither mental nor physical. He experimented with nitrous oxide and wrote of other forms of consciousness beyond the waking one. He died in New Hampshire in 1910.