University of Illinois Press

William James, "The Principles of Psychology,” and Experimental Psychology

Author(s): Rand B. Evans

Source: The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp.
433-447
Published by: University of Illinois Press

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AMERICAN SCIENCE SERIES--ADVANCED COURSE

THE PRINCIPLES

OF

PSYCHOLOGY

BY

WILLIAM JAMES
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. 1

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

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William James, The Principles of
Psychology, and experimental
psychology

RAND B. EVANS
East Carolina University

William James is usually considered the founder of modern American psy-

chology. Yet James openly rejected experimental psychology and the methods
of the laboratory. His attitudes toward experimentation are discussed and
the reasons for them explored. Even with these attitudes, James and his
Principles of Psychology (1890) influenced early experimental psychology. These
influences are traced.

In this year of the centennial of the publication in 1890 of The Prin-

ciples of Psychology by William James, it is particularly appropriate to
consider this remarkable man and his remarkable book.!

So much has been published about James and his Principles in recent
years and so much more will emerge from the numerous symposia
and memorial publications to mark the centennial, that it is difficult
to find a topic not already worn thin by much handling. A significant
area that still requires explication, however, is James's relationship to
experimental psychology.

That relationship may seem obvious. After all, James is credited

with founding the first psychological laboratory in America. He has
been lionized as the founder of American psychology itself or at least
as the first major psychologist in American history.

Yet, as early as 1895, when James was at the height of his psycho-
logical activity—the period of the Principles and its abbreviated ver-
sion, the Briefer Course (James, 1892)— James was accused of being
an “armchair” psychologist, the ultimate deprecatory label for a non-
experimental, philosophical psychologist of the “old school” (Hall,
1895). Then we also have James's own writings, in the Principles and
elsewhere, in which he criticizes and even denigrates the experimental
endeavor. The present article explores some of these issues to deter-
mine whether a clearer picture of James's attitude toward the ex-
perimental psychology of his day can be ascertained and how James
relates to the experimental tradition.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY

Winter 1990, Vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 433-447

© 1990 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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434 EVANS

We use the term “experimental” today typically in the sense of the

manipulation of independent variables and the observation of de-
pendent variables, ultimately drawing a functional relationship be-
tween the two. James and his contemporaries did not have that def-
inition, however, because it came into widespread use only in the
1930s (see Winston, 1990). Nevertheless, this definition largely par-
allels J. McKeen Cattell’s definition of experiment as ‘‘the alteration
of phenomena or of the methods of observing phenomena, in order
to obtain knowledge regarding them” (Cattell, 1918, p. 362). The
common usage of the time defined experiment as ‘an observation
made under artificial conditions, as with instruments...” (Cattell,
1918, p. 362). This jibes closely as well with E. B. Titchener’s simplest
definition of experiment as “an observation that can be repeated,
isolated and varied” (Titchener, 1910, p. 20). James did not define
the terms “experimental” or “experimental psychology” in the Prin-
ciples. However, he enumerates the research areas of his time that
made use of the method:

The principle fields of experimentation so far have been: 1) the connection

of conscious states with their physical conditions, including the whole
of brain-physiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology of
the sense-organs, together with what is technically known as *“‘psycho-
physics,” or the laws of correlation between sensations and the outward
stimuli by which they are aroused; 2) the analysis of space-perception
into its sensational elements; 3) the measurement of the duration of the
simplest mental processes; 4) that of the accuracy of reproduction in the
memory of sensible experiences and of intervals of space and time;
5) that of the manner in which simple mental states influence each other,
call each other up, or inhibit each other’s reproduction; 6) that of the
number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously discern; finally,
7) that of the elementary laws of oblivescence and retention. (James,
1890, 1:193)

In the Principles, James uses some of his strongest language in at-

tacking this experimental psychology. James, in his famous chapter
“The Methods and Snares of Psychology,” identifies experimental
psychology with “a microscopic psychology” that had recently arisen
in Germany. This psychology, according to James, is “carried on by
experimental methods, asking of course every moment for intro-
spective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a
large scale and taking statistical means” (James, 1890, 1:192). He tells
us of the methods of this experimental psychology:

This method taxes patience to the utmost and could hardly have arisen
in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber,
Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot; and their success has

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 435

brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists,

bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out
from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible
reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of
attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out,
and harassing to death is tried; the Mind must submit to a regular
siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces
that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow.
There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum,
and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What
generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought
by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do,
their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic
cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. (James, 1890, 1:192-
193)

James took his position in the Principles not with experimental psy-
chology but with what he called “introspective observation.” That
term should not be confused with the analytical introspection used
by Wilhelm Wundt and particularly developed later by E. B. Titchener.
James meant by introspective observation, “the looking into our own
minds and reporting what we there discover” (James, 1890, 1:185).
What James found there, of course, were states of consciousness. His
was a phenomenological description rather than an analytical descrip-
tion as was used by Wundt and Titchener. James's notions of psycho-
logical description were based on the fundamental precept that “all
people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and
that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion”
(James, 1890, 1:185).

James understood that this sort of introspection was fallible, but he

held that “the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind’
(James, 1890, 1:191; italics in original). He believed, however, that
the age-old method of philosophy would best serve to resolve any
individually erroneous observations. James tells us:

The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge

about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until
at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. Such a system,
gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give
for the soundness of any particular psychologic observation which he
may report. Such a system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be,
to attain. (James, 1890, 1:192)

In this way, James claims a place in the line of Herbart, Locke,

Hume, Reid, Hartley, Stewart, Brown, the Mills, and James's British
contemporary, Alexander Bain. His was the tried and true method

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436 EVANS

of philosophical observation and reflection. It is probable that James

recognized the inevitable passing of this chivalrous method of ac-
quiring and checking knowledge of mental life. He refers almost
lovingly to Alexander Bain’s writings as ‘‘the last word of what this
method taken mainly by itself can do—the last monument of the
youth of our science, still untechnical and generally intelligible, like
the Chemistry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was
used” (James, 1890, 1:192).

Roswell P. Angier, a student in James's laboratory course in the

early 1890s, remembered that “in the laboratory it was plain that
James had neither flair nor patience for experimental work, and that
he didn’t care who knew it” (Angier, 1943, pp. 132-133).

By 1892, James had turned over the new Harvard laboratory to

Hugo Miinsterberg, taking it back only briefly during Miinsterberg’s
temporary return to Germany. By 1894, with Miinsterberg firmly in
control, James expressed relief that he no longer had to deal with
the laboratory at Harvard. His relief was not just from being freed
from a course he had come to dislike. He appears to have come to
the conclusion that laboratory psychology was not able to deal with
significant problems. He exclaimed to Carl Stumpf in 1894, “For of
what laboratory experiments made with brass instruments can one
say that they have opened an entirely new chapter in human nature
and led to a new method of relieving human suffering?” (Perry, 1935,
2:188). By 1899, James would write that “the thought of psycho-
physical experimentation, and altogether of brass-instrument and
algebraic-formula psychology fills me with horror. All my future ac-
tivity will probably be metaphysical” (Perry, 1935, 2:195). Miinster-
berg (1909) confirmed that James had, indeed, done nothing for
psychology over the previous decade.

Miinsterberg was not alone in his assessment. Even in the mid-1890s

several experimental psychologists simply did not think of William
James as being one of them. As noted above, G. Stanley Hall classed
James with the “armchair” psychologists of the preexperimental school.
Hall went so far as to dismiss James's early laboratory as being part
of the history of experimental psychology at all (Evans & Cohen, 1987,
pp. 335-337; Hall, 1895).

This led to an angry response from James and a demand for Hall’s
public recognition of the precedence of James's early laboratory at
Harvard and of his own lectures at Johns Hopkins on experimental
psychology as marking the beginning of an epoch (James, 1895). Still,
it is clear that the rise of experimental psychology moved the field
away from the path James would like to have seen it take.

This is the same William James who champed at the bit in the 1870s

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 437

with the idea of studying with Helmholtz and Wundt at Heidelberg,

who introduced laboratory work to the psychologists at Harvard, and
who worked to establish the larger and more formal laboratory in
the early 1890s. What happened?

One reason given for James's inability to spend the long hours
required for laboratory work was his health (Perry, 1935, 2:24).
Whether his health problems were real or imagined, it is clear by
looking through James’s life that he went through periods when he
had little physical stamina (see Evans, 1990; Feinstein, 1984; H. James,
1920; Perry, 1935).

Such an argument might explain why James conducted so few ex-

periments himself; however, at the time James was working, very few
professors carried out their own experiments. Wundt and Titchener,
both highly robust individuals, did not conduct their own research.
The experiments were directed by them but conducted by their stu-
dents. Also, despite his infirmities, James was able to conduct his
laboratory courses off and on for almost 20 years.

The shift in James’s attitudes toward experimental work from initial

exuberance and optimism to criticism and finally to rejection may be
traced, in part, to a peculiar tendency in James’s personality: He
entered into a situation based on his optimistic conceptions of its
possibilities but turned away when faced with its realities. James ex-
hibited this behavior throughout his life.

He entered Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1861 as a

chemistry major, after having given up art as a possible profession.
Why he gave up his earlier interest in art for chemistry has been
discussed exhaustively (see Feinstein, 1984), but the fact is that he
left for Harvard expressing ‘‘ardor” for chemistry (H. James, 1920,
1:43).

James’s early education had contained very little science and little
if any experimental chemistry. Charles Eliot, later president of Har-
vard but in the early 1860s James’s chemistry professor, noted that
James’s educational preparation “did not conform to the Boston and
Cambridge traditional method.” What little science James had was
largely biological and ““in a large proportion observational” (Perry,
1935, 1:207).

James found laboratory chemistry demanding. He remarked that

Professor Eliot was a “fine fellow” and chemical analysis was “‘very
interesting” at the very beginning of the term. Yet he reported finding
the work “so bewildering at first that I am entirely ‘muddled and
beat’ >’ By near the end of the term he reported that ‘‘Chemistry
comes on tolerably, but not as fast as I expected. I am pretty slow
with my substances, having done but twelve since Thanksgiving and

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438 EVANS

having thirty-eight more to do before the end of the term” (Perry,

1935, 1:210-211). Perhaps coincidentally, James demonstrated during
this term some of the major symptoms of what was then called neur-
asthenia, an illness that would chronically incapacitate him for many
years to come (see Gosling, 1987). Eliot recalled later that James's
attendance in the laboratory was “‘irregular” (H. James, 1920, 1:32,
fn.). A year later, Eliot attempted to draw James into an experiment
on the effects on the kidneys of eating bread

made with the Liebig-Horsford baking powder, whose chief constituent

was an acid phosphate. But James did not like the bread, and found
accurate determination of its effects three times a day tiresome and
unpromising; so that after three weeks he requested me to transfer that
inquiry to some other person. (Perry, 1935, 1:207)

James found, at last, that his ardor for the field of experimental
chemistry had “somewhat dulled” (H. James, 1920, 1:43). It may be
that James's later praise for the ‘generally understandable” chemistry
of Lavoisier derived from his negative experience with experimental
chemistry.

In 1865, James had decided that he would like to be a field naturalist

and was able to spend a semester going up the Amazon with Louis
Agassiz. As he had discovered with chemistry, James soon found that
the life of the field naturalist was also not for him. He found the
collecting and packing away of objects for later study too mundane.
It was on this trip that James decided on the life of a philosopher, a
speculative rather than an active life (H. James, 1920, 1:53).

The same story is repeated with his decision to become a medical

doctor, although his degree would ultimately be in medicine.

James’s medical education was broken up by periods of ill health,

with convalescence taken at European spas. It was during one of those
periods of convalescence that James developed an interest in exper-
imental physiology and the beginnings of experimental psychology.
In Berlin during the fall of 1867, he heard lectures in experimental
physiology, and it was there that he seems to have first gained his
inclination that psychology might be a worthy topic. He wrote:

It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin
to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the
region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the ap-
pearance of consciousness-at (in the shape of sense perceptions), and
more may come of it. I am going on to study what is already known,
and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a2 man
named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope I live through
this winter to go to them in the summer. (H. James, 1920, 1:118-119)

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 439

James had high praise for the scientific work he saw in Berlin: “The
general level of thoroughness and exactness in scientific work here is
beyond praise.” James wrote to Henry Bowditch that “it seems to me
that the fact of so many American students being here of late
years . . . ought to have a good influence on the training of the suc-
ceeding generation with us” (H. James, 1920, 1:121). Although James
found the opportunities for study in Berlin “superb,” he was, himself,
unable to work in the laboratories because of his lack of energy. He
was able to go to Heidelberg in the spring and appears to have
attended some lectures given by Helmholtz. Most of the time that he
was supposed to have been studying physiology, however, he spent
convalescing at a spa. He apparently never did any of the laboratory
work available for him, although he expressed great admiration for
the laboratories at Berlin: “The physiological laboratory, with its end-
less array of machinery, frogs, dogs, etc., etc., almost ‘burst my gizzard,
when I go by it, with vexation” (H. James, 1920, 1:121).

I do not want to make light of James's illness. Readers of James's

letters published by Henry James (1920) or by Ralph Barton Perry
(1935) can come to their own conclusions about the bases of his
symptoms. There is no doubt that James suffered, albeit in rather
pleasant surroundings. The point is that his enthusiasm for a scientific
pursuit seems always to have been in inverse relationship to his ability
to enter into it. At the same time, his “nostalgia” for a missed op-
portunity was greatest when there was the least likelihood of regaining
it. Although he was “bursting his gizzard” about the laboratories in
Berlin, for instance, he was unable to do laboratory work and was
convinced he would never be able to do such work because of his
health. As to lost possibilities, James tells us:

Whatever we are not doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in

the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to
us. I have felt so about zoSlogy whenever I was not studying it, about
anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately,
now that I am cut off from it. ... (H. James, 1920, 1:128)

James seems always to have sought the possibilities in things, but

when he was faced with the mundane realities that accompanied those
possibilities, he had great difficulty in maintaining himself. He saw
the possibilities of chemistry, of field naturalism or medicine or lab-
oratory physiology, but in each case he found himself either physically
or psychologically unable to live with the exacting demands of their
realities.

In many respects, the shift in James's attitudes toward laboratory

psychology may have been the result of a similar process. The pos-

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440 EVANS

sibilities of the laboratory, its potential still largely unplumbed, appear

to have fascinated James early on. When he finally was able to have
his own laboratory, however, he seems quickly to have lost interest in
it for anything but demonstration purposes. The first primitive lab-
oratory he set up to demonstrate concepts of physiological psychology
in 1875 or 1876 was certainly there for the possibilities of the new
venture. James was obviously disappointed in the reality of the routine
activity of collecting psychophysical data. Shortly thereafter, he began
talking about working “more and more deeply into my pure phe-
nomenalistic standpoint— provisionally, at any rate, so as to see how
far it can carry one” (Perry, 1935, 2:20). Phenomenological obser-
vation, of course, did not require laboratory manipulation. As late as
1880, James was planning to spend his sabbatical year in Germany,
listening to the lectures of Helmholtz and doing laboratory work with
G. Stanley Hall, who was then studying in Europe. James did meet
Hall at Heidelberg that summer, but they spent their time in discourse,
not laboratory work (Perry, 1935, 2:22).

After James's return to Harvard and his resumption of the labo-

ratory course, most of what one hears from James about the laboratory
is couched in grumbling tones.

The laboratory atmosphere did not agree with James's tempera-

ment. It is quite possible that James never felt adequate to conduct
laboratory experiments. Perhaps the patience required to do the sort
of laboratory work typical in his day, that using psychophysical mea-
sures, was also lacking in James.

James did conduct some experiments. His primary work was done
on dizziness in which he used not only questionnaires collected from
physicians and other medical workers, but also the examination of
nearly 200 Harvard students and faculty (James, 1880, 1881, 1882;
Perry, 1935, 2:23). It does not appear to have been a satisfying pursuit.

Another reason that James may have been led to reject experimental
psychology had to do with his conception of the relationship between
experimentation and elementism. He noted this relationship as early
as 1873 when he wrote, “For the empiricist the only order which has
any objective existence is the elementary order—the dynamic laws
by which elements and their properties are associated” (Perry, 1935,
1:497). Much later, James would define empiricism as “the tendency
which lays most stress on the part, the element, the individual, treats
the whole as a collection, and calls the universal an abstraction” (Perry,
1935, 2:380).

At the core of James's psychological thought was a rejection of

elementism. In the Principles, James identified the atomistic conception
of psychological processes as a form of metaphysics quite as unac-

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 441

ceptable to a positive descriptive psychology as spiritualism. James's

functionally oriented approach, one that looked at mental functions
rather than the summation of elementary experiences, and his reliance
on a form of phenomenalistic introspection put him much more in
the line of Goethe, Hering, and Brentano than in that of John Stewart
Mill, Helmholtz, and Wundt. Taylor (in press) has recently argued
that a major influence on James’s conception of scientific explication
was the tradition of French physiology, the ideal of the clinical method.
It was a method of demonstration dealing with ongoing processes
rather than a method of control and manipulation. French clinical
method certainly had a greater influence on Harvard in James's day
than did German experimental physiology (Ackerknecht, 1967;
Beecher & Altschule, 1967; Lesch, 1984). This view is supported by
James's statement to Carl Stumpf in the 1890s that “To me the sort
of thing that Pierre Janet has just done in his Etat mental des hystérigues
seems to outweigh in importance all the ‘exact’ laboratory measure-
ments put together” (Perry, 1935, 2:188). Janet made elegant use of
the French clinical method.

Although in the Principles James included experimentally derived

information from others, it represented only about 20% of the content
of the book. One of the few times that James waxed enthusiastic about
a thoroughly experimental book was for Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Ueber
das Gediichtnis, with his classic research on memory (James, 1885). It
is important to remember that Ebbinghaus’s experimental approach,
although gaining its inspiration from Fechner’s psychophysics, was a
thoroughgoing functional study. Ebbinghaus did not break the mem-
ory process up into elements. He set up situations in which the function
of memory could be measured, an approach compatible with James's
own functional notions. James's research on dizziness, to the degree
that it was experimental, was of this sort.

The problem James had with most laboratory research was that
when the experimenter manipulated some variables while holding
others constant, there was the general assumption that the phenom-
enon under study was made up of component parts. Analysis pre-
supposes wholes made up of parts. Thus Wundt and Titchener could
easily experiment with sensations using their analytical introspection,
perhaps manipulating qualities of the sensation while holding intensity
constant and vice versa. James could not do the same within the
context of his stream-of-thought metaphor. Cutting a cross section of
the stream and determining the constituents of the stream at that
instant, which is what the elementists were doing, did not relate to
the ongoing processes of the thoughts that make up the stream.

James had a problem similar to that of Franz Brentano, Ewald

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442 EVANS

Hering, Carl Stumpf, and all who made use of phenomenological

description as their introspective process. Ebbinghaus had hit upon a
subject matter that was conducive to a functional study rather than
to a structural analysis and that did not require introspection of any
sort. This was more difficult in fields requiring description of conscious
processes. Still, Hering was able to do studies in visual experience
and Stumpf in auditory experience along these lines. James Rowland
Angell, in establishing the research program at the University of
Chicago, was able to carry out functional rather than structural studies.
It is clear that Angell saw Chicago Functionalism as the systemization
and experimentalization of James's brand of psychology. Perhaps the
most elegant studies of the type James would have appreciated were
those of the Gestalt psychologists, but even they relied as much on
demonstration as on experimentation. It is clear, however, that Gestalt
psychology stands in much the same tradition as does the William
James of The Principles of Psychology. The research carried out by Angell
at Chicago largely came after James had already turned away from
psychology, however, and Gestalt psychology emerged after James's
death.

Why did James not do research using the models available to him?
Perhaps, in the end, James’s avoidance of experimentation came down
to the simple matter that James was interested in mental life in its
broad strokes, in its great significances, but found the details tedious.
Problems dealing with more specific subjects, such as the ease of
remembering differing stimulus types or studies of the perception of
octaves, were not the sort that could hold the attention of someone
like William James. With his leanings and interests, it is doubtful that
James would have been involved in psychological research even if an
experimental methodology congenial to his holistic and functional
notions had been dominant in his time. He was, at heart, a philosopher,
not an experimental scientist. James admitted to his confidant, Stumpf:

As long as man is working at anything, he must give up other things

at which he might be working and the best thing he can work at is
usually the thing he does most spontaneously. You philosophize, ac-
cording to your own account, more spontaneously than you work in
the laboratory. So do I, and I always felt that the occupation of phi-
losophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting laboratory work,
since there is not time for both. (Perry, 1935, 2:178)

James considered even his Principles as dealing with miniscule mat-

ters, calling it “mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into
queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can
hope successfully to deal with” (James, 1890, 1:vii).

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 443

To the degree that he was more than a philosophical psychologist,

James was closer to being a scientific psychologist in the broad meaning
of that term, rather than an experimental psychologist. He was sci-
entific in the same way that Darwin and Freud were scientific. His
was the science of unfettered observation and description, one looking
to bigger issues and searching for the possibilities in the understanding
of mental life yet not seeking the structure or order of a global system.

So, if all the previous is correct, why is it that American psychologists

have made such a fuss over William James and his Principles?

One reason has to do with James’s role as a transitional figure

between the older American philosophical psychology and the new
psychology of the laboratory (Evans, 1981). Although, as noted, James
devoted only about 20% of the pages of the Principles to experimentally
determined findings, this was far and above what most other psy-
chologies previously written by Americans had provided. More im-
portant, however, James’s Principles was a positivistic psychology, a
term James used himself to describe his book. Perhaps the most sig-
nificant aspect of this positivism to many of the readers of the Principles
was its antimetaphysical stance. At last, an American psychologist was
able to deal with mind as a natural process, not as a manifestation of
the actions of the soul. James later recalled his intent in this naturalistic
and secular representation of mind:

I thought that by frankly putting psychology in the position of a natural

science, eliminating certain metaphysical questions from its scope al-
together, and confining myself to what could be immediately verified
by everyone's own consciousness, a central mass of experience could
be described which everyone might accept as certain no matter what
the differing ulterior philosophic interpretations of it might be. (Perry,
1935, 2:53)

The impact of James's secularization of the mind was very great,

particularly on the generation of students who were just coming to
psychology in the early 1890s. Thorndike recalled as a student en-
countering James's Principles with its message that mental life was a
natural process and not the product of a soul. Thorndike found this

news, and good news, to young students of psychology in the nineties

and attracted to the further study of psychology some who would have
avoided it like the plague if they had been introduced to it by [Noah]
Porter or [James] McCosh or even by [George Trumbull] Ladd or
[J. Mark] Baldwin. (Thorndike, 1943, p. 90)

Although Ladd’s Principles of Physiological Psychology (Ladd, 1887)

had come out before the release of James's Principles and contained
more experimental material, Ladd was unable to avoid the obligatory

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444 EVANS

chapter on the nature of the soul as a real unit-being standing behind

the psychological phenomena.

James Rowland Angell, who, as noted, would later found Chicago

Functionalism and who did more than anyone else to experimentalize
James’s general positions, was similarly drawn to psychology by read-
ing the Principles in a course given by John Dewey (Angell, 1936).
There were many others similarly affected, who would later form the
next generation of experimental psychologists. The Principles was
James’s primary source of influence on the experimental psychologists
and on their later psychologies.

Perhaps because of that impact and its message of a scientific psy-

chology, James became something of a totem or at least a banner to
many of the new generation of scientifically oriented psychologists,
which for all practical purposes meant experimental psychologists. By
the time James died in 1910, experimental psychology had taken over
the American psychological scene. Whether the psychologist was in-
volved in theoretical work or applied work, the method of choice was
experimental. By the time that generation came to write the history
of the establishment of scientific psychology in America, they credited
James as its founder, equating in their own minds scientific with ex-
perimental psychology. In fact, even the term *‘psychology”’ became
synonymous with “experimental psychology.” J. McKeen Cattell, look-
ing back to the late 1870s, noted about James: “As to other American
psychologists there were—as Franklin said when asked if he had any
children— ‘none to speak of” ” (Cattell, 1929).

In this way, William James and his Principles became appropriated

by the American experimental movement in psychology, a movement
made up of the “laboratory blackguards” that James so criticized in
his writings. Thus appropriated and reified, James and his Principles
became part of a creation myth of American experimental psychology.

As myths go, James as experimental psychologist is a relatively

harmless one. Still, its role has perhaps been to mask his real contri-
bution in The Principles of Psychology—the book itself.

James's ideas are so compelling and his descriptions and speculations

in the Principles are so open-ended, that they invite, almost demand,
further attention and definition. At times James has served the purpose
that Aristotle served for generations of empirical philosophers in the
post-Renaissance era. Where a researcher finds data in agreement
with the ideas of the master but using newer and more scientifically
acceptable methods, it gives more historical substantiation to the newer
observation. Where the new approach finds the answer to the older
authority’s uncertainty or query, the newer comes to share the re-

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JAMES AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 445

spectable lineage of the older and becomes a sorting out and confir-
mation of the older. Where the newer finds the older in error, there
is status gained by disproving the great authority of the past, thus
taking on some of the luster of the older without really diminishing
the older’s authority. James has served this purpose for generations
of experimental psychologists, as has Ebbinghaus. The profusion of
ideas in James’s Principles has been the source of many research ideas
using experimental methods. Thus, a wealth of experimental research
was stimulated by James’s interesting observations and his often ten-
uous explanations. How many experimental research lines can be
traced directly or indirectly to some flash of insight or speculation in
one of James's writings? James believed that these uneven trails, these
loose ends, this “unfinished-seeming front” was the “best mark of
health that a science can show” (James, 1890, I:vii).

It is ironic that the Principles, while much referenced and referred

to, is rarely read cover to cover. That is really the only way to read
it. The chapters, read out of order and out of context, have led to
much misunderstanding about James's ideas. Gordon Allport could
complain almost 50 years ago that “psychologists are inclined to do
obeisance to James’s name while avoiding the details of this thought”:

Whatever tributes we pay to the radiance of his personality and to his

accomplishments, it is none the less true that James, like other historic
figures of equal stature, grows legendary in the course of time. Few
psychologists under the age of forty-five, I venture to say, have read
the Principles from cover to cover. . . . All of them, to be sure, can quote
from James—who cannot?— but not many have voyaged with him into
the obscurer reaches of his thought. (Allport, 1943, p. 95)

The Principles has much to say to experimental psychologists of the

present day. Modern psychologists who go to that well of ideas come
away better for the experience.

Roswell P. Angier defended James’s negative statements about ex-

perimental psychology as being aimed at experimentalists contem-
porary to him, not at experimentation itself. “What he missed in his
experimenting contemporaries,” Angier tells us, “was the ideas” (1943,
p. 133).

James in his Principles of Psychology and in other writings not con-

sidered here remains a source for ideas and is just as relevant to the
psychological thought of our day as he was for his. Underneath the
use of James as totem, and as mythical founder, the continuing vitality
of his ideas is the real significance of the centennial celebration of
William James's seminal Principles of Psychology.

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446 EVANS

Notes

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rand B.

Evans, Department of Psychology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
27858. Accepted February 25, 1990.

1. Although James's Principles was not his last word on psychological

matters, it was certainly his most influential statement on the topic, both in
his own day and in ours. James's views discussed in this article are those of
The Principles of Psychology rather than his later views of pure experience and
pragmatism,

2. Cattell also mentioned G. Stanley Hall, but pointed out that Hall was
still a student in Germany.

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