Five-minute digest
The Principles of Psychology
Summary
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation. The first chapters build the biological foundation. James reviews the functions of the brain, from frog experiments and the localisation of motor and sensory centres to aphasia, and the general conditions of nervous activity such as summation and reaction time. The chapter on habit, which became his most widely read, describes the nervous system as plastic tissue in which repeated actions carve paths, and draws ethical maxims from the physiology: habit is the flywheel of society, and young people should realise how soon they will become walking bundles of habits. James then criticises the automaton theory, which treats consciousness as a useless by-product, and the mind-stuff theory, which builds consciousness out of elementary units. After a chapter on the methods and snares of psychology, including the 'psychologist's fallacy', and one on the relations of minds to other things, which surveys hysterical anaesthesia, automatic writing and divided consciousness, come the book's most celebrated chapters. The Stream of Thought argues that consciousness is personal, always changing, sensibly continuous and selective, so that it should be described not as a chain or train but as a stream, with substantive resting places and transitive flights. The Consciousness of Self distinguishes the material, social and spiritual selves and the pure Ego, and discusses alterations of personality, including the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne and mediumistic trances. Further chapters on attention, conception, discrimination, association, the perception of time and memory complete the first volume, which is the volume stored in this library. The second volume covers sensation, imagination, perception of things and of space, reasoning, instinct, the emotions, will, hypnotism and necessary truths. It contains the James-Lange theory that bodily changes follow directly on perception of an exciting fact and that our feeling of those changes is the emotion, so that we feel sorry because we cry. Throughout, James writes with vivid examples and personal asides, and is openly willing to leave questions unresolved. The work made him the leading American psychologist and remains a source for cognitive science, phenomenology and clinical psychology.
Top Lessons
Consciousness flows rather than links
James's chapter on the stream of thought replaced the image of the mind as a chain of discrete ideas with that of a continuous stream with resting places and flights. The image changed psychology and literature alike. It also teaches attention to the vague fringes of thought, feelings of 'and', 'if' and 'but', that atomistic theories ignored.
Habit as the body's ethics
Because nervous tissue is plastic, every repetition makes the next easier. James turns this into moral advice: launch new habits strongly, permit no exceptions, act on resolutions at the first opportunity. The chapter anticipates later work on habit formation, addiction and neuroplasticity while remaining frankly hortatory.
Many selves, one person
A man has as many social selves as there are people who recognise him. James's layered account of the self, from body and clothes to reputation to inner activity, and his cases of fugue and alternating personality, make identity something constructed and fragile rather than a given.
Experience is shaped by what we attend to
James argues that without selective interest experience would be utter chaos. Attention is active and costly; it implies withdrawal from some things to deal with others. This places choice at the root of perception and links psychology with his later pragmatism.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions”
Frequently cited
“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent”
“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state”
“Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar”
“An hysterical woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it together”
“It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described”
“a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him_ and carry an image of him in their mind”
“Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought”
“My experience is what I agree to attend to”
Frequently cited
“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion”
Medical Lens
James was a physician, and the Principles is a landmark between neurology and psychiatry. Chapter II reviews cerebral localisation, aphasia (Broca's and Wernicke's work) and the effects of brain lesions. The habit chapter gives a physiological theory of addiction and its ethics, with drunkenness as a recurrent example. Chapter VIII and Chapter X bring Janet's hysterical anaesthesia, automatic writing, alternating personality and dissociative fugue (the Ansel Bourne case, which James himself investigated under hypnosis in 1890) into general psychology. James also discusses gaps in consciousness under nitrous oxide, chloroform, epilepsy and fainting, and in Chapter XVI amnesia and memory disorders. Volume II, not stored here, contains the James-Lange theory of emotion, which has had lasting influence on psychosomatic medicine and theories of anxiety and panic. James's own depressive crisis of 1869–70 is sometimes read into his emphasis on will and habit; that is biography, not a claim the book makes.
- Vol. I, Chapter II: The Functions of the Brain
Motor and sensory aphasia, cerebral localisation, lesion studies and the cases in which patients recognise and suffer from their speech errors.
- Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- Vol. I, Chapter VIII: The Relations of Minds to Other Things
Hysterical anaesthesia and blindness, Janet's and Binet's experiments, automatic writing and the secondary or subconscious self.
- Vol. I, Chapter IX: The Stream of Thought
Interruptions of consciousness under nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in epilepsy and fainting, and how the edges of experience merge across the gap.
- Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- Vol. I, Chapter XI: Attention
The definition of attention and its opposite, the dazed scatter-brained state of distraction; discussion of effort and fatigue.
- Vol. I, Chapter XVI: Memory
Retention as a matter of brain paths, the conditions of good memory, forgetting, and pathological losses of memory.