James was the great renovator and the pioneer of psychological studies in the United States. He was in psychology a true realist. Anti-intellectualist through both education and temperament, he brought psychology from the clouds to the earth; object and subject into the world of facts. He eliminated all scholasticism from the study of the self. He refused to subject the powers of the mind to empirical classifications. He conceived the spiritual life as a continuous creation. He condemned the division of the mind into autonomous faculties. The ego appeared to him to be, not a marquetry of powers, but a cluster of energy, one living and inseparable force, a current, a river, a “stream of consciousness.” Nor does James consent to the separation and classification into distinct _genres_ of the activities of the mind. Art, mysticism, philosophy, science, ethics were in his eyes but aspects, different in appearance but in reality identical, of a single force; a happy confusion which permitted him, in his fine book on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” to bring into a new light the mystic phenomena, and which suggested to him an original philosophy of religions based on a new conception of conscious life. The importance which he attached to the subconscious and the confidence, carried even to credulity, which he accorded to psychical researches are well known. From James, the contemporary psychologists borrowed a theory which had a great success. I mean the studies on the dissociation of a personality. The views on this subject of the author of the “Treatise on Psychology” have their origin in his pragmatism. Desirous of assuring to the mind the free and entire use of all its powers, James, although a strong and confirmed realist, accorded but a representative and symbolic character to spiritual events. They were epiphenomenal, means chosen by the conscious activity to reach its ends and without other than purely symbolic importance. He considered the facts of the conscience not at all the equivalent of the facts of reality, but as symbols representing much less things themselves than the interest we take in them. Nothing can be more original than his hierarchy of the “Selves.” His mistrust for abstraction had caused him to form a very curious theory. He distinguished three orders of Self; the material Self which he reduced to the sensations of our body, of our clothes and of our surroundings; the social Self; and the spiritual Self. According to him, every individual possesses several social Selves; in fact, there are as many as there are groups which recognize them. Each one of these Selves acts in its group like an independent personality. Each has its own fashion of acting and reacting. In the same individual the different Selves may oppose each other, according to the social groups in which they develop.