The Letters of William James, Vol. 2James, William
Philosophy
The Letters of William James, Vol. 2
James, William
Intellectuals -- United States; James, William, 1842-1910; Philosophers -- United States; Psychologists -- United States
"I can well remember the first meeting of the course in psychology in
1890, in a ground-floor room of the old Lawrence Scientific School. He
took a considerable part of the hour by reading extracts from Henry
Sidgwick's Lecture against Lecturing, proceeding to explain that we
should use as a textbook his own 'Principles of Psychology,' appearing
for the first time that very week from the press, and should spend the
hours in conference, in which we should discuss and ask questions, on
both sides. So during the year's course we read the two volumes through,
with some amount of running commentary and controversy. There were four
or five men of previous psychological training in a class of (I think)
between twenty and thirty, two of whom were disposed to take up cudgels
for the British associational psychology and were particularly troubled
by the repeated doctrine of the 'Principles' that a state of
consciousness had no parts or elements, but was one indivisible fact. He
bore questions that really were criticisms with inexhaustible patience
and what I may call (the subject invites the word often) _human_
attention; invited written questions as well, and would often return
them with a reply penciled on the back when he thought the discussion
too special in interest to be pursued before the class. Moreover, he
bore with us with never a sign of impatience if we lingered after class,
and even walked up Kirkland Street with him on his way home. Yet he was
really not argumentative, not inclined to dialectic or pertinacious
debate of any sort. It must always have required an effort of
self-control to put up with it. He almost never, even in private
conversation, contended for his own opinion. He had a way of often
falling back on the language of perception, insight, sensibility, vision
of possibilities. I recall how on one occasion after class, as I parted
with him at the gate of the Memorial Hall triangle, his last words were
something like these: 'Well, Miller, that theory's not a warm reality to
me yet--still a cold conception'; and the charm of the comradely smile
with which he said it! The disinclination to formal logical system and
the more prolonged purely intellectual analyses was felt by some men as
a lack in his classroom work, though they recognized that these analyses
were present in the 'Psychology.' On the other hand, the very tendency
to _feel_ ideas lent a kind of emotional or æsthetic color which
deepened the interest.
"In the course of the year he asked the men each to write some word of
suggestion, if he were so inclined, for improvement in the method with
which the course was conducted; and, if I remember rightly, there were
not a few respectful suggestions that too much time was allowed to the
few wrangling disputants. In a pretty full and varied experience of
lecture-rooms at home and abroad I cannot recall another where the class
was asked to criticize the methods of the lecturer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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