Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

William James 125
attending so many different schools as a child. James’s first career choice was artist, with Eugene
Delacroix his favorite painter. He suffered from depression for most of his life, and by the age of
nineteen he had abandoned his artistic ambitions to enroll in the Lawrence Scientific School at
Harvard. While Charles William Eliot was his chemistry teacher and mentor, the scientist Louis
Agassiz made an even greater impression on the young man. After James enrolled in Harvard
Medical School, he accompanied Agassiz on a research voyage to Brazil, and it was this experience
that led to his decision to abandon natural science for the study of philosophy. James
graduated with an MD in 1869; it was the only degree he ever earned (Matthiessen, 1961).
At the invitation of Eliot, by then the president of Harvard, James began a long career at that
institution by becoming an instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1872. James’s biographer
Gerald Myers (1986) says the combination of those two streams of science served the young
professor well in preparation for his future work, since in those early days, the field was known as
“physiological psychology” (p. 5). Meanwhile, biographer Paul Woodring describes James’s 1876
offering of a course by that name, the first of its kind in the United States and one of the first in
the world (p. 10). In 1878, James was contracted to write his Principles of Psychology.Thework
was delivered in installments to the publishers, and finally published in 1890. It became a seminal
text, with the full edition known to generations of students as “The James” and the shorter version
as “The Jimmy.” James gave a series of talks to a group of teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in 1892, and the text of those lectures was published as Talks to Teachers (1899/1958), arguably
the first educational psychology textbook. During his lifetime, James was elected president of
both the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association, and
in addition to his professional presentations, he gave numerous public lectures. Toward the end of
his life, he became increasingly interested in mysticism and spiritualism. William James married
Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878, and biographer Daniel Bjork says the influence of Alice on James’s
career is underrated, while that of Henry James Sr. is overstated (1988, p. xv). Together, the
couple had five children. William James resigned from Harvard in 1907 and died in 1910. The
headline of his August 27th New York Times (1910) obituary reads “Virtual Founder of Modern
American Psychology, and Exponent of Pragmatism and Dabbled in Spooks,” the latter referring
to James’s enthusiasm for séances.
William James gained a wide audience during his lifetime, partly due to the fact that he spent
his career at Harvard, and partly due to the illustrious company he kept. His broad reception may
also be attributed in part to his travels, whether to Europe or across America (he experienced the
San Francisco earthquake of 1906), as well as his fluency in many languages resulting from his
youthful education. While his popular reputation today may be overshadowed by the greater fame
of his brother Henry, and it is true that literary critics often identify Henry’s presence in William’s
writing, psychologists just as often see the influence of William’s thought in Henry’s novels. The
full texts of James’s major works are available on the Internet, as are countless quotations and
references to his ideas.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
William James’s contributions to the field of educational psychology are numerous. Biographer
Daniel Bjork calls James a critical link in a large sense between Darwin and Freud, bringing
the ideas of the former into philosophy and psychology and anticipating the latter’s depth psychology
(1983, p. 2). In fact, it was William James who first introduced the writings of Freud
to North America. At the same time, Bjork says, James also bridged the nineteenth-century
transcendentalism of Emerson with the twentieth-century instrumentalism of Dewey (1983,
p. 2). William James’s publications alone are notable because they were central in creating a field