1019William James was born into one of the leading families of New York City.
His grandfather, a strict Calvinist and also named William, was an Irish immi-
grant who had amassed a fortune in real estate. His father, Henry, rejected the
grandfather’s religion and became an unorthodox mystic. His mother, Mary,
was also a child of wealth, and his brother, Henry Jr., became a famous novelist.
The life of the James family was one of creative anarchy. Their dinner table was
animated with lively debate in which the children were expected to hold their
own with guests such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and Oliver
Wendell Holmes. To encourage intellectual freedom, and to avoid the rigidity of
his own joyless upbringing, Henry Sr. put his children into as many different
schools as possible. The family moved often, restlessly wandering back and
forth across the Atlantic, alighting temporarily in London, Paris, New York,
Geneva, Newport, Bonn, and Albany.
William James reflected his family’s wanderlust in his academic pursuits. He
studied art for a time before joining an expedition to the Amazon basin as an
apprentice naturalist. He then traveled to Germany to study physiology, before
returning to the United States to complete a degree in medicine at Harvard
Medical School in 1869. In 1872, James was appointed to teach physiology and
anatomy at Harvard. His intellectual roving and his unwillingness to be bound by
the usual academic disciplines continued when he moved in 1875 to psychology
and later to philosophy. He subsequently marveled at his audacity:I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology
and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction and the
first lecture on psychology I ever heard was the first one I ever gave.WILLIAM JAMES
1842–1910