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77 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A road not taken, January 14, 2003
Why would anyone want to read a book about psychology that was first published 113 years
ago? One answer is the rationale for reading any psychology book: that it
provides insights into psychological issues not available elsewhere. Although
many psychologists of the late 19th and early 20th century probably started their career by
reading this book, it is not appropriate today as an introduction to psychology. Too
many of James's viewpoints are antiquated, and his facts, outdated or incorrect. Neither
is it the book to read if you are looking for contemporary psychological views
or a compilation of psychological knowledge. Recent textbooks are better for these purposes.
Yet, the word most frequently used to describe James's Principles of Psychology
is probably 'monumental' and rightly so because not only is this a lengthy work (~1400pgs),
but it also is the culmination of a long line of philosophical thinking about the Soul,
Self, Mind, Matter, and related topics that began with the pre-Socratic Greeks
and continued through the 19th century, when positivist philosophers and experimentalists
began to explore psychologically relevant philosophical questions in more concrete terms,
invoking a scientific method and rejecting metaphysics. At the end of the 19th century, a
seeming riot of discussion about the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, mind,
ego, evolution, and related subjects dominated the scientific and popular culture. At this point in history, William James, an American trained as a physician and employed
as a Harvard professor, examines the various philosophies of the previous two millenia, picking
out those aspects relevant to psychology, comparing and sorting them to reveal their value
as unambiguous theories that might be tested by research, and reflecting on how the evidence
stacks up in their favor. He also advances his own, original conceptions on various issues.
His work is not the first to collect speculation and evidence into a coherent
psychology, and there are many previous works with "Psychology" in their titles,
but James's efforts would galvanize an American discipline of psychological science that
would eventually become a dominant intellectual force. James defines psychology as the "Science of Mental Life" and describes the
stream of consciousness as "the ultimate fact for psychology." Out of his viewpoint,
the school of functionalism in psychology developed, where the mind is conceived as a
useful organ that evolves according to natural selection and grows according
to discoverable rules. His orientation towards physiological and behavioral data
eventually diminished the then dominant psychological
method of introspection that James himself uses so frequently with great effect.
Subsequent viewpoints in psychology, such as behaviorism, though taking part of their
inspiration from functionalism, reject James's definition of psychology, so that
by the end of the 20th century, most psychologists with an empirical orientation may
call themselves "behavioral scientists," but certainly not "mental scientists." Reading this book can be disconcerting, perhaps because of his period style or
Victorian sensibilities, or the frequent, unglossed short quotes and phrases in German, French,
and Latin because he assumes the reader has at least these minimal language skills.
Perhaps also, it is because James is not only conversant with the giants of philosophy
and experimental technique who preceeded him, but seemingly, with virtually every
published sentence to date bearing on the subjects of concern, and in veritable fractal detail,
producing a tour de force in erudition. His is not the style of current psychology
journals and textbooks, but fortunately he does translate into English many long passages
he quotes from their original sources. Yet possibly the most disconcerting aspects
are the subjects that James raises in this book. The new mainstream psychology after James rejects many topics as unsuitable - even for
discussion - that figure prominently in the intellectual history of philosophy
and psychology. James's view that the concept of Soul should be eliminated in
scientific works is one point on which later psychologists heartily agree, but they
also, to a large extent, throw out other concepts of central concern to James, such as
mind, emotion, will, and feeling. Rare pleas by scholars
with varying backgrounds (e.g., Ornstein, Tomkins) urge students of psychology to
revisit issues discussed by James and address the larger questions contained therein, but
such exhorations echo mostly in halls of learning emptied by Vita enhancement pressures.
Renewal of interest reappears lately for some of the suppressed topics, cast into such areas as
cognitive psychology or emotion theory, but James's idea that the mind is a core
concept remains foreign to virtually all contemporary psychologists, and much of his
emphasis seems uncomfortable from today's viewpoint. The reluctance among psychologists to embrace such philosophical and scientific issues
concerning the mind is remarkably not shared by some physicists, mathematicians,
biologists, computer scientists, and other scientists who in recent works have implied
that psychologists may be irrelevant to elucidating such issues, if not muddle-headed,
scientific dwarfs. This twist is ironic because psychologists restrict their
vocabulary and investigations partly to ape their conception of these "hard-core" sciences.
It is not clear whether psychology will survive the choices that psychologists have
made about their subject matter, or whether psychology departments will inevitably be
diced and parsed into their appropriate slots in departments of computer science, biology,
medicine, statistics, and physics, but certainly, the end of psychology is nearer if
tomorrow's students of psychology fail to study James's Principles of Psychology. James's work is the jumping off point for much of what forms 20th century psychology:
habit, association, attention, memory, imagination, object and space perception, etc.
His thoughts about emotion, feelings, the self, consciousness, and other topics remain important
for today's theoretical views. On the other hand, this work predates psychoanalysis
and does not include an organized account of abnormal psychology, human communication,
and other topics raised in most elementary surveys of psychology. The context in which
James puts scientific psychology is probably the most important lesson of this book.
The Dover edition is unabridged, the only form of this work that should be
considered by the serious reader.
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