William James: Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Pure Experience

Part V: 20th-Century Philosophy ／ 2026-08-06

Introduction: The Man Who Opened Pragmatism to the World

The first person to utter the word "pragmatism" in public was William James (1842–1910). In 1898, in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley titled "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," James introduced, as "the principle of pragmatism," an idea his friend Peirce had proposed a quarter of a century earlier. From that moment, a line of thought born in a small conversation club in Cambridge was transformed into a worldwide philosophical movement. If Peirce was the founder, James was the evangelist who opened pragmatism to the world—and, at the same time, a second creator who developed it in a direction of his own.

Yet to understand James solely as pragmatism's popularizer is to misjudge the reach of his thought. With The Principles of Psychology he laid the foundations of American psychology and earned the title "father of American psychology"; with The Varieties of Religious Experience he made a lasting contribution to the psychology and philosophy of religion; and in the radical empiricism of his final years he sketched an original metaphysics that anticipates later phenomenology and process philosophy. An intellectual career cutting across medicine, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies embodies a rare synthetic breadth in a century increasingly given over to specialization.

This essay follows James's life and then examines his principal ideas in turn—the stream of consciousness, the pragmatic method and its conception of truth, the will to believe, the analysis of religious experience, pure experience and radical empiricism, and the doctrine of a pluralistic universe—before surveying his influence on contemporary thought. It forms the second installment in our treatment of the pragmatist lineage, a companion piece to the preceding essay on Peirce.

A Life: From a Wandering Youth to Harvard's Star Professor

William James was born in 1842 into a wealthy intellectual family in New York. His father, Henry James Sr., was a religious thinker steeped in Swedenborgian mysticism; his brother Henry James would become the great novelist known for The Portrait of a Lady and other works. For the sake of the children's education the family moved restlessly around Europe, and William acquired a multilingual, cosmopolitan cultivation from schools and private tutors in England, France, and Germany. This nomadic education gave him a wide horizon and, at the same time, implanted a sense of belonging nowhere that would follow him all his life.

As a young man James wandered long over the question of a vocation. He aspired to be a painter and studied under William Morris Hunt before giving it up; at Harvard he turned to chemistry, comparative anatomy, and then medicine; in 1865 he joined Agassiz's expedition to the Amazon; and in 1869 he finally took a medical degree—though he never practiced as a physician. Throughout these years he suffered from severe depression and suicidal thoughts. In 1870, after reading Renouvier on free will, James wrote in his diary that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. This personal crisis and his emergence from it became the existential source of his later conviction that belief sustains life.

Appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard in 1872, James established America's first psychological laboratory in 1875 and rose to become the university's star professor, first of psychology and then of philosophy. The publication of The Principles of Psychology (1890), twelve years in the making, secured his reputation, and his major works followed one after another as he aged: The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). He died of heart disease in 1910. Until shortly before the end he was still writing drafts toward an unfinished metaphysical system.

The Principles of Psychology and the Stream of Consciousness

The Principles of Psychology is a fourteen-hundred-page work that integrates the latest findings of physiological psychology with introspective description and philosophical insight; it became a classic of the discipline the moment it appeared. Its most famous contribution is the concept of the "stream of consciousness." For James, consciousness is not a compound of independent atoms of ideas, as the associationists imagined. It is a continuum that flows without breaks, and it can be adequately described only by the metaphor of a river or a stream—not by that of a chain or a train.

James listed the characteristics of the stream of consciousness: it is personal (every thought is someone's thought); it is in constant change; it is continuous; it deals with objects beyond itself (intentionality); and it is selective (it sifts by attention). The emphasis on selectivity is especially important. Consciousness is not a passive mirror but an active operation that carves objects out of an infinity of stimuli according to interest. This view became the psychological foundation of the later pragmatist claim that cognition is guided by practical interests.

The Principles also contains many other theories that shaped later thought: the account of habit; the theory of the self (with its distinction between the material, social, and spiritual self); and the James–Lange theory of emotion—the view that the perception of bodily change is the emotion, so that we do not weep because we are sad but are sad because we weep. Its functionalist approach, in sharp contrast to Wundt's elementarism, became the mainstream of American psychology, while the description of the stream of consciousness influenced even the literary techniques of the twentieth century in Joyce and Woolf.

Pragmatism: Philosophy as Method

For James, pragmatism is first of all a method for settling metaphysical disputes. Consider the famous example from Pragmatism (1907). A squirrel clings to a tree trunk while a man circles the tree. Because the squirrel keeps moving to the opposite side of the trunk, the man never sees it. Does the man go round the squirrel? James's answer is: distinguish the senses of "go round" by their practical consequences. If it means passing successively through the positions north, east, south, and west of the animal, then he does go round it; if it means seeing the squirrel's front, side, and back in turn, then he does not. Once the distinction is clear, the dispute evaporates.

This is an application of Peirce's pragmatic maxim—that the meaning of a concept is the sum of its practical consequences. But James extended the method beyond the clarification of scientific concepts that Peirce had intended, carrying it into the problems of metaphysics and religion. The dispute between materialism and theism, between free will and determinism, between monism and pluralism, should be adjudicated by asking what difference each position makes to our experience and our way of living. If a metaphysical doctrine makes no experiential difference whatever, the dispute is empty; if it does make a difference, that difference is precisely the doctrine's meaning.

James also presented pragmatism as a third way mediating between the empiricist "hard" mind and the rationalist "soft" one—in his own terms, the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Pragmatism preserves the empiricist virtue of fidelity to facts while leaving room to accept religious and moral ideas in proportion to their practical value. This inclusiveness is the charm of James's version of pragmatism—and also the reason it drew criticism from thinkers who prized rigor.

The Pragmatic Theory of Truth: Truth Is Something That Happens

The most controversial part of James's pragmatism is his theory of truth. The traditional correspondence theory takes truth to be a static agreement between idea and reality. James asks what this "agreement" means. For an idea to agree with reality is for that idea to lead us into satisfactory relations with reality—that is, for the idea to be verified in the course of experience and to work effectively. Hence the famous formulation: truth is an event that happens to an idea; an idea becomes true, is made true by events. Truth is not a possession but a process, a history of verification.

His compressed slogan that the true is the useful has often been criticized as a subjectivism amounting to the claim that whatever is convenient is true; the objections of Russell and Moore are typical. James's intention, however, is more careful. He insists that the usefulness of an idea is tested across long-run and total experience, and he does not claim that the satisfaction of an individual wish constitutes truth on the spot. A true idea is one that connects smoothly with the rest of experience, withstands verification, and goes on succeeding in guiding future experience. This is less a rejection of the correspondence theory than a pragmatic elucidation of what "correspondence" actually means.

Even so, in treating verification and satisfaction—moments on the side of the subject—as constituents of truth, James's theory does differ from Peirce's convergence theory, which stresses the constraint of reality. Where Peirce located truth in the ideal of long-run agreement within a community of inquirers, James locates it in what "works" within the individual's process of experience. This divergence marks a fundamental difference in the character of their two pragmatisms.

The Difference from Peirce: Two Pragmatisms

The relationship between James and Peirce is a story of friendship and tension rare in the history of philosophy. James acknowledged Peirce's genius throughout his life and continually supported him financially when he was in straitened circumstances; it was James who arranged his lecture series at Harvard. Peirce, for his part, never forgot the debt, going so far in his late writings as to sign himself "Santiago"—Saint James. Intellectually, however, the two developed different philosophies under the same name of "pragmatism."

The first difference concerns scope. For Peirce, the pragmatic maxim is a logical rule for clarifying the meaning of concepts in scientific inquiry, applicable to intellectual concepts alone. James extended it to the problems of individual life—religion, morality, the meaning of existence. The second concerns truth. Peirce's truth is the community's agreement at the ideal end of inquiry, and it carries a normativity that transcends the individual. James's truth is immanent in verification and satisfaction within the individual's experience. The third is temperament. Peirce the logician aimed at rigorous systems and a realist metaphysics; James the psychologist preferred the description of concrete particular experience and a pluralist outlook.

That Peirce parted ways in 1905 by renaming his own position "pragmaticism" was described in the preceding essay. This branching was not merely a terminological episode but a symbol of the intrinsic diversity of the pragmatist movement. From then on, pragmatism unfolded along two currents: a Jamesian humanist line (Schiller, and later Rorty) and a Peircean logical and realist line (passing through Dewey's instrumentalism to the revaluations of Putnam and Habermas).

The Will to Believe: The Right to Believe Without Evidence

The 1896 lecture "The Will to Believe" is the most easily misunderstood text in James's corpus and also the most existentially colored. Its target was Clifford's evidentialism—the principle that it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. James argues that this seemingly high-minded principle yields irrational consequences in a certain class of important questions.

According to James, when a choice that evidence cannot settle presents a "living, forced, and momentous" option—that is, when both hypotheses are real candidates, when refusing to choose brings the same result as one of the choices, and when the decision matters greatly for one's life—our passional nature has the right to decide belief. Religious belief is the paradigm case. The existence of God cannot be settled by evidence, but suspending judgment indefinitely is, in practical terms, no different from choosing unbelief, since it guarantees the loss of whatever good religion would bring if it were true. In that case the right to bet on believing can be defended.

James further points out that certain truths do not exist prior to belief but are created by it. Just as a climber's belief that he can leap a crevasse makes the leap succeed, and as people's trust in one another brings the fact of cooperation into being, belief can contribute to the very constitution of a fact. This analysis of "self-fulfilling belief" is an important criticism of the static epistemology of evidentialism and a forerunner of later anti-evidentialism in the philosophy of religion (Reformed epistemology, for instance). Still, the objection that it opens the door to wishful thinking has never subsided, and James himself later remarked that the lecture should have been titled "The Right to Believe."

The Varieties of Religious Experience: Conversion, Mysticism, Saintliness

Based on the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience is a monumental work that accomplished a methodological turn: the study of religion not from doctrine or institution but from individual experience. James defined religion as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine, and he described the types of such experience—conversion, saintliness, mysticism—by drawing on a wealth of documentary cases.

The book's methodological principle is clear: the value of a religious experience is to be judged not by its origins (a neurotic disposition, say) but by its fruits—the consequences the experience brings to a life. The process by which the "sick soul" passes through conversion to a unified self; the asceticism, strength, purity, and charity found in the saints; and mystical experience, which is ineffable, noetic, passive, and transient. James describes all of these psychologically while treating the changes they actually produce in life as evidence of religion's reality. Here too the pragmatic method—judgment by consequences—runs throughout.

In the concluding section James suggested that at the core of religious experience lies a consciousness of contact with a "MORE," and that the near side of this "MORE" is the individual's subconscious self. The hypothesis is that through the door of the subconscious a saving power beyond ordinary consciousness flows in. This cautious supernaturalism is a tightrope walk between scientific psychology and religious realism, and it became the starting point of the empirical tradition in religious studies, extending through the psychology and sociology of religion to the study of mysticism today.

Radical Empiricism and Pure Experience

In his final years James, alongside pragmatism, conceived a metaphysics he called "radical empiricism." His 1904 essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" is its boldest statement. There James denies the existence of consciousness as an entity. What exists is only "pure experience"—the sheer flow of experience prior to any differentiation into subject and object—and consciousness and matter are merely functional names for pure experience taken in different contexts. One and the same experience is mental when counted in the series of experiences as "the perception of the room," and physical when counted as "the room itself."

What makes radical empiricism radical is that it recovers within experience the experience of relations, which traditional empiricism had overlooked. Humean empiricism dissolved experience into discrete impressions and referred the connections among them to the habits of the mind. James maintains, on the contrary, that conjunctive relations such as "and," "if," and "therefore" are directly experienced just as things are. Experience is from the outset a flow that includes continuity and transition; relations are not added from outside. This insight may be described as the elevation of the psychology of the stream of consciousness into an ontology.

The monism of pure experience—more precisely, a "neutral monism" that places at the ground something neither mental nor physical—was taken up by Russell and Mach and became one current in twentieth-century philosophy of mind; and the project of starting from immediate experience prior to the subject–object split decisively influenced Nishida Kitarō's concept of pure experience in An Inquiry into the Good. Parallels with Husserl's phenomenology were noted early on, and James's late speculations are today being reappraised as a source for several currents of twentieth-century philosophy.

A Pluralistic Universe: Revolt Against the Block Universe

Nothing displays James's metaphysical temperament better than his lifelong revolt against monism. Facing him stood the "block universe" of absolute idealists such as Royce and Bradley—a universe in which everything is eternally complete within the Absolute and every part is necessarily bound to every other. For James this picture cannot account for the reality of evil, leaves no room for freedom and novelty, and above all fails to match the fragmentary, unfinished character of our experience.

What James opposes to it in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) is a universe whose parts are loosely joined by "external relations" and whose unity is not an accomplished fact but something in the making. The world starts from the many and is building unity, rather than starting from the one. In such a universe chance and novelty are real; evil is not justified as part of the Absolute's plan but is a real enemy to be eliminated; and human effort actually contributes to the world's completion. James called this view "meliorism." The world's salvation is neither guaranteed nor impossible—it depends on what we do.

This pluralism and meliorism is bound up with the bold hypothesis of a finite God: not an omniscient and omnipotent Absolute but a finite deity who fights evil and needs human cooperation. From the standpoint of orthodox theology the idea is heretical, but it is one honest response to the problem of evil, and it feeds into the later process theology of Whitehead and Hartshorne. Together with his resonance with Bergson's creative evolution and his legacy in Dewey's meliorist social philosophy, James's pluralistic universe was the philosophical expression of a distinctively twentieth-century image of the world as an open future.

Contemporary Influence: Psychology, Religious Studies, Phenomenology, Neopragmatism

James's influence extends well beyond any single philosophical school. In psychology he oriented pre-behaviorist American work as the father of functionalism, and the James–Lange theory of emotion is being reappraised as a forerunner of contemporary emotion theories that emphasize bodily feedback (Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, for example). His analysis of habit echoes in today's research on habit formation and in behavioral economics, and The Principles of Psychology remains a classic that is still read.

In religious studies, the experience-centered approach established by The Varieties of Religious Experience became a research tradition in its own right, with a lineage running through the study of mysticism and conversion to recent scientific work on meditation and altered states of consciousness. In philosophy, the doctrine of pure experience bore fruit in Russell's neutral monism and Nishida Kitarō's pure experience, while the description of the stream of consciousness resonated with Husserl's phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. His existential account of belief is repeatedly invoked in contemporary debates over the rationality of religious belief.

And in the second half of the twentieth century, amid Rorty's pragmatist revival, James returned to the center of philosophy. The idea of truth as immanent in the practice of inquiry rather than as a mirroring relation detached from practice, and the stance that treats philosophy as an activity in the service of improving human life, are the keynotes of neopragmatism after Rorty and Putnam. From analytic theories of truth to virtue epistemology, the problem-space James opened remains alive throughout contemporary philosophy.

Conclusion

What runs through William James's philosophy is fidelity to lived experience. The psychology of the stream of consciousness was an attempt to describe the texture of experience before abstraction; pragmatism was a method for evaluating ideas by returning them to the context of living practice; the will to believe was a defense of the right to decide where theoretical evidence runs out and life demands a decision; and the metaphysics of pure experience was an attempt to reconstruct the world from experience itself, prior to the split between subject and object. To choose the richness of experience over system, becoming over completion, freedom over necessity—that is James's consistent philosophical choice.

Set beside Peirce's logical rigor, James's thought leaves ambiguities. The criticisms of his theory of truth and of the will to believe can hardly be said to be settled even now. Yet his achievement in bringing philosophy back from the technical problems of specialists to the problems of human life, and in opening a space for dialogue between religion and science, theory and practice, rigor and humanity, is not diminished by those criticisms. Philosophy, he said, is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly. James pursued that attempt for a lifetime—in the laboratory, at the lectern, and in the midst of the records of sick souls.

The pragmatist lineage passes from James to Dewey and unfolds into the thought of education and democracy in twentieth-century America. On Dewey, see Dewey; on the founder Peirce, see Peirce; and for an overview of pragmatism as a whole, see Introduction to Pragmatism (these link to the Japanese editions).

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