ABSTRACT
In 1875 James penned a letter to Harvard President Charles Eliot in which he proposed to teach the first undergraduate physiological psychology course ever to be offered in the US. James imagined this course as part of a new philosophical anthropology, or as he put it, ‘a real science of man’ based on ‘the theory of evolution and the facts of archaeology, the nervous system, and the senses’. James’s question to Eliot was the following:
The question is shall the students be left to the magazines, on the one hand, and to what languid attention professors educated in the exclusively literary way can pay to the subject? Or shall the College employ a man whose scientific training fits him fully to realize the force of all the natural history arguments, whilst his concomitant familiarity with writers of a more introspective kind preserves him from certain crudities of reasoning which are extremely common in men of the laboratory pure and simple? Apart from all reference to myself, it is my firm belief that the College cannot possibly have psychology taught as a living science by anyone who has not a first-hand acquaintance with the facts of nervous physiology. On the other hand, no mere physiologist can adequately realize the subtlety and difficulty of the psychologic portions of his own subject until he has tried to teach, or at least to study, psychology in its entirety. A union of the two ‘disciplines’ in one man, seems then the most natural thing in the world, if not the most traditional.1
