ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question: What if James had revised The Principles of Psychology at the end of his life, in view of his fuller development of radical empiricism in the years after 1890? What might that revised version of his Principles have looked like? After underscoring that the basic features of radical empiricism were already embedded in Principles, albeit insufficiently and inconsistently, the chapter reviews James’s hesitations about Principles in the years immediately after its publication and his confession in 1894 that he had been unable – and inevitably unable – to keep metaphysics from “leaking” into his “positivistic” psychology. The chapter then treats his early development of radically empiricist notions, including his early qualms about the very notion of “consciousness,” and goes on to touch upon various steps in his more formal articulation of radical empiricism in the years after 1897. The chapter then offers a series of informed conjectures about what a revised Principles of Psychology might have entailed, ending with the suggestion that James’s use of metaphor and narrative might well have typified his revised mode of psychological understanding, the goal of which would have been the achievement of greater clarity about what is “dramatically probable” within human experience and affairs. To the extent that others might pick up the threads of these conjectures, the Epilogue about possible revisions of Principles could serve as a Prologue to a new phase in the legacy of William James.
