ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular theme – the quest for meaningful measurement – that runs through William James’s thought and plays an important role in his work in both psychology and religion. As a young scholar, James was already keenly aware that the approach to psychology he was interested in would have to integrate scientific work in physiology with the more traditional literary and philosophical approaches to the study of the mind. James was at least as ambivalent about the comparative method, the third method of investigation he described. He argued that it, too, relies on the method of introspective observation, but that it seeks to understand particular phenomena more deeply by tracing their presence in a range of organisms. James’s account of the union of the two disciplines needed for an adequate psychology to emerge and his description of the methods of investigation on which such a psychology depended point to a basic characteristic of his thinking.
