ABSTRACT
William James’s characteristic virtues as a thinker and writer – lucidity, a talent for noticing, and an openness to all possible sources of evidence and illumination – make the Principles of Psychology at times read less like a textbook and more like a novel. The construction of real space from processes of discrimination, association, and selection shades accordingly for James into reasoning. The empirical concreteness of the world, infinite in its particularity, requires that parts be singled out and made to stand in for wholes so that, as James puts it, “an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire datum from which it comes.” In The Turn of the Screw , descriptions of space are thickly entwined with the governess’s propensity for making willful inferences. The governess notes that the figure does not appear “with greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse”.
