ABSTRACT
William James (1842–1910) was a psychologist in the days before the boundaries between psychology and philosophy were well formed. His writings, including Principles of Psychology (1890), were, therefore, equally important to modern psychology's early history in the United States and to pragmatism, the most indigenous American school of philosophy. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,–a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,–like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
