ABSTRACT
In 1878 William James, then an assistant professor of physiology at Harvard, contracted with the New York publisher Henry Holt to write a textbook in psychology. James saw clearly that this is exactly what had happened in the “New Psychology” of Wilhelm Wundt and the Wundtians, the chief psychological orthodoxy of the late nineteenth century. The two volumes and 1,377 pages of James’ Principles of Psychology were published in 1890—and they are in print! His other major psychological work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is also in print. Both works deal at length with aspects of the stream of consciousness, and certainly one of the main parts of their continued appeal is that James was such an extraordinarily keen observer of the stream’s flow, in both himself and others. James’ espousal of mechanistic psychophysiology reached its highest point in his theories of emotion and action.
