January 11, 1842

William James (January 11, 1842 to August 26, 1910), the American thinker, has been called a psychologist as well as philosopher. This misleads the modern reader into attributing our own view of psychology as some subjective system of inner pulleys, to the much subtler James.

The pragmatism for which James is famous was actually a way of focusing on the inbetween, in between inner and outer, worlds, where we actually and can only, exist. The old  Greek idea of metaxy captures this, as well as the current continental talk labeled post-modernism. The Jamesian pragmatism is just a frank appraisal of the possible.

Where this led him is charmingly conveyed in a picture which we excerpt from the book
A Pluralistic Universe, (1909) published, after his Hibbert lectures were delivered in 1908.

'In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal and the unwholesome, the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life, with which we may unknown to ourselves be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all. The intellectualist objections to this fall away, when the authority of intellectualist logic is undermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidence remains...