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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy," William James presents a compelling exploration of the relationship between belief, faith, and rationality. Written in accessible prose, this collection of essays delves into philosophical concepts grounded in pragmatism'—a movement for which James is a pivotal figure. Through analyses of belief systems, particularly in religious contexts, James asserts that our will to believe can be justified in the absence of definitive evidence, emphasizing the role of personal experience and subjective truth in shaping beliefs. This collection conveys the vibrant intellectual climate of the late 19th century, where philosophical inquiry was increasingly intertwined with psychology and the social sciences. William James, an eminent psychologist and philosopher, was deeply influenced by the tumultuous socio-political landscape of his time as well as his own interdisciplinary upbringing in a prominent intellectual family. His formative experiences in both philosophy and psychology, along with his interest in spirituality, culminated in this work, which challenges conventional epistemology and seeks to redefine the boundaries of rational thought. By promoting a pluralism of beliefs, James not only engages with philosophical doctrines but also examines their practical implications for personal conviction and moral life. Readers seeking a profound yet approachable dive into philosophical thought will find "The Will to Believe" an essential text. It encourages critical introspection regarding the nature of belief and the interplay between science and spirituality. James' insightful analyses and accessible writing style make this work suitable for both seasoned philosophers and those new to the field, urging readers to reconsider the power and importance of their own beliefs. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers a set of essays by William James, presented under the rubric of popular philosophy and first issued together in 1897. Its scope is deliberately practical: to show how philosophical reflection bears upon concrete decisions, habits of thought, and the moral temper of everyday life. Rather than advancing a closed system, the collection invites readers to approach enduring questions as live options that demand personal engagement. The purpose is to bridge academic discourse and the concerns of a wider public, demonstrating how inquiry, when steered by experience and tested by consequences, can illuminate belief, conduct, and the claims we make upon one another.
The contents are non-fiction prose throughout. Readers will find a dedicatory note, a preface outlining the author’s aims, a sequence of argumentative essays originally crafted for lectures and journals, and an index for reference. There are no novels, dramatic pieces, poems, letters, or diaries. The essays range across philosophical analysis, psychological reflection, moral reasoning, and cultural criticism, often blending illustrative cases with conceptual discussion. Their form is expository and dialectical rather than technical or formalized. While attentive to scientific developments of the period, the writing remains literary in cadence and accessible in structure, crafted for readers beyond professional specialists.
Across diverse topics, the collection is unified by a pragmatist orientation. Beliefs are assessed in light of their bearings on experience; explanations are valued for the sense of rational ease they afford; and moral reflection proceeds from the felt claims of persons and communities. The essays share a pluralist temper, resisting monolithic answers in favor of experimentally minded openness. Throughout, James emphasizes the responsibilities that attend belief under uncertainty, the practical import of freedom and chance, the interplay of character and circumstance in social life, and the limits of abstract system-building. Their significance endures in how they connect philosophy to lived choice.
Stylistically, the essays are marked by clarity without simplification. James writes in a conversational, carefully paced manner, using examples from ordinary situations as well as cases from psychology and history. He presents opposing positions with fairness, articulates their attractions, and then tests them against experiential considerations. Technical vocabulary is kept to a minimum, and when introduced, it is explained rather than presumed. The prose invites readers into the movement of thought, emphasizing transitions, hesitations, and the felt momentum of inquiry. This rhetorical openness is integral to the project: it models philosophy as an activity one can undertake, not merely observe.
The historical context is crucial. The essays emerge from a late nineteenth-century moment shaped by advances in the natural sciences, the rise of experimental psychology, renewed debate over religious belief, and the influence of idealist metaphysics in academic circles. Rather than capitulating either to dogmatic skepticism or to rigid system, James seeks a middle path that honors empirical methods while acknowledging dimensions of experience not exhausted by measurement. The result is a sustained attempt to recalibrate intellectual conscience: to ask what we may responsibly believe, how explanations satisfy or fail our sense of adequacy, and where ethical commitment finds its footing.
The purpose of popular philosophy, as practiced here, is not to dilute difficulty but to relocate it within the reader’s own deliberations. Arguments are presented as tools for orienting action under conditions where evidence may be incomplete and consequences significant. The essays ask how we might justly apportion belief, how rational satisfaction relates to explanatory scope, and how moral striving persists amid contingency. This orientation keeps the stakes practical: ideas are means for navigating choices rather than ornaments of speculation. The collection thus serves as an introduction to a method as much as a set of positions, inviting trial, revision, and resolve.
The selection and sequencing create a broad conversation. Early discussions consider the relations among belief, evidence, and the needs of agency, then turn to the experiential texture of rational understanding. Subsequent pieces address responsibility and freedom, the conditions of moral judgment, and the dynamics of social change, culminating in critical engagements with grand metaphysical systems and cautious appraisals of research at the boundaries of scientific inquiry. A preface situates the intent, a dedication acknowledges an intellectual debt to a close philosophical colleague, and an index facilitates consultation. Together, these parts frame a coherent yet exploratory portrait of philosophy in action.
Several essays examine belief under risk, emphasizing that decisions often cannot wait upon final proof. They explore how commitments shape perception and effort, and how the readiness to act can itself be a condition for discovering truth. James attends closely to the felt quality of rational satisfaction—what it means to experience an account as adequate, simplifying, or liberating—without reducing that feeling to mere sentiment. The result is a nuanced picture of intellectual life as both disciplined and passionate, where the psychology of conviction and the ethics of assent intersect, and where responsible belief remains sensitive to future correction.
The treatment of freedom and responsibility addresses a classic philosophical divide. Without rehearsing technical arguments in detail, the essays weigh the moral significance of contingency and the lived contrast between inevitability and openness. They ask what becomes of praise, blame, and reform if human conduct is entirely fixed, and what sort of world is presupposed by our practices of accountability. The approach is neither speculative metaphysics for its own sake nor purely scientific determinism; rather, it is an attempt to articulate the experiential underpinnings of our moral life, testing positions by their coherence with the texture of deliberation and regret.
On social and historical questions, the volume considers the roles of exceptional individuals and enabling environments. It resists stark alternatives between heroic agency and impersonal forces, instead tracing how personal initiative interacts with cultural resources, institutions, and chance. The emphasis falls on empirical assessment rather than doctrine: the measure of a theory is how well it accounts for observed patterns of innovation and diffusion. This perspective aligns with the collection’s wider commitments, balancing respect for singular persons with attention to conditions that make their contributions possible, and keeping philosophical reflection responsive to the complexities of historical explanation.
The essays also engage with the ambitions and limits of comprehensive metaphysical systems, particularly those that dissolve difference into a single unifying whole. James favors concreteness and the givenness of experience over abstract finality, arguing that explanatory elegance must not erase the manifold. In surveying inquiries at the edges of accepted science, he neither dismisses unconventional data outright nor abandons critical standards. The stance is methodologically even-handed: openness paired with scrutiny, curiosity constrained by evidence. Such discussions exemplify the collection’s broader lesson that responsible inquiry accommodates uncertainty while maintaining disciplined criteria for belief.
Taken together, these writings exemplify a humane, pluralist, and experimentally minded philosophy that continues to resonate. Their enduring significance lies less in settled theses than in a way of proceeding: start from experience, test ideas by their consequences for living, acknowledge fallibility, and keep inquiry hospitable to future learning. As an accessible yet rigorous contribution to American thought, the collection helped shape the pragmatic tradition and broadened the audience for philosophical reflection. It speaks to ongoing disputes about science and religion, freedom and responsibility, and the individual and society, urging readers to think courageously and act conscientiously.
Author Biography
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist whose work helped define pragmatism and establish psychology as an academic science in the United States. Writing and teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he bridged laboratory study of mind, reflection on ethical and religious life, and a public-facing prose that reached beyond specialists. His major books include The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, and The Meaning of Truth. Across these works he developed influential ideas about consciousness, emotion, belief, and truth, pairing respect for concrete experience with a pluralist, open-ended vision of reality.
James’s education combined rigorous science with broad humanistic reading. He studied at Harvard, trained in medicine, and early on engaged deeply with physiology and experimental psychology as these fields were taking shape. Extensive time in Europe exposed him to continental research and debates, while British empiricism and evolutionary thinking sharpened his methodological commitments. He formed lasting intellectual ties with contemporaries exploring logic and scientific method, notably Charles S. Peirce, whose work on pragmatic clarification James admired and later popularized. These influences, along with Kantian and post-Kantian discussions of experience and concepts, set the stage for his lifelong effort to reconcile science with the varieties of lived life.
In psychology, James was a pioneering teacher and organizer. At Harvard he offered one of the earliest American courses in physiological psychology and helped establish laboratory spaces for hands-on study. The Principles of Psychology synthesized research and reflection into a panoramic account of mind, introducing memorable formulations such as the stream of consciousness and emphasizing habit, attention, and the adaptive functions of mental life. He also advanced a bodily-feedback account of emotion, later associated with his name alongside Carl Lange, that stimulated decades of research and debate. Throughout, he treated psychology as a natural science tied to practical concerns, not a purely speculative enterprise.
James’s philosophy developed around the pragmatic method, a way of clarifying concepts by tracing their practical consequences. In the lectures collected as Pragmatism and in The Meaning of Truth, he proposed a view of truth tied to verification and workable outcomes within ongoing inquiry, while resisting both absolute idealism and rigid scientism. He argued for pluralism, contending that reality is not a single finished block but an unfinished, many-centered process. His well-known essay collection The Will to Believe defended the permissibility of commitment in cases where evidence is inconclusive yet the option is live, momentous, and unavoidable, linking belief to action and risk.
Religious and mystical experiences were central test cases for James’s empiricism. The Varieties of Religious Experience, based on prestigious lectures delivered in the early twentieth century, examined first-person testimonies and their psychological and moral fruits rather than doctrinal systems. James treated such experiences as data, asking what they do for conduct and character. In tandem, he developed radical empiricism, the thesis that relations and transitions are as much parts of experience as discrete things, a view elaborated in essays published during and shortly after his lifetime. Together these positions sought to honor the felt richness of life while remaining answerable to inquiry.
Beyond the academy, James was a celebrated lecturer and public intellectual. His Talks to Teachers on Psychology translated findings into practical guidance for the classroom, and his writing style modeled clarity without sacrificing nuance. He engaged civic questions in addresses such as The Moral Equivalent of War, which explored channeling martial energies toward constructive social service, and he spoke against imperialist policies of his era. Critics challenged aspects of his theory of truth and his permissive stance on belief, yet admirers praised his responsiveness to experience and his humane tone. Across debates, he remained a distinctive voice linking philosophy to everyday problems.
James’s later years were marked by heavy writing, wide correspondence, and recurring health struggles that led him to reduce formal teaching before his death in 1910. His legacy straddles disciplines: in psychology, discussions of habit, attention, and emotion still cite him; in philosophy, pragmatism and radical empiricism continue to shape theories of meaning, truth, and mind; in religious studies, his case-centered approach remains influential. Figures from John Dewey to later pragmatists drew on his work, and contemporary readers find in his essays a model of inquiry that is fallibilist, practical, and open to novelty. His books remain in print and widely taught.
Historical Context
In 1897, Longmans, Green (New York and London) published The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, gathering addresses and papers William James composed between the late 1870s and mid‑1890s. The volume opens with a dedication to his old friend Charles Sanders Peirce, acknowledging debts reaching back to the Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Written for lay and academic audiences in Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and New Haven, the essays reflect a United States entering the Gilded Age, with scientific confidence shadowed by moral anxiety. They register transatlantic debates in British agnosticism, German idealism, and French neo‑Kantianism while staking an American voice seeking practical bearings for belief, conduct, and inquiry.
William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City to Henry James Sr., a Swedenborgian‑leaning religious writer, and grew up shuttling between the United States and Europe, studying in Geneva, London, Bonn, and Paris. After joining Louis Agassiz’s Thayer Expedition to the Amazon (1865–1866), he earned the M.D. at Harvard (1869) but turned from medical practice to physiology, psychology, and philosophy. From the 1870s he taught at Harvard, bridging laboratory science and reflective life. His cosmopolitan family of letters included the novelist Henry James and his diarist sister Alice. The essays in this collection address a public schooled in literature and science, striving to reconcile rigor with a humane temperament.
A seedbed for the collection’s themes was the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1872, where James conversed with Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Chauncey Wright, and others. The club’s empiricist temper and anti‑absolutist instincts seeded pragmatism as a method for clarifying ideas by their experiential consequences. In these essays James translates that attitude into guidance for religious faith, moral choice, and historical judgment. Rather than erect a system, he experiments with hypotheses, taking cues from Peirce’s popular essays on the fixation of belief while resisting excessive intellectualism. The club’s conversational ethos survives here as stylistic directness, methodological pluralism, and respect for fallibility in inquiry.
The essays emerged amid the authority of evolutionary science after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871). English scientific naturalists like T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall pressed agnostic conclusions, notably Tyndall’s Belfast Address (1874), while Herbert Spencer’s synthetic philosophy popularized evolutionary explanations of mind, morals, and society. W. K. Clifford’s Ethics of Belief (1877) argued that believing without sufficient evidence is wrong everywhere and always. James engages this climate by exploring the permissible roles of temperament, risk, and lived needs in assent. He probes whether naturalism exhausts human meaning, refusing both ecclesiastical dogmatism and a reductive materialism that ignores experience’s richer textures.
James helped institutionalize psychology as an empirical science in the United States. He opened a teaching laboratory at Harvard by 1875, lectured on physiological psychology, and absorbed German methods shaped by Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner, and Wilhelm Wundt, whose Leipzig lab began in 1879. The Principles of Psychology (1890) synthesized these currents, and its concerns echo here: habit, attention, emotion, and the stream of consciousness inform his accounts of belief, freedom, and action. Students such as G. Stanley Hall helped carry laboratory psychology into American universities. Yet James preserved room for introspection, ethics, and metaphysics, insisting that findings be situated within broader human purposes and valuations.
Postbellum New England’s religious landscape—Unitarian liberalism, the afterglow of Transcendentalism, and the Free Religious Association founded in Boston in 1867—formed James’s audience. Harvard Divinity School, embattled since Emerson’s 1838 address, fostered debates on miracle, authority, and moral intuition. James’s father cherished Emanuel Swedenborg, encouraging a spirituality critical of rigid ecclesiasticism. The essays navigate this pluralism, neither defending orthodoxy nor capitulating to disenchantment. They treat faith as a permissible experiment under uncertainty, resonating with the Social Gospel’s reformist ethos and with a broader American habit of testing beliefs in conduct. The result is a lay theology compatible with scientific candor and democratic diversity.
A personal crisis circa 1870 decisively shaped James’s stance on freedom. Reading the French neo‑Kantian Charles Renouvier, he recorded in his diary an act of will to believe in free will, a commitment countering depressive fatalism and physiological determinism. This existential wager informed his later vocabulary of chances, options, and moral responsibility. In an era when Laplacean determinism promised predictive omniscience to physics, and when neurological mechanisms were rapidly mapped, James defended indeterminism as a live possibility consistent with empirical life. The claim that choice matters underwrites his treatments of rationality, ethics, and the permissible leap that a genuine option sometimes requires.
Nineteenth‑century debates on historical agency provide another backdrop. Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes (1841) exalted great men; Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer emphasized impersonal social laws; Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) quantified talent and heredity. American commentators folded these disputes into reflections on the Civil War’s leaders, Reconstruction policy, and the captains of industry. James addresses this contested terrain, weighing personal initiative against environmental and institutional constraints. His emphasis on plural causes—biography, milieu, accident, and effort—mirrors a democratic suspicion of monocausal theories. It reflects practical concerns in a rapidly urbanizing nation where education, immigration, and technology were reshaping opportunity and calling the sources of excellence into question.
Anglo‑American idealism dominated many philosophy classrooms in the 1870s and 1880s. The St. Louis Hegelians around William Torrey Harris promoted Hegel’s logic of the Absolute in the United States, while at Harvard James’s colleague Josiah Royce defended objective idealism. In Britain, T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley elaborated critiques of empiricism that prized coherence and monism. James’s essays wrestle with this inheritance, drawing on Rudolf Lotze’s more personal idealism yet rejecting a necessary, all‑encompassing system. His later term radical empiricism seeks relational experience without subsuming individuals under a single metaphysical Whole, preserving contingency and novelty against dialectical closure while engaging idealist rigor on its own terms.
Late nineteenth‑century moral philosophy juxtaposed utilitarian calculation, articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861), with Kantian duty, while Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) probed their tensions. American reform movements—the temperance crusade, woman suffrage, anti‑slavery memory, and nascent labor organization—pressed ethical questions into public life. Universities professionalized ethics even as ministers and activists translated theory into policy. Against this backdrop, James frames morality as a cooperative enterprise negotiating claims from multiple stakeholders and visions of the good. He favors meliorism—the belief that improvement is possible but not guaranteed—over perfectionist or pessimistic extremes, aligning philosophical analysis with civic experiment and incremental social change.
College curricula in the United States still leaned on Scottish Common Sense philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart) well into the 1860s, even as experimental science advanced. English logic textbooks by Richard Whately and John Stuart Mill remained staples. Peirce’s essays in Popular Science Monthly (1877–1878) introduced a fallibilist account of inquiry as social and self‑correcting. James’s notion of a sentiment of rationality adds a psychological dimension: the feeling of sufficiency and relief that accompanies a satisfying explanation. In a culture of newspapers, lyceum lectures, and journals like Mind (founded 1876), he interprets rational conviction as both cognitive and affective, tracking how communities actually fix belief across domains.
Industrial capitalism, the financial panics of 1873 and 1893, and the ethos of the American frontier normalized risk‑taking in enterprise and migration. Railroads, telegraphy, and mass markets required decisions under incomplete information. Legal culture paralleled this pragmatics: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s The Common Law (1881) portrayed law as experience‑driven prediction more than deduction. James’s vocabulary of live, forced, and momentous options speaks to these conditions, articulating how agents responsibly commit when evidence is not decisive yet delay carries costs. His analysis extends beyond religion to science, art, and politics, endorsing disciplined ventures of the will where opportunities are perishable and the stakes decisively shape future evidence.
Spiritualism, born with the Fox sisters’ 1848 rappings in New York, matured into séances, trance mediums, and hopes for empirical survival evidence. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers; an American society formed in Boston in 1885, with James among its leading investigators. He studied the Boston medium Leonora Piper for years, publishing cautious reports that balanced exposure of fraud with a demand for methodological fairness. The essays situate such inquiries within a broader empiricism, asking what should count as evidence and whether science must foreclose extraordinary hypotheses in advance.
James wrote as a public intellectual in a robust lecture circuit that included the lyceum system and the Chautauqua movement (founded 1874). He addressed university clubs and divinity schools in New England and the Mid‑Atlantic, then printed talks in venues ranging from Mind to the International Journal of Ethics and the Atlantic Monthly. The genre of popular philosophy—concrete cases, accessible metaphors, and polemical clarity—grew from this mixed audience. Simultaneously, specialized journals such as Philosophical Review (established 1892 at Cornell) encouraged professional standards. The collection straddles both worlds, translating technical disputes into civic conversation without sacrificing argumentative rigor or responsibility to evidence.
Transatlantic networks decisively shaped James’s style and substance. His education and sabbaticals took him repeatedly to Germany and France, where he encountered Helmholtz’s physiology, Fechner’s psychophysics, and Théodule Ribot’s clinical psychology. He corresponded with European philosophers and reviewed their books in American journals, mediating currents for readers in Boston and New York. From Peirce’s logic to Mill’s empiricism and Renouvier’s voluntarism, the essays compress decades of cross‑Channel exchange. They exemplify Harvard’s role under President Charles W. Eliot (1869–1909) in globalizing American higher education. Cosmopolitanism here is instrumental, supporting methodological openness and testing abstractions by their fruits across diverse cultural laboratories.
Politically and socially, the period spanned Reconstruction’s contested endings, the Gilded Age’s inequality, Populism’s insurgency in the 1890s, and the early Progressive Era’s reforms. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and its Parliament of Religions dramatized pluralism, immigration, and technological optimism. University enrollments soared; elective systems multiplied; laboratories proliferated. At the same time, anxieties about decadence, neurasthenia, and urban disorder shadowed progress. James’s essays answer this moment with a philosophy of chance, effort, and respect for minorities of one. He defends individual initiative without neglecting social conditions, inviting citizens to risk constructive belief where moral energy is required to create the very facts at issue.
The arguments first crystallized here prefigure James’s Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), his Pragmatism lectures at the Lowell Institute and Columbia (1906–1907), and A Pluralistic Universe (Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, 1908–1909). They influenced John Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, and later American legal realism, while provoking rejoinders from absolutists and scientific naturalists. By James’s death at Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 1910, the volume had helped set the agenda for twentieth‑century American philosophy: fallibilist yet hopeful, empirically responsible yet generous to the will, and hospitable to individuals whose choices help to make truths true.
Synopsis (Selection)
Dedication (To My Old Friend, CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE) and Preface
The dedication acknowledges James’s intellectual debt to Charles S. Peirce, while the preface frames the volume as accessible essays defending reasonable faith and a pragmatic, experience-based approach to philosophy.
The Will to Believe
Defends accepting certain beliefs without prior evidence when the option is living, forced, and momentous, allowing one’s passional nature to decide under genuine uncertainty, especially in religious matters.
Is Life Worth Living?
Addresses pessimism by arguing that life’s worth hinges on strenuous commitment and risk-taking faith in ideals that give meaning to action, rather than on theoretical proofs.
The Sentiment of Rationality
Explores why some explanations feel rational, tying rationality to a satisfying sense of simplicity and practical adequacy while warning against over-systematic philosophies detached from experience.
Reflex Action and Theism
Argues that physiological accounts of reflex action do not undermine theism and that belief in God may be treated as a working hypothesis justified by its moral and practical bearings when evidence is inconclusive.
The Dilemma of Determinism
Challenges strict and soft determinism, defending indeterminism (real chance) as required for genuine moral responsibility, regret, and meaningful deliberation.
The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life
Outlines a pluralistic, empirical ethics where obligations arise from the claims of sentient beings and ‘the good’ is what best satisfies competing demands through ongoing social negotiation.
Great Men and Their Environment
Mediates between hero-centric and environmental accounts of history, holding that exceptional individuals matter decisively but only where conditions permit their influence to take hold.
The Importance of Individuals
Affirms the causal and moral significance of individual persons and choices in a pluralistic world, resisting abstractions that minimize personal initiative and responsibility.
On Some Hegelisms
Critiques Hegelian absolute idealism and the reconciliation of opposites, arguing that concrete experience and plural realities resist subsumption under a single rational totality.
What Psychical Research Has Accomplished
Surveys evidence for phenomena such as telepathy and mediumship, judging some findings suggestive (notably for telepathy) but inconclusive on survival, and urging rigorous, open-minded study.
Index and By the Same Author
Provides an alphabetical index of topics and a list of James’s other works for reference.
