A Long-Awaited Completion

After reading a chapter here and a chapter there for over twenty years, I have at last completed all of William James’s Principles of Psychology. I’m sure his work has been superseded in the 130 years since its publication, but still I felt compelled to continue with it a bit each year until I finished reading it all. James teaches me to think about how I think and seems to know me and several of my weird mental habits quite well. In previous posts, I’ve commented on, among other things, James’s explanation for why I need special help with memorization and how many of the mnemonic tricks I’ve developed myself work, why I struggle to move a single muscle in order to get out of bed some mornings, why walking helps my attention-challenged mind to concentrate on a book, how (on the other hand) my habit of wool gathering while reading is a sign of extraordinary intelligence (I choose to read his observations that way, in any case), and most surprisingly why I’ve had trouble recording from old LPs with skips when I’ve tried to drop the needle at just the right moment.

James self-deprecatingly downplayed the value of his work and suggested a scattered and serpentine order of chapters for his readers. So I followed his plan and then wandered around the book over the next several years picking up all the leftover bits, as well as rereading some of the chapters I read first in the early 90s. So, odd as it seems as a plan for finishing a book with twenty-eight chapters, this year I read chapters VIII, XVII, and XXI.

In chapter VIII, “The Relation of Minds to Other Things,” the Psychologist explains, among other things, the ability of exhausted mothers to sleep soundly and yet to be awakened instantly when the baby cries, and the correspondence of the French verbs connaitre and savoir to two distinct psychological states. In the most fascinating passage of the chapter, he claims that many people have multiple consciences, only one of which has access to the mouth. His evidence comes from observations that certain people, while talking animatedly to someone in front, can be made by someone standing behind to follow simple instructions or to grasp something presented to the hand, and yet say that they don’t remember any of this posterior activity. My wife has very little attention for anything else when she’s talking on the phone. I’m going to sneak up behind her someday when she’s talking, tell her to raise her right arm, and see what happens!

In chapter XVII, “Sensation,” James brings up a point that he has made earlier and that he goes into later in the book as well (things I know from having read the book so out of order): that all sensations automatically have a spatial element. It’s his version of Kant’s tenet that space is a category or form of the mind. (Don’t ask me for a treatise on how the two authors might agree or disagree on this topic!) In a passage that I approach with delicate skepticism, he says that babies at first only have a notion that the objects they hear and see are “out there.” It takes many months and many sensations in order to learn to coordinate the “out theres” into a mental concept of a spatial framework. I don’t know. Are horses that different from humans? Foals can walk when they’re born, and they don’t, to my knowledge, constantly bump into trees as if they don’t know how close the trees are. But James hooks me again when he talks about where we locate sensations of touch. We feel the desktop under the pencil point, he says, and we sense the tap of a cane to be located on the ground, even thought the sensation is really all in our hand. I think he’s right, and I’m now convinced that all sensations carry a sense of “out there” with them.

Chapter XXI, “The Perception of Reality,” is really about belief. James says so many thought-provoking things touching on religion, patriotism, family or tribal identity, the created worlds of fiction and what others might term the suspension of disbelief, mathematics, scientific forces, and mad delusions, that I can’t do them all justice. So I’ll just highlight one point. Belief, he says, involves an emotional layer in the thought. Try saying, “The sky is blue” and then “The sky is red,” in order to begin to feel the difference. (I think I do.) Well, if belief involves an emotion, then you can come to believe proposition X by having that emotion while thinking proposition X. Thus someone can make you believe proposition X if they can instill the right emotion in you when trying to convince you of proposition X. (It all sounds a little crazy until you think about the early days of a romance and things you believe without having copious amounts of evidence.) And now, finally, the “one” point I’m trying to highlight: an idea involving an extreme call to action is often believed precisely because the call to action raises such strong emotions. In some cases, the more absurd the action called for, the easier it is to believe the associated idea.

We think we’re so rational, and reason seems so clear when we’re calmly looking at a neat syllogism. Yet our human connection to reason is so tenuous! As Pascal noted, we take pride in the nobility of our lofty thoughts, and yet what power a little fly has to paralyze our minds by simply landing on our knee. Chapter XVII of James reassured me that I have a grasp on reality. Chapter XXI told me my reality may be the result of emotional manipulation. I’m glad my temperament told me early in life to be wary of people trying to convince my mind while toying with my heart.