When . . . we talk of 'psychology as a natural science? we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse: It means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical eroticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms. It is, in short, a phrase of diffidence, and not of arrogance.

The Inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight.

After twelve years of arduous research and writing, James completed The Principles of Psychology in 1890. The work was at once a grand summation of previous developments and and a portent of the paths psychology would take in the twentieth century. Glimmerings of every major psychological movement of the last 70 years appear in the book. Moreover, a direct line of influence is traceable in many instances.

James did not achieve this remarkable breadth of treatment without some sacrifice. Not all of his notions are operationally verifiable, nor does he always escape self-contradiction. Yet his transgressions of the scientific ethic must not be taken too seriously. He persistently applied himself to real problems, to ones of great human import. And though James, with characteristic hospitality, would welcome the use of computer models and animal studies, he would have protested vehemently against sacrificing the fullness of life for a manageable but sterile fragment.

Role of Habit

Habit for James was the structural unit of mental life. The acquisition of a habit consisted of developing a new pathway of discharge in the brain. Even the most complex habits were viewed as merely a chain of discharges in the nerve centers--the result of a series of sensory stimuli and motor responses comprising a system of reflex paths.

The physiological terminology is now somewhat outmoded, but it afforded James a convenient basis for some of his famous pedagogical maxims. "Could the young but realize," he wrote, "how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so little scar. . . . Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work."

James considered habit the great conservative agent of society. "It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice." He felt that most personal habits, such as vocalization, pronunciation, gesture, and gait are fixed by age 20.

The period between 20 and 30, on the other hand, appeared to him as the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits.

"Already at the of 25," he wrote, "you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, and on the young minister, and on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shops,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new seat of folds.... We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, . . . for in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again."

Stream of Consciousness

Shifting metaphor, James adopted the language of the hydraulic engineer in his discussion of consciousness. He decried the practice of chopping consciousness into supposed "single ideas" with which the investigator really had no immediate acquaintance. Chains, trains, or other compounding of bits seemed inadequate as models. Consciousness is nothing jointed, he argued; it flows. Thus he preferred such metaphors as "river" or "stream."

"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relation, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. . . ."

Several years after the publication of the Principles, Gertrude Stein '97 arrived at Radcliffe. She elected to concentrate--if such a pedestrian word is proper--in psychology. Like Alice Toklas, James had great respect for her intelligence; he publicly acclaimed her the most outstanding woman student of his long teaching career.

Gertrude Stein was never one who seemed to require the services of men: her creative faculties appeared self-fecundating. But perhaps we can imbroil James in an intellectual paternity suit, nonetheless. After all, she was but a young impressionable 'Cliffie, while he had by then attained world renown. In lieu of a blood test, one need only examine the term "stream of consciousnes literature." It is astonishing how Jamesian some passages of Miss Stein's essays on the art of writing sound. Surely the extent of the dalliance is clear beyond reasonable doubt. And if we can obtain the conviction, we must congratulate the father on his splendid brood. For Gertrude Stein did not spawn just one "natural" child but an unnaturally gifted litter of literary figures. Her American progeny include, by the way, such robust bastards as Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.