GREAT THINKER DEAD.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 908, 30 August 1910, Page 5

GREAT THINKER DEAD.

-» PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES. Dj Telc|*rapß-Prei<« Association—Copyright. . ■'■■ New Yofk, August 28. Tho death is announced of Professor William James, for many j-ears Professor of Philosophy' at Harvard University, and tho most distinguished of contemporary American philosophers. . The late Professor William James, the foroinost exponent of Pragmatism and the represoulativu. u! contemporaneous American philosophy who looms largest in the public eye not only in- his native country but all over the world, retired officially on October 1 from the' chair of philosophy at Harvard University, which he hud occupied'for ten years. A pension froln the' Carnegie Institution enabling him—then sixty-five years old, but as.hale and strong and active as a man of fifty—to realise a long' cherished desire. of devoting his wholo time and energy to the completion of several philosophical works previously planned. Harvard was his home almost uninterruptedly from the time he first entered the Lawrence Scientific School us a student iu 1801. The exact sciences drew him at first. He studied medicine and took his degree of M.D. in 1870, but he never practised. Instead, he taught, giving the major portion of his attention to physiology. .By degrees he turned more and more from .mutter to uiiiiil, Jrom tlui' budy to tho soul. He began by interpreting the psychological theories of Spencer, and ended by working out new oncs> of his own. Iβ 1880 an assistant professorship in philosophy , ' was given , tho young psychologist, and five/years later this was made a full professorship. But only in ISS9 was Professor James given a separate: chair of psychology. In the following year appeared his first great work, the "Principles of I'sychulog.y." It had been uino years in'the'making. But it took hardly that many months to spread the name of the author throughout the civilised world. In it he propounded a new theory, the essence of which may bo roughly oppressed in tho contention that our feelings aro the result rather than the cause of our. instinctive reactions against impressions from without. • In 1897. came his transfer to a chair of philosophy at his own request, and in the saruo year was published the volume entitled "The Will to Believe, and Other Essays," in which mny be found his first definite., announcements of • pragmatiu theories. Tho two winters of 1900-01 and 1901-02 were spent by Professor James at Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where he went to deliver the Gilford lecture courses on philosophy. The result of thut venture across the ocean was his second monumental work, the "Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature." Anil again ho was found to have rendered a contribution to human learning that was in a large degree original and in every respect significant. In late years Professor James has more and more claimed the attention of layinon and experts alike as the expounder and defender of a now philosophical method, to yhich he ha? given the nome of Pragmatism. It is a method rather than anything else, a way of working that leads to tho weighing and judging of truth by the consequences its-accept-ance may hnvc to men. Of those who havo preached it so far, none has done more than Professor James to carry, out its innermost spirit by making it intelligible to all thinking men and women. With this object in view he delivered a course of lectures, first at Boston and then at Columbia University, publishing them later' in book form under the titlo of "Pragmatism: A Now Name for Some Old Ways of -Thinking.." Edwin Bjorkinail. in a recent character sketch, said of-the late professor:—"Obscurity is hateful to him. A master of stylo, lie does not disdain tn employ colloquialisms, or even slang, if thereby ho may make himself more easily understood. And to him the truth Hint is not known nnd understood is not yet any truth at all. One result of his passion for clearness, on the platform as well as in print, has been to make many think him less deep than he is: the plainness of his stylo seen«> siidly lacking in profundity when compared with the'veiled and oracular utterances of othor philosophers."