¹ Later (Chapter 5), we will explore whether these themes might be informative for contemporary psychology and its pluralisms.

² James’s biographies usually illustrate each of these points abundantly (e.g., Allen, Reference Allen1967; Bjork, Reference Bjork1997; Croce, Reference Croce2018; Perry, Reference Perry1935; Richardson, Reference Shook and Margolis2006; Simon Reference Simon1998).

³ For example, Christopher Green suggests that the “seeds” of James’s pluralism “may well have been planted” as early as 1874 (Green, Reference Green2019, p. 106), when he read and reviewed Paul Benjamin Blood’s Anaesthetic Revelation (WWJ 17: 285–288).

⁴ Throughout his writings, James uses the terms “ethical,” “moral,” and their associates interchangeably. Although others may distinguish these terms for various purposes, here, we will follow James’s usage. The important point here is to insist that “James was committed to the proposition that pluralism also pertains to ethics” (Leary, Reference Leary2009, p. 121), which in his case includes religion as well.

⁵ Apart from personal uncertainties regarding his professional career, we should keep in mind that James lost both his mother and his father in 1882, which had a significant impact upon him (Lewis, Reference Lewis1991, pp. 333–363), not to mention his constant health issues (mental and physical) throughout that decade. This loss and struggle constitute the broad personal background, against which he turned to reflections not only on the role of the will in moral questions, but also on the meaning of religious ideas and of life in general (e.g., pessimism, optimism, meliorism). This is not to say that before this period he had never engaged with religious and spiritual matters, but only that after his father’s death, those topics acquired a new meaning for him. In a letter to his wife on January 1883, just a few days after his father’s death, he pledges her: “You must not leave me till I understand a little bit more of the value & meaning of religion in Father’s sense, in the mental life & destiny of man. It is not the one thing needful, as he said. But it is needful with the rest. My friends leave it altogether out. I as his son, (if for no other reason,) must help it to its rights in their eyes & for that reason I must learn to interpret it aright as I have never done, & you must help me” (CWJ 05: 379).

⁶ James accepted the invitation of the publisher Henry Holt (1840–1926) in June 1878, promising to finish the book by “the fall of 1880” (CWJ 05: 14). However, it was only in the 1880s that James began to work seriously on the project, which eventually took him twelve years instead of two. For a detailed account of James’s preparatory work for The Principles as well as of its context, see Evans (Reference Evans and James1981) and Perry (Reference Perry1935, vol. II, pp. 34–50).

⁷ Apart from James’s lifelong reading of Hegel, which can be traced back to as early as May 1867 – when he admits having “just been reading Hegel’s chapter on epic poetry in his Aesthetik” (CWJ 04: 161) – there is a specific context associated with James’s essay – namely, the spread of Hegelianism in the United States, especially in Boston and Cambridge. Back to the beginning of the seventies, James recalls “a little philosophical Club which used to meet every fortnight … in Boston,” in which “we had gone over a good part of Hegel’s larger Logic” (WWJ 17: 88–89). On December 1880, he complains that “[t]he Hegelian wave … is deluging the College this year” (CWJ 05: 145), and that “[i]t is a strange thing, this resurrection of Hegel in England and here” (149). On November 1881, American philosopher William T. Harris (1835–1909) founded a Hegel Club in Cambridge, in which James took part actively: “We meet every Saturday to read Hegel’s Logic” (CWJ 05: 194). On the beginnings of Hegelianism in the United States, see Goetzmann (Reference Goetzmann1973), Kaag and Jensen (Reference Kaag, Jensen and Moyar2017), and Watson (Reference Watson1982).

⁸ James’s criticism includes not only Hegel, but also the Anglo-American Hegelians, who became his philosophical archenemies. As Perry noted, “‘Hegel’, ‘Hegelian,’ and ‘the Hegelians’ became to James symbols of the great rival way of philosophizing” (Perry, Reference Perry1935, vol. I, p. 725).

⁹ Here (and in Chapter 4) it is not our aim to evaluate James’s assertions about Hegel and Hegelianism in general, but only to indicate and clarify how he understands and uses them to build his arguments. Nonetheless, we should not be blind to the fact that James’s interpretations are problematic, as some have pointed out (e.g. Cook, Reference Cook1977; Morse, Reference Morse2005; Schultz, Reference Schultz2015; Stern & William, Reference Stern, William and Klein2019).

¹⁰ As in the case of Hegel, James’s contact with Renouvier’s work can be traced back to the 1860s. In a letter to his father on October 1868, he admits reading “one Ch. Renouvier of whom I never heard before” (CWJ 04: 342). “From this date,” Perry says, “James followed Renouvier’s writings with close attention and eager interest” (Perry, vol. I, p. 654). What really impressed James, in the first place, was Renouvier’s defense of freedom in his Essais de Critique Générale (Renouvier, Reference Renouvier1859, pp. 324–369), which was decisive for James to overcome his depressive crisis in the Winter 1869–1870, as he admits in his diary entry of April 30, 1870: “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second ‘Essais’ and see no reason why his definition of Free Will … need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present … that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free-will” (WJPD 01: April 30th). Later, in his first letter to Renouvier on November 1872, it becomes clear that the first debt of his pluralism to Renouvier is the latter’s defense of freedom: “Thanks to you I possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of Freedom” (CWJ 04: 430). Moreover, James offered a course on Renouvier’s philosophy in 1879–1880 (WWJ 05: 61, 64) and met Renouvier in Switzerland on August 1880 (CWJ 05: 135, 139), not to mention his reviews of Renouvier’s works (WWJ 17: 265–266; 321–326; 440–443), which further helped him to develop and consolidate his pluralism. This does not mean, however, that James adopted Renouvier’s position without reservation. Actually, he also criticized Renouvier in specific points. For a detailed treatment of this relationship, see Perry (Reference Perry1935, vol. II, pp. 654–710). We will come back to some aspects of this relationship in Chapter 4.

¹¹ Shortly before his death, James dedicated his Some Problems of Philosophy – published posthumously – to Renouvier: “… he was one of the greatest philosophical characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the ‘seventies’ by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up. The present volume, in short, might have never been written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as I do, I dedicate this text-book to the great Renouvier’s memory” (WWJ 07: 85). As Croce observes, the French philosopher provided systematic expression of ideas James had already been developing; reading Renouvier provided philosophical sanction to his thoughts about importance of freedom and pluralism (Croce, Reference Croce2018, especially pp. 227–31).

¹² We should notice that James associates the theory he wants to defend with the commonsense view, according to which free-will exists. However, James also criticizes common sense beliefs in several passages of his works. We will further develop this point in Section 4.5.

¹³ “Naif” here is to be understood in philosophical terms; that is, James recognizes that this kind of pluralism lacks a philosophical elaboration and justification, in contrast with the monistic philosophy of religion espoused by his father, in which God is explained in terms of the universal substance, the one and only being.

¹⁴ It may be worth noting that monism does not threaten this popular pluralism because of the realms of thinking mentioned above and the distinction between them: formal/professional/elite thought operate with concepts, while informal/popular/experiential thought operates with perceptual richness.

¹⁵ See Sections 3.4 and 4.4 for more details.

¹⁶ James’s anti-dogmatism, before being announced in 1896 as a central thesis of his radical empiricism (WWJ 06: 5), was already part of his essential attitude toward the world. In fact, his religious view depends on his anti-dogmatic stance, as Seigfried (Reference Seigfried, Rydenfelt and Pihlström2013) has noted.

¹⁷ In his essay Reflex Action and Theism, first published in 1881, James already defends a broad conception of theism against what he calls “the anti-theistic wing” (WWJ 06: 103). In this context, he defines theism in terms of two essential features: “First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality” (97). For the broad personal and cultural context of James’s engagement with religion, see Croce (Reference Croce1995), Levinson (Reference Levinson1981), and Ramsey (Reference Ramsey1993).

¹⁸ This religious face is close to what Paul Croce labels “the transcendent within” or James’s search for “an inscendent realm” (Croce, Reference Croce2018, p. 174). We will come back to this point in Section 4.4.

¹⁹ James uses the terms “metaphysics” and “metaphysical” in a broad sense, sometimes in contrast with “science” and “scientific” – meaning that metaphysical questions cannot be settled scientifically – sometimes to refer to a general theory of the world or worldview, which includes a blend of special aspects (ontological, cosmological, epistemological, theological, etc.). In this sense, we might say that James had in mind a metaphysical project that he was not able to fulfill, but which he could only partially realize (in terms of his pluralism, radical empiricism, and pragmatism as a theory of truth). At the same time, he dealt with specific philosophical questions we can include under the umbrella of metaphysics (determinism versus indeterminism, the mental and the physical, materialism versus spiritualism, the knowledge of reality, continuity versus discontinuity, the one and the many, etc.). Accordingly, we will use the terms “metaphysics” and “metaphysical” here to emphasize the general nature of those questions important to James, whereas we will indicate their ontological, cosmological, epistemological, and so forth, character when dealing with these in particular. For different uses of the term and the concept of metaphysics, see van Inwagen and Sullivan (Reference van Inwagen, Sullivan and Zalta2021).

²⁰ This will be explained in Section 4.2.

²¹ There is a tension between James’s declared intentions and several of his theoretical discussions in The Principles. On the one hand, in the preface, James says that he wants to keep “close to the point of view of natural science” or “this strictly positivistic point of view” (WWJ 07: 6), meaning that scientific psychology must restrict itself to the phenomenally given mental states and not go beyond its data, thereby rejecting metaphysical speculations. For, James continues, “[m]etaphysics fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into a natural science” (6). On the other hand, we find not only several references to metaphysical works inside The Principles, but also a whole chapter that James considers “exclusively metaphysical” (WWJ 07: 148), not to mention his admission, in the last pages of his Psychology: Briefer Course, that, when talking of psychology as a natural science, “it means a psychology … into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint” (WWJ 14: 400). These apparently conflicting claims have been interpreted differently in the literature (e.g., Embree, Reference Embree, DeArmey and Skousgaard1986; Leary, Reference Leary2018, pp. 38–49; Seigfried, Reference Seigfried1981). However, it seems clear that James could only adopt a partial and provisional anti-metaphysical view, for the specific purposes of a more descriptive psychology, until he could develop his own “responsible” metaphysics (pluralism or radical empiricism). As early as 1879, in his paper The Sentiment of Rationality, he defends the necessity of “good” metaphysics: “Metaphysics of some sort there must be. The only alternative is between the good Metaphysics of clear-headed Philosophy and the trashy Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism. Metaphysics, the quest of the last clear elements of things, is but another name for thought which seeks thorough self-consistency; and so long as men must think at all, some will be found willing to forsake all else to follow that ideal” (WWJ 05: 57).

²² After the publication of The Principles, James was already dissatisfied with the subject-object (or mind-matter) dualism he had provisionally adopted in that work. As early as 1891, in a letter to German psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), he reveals his plans about this issue: “This is an obscure matter about which I have aspirations to write something which shall do away with the contradictions which occur so much on the psychological plane. I mean … an analysis of the way in which we come to treat the phenomenon or datum of experience sometimes as a thing sometimes as a mental representation of a thing etc. etc.” (CWJ 07: 202). Radical empiricism, then, is first thought as an attempt at a new metaphysics – namely, the doctrine of pure experience – to replace traditional dualism.

²³ Before that public announcement, however, James had already begun to develop his doctrine of radical empiricism. For example, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association on December 1894, he already anticipates one of its central ideas: “the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience” (WWJ 05: 75). In addition, in 1895/1896, he offered a psychological seminary called “The Feelings,” in which he basically reaffirms that central thesis: “There is no stuff anywhere but data. The entire world (obj. & subjective) at any actual time is a datum. Only within that datum there are two parts, the obj. & the subjective parts, seen retrospectively” (WWJ 19: 219). Between 1897 and 1899, he offered graduate courses at Harvard – especially “The Philosophical Problems of Psychology” – to explore his “system of pure experience” (238). His notes for these courses concern many of the topics that he would later develop in his published essays on radical empiricism (1904–1905). In this context, pluralism again appears connected with the development of radical empiricism: “On my pluralistic scheme, the oneness of the universe comes from the parts overlapping” (WWJ 19: 224).

²⁴ This is James’s anti-dogmatism in its purest form. However, it cannot be restricted to philosophy and science; it extends into the realms of ethics and religion as well as of psychical research. Moreover, James’s anti-dogmatic stance is also part of his pragmatic method. For more details, see Section 4.5.

²⁵ The question of whether or not the terms “pluralism” and “radical empiricism” are synonymous cannot be answered in terms of a single “yes” or “no.” It depends on the specific context. Since James used both terms in different contexts with distinct meanings, such an answer can only be decided “locally” – that is, on a case-by-case basis. Our goal here is only to indicate that sometimes James used the terms in close connection with each other, in which cases it is difficult to tell their precise difference.

²⁶ James’s career as a speaker should always to be taken into account in evaluating his arguments. Many of his positions were first elaborated in public lectures (the Lowell Lectures, the Gifford Lectures, the Hibbert Lectures, etc.), including pluralism. After the publication of The Principles in 1890, the demands for talks became more intense. As Richardson has remarked, by 1897 “[h]e was getting an invitation to speak in almost every mail” (Richardson, Reference Richardson2007, p. 370). The Talks volume comprehends two different sets of public lectures James gave between 1891 and 1898. The first one comprises fifteen lectures that were mostly composed in the first half of the decade, in which James simply presents his psychology to teachers in an abridged form. James came to consider them “incarnate boredom” (CWJ 08: 521). The second set contains only three lectures, developed between 1895 and 1898, in which he talks to students on psychological and moral topics in alignment with his The Will to Believe. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” is the second one, which he was particularly fond of: “I care very much indeed for the truth it so inadequately tries by dint of innumerable quotations to express” (517). For the whole history of those lectures, see Bowers (Reference Bowers and James1983).

²⁷ Individuality is important for ethics and democratic politics also because it recognizes the worth of the human mind’s spontaneity. As early as 1878, James defended that “there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote” (WWJ 05: 21).

²⁸ We will discuss this point in Section 4.4.

²⁹ James accepted the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures on January 1897 (CWJ 08: 223–224) but was able to deliver them only in 1901 and 1902. Between 1899 and 1902, he practically suspended his courses at Harvard to prepare his Gifford Lectures. A few weeks after his letter of acceptance, he revealed his future plans regarding that work: “I am going to give all the fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious biography and philosophy” (228). Also of importance to understanding these lectures is James’s previous engagement with abnormal psychology and psychical research in the 1880s, which helped him to expand his conception of human experience. For a good contextualization of these activities, see McDermott (Reference McDermott and James1986), Sommer (Reference Sommer and Klein2020), and Taylor (Reference Taylor1984). As for the whole history of James’s preparation for the Gifford Lectures, see Bowers (Reference Bowers and James1985, pp. 520–555).

³⁰ It is important to note that in The Varieties, James takes the term “religion” in a very broad sense, which can sound strange to contemporary ears. It means “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (WWJ 15: 34). In this sense, James focuses not on the institutional or theological aspects of traditional religions, but on “personal religion pure and simple” (32), which goes from Christianity to self-help movements to mysticism. So, James’s defense of a pluralistic religion is in tune with his defense of spiritualism, as we will discuss in Section 4.4.

³¹ On September 1900, in a letter to Scottish philosopher Andrew Seth (1856–1931), who nominated him for the Gifford Lectures, James reveals his intention of offering two different courses, one more descriptive, the other more reflective: “The two courses are fortunately so different in subject that the first one remains complete in itself and requires no supplement. … this second course … will be my first and last effort at at original metaphysical construction. … It will be called ‘The Tasks of Religious Philosophy.’ I might as well give you the program of the first course, to be called the ‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’ … The second course, or rather the philosophic sequel of the first ought … to be highly abstract” (CWJ 09: 325–326). In the end, the psychological part grew longer than James expected, so that he could not develop the philosophical part, as he complains to his friend, British philosopher Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864–1937) on April 1902: “The Gifford lectures are all facts and no philosophy” (CWJ 10: 27). As a result, the book does not contain much philosophy, either. As Niebuhr has aptly noted, “the Varieties we read is not the Varieties he originally planned” (Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr and Putnam1997, p. 216).

³² One should never forget that James’s main goal in The Varieties is to offer a psychological analysis of religion – that is, he establishes that “the inquiry be psychological” (WWJ 15: 12). So, underlying his descriptions of those religious experiences he chooses to attend to, James establishes a distinction between two types of temperament – healthy-mindedness and morbid-mindedness – which in its turn leads to two opposing views of life and religious attitudes, namely, optimism and pessimism, respectively. Further, we might see this as a faith-based orientation toward active fighting for causes versus a more passive need for comfort from faith (WWJ 15: 71–138).

³³ We will come back to this point in Section 4.4.

³⁴ The monistic view remains open as a pragmatic option, however. In this sense, James’s religious pluralism subsumes monism. After all, “[o]n pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it” (WWJ 01: 131). Indeed, James insists, “[p]ragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run” (WWJ 01: 144).

³⁵ In a letter to Carl Stumpf on August 1902, he reveals: “After my lectures on religious experience are published, I hope to write a more systematic attempt at a Weltanschauung on a radical empiricist and pluralist basis, seeking to destroy the notion of a monistic Absolute of any sort” (CWJ 09: 526). On December, he confesses to Henri Bergson (1859–1941): “I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics” (CWJ 10: 167). By July 1903, he still keeps up with his project, as he tells French philosopher François Pillon (1830–1914): “I expect, on returning to the country, to begin the writing of a somewhat systematic book on philosophy – my humble view of the world – pluralistic, tychistic, empiricist, pragmatic, and ultra-gothic, i.e. non classic in form” (279).

³⁶ Actually, his concrete work began only in 1902/1903, when he offered a course called “The Philosophy of Nature.” From 1903 until his retirement in 1907, he offered courses on metaphysics, including “A Pluralistic Description of the World” (1903/1904). These notes James prepared for those courses show how interrelated radical empiricism and pluralism are (WWJ 19: 267–428). For a list of James’s courses at Harvard, see Skrupskelis (Reference Skrupskelis and James1988).

³⁷ We cannot ignore the influence of James’s illnesses – especially his heart condition – on his academic production in his last decade of life. On November 1898, James discovered he “had a slight mitral insufficiency and some dilatation of the heart” (CWJ 09: 34), which he attributed to the excesses of his climbing the Adirondack hills a couple of months before, and which would eventually kill him. Be that as it may, in a letter to François Pillon on June 1904, he complains that “I have written only 32 pages!” (CWJ 10: 409). By the end of that year, he reveals to one of his students: “… and my real interest lies in desiring to write, but not writing, an epoch-making philosophical book. Perhaps it will come yet!” (472). It seems that, after 1904, James gave up his initial idea of writing a metaphysical treatise.

³⁸ In this passage, James identifies pluralism not only with radical empiricism, but also with tychism. That James understood these three terms as identical is shown in a letter of April 1903 to Swiss physician and psychologist Theodore Fournoy (1854–1920), in which he refers to his intended “‘system’ of tychistic & pluralistic ‘philosophy of pure experience’” (CWJ 10: 240). James borrowed the term “tychism” from C. S. Peirce (1839–1914). At least since March 1897, James begins using the term to refer only to Peirce’s own doctrine, as their correspondence shows (CWJ 08: 245, 324, 326, 330, 336). Later, he applies it to his own philosophy, as he tells Carl Stumpf on March 1900: “I am going to defend radical pluralism and tych-ism, and I hope to make a convert of you” (CWJ 09: 166). However, there is an important difference between James and Peirce. For the latter, tychism means “absolute chance” (Peirce, Reference Peirce1892, p. 533, 1893, p. 188) or indeterminism, in contrast with absolute necessity. James also understands tychism in terms of indeterminism and chance, but adds more elements to it. In the passage above, he wants to emphasize that the world changes continually through spontaneous additions of discrete elements or that “things come in instalments, causing change” (WWJ 19: 272). By broadening the meaning of his tychism, James seems to have deviated from Peirce’s theory in important details. We will come back to this point in Section 4.2.

³⁹ The term “humanism” was first suggested to James by Ferdinand Schiller on April 1903 (CWJ 10: 238). At first, James did not like it: “‘Humanism’ does not make a very electrical connexion with my nature” (280). However, by February 1904 James had accepted it, as he tells Schiller: “‘Humanism’ (the term), which did not at first much ‘speak’ to me, I now see to be just right” (369). It is interesting to note that in his thirty-two-page manuscript of 1903/1904 (“The Many and the One”), James already uses the term to label his philosophical position as a whole: “A philosophy ‘empiricist’ in its intellectual habits, and ‘spiritualist’ in its emotional and practical outcome, is a thing almost impossible to find. … I believe that such a philosophy – ‘Humanism’ Mr. Schiller has called it – can be worked out, and the purpose of the following pages is to make the attempt” (WWJ 18: 6). Nonetheless, as with the other terms James used to identify his philosophy, he used “humanism” in different contexts with different meanings. For example, in his paper “Humanism and Truth,” first published in 1904, there is no mention of pluralism (WWJ 02: 37–60). Additionally, as we have earlier noted, James’s “spiritualism” is not equitable with religious practice so much as an openness to the abundance and complexity of nature, an attitude of wonder, awe, and devotion.

⁴⁰ Later, in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), James still refers to his doctrine as “pluralism or humanism” (WWJ 04: 7).

⁴¹ Actually, James’s first public announce of his pragmatism occurred in a lecture he gave at the University of California on August 1898 – “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (WWJ 01: 257–270). However, given his constant health issues as well as his preparation for the Gifford Lectures, he only resumed the further elaboration of pragmatism around the same period he began developing his radical empiricism. Between February 1905 and January 1907, James gave lectures on pragmatism in different places across the United States.

⁴² Pragmatism was published in June 1907, based on the Lowell Lectures delivered between November 1906 and January 1907. For the development of James’s Pragmatism from 1898 to 1907, see Bowers (Reference Bowers and James1975, pp. 185–197).

⁴³ And not only for James is this so. As Trevor Pearce recently claims, “[i]t is hard to find delimiting criteria that pick out even self-declared pragmatists, let alone all those who embraced something like the pragmatic approach” (Pearce, Reference Pearce2020, p. 8). For an overview of the broad scope of the term, see Malachowski (Reference Malachowski2013), Pihlström (Reference Pihlström2011), and Shook and Margolis (Reference Shook and Margolis2006).

⁴⁴ It is worth noting that by February 1904, James still understood pragmatism in methodological terms, as he confides to Ferdinand Schiller: “[B]ut ‘pragmatism’ never meant for me more than a method of conducting discussions (a sovereign method, it is true) and the tremendous scope which you and Dewey have given to the conception has exceeded my more timid philosophizing” (CWJ 10: 369). Thus, as a theory of truth, it could only take form during the preparation for the lectures 1904 and 1907.

⁴⁵ We will discuss this point in Section 4.5.

⁴⁶ The lectures were given at Manchester College on May 4–26, 1908, under the title of “On the Present Situation of Philosophy.” Even though James was at first hesitant, he eventually decided to accept the invitation. After all, as Perry has rightly noted, Oxford was “the very stronghold of monistic idealism” (Perry, vol. II, p. 583), which James would attack in his lectures. However, his heart condition was threatening the whole initiative, as he told Schiller on January 1908: “[M]y damned arterial degeneration (which gives me pectoral anguish when I make efforts or get badly fatigued) may in the end wreck the enterprise” (CWJ 11: 505). To his brother he also lamented his “infernal nervous condition” and “other fatigues” (CWJ 03: 358). Also of note here is James’s dissatisfaction with the style of his lectures and the lack of a more rigorous publication thereafter. In that same letter to Schiller, he confides, “I actually hate lecturing; and this job condemns me to publish another book written in picturesque and popular style (when I was settling down to something whose manner would be more streng ‘wissenschaftlich,’ i.e. concise, dry, and impersonal). My free and easy style in ‘Pragmatism’ has made me so many enemies in academic & pedantic circles that I hate to go on increasing their number, and want to become tighter instead of looser. These new lectures will have to be even looser; for lectures must be prepared for audiences; and once prepared, I have neither the strength to re-write them, nor the self-abnegation to suppress them” (CWJ 11: 505–506). This letter shows how far James was by 1908 from his planed magnum opus. For a detailed account of the development of the Hibbert Lectures, their reception, and the ensuing publication of A Pluralistic Universe, see Bowers (Reference Bowers and James1977, pp. 213–227).

⁴⁷ The terms “each-form” and “all-form” should be understood in association with the opposition of “pluralism” and “absolutism,” respectively. In the first case, the emphasis in on the plurality of individual parts; in the second, the whole is prior to, and determines the parts. For a discussion of this point, see Araujo and Osbeck (Reference Araujo, Osbeck and Pickren2022).

⁴⁸ We will discuss the meaning of James’s spiritualism in Section 4.2.

⁴⁹ Some Problems of Philosophy was published posthumously on May 1911. This time, instead of lectures for general audiences, James based his book on introductory courses he gave at Stanford and Harvard between 1906 and 1907 (WWJ 19: 378–428). His idea was to offer a general introduction to philosophy for college students from his point of view. James left the manuscript unfinished, but with instructions for publication. For more details, see Bowers (Reference Bowers and James1979, pp. 198–207).