The transpersonal journey of post-1890 William James. William James, whose ideas were to grow into the school of functionalism and the philosophy of pragmatism, brought prominence to United States psychology though the publication in 1890 of his two-volume, 1,393 page textbook on psychology, The Principles of Psychology (James, 1950). After 1890, James’s work shifted away from positivist explanations of human behavior and experience to focus on creating a person-centered (as opposed to laboratory-centered) psychology that included a broadened notion of the scope of psychology and its methods of inquiry (Taylor, 1996b). Post-1890 Jamesian psychology focused on personality phenomena related to “the rise and fall of the threshold of conscious” (Taylor’s phrase) and the development of his metaphysics of “radical empiricism” – the notion that all consistently reported aspects of human experience were worthy of investigation. It was during the period from 1890-1910 that James championed the cause of religion, mysticism, faith healing, and psychic phenomena. One of the best accounts of the transpersonal journey of post-1890 William James can be found in Eugene Taylor’s 1996 book, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin (Taylor, 1996b).
Humans live by values that science ignores. After 1890, Williams James came to recognize that psychology’s materialistic, deterministic, reductionist, and mechanistic account of the lived world was inadequate because of its failure (or inability) to accommodate the value-laden character of psychological reality. Human beings live by values that science ignores. When psychological science states that it is neutral in the world of values, or that it is value-free, or that certain values are outside its frame of reference, psychological science implies that those values are without basis, whether it intends to or not.
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The disaster of positivist psychology. The more that William James explored so-called “exceptional” human mental states such as hysteria, multiple personality, possession states, and various psychological disorders, the more he realized that materialistic, deterministic, reductionist, and mechanistic science, by what it said and by what it neglected to say, had helped create insanities that otherwise would not have plagued our world. By denying our species the practical use of those very elements that are needed to remain healthy in body and mind – the feeling that we are at life’s center, that we can act safely in our environment, that we can trust ourselves, that our being and our actions have meaning – positivist science had played an important negative role in contributing to the troubles of society and undermining personal integrity (James, 1936; Taylor, 1982, 1996b).
The artificial scaling down of psychological reality. William James knew that psychology’s determination to be sensory-empiricist like the physical sciences had brought about a particular brand of science that was a relatively narrow one, which had resulted in a certain artificial shrinking and “scaling down” of what constitutes psychological reality to those aspects that could be studied in an exterior fashion. The scientific psychology of James’s time had come to accept only certain specific areas of inquiry and investigation as appropriate for study (e.g., laboratory demonstrations). Experience became limited to events that laboratory science could explain. Areas outside its boundaries became off-limits and taboo subjects. What could not be proven in the laboratory was presumed not to exist. Anyone who experienced “something that cannot exist” was regarded as crazy, delusional, or otherwise mentally ill. As a result, Western psychology had only a surface understanding of what the self was or of the mind’s associative processes. James recognized that if everything we knew about human psychology were limited to what we could demonstrate in the laboratory, then we would not have much of a psychology at all.
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