On the 30th of April, 1870, a man of twenty-eight wrote in his diary that the day before had been a crisis in his life. He had a Harvard medical degree he had never used, he was living in his parents' house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for two years he had barely been able to work. Twenty years later he published The Principles of Psychology, and its most famous chapter is about habit.

Tonight is the whole of William James, slowly, read as what his work is underneath: an account of what a person can still do from inside a life that is mostly running itself.

The house of Henry James senior, and an education with no fixed address. A year in a painter's studio. The Amazon with Louis Agassiz. Germany, and the letters to Oliver Wendell Holmes. The dressing room, and the account of it he published thirty-two years later as the testimony of an anonymous Frenchman. Renouvier, and the diary entry. Then the Principles: the fly-wheel of society, the four maxims and what modern research has kept of them, the stream of thought, "my experience is what I agree to attend to", the social selves, and self-esteem as success over pretensions - with the denominator nobody touches. Then the emotions, the will, the sick soul, pragmatism, a settler's clearing in North Carolina, a walk with Freud in 1909, and Chocorua.

It will not tell you to change your life. It gives you the one part of it he claimed, in his father's house, with nothing else to work with: which thought you hold, for the next few seconds, when several are available.

Nothing here is medical advice. It is the history of one idea about attention, told quietly.

Read in a calm voice, at low volume, for sleep and for rest.

Awake? Blaise Pascal on the room you won't sit in is on PhiloPsych Wake → It's Not the Phone. It's the Room You Won'...

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
The Principles of Psychology (1890) - William James
The Will to Believe (1897) - William James
Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) - William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) - William James
Pragmatism (1907) - William James
Essais de critique générale (1854-1864) - Charles Renouvier
"The Ethics of Belief" (1877) - W. K. Clifford
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006) - Robert D. Richardson
"How Are Habits Formed" (2010) - Phillippa Lally and colleagues

CHAPTERS
0:00 - The thirtieth of April, 1870
2:50 - The habits you built
8:42 - The house he grew up in
13:31 - An education with no address
18:08 - The painter
22:40 - The Amazon
26:58 - Germany
31:59 - The dressing room
37:11 - Renouvier
41:59 - The diary entry
46:42 - What he actually decided
51:19 - Why that is not wishful thinking
56:36 - The twelve years
1:00:58 - The chapter on habit
1:05:33 - The fly-wheel of society
1:10:26 - What he means by too late
1:17:08 - Nothing is ever wiped out
1:22:06 - The four maxims
1:26:24 - Launch with a strong initiative
1:31:05 - Never suffer an exception
1:36:12 - Act at the first opportunity
1:41:23 - A little gratuitous effort
1:46:41 - What modern research adds
1:53:53 - The stream of thought
1:58:56 - The transitive parts
2:03:49 - The sculptor and the block
2:09:04 - Everyone knows what attention is
2:14:15 - The self
2:19:01 - The social selves
2:26:27 - Success over pretensions
2:33:34 - The denominator
2:40:39 - Afraid because we tremble
2:45:39 - What survives of the theory
2:51:10 - Effort
2:58:34 - The twenty years after
3:03:11 - The Varieties
3:10:27 - The sick soul
3:14:49 - The divided self
3:22:08 - Pragmatism
3:28:55 - Truth happens to an idea
3:33:58 - On a certain blindness
3:39:04 - The energies of men
3:46:40 - What he was actually like
3:53:19 - Chocorua
3:57:18 - What is actually usable
4:03:20 - What he would say about tonight
4:09:18 - Grain on grain
4:14:46 - Sleep now

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Where the record is thin, the episode says so. The dressing-room account is known to be his own because he admitted it to his French translator, Frank Abauzit, in a letter in 1904. The "greatest discovery of my generation" line in chapter 46 is not his; it first appears in print decades after his death. Four corrections: James taught America's first psychology course but was not its first professor of psychology (chapter 1); the cold-morning passage is in the chapter on Will, not Habit (chapter 4); Alexander Bain was Scottish, not German (chapter 18); and Will is the twenty-sixth of the Principles' twenty-eight chapters, not the last (chapter 34). You do not have to decide anything tonight.

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