The Philosophy of William James

WILLIAM JAMES was an artist by virtue of an originality and perfection of literary style which made him one of the most brilliant writers of his own country. But above all he was an artist in his extraordinarily vivid and delicate feeling for concrete realities, his penetrating vision in the realm of the particular, and his aptitude for seizing on that which was characteristic and unique in everything that he met. I do not here refer to external and material realities (although it is true that James appreciated as few do the beauties of nature, and having a remarkable facility for drawing, he entertained for a time the idea of becoming a painter), for in the life of the soul he saw a still more mysterious and fascinating spectacle, and it is to the observation of this that he resolved to devote himself. He was a born psychologist and a psychologist of genius precisely because of this artistic insight, which in him, by

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