Practical Fruits

William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, had this to say about New Thought, known at the time as "mind cure": The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by the Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James that comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on "Natural Theology" delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland between 1901 and 1902.

These lectures concerned the nature of religion and the neglect of science, in James' view, in the academic study of religion. Soon after its publication, the book entered the canon of psychology and philosophy, and has remained in print for over a century.

"The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most strongly insists—the development namely from within outward, from small to great. Consequently one's thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be literally like a step in the dark. To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New Thought terms, this is called 'entering the silence.'"H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom – 1900

The oldest of the five children of Henry James Sr., a theologian, and the brother of Henry James, the novelist. The family lived in Europe for five years and returned to the USA, eventually settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where James remained for the rest of his life. Unusual for a philosopher, he was happily married and had five children.

He entered Harvard Medical School in 1863 and graduated with a doctor of medicine (MD) after six years. His education was interrupted by bouts of illness and depression, which he was able to overcome only by what has been described as a “Promethean act of will.” For almost three years after receiving his MD, James lived in his family home battling ill health and depression. He would later describe this depression as a “crisis of meaning” brought on by his studies in science. These left him feeling that there was no ultimate meaning in life, and that his belief in freewill and God were illusions. James suffered panic attacks and hallucinations just like his father before him, which caused him to believe that his illness was rooted in a biological determinism he could not overcome. One day in April of 1870, after reading an essay by Charles Renouvier[1], his psychological fever began to subside. He had come to believe that freewill was not an illusion and that his own will could alter his psychological state. As he writes in his journal from that time:

“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 — ‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’ — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Together with Charles Sanders Peirce[2], who first coined the term, James founded the philosophical school of pragmatism, which holds that the meaning of an idea is to be sought in its practical effects, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is to be tested by the practical consequences of belief.

[1] Charles Bernard Renouvier (1815 – 1903) was a French philosopher. Renouvier became an important influence upon the thought of American psychologist and philosopher William James. James wrote that "but for the decisive impression made on me in the 1870s by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up."

[2] Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".

An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself a logician first and foremost. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea as was used decades later to produce digital computers.

Peirce's most important work in pure mathematics was in logical and foundational areas. He also worked on linear algebra, matrices, various geometries, topology and Listing numbers, Bell numbers, graphs, the four-color problem[3], and the nature of continuity. He worked on applied mathematics in economics, engineering, and map projections (such as the Peirce quincuncial projection), and was especially active in probability and statistics. Peirce made a number of striking discoveries in formal logic and foundational mathematics, nearly all of which came to be appreciated only long after he died.

[3]In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem states that, given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, producing a figure called a map, no more than four colors are required to color the regions of the map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Two regions are called adjacent only if they share a common boundary of non-zero length (i.e. other than a single point) that is not shared with a third region. For example, Utah and Arizona are adjacent, but Utah and New Mexico, which only share a point that also belongs to Arizona and Colorado, are not.

Despite the motivation from coloring political maps of countries, the theorem is not of particular interest to mapmakers. According to an article by the math historian Kenneth May[4],

"Maps utilizing only four colours are rare, and those that do usually require only three. Books on cartography and the history of mapmaking do not mention the four-color property."

[4] Kenneth O. May (1915 – 1977) was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics.