William James 威廉・詹姆斯 · William James

🔊He took his medical degree in 1869 and never practiced. His back, his eyes, and his digestion troubled him, and behind these lay a depression that brought him close to suicide. The science he had studied seemed to show that human beings are machines and that effort is an illusion. On April 30, 1870, he wrote in his diary that he had been reading the French philosopher Renouvier and saw no reason why free will need be an illusion. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” He recovered slowly, and he always spoke of that decision as the turning point.

他在 1869 年拿到了醫學學位，卻從未行醫。他的背、眼睛與消化都困擾著他；而在這些的背後，是一場把他帶到自殺邊緣的憂鬱。他所學的科學，似乎顯示人是機器、努力是幻覺。1870 年 4 月 30 日，他在日記裡寫道：他讀了法國哲學家勒努維耶，看不出有什麼理由非得把自由意志當成幻覺不可。「我自由意志的第一個行動，就是相信自由意志。」他恢復得很慢；而他後來總是把那個決定說成轉捩點。

🔊In 1873 Harvard gave him a post teaching physiology. He moved the subject toward the mind, set up one of the first psychological laboratories in the world, and in 1878 signed a contract to write a textbook in two years. It took twelve. The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, runs to fourteen hundred pages and is written with a novelist’s eye. It described consciousness as a stream and not a chain of separate ideas, argued that we feel afraid because we tremble and not the other way about, and gave a chapter to habit, “the enormous fly-wheel of society,” on which it founded a theory of education. “The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

1873 年，哈佛給了他一個教生理學的職位。他把這門課朝「心靈」的方向推，設立了世界上最早的心理學實驗室之一；1878 年，他簽了一份合約，要在兩年內寫出一本教科書。結果寫了十二年。1890 年出版的《心理學原理》長達一千四百頁，是用小說家的眼光寫成的。它把意識描述成一條流，而不是一串分開的觀念；主張我們是因為發抖才感到害怕，而不是反過來；並且用了一章談習慣，「社會巨大的飛輪」，在這上面建立了一套教育理論。「所以，一切教育當中的大事，就是使我們的神經系統成為我們的盟友，而不是我們的敵人。」

🔊He had married Alice Gibbens in 1878, and the marriage steadied him. They had five children, one of whom died in infancy. His students at Harvard included Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he was known for treating them as equals. Having finished the great book, he announced that he was tired of psychology and turned to the questions that had driven him since his breakdown.

他在 1878 年娶了艾麗絲・吉本斯；這段婚姻使他安定了下來。他們有五個孩子，其中一個夭折。他在哈佛的學生包括西奧多・羅斯福、葛楚・史坦與杜波依斯；而大家都知道，他把學生當作平輩看待。寫完那部大書之後，他宣布自己厭倦了心理學，轉向那些從他崩潰以來就一直驅動著他的問題。

🔊The essays of the 1890s defended the right to believe where evidence cannot decide and a decision cannot wait. In 1899 he published his lectures to schoolteachers, with three addresses to students added, among them “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant.” His Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh became The Varieties of Religious Experience, which studied conversion, saintliness, and mysticism as facts of human psychology, from the testimony of those who had them. He did not ask first whether the beliefs were true.

他 1890 年代的幾篇文章，為這樣一項權利辯護：在證據無法裁決、而決定又不能等的地方，人有相信的權利。1899 年，他出版了對中小學教師的演講集，另外加上了三篇對學生的演講；其中有〈論人類的某種盲目〉與〈什麼使一個人生有份量〉。他在愛丁堡的吉福德講座，成了《宗教經驗之種種》；這本書根據親歷者的見證，把皈依、聖徒性與神祕經驗當作人類心理的事實來研究。他並沒有先問那些信念是不是真的。

🔊In 1907 he gave the name pragmatism, which he credited to his friend Charles Peirce, to a method and a theory of truth, and spent his last years defending it against critics on both sides of the Atlantic. A weak heart, strained years earlier on a climb in the Adirondacks, grew worse. He died at his summer house in New Hampshire in August 1910. His brother Henry, the novelist, was with him.

1907 年，他把「實用主義」這個名字（他說這個名字出自他的朋友查爾斯・皮爾斯），給了一種方法與一種關於真理的理論；並且把最後的幾年用來在大西洋兩岸為它辯護。他的心臟本來就弱，多年前在阿第倫達克山區登山時受過損傷；這時越來越糟。1910 年 8 月，他在新罕布夏州的避暑別墅去世。他的弟弟、小說家亨利，當時在他身邊。