INTRODUCTION – JAMES AND WORDSWORTH

Unlike Emerson, William James was a professional philosopher. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the profession. He maintained that “technical writing on philosophical subjects is certainly a crime against the human race!” And from his summer home in New Hampshire he wrote that he was “one unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being.” (Of course this is a philosophical statement.)

James was always “a man speaking to men,” as Wordsworth wrote of the poet, and nowhere more so than in his philosophy. Indeed, it is almost as if Wordsworth were forecasting the character of William James when he described the poet as