“… to rely on first and foremost and always”: Revisiting the role of introspection in William James’s early psychological work

Definition and critique of introspection

If we take into account James’s correspondence, we see that from the beginning of his professional life, the use of introspection was already apparent in relation to his own psychological investigations. For example, in a letter written on August 24, 1872, he confessed to his brother Henry the benefits of his new activity as physiology professor:

The appointment to teach physiology is a perfect God-send to me just now, an external motive to work, which yet does not strain me—a dealing with men instead of my own mind, and a diversion from those introspective studies which had bred a sort of philosophical hypochondria in me of late and which it will certainly do me good to drop for a year. (H. James, 1920, I, p. 167) ³

In the following year, on May 10, 1873, he wrote again to his brother, defending the use of introspection in psychology: “you can’t divorce psychology from introspection, and immense as is the work demanded by its purely objective physiologic part, yet it is the other part rather for which a professor thereof is expected to make himself publicly responsible” (Perry, 1935, I, p. 343).

In his publications, the term “introspection” seems to have appeared for the first time in 1880 (W. James, 1880a, p. 589; 1880b, p. 7). Nonetheless, it is not, as one might imagine, a discussion on the scope and limits of the introspective method. On the contrary, James appealed to introspection merely to sustain his point of view on the association of ideas, the feeling of effort, and the will, topics that we will consider in the next section.

A proper definition of introspection appeared only in 1890, in the seventh chapter of his Principles of Psychology (1890/1981). Without discussing the subtleties and historical variants of that concept, James did not see any difficulty in his definition: “it means, of course, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover” (W. James, 1890/1981, I, p. 185). Through this general and comprehensive definition, he intended to capture all the important positions of 19th-century authors, such as Friedrich Ueberweg (1826–1871), Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), and Franz Brentano (1838–1917; Brentano, 1874, pp. 34–45; Ueberweg, 1857, pp. 69–73; Wundt, 1883, II, pp. 482–483).

Nevertheless, well before presenting his definition in the Principles, James had already written a paper on the problems of introspection: “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (W. James, 1884a). In this text, his goal was to analyze the controversies about the introspective method and to defend its utility, without losing sight of the perils and illusions derived from an excessive confidence in it. Here, James offered more details about the type of introspection he wanted to save for psychology, although he did not give a name to it.

His point of departure was the dispute between two contradictory theses. On the one side are authors such as Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), who judged the introspective method to be useless, as Comte’s famous critique shows:

The thinking individual could not divide himself in two, so that one would think while the other observed him thinking. In this case, the observing and the observed organ being identical, how would observation take place? Therefore, this supposed psychological method is completely useless in principle. (Comte, 1830, p. 36; our translation)

On the other side, James mentioned Brentano and Ueberweg as defending the infallibility of introspection (Brentano, 1874, pp. 34–45; Ueberweg, 1857, pp. 69–73). ⁴ In fact, James was searching for a middle term between these two extremes. For him, the position of Comte and Maudsley was exaggerated. ⁵ At the same time, he recognized the fallibility of introspection, criticizing Brentano and Ueberweg, as the following passage reveals:

Both opinions are extravagances; the first for reasons too obvious to be given, the second because it fails to discriminate between the immediate feltness of a mental state and its perception by a subsequent act of reflection. The esse of a mental state, the advocates of infallibility say, is its sentiri; it has no recondite mode of being “in-itself.” It must therefore be felt as it really is, without chance of error. But the feltness which is its essence is its own immanent and intrinsic feltness at the moment of being experienced, and has nothing to do with the way in which future conscious acts may feel about it. Such sentiri in future acts is not what is meant by its esse. And yet such post-mortem sentiri is the only way in which the introspective psychologist can grasp it. In its bare immediacy it is of no use to him. For his purposes it must be more than experienced; it must be remembered, reflected on, named, classed, known, related to other facts of the same order. And as in the naming, classing, and knowing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here? (W. James, 1884a, pp. 1–2) ⁶

Not by accident, he emphasized that his analysis should also be seen as a complement to the observations of James Sully (1842–1923) on the illusions of the introspective method (Sully, 1881, pp. 189–211). In sum, James was well aware of the pitfalls and dangers of introspection and wanted to highlight a series of specific errors committed by introspective psychology in the 19th century (W. James, 1884a, p. 2). ⁷

In order to understand the problems indicated by James in his article, it is necessary to underline his main psychological thesis, which serves as premise to all his criticisms to introspective psychology. It is the thesis of the stream of consciousness or the stream of thought, announced here for the first time but later resumed and further developed in the ninth chapter of the Principles. In James’s own words:

Our mental life, like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the “substantive parts,” and the places of flight the “transitive parts,” of the stream of thought. (W. James, 1884a, pp. 2–3)

On the basis of this distinction between substantive and transitive parts of consciousness, James announced the first difficulty of the introspective method: “seeing the transitive parts for what they really are” (W. James, 1884a, p. 3). When we try to divide a thought in the middle of its occurrence to analyze any of its parts, James said, we face an obstacle. Because of the speed with which it occurs, its transitive parts escape our attention. It is like “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks” (W. James, 1884a, p. 3). Thus, we end up concentrating on its final or substantive parts. For James, this would be the first fallacy or the first error in psychology, which had been committed equally by British, French, and German psychologists: ignoring the existence of such transitive parts and restricting psychological analysis to the substantive parts of mental life (W. James, 1884a, pp. 3–4).

The second mistake committed by introspectionist psychologists was to neglect that the awareness of each objective relation is accompanied by a corresponding subjective modification. According to James, “we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (W. James, 1884a, p. 5). ⁸ However, our linguistic habits, focused on the substantive parts, did not develop to follow the transitive parts.

Because of this negligence, the continuous flux of mental life is transformed into a discontinuous process, based on a plurality of discrete ideas or mental atoms, a compound of separated ideas or representations. “The Associationist and the Herbartian psychologies are both false and for one and the same reason, that what God has joined together they resolutely and wantonly put asunder” (W. James, 1884a, p. 6). ⁹ For James, we naturally feel our mental life as a continuous flux, in which there are no separated parts. This was for him an empirical fact (W. James, 1884a, p. 7).

The third problem indicated by James consists in the “confusion between the psychologist’s standpoint and the standpoint of the feeling upon which he is supposed to be making his report” (W. James, 1884a, p. 20). Later, in the Principles, James called this confusion “The Psychologist’s Fallacy” (W. James, 1890/1981, I, p. 195). The problem here, according to James, is that the psychologist’s point of view is external to the conscious state or process he is investigating. Both consciousness and its object are objects to the psychologist, who puts them in relation and compares them to verify what kind of knowledge he obtains. By proceeding in this way, he can confound himself and attribute to mental states characteristics they do not have:

Now he may err either by foisting his own knowledge of the object into the feeling, and representing the latter as aware of it just as he is. Or he may err by representing the feeling as if it felt itself to be what he knows it to be. Thus the psychologist may misrepresent the feeling in either of two ways, or in both. (W. James, 1884a, p. 20)

This happens, for example, whenever we describe a mental state by isolating from its real content only a substantive part and saying that it is its object, or whenever we add to its content a substantive part that was not originally articulated with it and say that it is its object. Thus, we lose the totality of the original mental content, which also includes transitive, relational, and incomplete parts of thought. It is necessary, then, to distinguish explicitly the points of view (W. James, 1884a, pp. 21–26).

In the Principles, James resumed the discussion about the methodological problems of psychology and emphasized again the pitfalls of introspection, including the psychologist’s fallacy, but in reality, there was no major departure from his previous article. However, to explain how language contributes to the creation of introspective illusions, James introduced a subtle distinction between the immediate apprehension of a conscious state and its later reproduction in memory or observation. ¹⁰ For him, the fallibility of introspection would be mainly related to the subsequent acts of naming and classifying mental states:

However it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class, and not merely to feel. (W. James, 1890/1981, I, p. 190)

We cannot ignore the fact that, in spite of such pitfalls and illusions of the introspective method, James accepted it as an indispensable instrument in psychological investigations. His position, at least up to the Principles, can be summarized in the following sentence: introspection is fallible but useful. More than that, as he claimed, it is “what we have to rely on first and foremost and always” (W. James, 1890/1981, I, p. 185). Furthermore, he ended his presentation by proposing a criterion to judge the reliability of its results:

The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give for the soundness of any particular psychologic observation which he may report. Such a system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain. (W. James, 1890/1981, I, p. 191)

It seems clear that, up to this point, James’s position was favorable regarding the use of introspection, provided that certain precautions be taken. Moreover, given what we have seen above, he employed introspection to indicate its misuse. However, it is not possible, from his definition alone, to situate the specific type of introspection he defended amidst the various alternative versions that have been formulated throughout the historical development of psychology (Lyons, 1986). For this purpose, the only indication he provided was in the passage he later associated with Mill’s position, according to which introspection has to do only with past mental states. However, because James was emphasizing the negative side of the introspective method to show its limits and perils, we are unable to see its positive aspects. It is worth asking, for example, if he remained faithful to his own indications concerning how the method should be useful to psychologists. Accordingly, after having analyzed his criticisms of the inadequate uses of introspection, it is now necessary to analyze how James effectively employed it in the construction and defense of his psychological theories. Only in this way will it be possible to indicate the specific sense it acquires in James’s initial work.

The use of introspection

The term “introspection” appeared in James’s writings for the first time in his article “The Association of Ideas” (W. James, 1880a), the goal of which was to defend a thesis on the spontaneous or involuntary association of representations in the stream of mental life. After mentioning an example of how many of our representations in daily life escape the traditional laws of association, James affirmed that, “Any reader’s introspection will easily furnish similar instances” (W. James, 1880a, p. 589).

This claim indicates that a significant part of his discussion on the laws of mental association was based on the use of the introspective method, notwithstanding the fact that in this context, he did not offer a definition of it. Even so, it is possible to understand its meaning through the examples James gave to illustrate the types of association. The first one, called “Pure Association by Contiguity,” refers to the reintegration in thought of the entire content of past representations (W. James, 1880a, p. 584). As James put it:

But in every one of us there are moments when this complete reproduction of all the items of a past experience occurs. What are those moments? They are moments of emotional recall of the past as something which once was, but is gone for ever—moments, the interest of which consists in the feeling that our self was once other than it now is. When this is the case, any detail, however minute, which will make the past picture more complete, will also have its effect in swelling that total contrast between now and then which forms the central interest of our contemplation. (W. James, 1880a, p. 585)

In the following, though, James said that this mode of association could not explain the greater part of our daily mental life. According to him, besides contiguity, there is another factor that influences the connection of our representations, namely, their underlying interest or perspective. By hearing the word “swallow,” for example, an ornithologist will think of a bird, whereas a specialist in throat diseases will think of deglutition. In this case, after revealing an example of his own life, James appealed to the reader’s introspective capacity:

Every reader who will arrest himself at any moment and say, “How came I to be thinking of just this?” will be sure to trace a train of representations linked together by lines of contiguity and points of interest inextricably combined. This is the ordinary process of the association of ideas as it spontaneously goes on in average minds. We may call it Partial or Mixed Association. (W. James, 1880a, p. 587)

Another clear example of how James used introspection in his early work can be seen in his article “The Feeling of Effort” (W. James, 1880b). Here, his main goal was to offer a physiological and psychological analysis of volitional phenomena. ¹¹

James’s first step was to criticize some authors who, like Wundt (1862), defended the existence of a feeling of innervation, that is, a feeling of muscular effort caused by motor or efferent discharge. For James, in voluntary movements, the will turns itself only to the images of movement, not to the muscular details of its execution. For this reason, the resulting feelings must be afferent, not efferent. Most important of all, in this argument, introspection played again a central role:

Our idea, notion, thought, of a movement, what we mean, whenever we speak of the movement, is this sensible perception which we get of it when it is taking place, or has completely occurred.

What then is this sensible perception?

What does it introspectively seem to be? I unhesitatingly answer: an aggregate of afferent feelings, coming primarily from the contraction of muscles, the stretching of tendons, ligaments and skin, and the rubbing and pressing of joints; and secondarily, from the eye, the ear, the skin, nose or palate, any or all of which may be indirectly affected by the movement as it takes place in another part of the body. The only idea of a movement which we can possess is composed of images of these, its afferent effects. By these differences alone, are movements mentally distinguished from each other, and these differences are sufficient for all the discriminations we can possibly need to make, when we intend one movement rather than another. (W. James, 1880b, p. 6)

Next, in order to reject the thesis of the existence of efferent feelings of innervation, James resorted again to the introspective method:

For if anything be obvious to introspection it is that the degree of strength of our muscular contractions is completely revealed to us by afferent feelings coming from the muscles themselves and their insertions, from the vicinity of the joints, and from the general fixation of the larynx, chest, face and body, in the phenomenon of effort, objectively considered. … If I will to utter the word Paul rather than Peter, it is the thought of my voice falling on my ear, and of certain muscular feelings in my tongue, lips and larynx, which guide the utterance. All these feelings are afferent, and between the thought of them, by which the act is mentally specified with all possible completeness, and the act itself, there is no room for any third order of mental phenomenon. (W. James, 1880b, p. 7)

It is important to note, however, that for James the will in itself is not exhausted by feelings of muscular effort, for there are cases of decision making in which no motor representation is involved, such as when we decide to be patient instead of acting immediately. Therefore, James insisted in separating both mental states, appealing once more to introspection:

Volition with effort is then incidental to the conflict of ideas of what our experience may be. Conflict involves those strange states or general attitudes of feeling, which when we speak logically or intellectually, we call affirmation and negation, but when we speak emotionally, we call assent and refusal. Psychologically of course, like every other mental modification, these attitudes are feelings sui generis, not to be described, but only labelled and pointed out. What they are in se, what their conflict is, and what its decision and resolution are, we know in every given case introspectively with an absolute clearness that nothing can make clearer. (W. James, 1880b, p. 23)

Later, discussing a new subject in his article “What is an Emotion?,” James presented an analysis of emotional states accompanied by bodily movements (W. James, 1884b). Right at the beginning, he explained that his arguments had emerged out of “fragmentary introspective observations” (1884b, p. 189). Be that as it may, his central goal was to defend a new theory of emotion, in opposition to the traditional conception, according to which the bodily modifications are manifestations or expressions of emotions. For him, instead, the bodily modifications follow directly the perception of stimulus, emotion being our feeling of those occurring bodily modifications. This, too, could be introspectively observed:

The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. (W. James, 1884b, p. 192)

Things are not so simple, though. The same time as he used introspection to support his theories, James also admitted that the results are not always absolute and that there might be divergent introspective reports. This happens, for example, when we ask someone to analyze his/her own emotions separately from their corresponding bodily movements:

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. It is true, that although most people, when asked say that their introspection verifies this statement, some persist in saying theirs does not. (W. James, 1884b, p. 193)

This passage is in complete agreement with the first section, when we showed that James was aware of the fallibility of introspection. On the other hand, despite the difficulties, James also believed that, at least in certain cases, introspection allows us to draw secure conclusions. On January 26, 1886, in a letter to the German psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), he declared his belief in the introspective method: “The feeling of distance is a feeling, or nothing is a feeling. That immediate simple fact of introspection cannot be overthrown by any amount of argument” (Perry, 1935, II, p. 64).

Regarding his theory of emotion, James also used the introspective method to generate reliable empirical evidence. In the following passage, we see that even his own autobiographical memories are included as valid empirical material:

The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable bodily effects. (W. James, 1884b, p. 196)

What kind of introspection?

After presenting James’s uses of introspection, we should ask if they lead us to a better understanding of his position on the subject. For example, are they coherent with his previous definition? If not, what do we learn from this?

As we argued in the introduction, in the few studies with a more detailed discussion on James’s position (Lyons, 1986; Myers, 1986a, 1986b; Shusterman, 2005), there is no consensus on the details, although there is an agreement that he understood introspection as being related to past events, as retrospection (Lyons, 1986, p. 6; Myers, 1986a, p. 12, 1986b, p. 66; Shusterman, 2005, p. 424). Myers, for example, adds that James had in mind not retrospection in general, but only immediate retrospection, “that one can still observe (rather like an afterimage) something that has just happened” (1986b, p. 67).

Despite all the merits of their detailed discussions of James’s position on the topic, which raise many questions that go beyond the focus of our investigation, both Lyons and Myers, having restricted their analyses only to selected passages of the Principles and not having paid attention to James’s different uses of the introspective method in his early writings, did not perceive that he introduced in his early work a second kind of introspection, namely somatic or bodily introspection, which involves direct or immediate apprehension of our conscious states. ¹² This becomes clear in James’s early analysis of emotions, as we saw in the previous section (W. James, 1884b). However, even in the Principles, one can find such examples:

When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one’s bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named. (W. James, 1890/1981, II, p. 1067)

Shusterman (2005) was right in noting the important role that somatic introspection plays in James’s conception. However, he did not see that it represents a new kind of introspection, because it involves not a retrospective, but a direct apprehension of conscious states. This is not the whole story, however. As seen in the previous section, James also used somatic introspection in a retrospective way, including autobiographical memories of his childhood, to generate empirical evidence and to support his theory of emotion. In this way, we can say that somatic or bodily introspection can be used both directly and retrospectively, a differentiation not considered by Shusterman.

As for Stanley’s thesis, he simply fails to present detailed and relevant textual evidence for a similarity between James’s position and the Buddhist tradition. The few passages he quotes from the Principles do not show any similarities at all, but instead striking differences. Moreover, the only section he mentions of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience does not support his thesis, because James is not using meditation or any other kind of introspective practice; he is only analyzing and comparing others’ reports of spiritual exercises and profound states of consciousness related to mental healing (W. James, 1902/1985, pp. 99–105). ¹³

Our analysis reveals further that James’s use of introspection was not in full agreement with his previous definition and defense of it. Especially in relation to emotion, he accepted a direct apprehension of bodily consciousness, which cannot be classified as retrospection. Thus, he ended up extending the meaning and reference of introspection in his psychological investigations.

Final remarks

We hope to have shown in a satisfactory manner that James defended and used introspection from the beginning of his professional life. However, the only definition he presented in the period under investigation, given its general and comprehensive character, did not make explicit the type of introspection he defended. For example, it was not clear what he understood by observation or examination of mental phenomena. Upon further investigation, we discovered that James tried to find a middle term between the two extremes of Comte and Brentano, accepting retrospection as a solution. However, his criticism of introspective psychology revealed negative rather than positive aspects of that method. In an attempt to understand his position, we resorted to his concrete use of introspective evidence to support his psychological theses, thus concluding that he used two different forms of introspection.

It is important to note that the results of our investigation cannot be generalized to James’s whole work. After 1890, he may have changed his mind or simply expanded introspection to new uses. This question can only be answered by future studies that take into account his later writings and correspondence.

Despite the limitations of the present paper, our results allow us to draw at least four conclusions. First, at the level of James’ scholarship, by showing that the divergent positions in the literature are partial finds that have been improperly taken for the whole, we are able to reconcile them into a new, more comprehensive interpretation of James’s stance (introspection as retrospection and as direct apprehension of conscious states). Second, it becomes clear that the history of introspection is more complex than is usually assumed. Third, at the level of theoretical psychology, James’s case illustrates how introspection can play an important role in the construction of psychological theories. Also important to contemporary issues in theoretical psychology is the possibility of a mismatch between the definition and use of introspection, as we have seen in James. Fourth, at a meta-theoretical level, our investigation shows how the history of psychology can be relevant to theoretical discussions in psychology. By revealing the level of complexity involved in the historical development of introspection, it can serve as an antidote to the oversimplifications and hasty generalizations that one finds in contemporary presentations and debates on the topic. In this sense, the history of psychology can and should go hand in hand with theoretical and philosophical psychology.