Assent_. This
line of reasoning, however, is most familiarly associated with the name
of William James; he first illustrated the Pragmatic Method by a famous
paper (for a theological audience) on _The Will to Believe,_ and founded
the psychological study of religious experience in his Gifford Lectures
on _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.

6. This brings us to the last, and historically the most fertile, of the
sources of Pragmatism, Psychology. The publication in 1890 of James's
great _Principles of Psychology_ opened a new era in the history of that
science. More than that, it was destined in the long run to work a
transformation in philosophy as a whole, by introducing into it those
biological and voluntaristic principles to which he afterwards applied
the generic name of Pragmatism, or philosophy of action. We must pass,
then, to consider the New Psychology of William James.

CHAPTER II

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

Until the year 1890, when James's _Principles_ were published, the
psychology of Hume reigned absolutely in philosophy.[A] All empiricists
accepted it enthusiastically, as the sum of philosophic wisdom; all
apriorists submitted to it, even in supplementing and modifying it by
'transcendental' and metaphysical additions; in either case it remained
uncontested _as psychology_, and, by propounding an utterly erroneous
analysis of the mind and its experience, entangled philosophy in
inextricable difficulties.

Hume had, as philosophers commonly do, set out from the practically
sufficient analysis of experience which all find ready-made in language.
He accepted, therefore, from common sense the belief that physical
reality is composed of a multitude of separate existences that act on
one another, and tried to conceive mental life strictly on the same
analogy. His theory of experience, therefore, closely parallels the
atomistic theory of matter. Just as the physicist explains bodies as
collections of discrete particles, so Hume reduced all the contents of
the mind to a number of elementary sensations. Whether the mind was
reflecting on its own internal ideas, or whether it was undergoing
impressions which it supposed to come from an external source, all that
was really happening was a succession of detached sensations. It seemed
to Hume indisputable that every distinct perception (or 'impression')
was a distinct existence, and that all 'ideas' were equally distinct,
though fainter, copies of imp