Abstract
[Miller’s first writing after his return from Europe in 1934 to begin his ‘American retirement’ in Boston was the following essay occasioned by Perry’s two-volume, prize-winning biography tracing the development of James’s thought. With Perry’s book as a point of departure, Miller makes a comprehensive and fundamental assessment of James’s views and sketches out his own alternatives. In particular, Miller finds James lacking at the very point where his earlier teacher, George Fullerton, had most impressed him, namely, discernment of how analysis can base ‘free will’ and ‘knowing’ on assured facts of experience to achieve durable results in philosophy. To be sure, James well practiced the method of analysis in his treatment of ‘personality’ in Principles of Psychology but elsewhere applied it haltingly or not at all because his prophetic side, his concern for the richness and openness of experience, made him distrust analysis.
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Notes
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James. As revealed in unpublished correspondence and notes, together with his published writings. Vol. I. Inheritance and Vocation. Vol. II. Philosophy and Psychology. Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, 1935. xxxviii + 826 pp.; xxii + 786 pp.
I have used in part in this paragraph phraseology already employed elsewhere. [Review of J. S. Bixler, ‘Religion in the Philosophy of William James’,Journal of Philosophy 24 (1927) 204–205.]
I have endeavored to make this clear in detail in an article, ‘Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It’, Mind 43 (1934) 1–27.
So also at a later date had G. S. Fullerton in his System of Metaphysic, though he never, like Hodgson, gave it general formulation. Too late and too obscurely to influence James. Fullerton derived it from Berkeley and employed it very effectively, as regards the external world, in his classroom teaching. There is no space here to comment on James’s correspondence with Hodgson and Renouvier.
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© 1975 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Miller, D.S. (1975). James and Analysis. In: Philosophical Analysis and Human Welfare. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1792-3_4
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