Get your own Free Home PageWilliam James: April 30, 1870:
"I finished the first part of Renouvier's second 'essais' and see no reason why his definition of free will - 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' - need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present - until next year - that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will..."
"Now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power."
from Gerald E. Meyers:
"In declaring his fist free act would be to choose to believe in free will, he expressed the existentialist thesis that ehtics rest finally upon choice and commitment; theer is clear resemblance between James and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre."
"...This response is in part what existentialists mean in claiming that one must find meaning in life within oneself or that one must give life the required meaning..."
from a web site:
"When he returned home in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still ill. Though he completed his M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in 1869, he was unable to begin practice. Till 1872 he lived in a state of semi-invalidism in his father's house, doing nothing but reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved by the reading of Renouvier on free will and the decision that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." This meant the rejection of established science and theology. His psychological and philosophical work, his views on the methods of science and the nature of reality all received their impulse from this resolution."
Abraham Maslow had a similar esperience with depression, he got over a bout of depression by deciding to study depression itself for his doctoral thesis.
Good James site: http://www.cc.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html
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