Is life worth living? This question, the title of one of William James’ essays, is one James himself struggled with in his life and work. Trained as a doctor, James never practiced medicine. Perhaps due to his own struggles with depression and melancholy, he was drawn to philosophy and psychology. That interest turned into a serious academic career. Known as the father of American psychology, James is the founder of functional psychology and cofounder of the James-Lange Theory of Emotion. He also wrote an important work on the psychology of religious experience. James’ philosophical work forms some of the seminal thinking on pragmatism—the belief that usefulness, not truth, should be the focus of philosophical ideas.
Given as the Ingersoll Lectures in 1897, Human Immortality seeks to argue for the possibility of immortality based on the transmission theory of cerebral action. James argues, against the materialism of his contemporaries, that the brain may not be the source and end of consciousness. Rather, consciousness may pervade all of reality. In this way, when a human dies, his consciousness remains in that larger sea of consciousness (James makes clear that it could be many larger seas, i.e., he denounces pantheism).
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