The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, psychology, American literature, sociology, religion, biology, and related subjects.

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life is by Professor John Kaag, who teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, the United States of America.

The TU Library collection includes a number of other books by and about William James. 

William James was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the father of American psychology.

According to Professor Kaag, James had an open, active, and hopeful an attitude toward life, but because he faced many challenges in his life, he realized that things do not always go as we hope and plan.

James believed that truth should be judged by its practical effect on our lives.

Here are some thoughts by William James from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

• The Thought and Character of William James (1935)

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

• Letter to E.L. Godkin (24 December 1895)

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. — You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.

• Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman (7 June 1899), in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2 (1926)

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him… The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way… The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the idea. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” and so on. But still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs, we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some reverie connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakes no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.

• The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

• The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

• The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)