M3D1: An Icon towards Experimental Psychology
William James’ major contributions to American experimental psychology are captured in his book titled The Principles of Psychology, comprised of two volumes. It took him twelve years to write the book. Within the two-volume book James wrote about consciousness, sensation, perception, association, memory attention, imagination, reasoning, emotions, and will, all elements of the functions of the mind. One of his most intriguing ideas is the stream of consciousness and its link to selective attention. James described consciousness as a stream of thoughts that flow together to make a whole and not in separate parts. He compares the mind to a sculptor. A sculptor works on a block of stone to form a …show more content…
Each one of us however experiences crisis in our own unique way. He lost his son, his parents, and a brother all in one year. He fell into a deep depression and alone all he did was read books. A thought from one of the books impacted his soul. It was on will. He made a decision to change his will of hopelessness into a will of power to decide to act on free will to think outside the box, and listen to his sixth sense of possibility beyond the current desperate situation and try new things to overcome. From this insight he wrote another book called The Varieties of Religious Experiences. In this book James defines religious experience as: “the feeling, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they stand in relation to the Divine” (Jones, 2003). In a review from the Journal of Moral Education - Religious Experience according to William James and Howard Thurman (Jones, 2003), Jones writes: Thurman defines religious experience as: “the consciousness and direct exposure of the individual to God”. James refers to God as the Divine, while Thurman refers to the Divine as God. James appears to follow in his father’s belief that one does not need to follow a denomination to have a relationship with God. His father was a theologian. Thurman was a theologian and an ordained minister of a Baptist