The American philosopher-psychologist William James was born in New York City in 1842 to the religious philosopher Henry James Sr. and his wife Mary Walsh. Throughout his childhood, James attended private schools in the United States and Europe and was also privately tutored. At the age of seventeen, James wanted to become a painter. His father who wanted him to study science or to become a philosopher, strongly disapproved. Believing that it would serve as a distraction and hopefully change William’s mind, his father took the family to Europe for a year. William would not be deterred.

Civil war began, but due to numerous health issues James did not enlist. In 1864 James entered Harvard Medical School, and in 1869 he graduated with an M.D. degree that he never put to use.

First, his suggested applications of psychological principles to teaching became the core of educational psychology. Second, In 1909 James who was an executive committee member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, was instrumental in getting the Rockefeller Foundation and similar groups to allocate millions of dollars to the mental hygiene movement, the development of mental hospitals and the training of mental health professionals. William James is known as one of America’s most respected psychologists. He is generally considered not only the most influential of all American philosophers, but the very representative of American thought.

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associations don’t exist in real-life experiences. He believed that our minds are constantly going and that some mental processes are automatic, such as daily routines. He says that when habits are formed something is changed in the nervous system so that every time we repeat the act it gets easier and easier for us to perform the act. Thus becoming the functionalist theory of mental life and behavior and the conclusions he came to with relating to only human life merely scratches the surface. It also tries to explain how any living thing deals with their specific environment. Unlike the new

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