The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2 Book

"Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them as individual facts. The logical stickler for justice always seems pedantic and mechanical to the man who goes by tact and the particular instance, and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Sometimes the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that of the man of instinct." Pg. 674.
James concludes the second volume of his mammoth The Principles of Psychology comfortable in his own curiosity. After spending hundreds of pages detailing his observations and thoughts on how the brain perceives and reasons and emotes, he leaves with more questions than answers. He is suspect of his own conclusions. Despite the apparent objectivity of his recorded observations, he is the first to wonder how his own process creates a perceived reality.
The popular notion that 'Science' is forced on the mind ab extra, and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly absurd. The craving to believe that the things of the world belong to kinds which are related by inward rationality together, is the parent of Science as well as sentimental philosophy; and the original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic the materials are in his hands. Pg.667
After over a decade, as I near the conclusion in reading all the titles found in the Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, I clearly see why William James is listed as the penultimate volume (in the first edition). He is the embodiment of 19th century Classical education. He pulls from philosophy with as much ease as biology. He is empirical but refuses to be bound by empiricism. He observes the world without being deluded into thinking the world has any obligation to fit within his observations. His observations serve as foundations for his theories on brain functioning, instinct, and Darwinian natural selection. But, despite all his learning, and clear intellectual rigor, James is comfortably mystified by Consciousness and the order of things. For James, we are all pawns for our own psychology. It's probably best if I let the last lines of this review be the last lines from his book: Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor impulses, the aesthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all grown up in ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant enough. And the more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night."