- Lived:
- 1842–1910 · New York City, Europe, and Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Tradition:
- American pragmatism; the founder of American psychology
- The Big Idea:
- Ideas are tools for living — an idea's meaning is the difference it makes in practice, and truth is something that happens to an idea when it works — while consciousness itself is not a chain of thoughts but a flowing, selective stream.
- In their words:
- "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who wrote the founding masterpiece on how the mind works had to talk his own mind out of suicide first — and the philosophy he built afterward is one long argument that what you believe, and what you attend to, actually shapes what your life becomes.