Topics Philosophers

Question I have a question regarding referencing and I don't know where else to turn, the quote: " Our greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another" is all over the net attributed to James, but I can not find a specific work of his which it is cited. Can anyone help?

Accepted:
October 10, 2013

Comments

That definitely doesn't sound like William James, on account of the use of the word "stress". The notion of stress, in what I take to be the relevant sense of the term, only really started to arise in the 1950s. But James died in 1910. That's the internet for you.

He did however say the following, which might perhaps have inspired whoever it was that made up that quotation:

"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right."

That's from The Principles of Psychology (1890), ch. 4; and there's a corresponding passage in ch. 10 of Psychology: Briefer Course (1892).