If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that mere feelings don't define the quality of experience or decision-making; deeper reflection is necessary.
William James argues that if the validity of human experiences relied solely on the feelings they evoke, then states like drunkenness, which can be pleasurable, would be deemed the highest form of experience. However, he implies that true value in human experience comes from more than just fleeting sensations and feelings; it requires meaningful contemplation and understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of happiness during a philosophy class.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.
It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.
No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.
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