William James (1842-1910) pragmatist, pluralist, voluntarist, a thinker of awesome depth and significance. To take but one point: James espoused a way of understanding human history that refuses to bury the individual with "social trends," yet likewise avoids the hero worship of Carlyle's "great man theory."

To understand the Jamesian view of history, and its ties to morality, one begins with "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."

"Invest some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands -- that and that only is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science."