Across the Atlantic, William James (1842–1910) launched psychology upon another trajectory. In defining psychology as ‘the science of mental life’ James fastened on the deficiencies of classical and medieval attempts to classify inner activities like wishing, feeling, thinking and reasoning by making them faculties of the soul. Late nineteenth century attempts to explain thought by simple linkages in what came to be called ‘associationism’—and Wundt would have been a target here-seemed to him just