Psychology: the briefer course (Harper torchbooks, TB1034. The Academy library)

I highly recommend Psychology: the briefer course to anyone who might be interested in the foundations of modern psychology. The work is very accessible, the style very straightforward, and the content far from dry or textbookish. The experience is definitely enhanced if one is familiar with some of the basic tenets of early modern thinkers (especially those like Kant and Hegel), but this knowledge is in no way required to enjoy James. He is treating psychology as a natural science, but it is important to understand that beyond this book James is a broad-ranging thinker, and so his Psychology dips its toes in many other fields of philosophy, and some fields not at all treated by philosophers (as, for example, the section at the end of Chapter 3 where he describes his experiences with spiritual mediums). The book itself is printed well enough, and contains no extraneous material (introductory essays from some scholar, intrusive footnotes, chapter analyses, etc.), just the way I like it.