  To be sure, Du Bois’s language and analysis owe a debt to James’s “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884) and, in particular, to James’s conceptualization of the will’s independence (its ability to choose courses of action not fixed “by parts of the universe already laid down” (1884, 150)) in terms of the concept of chance—a debt Du Bois acknowledges when he describes his view as “Jamesian pragmatism.” James explains the ethical implications of his indeterminism when he takes issue with Schopenhauer, “who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances” (1879, 13). Schopenhauer forgets, James argues, that “in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the very complexion of the character” (1879, 13). As a sociologist, Du Bois’s purports to have applied Jamesian pragmatism beyond the sphere of ethics, to “all human action,” but it is precisely here that he breaks with James; for notwithstanding his defense of indeterminism, James is skeptical of the possibility of measuring the degree to which the will is free (James, 1890, 572). In addition, James insists that the science of psychology must methodologically reject the assumption of chance. Psychology “abstracts from free-will without necessarily denying its existence” (James, 1892,  457).[32]