 Thus, Dewey sought an account of psychological experience mindful both of experimental limits and culture’s pervasive influences. William James’s tour de force, The Principles of Psychology (1890), modeled how he might explain the conscious and intelligent self without appeals to a transcendental Absolute. As Dewey recalled, Principles’ emphatically biological conception of mind gave his thinking “a new direction and quality” and “worked its way more and more into all my ideas and acted as a ferment to transform old beliefs” (FAE, LW5: 157). Rather than measuring psychic phenomena against preexisting abstractions, James showed how one might employ a “radical empiricism” that starts from the phases and elements of actual, lived experience. The goal would be to understand experience’s functional origins from a perspective that was, typically, coherent and whole.