James's essay The Importance of Individuals is a response to Grant Allen's The Genesis of Genius, and John Fiske's Sociology and Hero Worship, which in turn are responses to Great Men and Their Environment, a criticism of Allen's view (derived from Herbert Spencer) that individuals have no influence on the course of history.
I'm reading The Will to Believe / Human Immortality, a Dover collection of two books (The Will to Believe is itself a collection of essays, some originally given as lectures). I wish the Allen and Fiske pieces had been included in the collection.
Routledge charges an extortionate price for Bertrand Russell's What I Believe, a pamphlet he wrote in the twenties as part of a series. The series included Russell's Icarus, a response to Haldane's Daedalus, and Russell's then wife Dora wrote Hypatia, on women's liberation. It would have been nice to have at least Icarus and Daedalus included in the paperback of What I Believe (eight quid for fifty pages!).
The Dover collection of James is good value for money, but similarly it wouldn't have hurt to have added another couple of dozen pages to it, which would make James's response more understandable.
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