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"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Author

James, William (1842-1910)

Work Title

On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology

Date

January, 1884

Metaphor

"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it."

Metaphor in Context

Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that "tendencies" are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all. It is in short the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the reader's attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Mr. Spencer has made another in overthrowing the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in feelings, relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoons-ful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra, that surrounds and escorts it, -- or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
(pp. 16-17)