Date: January, 1884

"Now the first difficulty of introspection is that of seeing the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so ...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"From the dawn of an individual consciousness to its close, we find each successive pulse of it capable of mirroring a more and more complex object, into which all the previous pulses may themselves enter as ingredients, and be known."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of chang...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"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 a...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The present image shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thoughts as yet un-born."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"I wish that space were here afforded to show what, in most cases of rapid thinking, the fringe or halo is with which each successive image is enveloped."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1937

"Yes, the gadget mind is useful in its place; it can do many things. But the spiritual mind, God-illumined, is the hope of the race."

— Newton, Joseph Fort (1876-1950)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1949

"Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed para-optical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)