Date: 1890

"'The brain secretes thought, as the kidneys secrete urine, or as the liver secretes bile,' are phrases which one sometimes hears."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1891

"For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?"

— Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

Date: 1892

"Somebody observes the Moon through a telescope. I compare the Moon itself to the meaning; it is the object of the observation, mediated by the real image projected by the object glass in the interior of the telescope, and by the retinal image of the observer. The former I compare to the sense, t...

— Frege, Gottlob (1848-1925)

Date: 1893

A woman's nature "is like a great house full of rooms ... and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

— Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Date: 1898

"The primary aim of the experimental psychologist has been to analyze the structure of mind; to ravel out the elemental processes from the tangle of consciousness, or (if we may change the metaphor) to isolate the constituents in the given conscious formation. His task is a vivisection"

— Titchener, E. B. (1867-1927)

Date: 1892, 1899

"Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, an...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates; they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabe...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them large or small, they are all we have to work with."

— James, William (1842-1910)