Date: January, 1884

"They involve no new psychic dimension, as when the transcendentalists, after letting a number of 'pure' feelings successively go 'bang,' bring their deus ex machina of an Ego swooping down upon them from his Olympian heights to make a cluster of them with his wonderful 'relating thought.'"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The demand for atoms of feeling, which shall be real units, seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor."

— 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

"However it may be of the stream of real life, of the mental river the saying of Herakleitos is probably literally true: we never bathe twice in the same water there."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The best symbol for [the brain] seems to be an electric conductor, the amount of whose charge at any one point is a function of the total charge elsewhere."

— 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

"If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

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

— 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)