William James · Philosophy
James’s revolution in psychology: consciousness is not a chain of separate mental ‘atoms’ but a continuous, personal, ever-changing, selective <em>flow</em> - a stream in which no state ever recurs unchanged, and attention is forever choosing what to notice.
You learned that James rejected the ‘mental atoms’ of the associationists and described thought as a continuous stream that is personal, always changing, sensibly continuous, and selective (attention choosing among objects). Explain the five characters of thought and why the stream metaphor mattered.
Leads to Henri Bergson.
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