William James · Philosophy
Why the same thought never comes twice - and what that makes the self.
Describe a river as so many pailsful and barrelsful of water. Nothing has been left out, on paper. Yet the one thing that made it a river, the flowing, has drained away into the containers.
That gibe was aimed at the account of mind that ruled the psychology of the day. Associationism - the mind as simple sensations linked by association - built thought out of elementary units, atoms that could be strung and restrung. William James, at work on The Principles of Psychology (1890), thought this was no description of experience at all. It was a construction imposed on experience by theorists.
Introspect honestly, he insisted, and you never find bare atoms of sensation strung in a chain. You find something continuous, personal, and always on the move. The first question for a psychology is not what its mosaic contains. It is what the mosaic leaves out.
James gave the stream five characters, and each denies something the mosaic asserts. First, every thought is personal: it belongs to a particular consciousness, and there are no free-floating thoughts, only mine and yours. Second, thought is always changing. No state, once gone, can recur identical, because every thought is coloured by the whole stream that came before it, and that stream is never the same twice. What returns is the object - the same rose, the same theorem - not the mental state.
Third, thought is sensibly continuous - it feels unbroken even across a night’s sleep, with no felt joints. Fourth, thought deals with objects independent of itself; it points beyond itself to a world. Fifth, and for James the most important, thought is selective: it welcomes some things and suppresses others, attending here and ignoring there.
The associationists say otherwise. On their account the same idea can leave the mind and come back identical, like a coin returning to a pocket. If that school is right, the five characters describe an illusion, a smoothness the mind only seems to have.
Four of the five describe what thought is like. The fifth says what thought does, and that is the one with consequences.
What fills your stream is not everything that happened to you. It is the part you noticed. Of the five characters, selection fascinated James most, because it makes each mind an artist working on a common block.
The world floods us with far more than we can take in. Out of that blooming, buzzing confusion attention carves the ordered world we actually experience, according to our interests. The mind, James wrote, ‘is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest.’
The consequence goes deeper than two disagreeing reports. They attended to different things, and different things are now what their minds are made of. This is why James’s psychology is called functional - it studies the mind by what it does. The mind is no passive mirror registering reality. It is an active instrument, shaped by needs and purposes, forever choosing which parts of the flood to light up.
That leaves a question about the noticing itself. The present you do it in turns out not to be an instant at all.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
Recall the five characters James gave to thought, and the picture of mind he wrote them against. Explain what changed in psychology once thought was described this way.
Leads to Henri Bergson.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.