Know With

Portrait · Attention · 1890

Know With · 16

A nineteenth-century study window open to a moving river, a notebook on the desk.
He almost called it the stream of consciousness. He preferred thought. The river got into the language anyway.

Plate · Generated interpretation

The Stream of Thought

A psychologist refuses to cut the mind into pieces that would make a textbook tidy, and names the flow instead.

  • Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Gilded Age America
  • 42.38°N 71.12°W

Stay with one thought until another arrives without being asked.

PhilosophyPsycheScienceLanguage / Etymology

Listen · Eve

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William James, writing The Principles of Psychology, arrives at the chapter that will outlive the book. Consciousness, he says, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors that will not mislead. Thought is sensible; it is changing; it is reasonably continuous; it always seems to deal with objects other than itself; it is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others. The last is attention. The whole is a life, not a pile of ideas.

Source

The Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap. IX, “The Stream of Thought.” James is writing as a psychologist who is also a philosopher, at a moment before the word consciousness had become a banned term in American labs. He is describing, not proving. The description has the authority and the limit of a brilliant first-person plural.

James insists on the “fringe”: the halo of relations around a word or image, the feeling of “if” and “but,” the sense that a forgotten name is near. These are not decorations. They are how thought is thought. A psychology that keeps only the clear nuclei will miss the mind. He also notes that each thought is owned: it is my thought, in a way that does not require a soul-substance sitting behind it. Ownership is a feature of the stream.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on.
Interpretation

Later writers took “stream of consciousness” into the novel. James’s stream is not Woolf’s technique, though she inherits a climate. Behaviorism would soon refuse the stream as data. Cognitive science would later return, cautiously, to report. James sits before that war, naming what it is like to have a mind at all.

A word

attention

From Latin attendere, to stretch toward. James: my experience is what I agree to attend to. The stretching is the life of the stream.

Distant echoes

Echo

Interwar London · Westminster

A day in Clarissa’s mind

Woolf makes the stream a novel. The inner weather becomes a city. James would have recognized the fringe; he might have quarreled with the art.

Counterpoint

Second urbanization of the Ganges plain · Uruvelā, later Bodh Gayā

Beneath the fig

James wants the stream as it is. The Buddhist analysis wants to see the stream as not-self. One describes; one releases. Both start from flow.

Another language

offers another language

The cocktail of names

You do not hear the party until your name is spoken. James called this the mind’s interest. Later psychologists will call it selective attention. The phenomenon is older than both names.

One question remains

Attention · What enters awareness?

If thought is a stream, where do you stand to notice it? In it, on the bank, or is the standing another current?

What remained