Date: January, 1884

"As a snowflake-crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency and pa...

— 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

"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

"If this "solidarity" of the stream of feelings is all that is meant by the Ego, -- if the Ego is merely a name for that fact, -- well and good, -- we seem agreed!"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"A difference of intimacy, of warmth, of continuity, similar to the difference between a sense-perception and something merely imagined -- which seems to point to a special content in each several stream of consciousness, for which Ego is perhaps the best specific name"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1890

"A 'river' or a 'stream' is the metaphor by which" consciousness "is most naturally described" so that one may talk of "the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."

— 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: 1901-2, 1902

"Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar."

— James, William (1842-1910)