Date: 1900, 1901

"Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?"

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1900, 1901

"We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, e...

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Such fleeting aspirations are mere 'velleitates,' whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1902

"Suddenly, in the midst of some train of thought, rises the sought-for line, like a ghost out of a gulf."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1902

"If it were otherwise, no one could even set down on paper a closely reasoned argument, for the attention would be skipping like a stone hurrying down a sharp incline, or it would be moving hither and thither like a helpless shuttlecock at the mercy of eager players."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1904

"This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

The empiricist universe is "like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in...

— James, William (1842-1910)