Date: January, 1884

"I propose in this article to supplement Mr. Sully's chapter on the Illusions of Introspection, by showing what immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"Our mental life, like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"Now the first difficulty of introspection is that of seeing the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so ...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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

"The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"They involve no new psychic dimension, as when the transcendentalists, after letting a number of 'pure' feelings successively go 'bang,' bring their deus ex machina of an Ego swooping down upon them from his Olympian heights to make a cluster of them with his wonderful 'relating thought.'"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The demand for atoms of feeling, which shall be real units, seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"From the dawn of an individual consciousness to its close, we find each successive pulse of it capable of mirroring a more and more complex object, into which all the previous pulses may themselves enter as ingredients, and be known."

— 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)