garding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build up
the liiirher states of mind out of their 'association/ 'inte-
gration/ or 'fusion/ as houses are built by the agglutina-
tion of bricks. This lias the didactic advantages Avhich the
synthetic method usually has. But it commits one before-
hand to the very questionable theory that our higher states
of consciousness are compounds of units; and instead of
starting with what the reader directly knows, namely his
total concrete states of mind, it starts with a set of supposed
'simple ideas* with Avliich ho has no immediate acquaint-
ance at all, and concerning whose alleged interactions he is
much at the mercy of any plausible phrase. On every
ground, then, the method of advancing from the simple to
the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and
abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a
student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer
to follow the 'analytic' method, and to begin with tho
most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily ac-
quaintance in his own inner life. The analytic method
will discover in duo time the elementary parts, if such
exist, witliout daiiger of precipitate afisuin])tion. 'J'he
reader will bear in mind that our own chapters on sensation
have dealt mainly with the physiological conditions there-
of. They were ptit first sis a mere matter of convenience,
because incoming currents come first. Psyrtmlorjicalhi
they might bettor luivo come la^t. I'uro senRations won
162 PSTCHOLOGT.
described on page 12 as processes which in adult life are
well-nigh unknown, and nothing was said which could for
a moment lead the reader to suppose that they were the
elements of compositio7i of the higher states of mind.
The Fundamental Fact. — The first and foremost concrete
fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner ex-
perience is the fact that couscious7iess of some sort goes on.
' States of mind ' succeed each other in him. If we could
say in English ' it thinks/ as we say ' it rains ' or * it blows/
we should be stating the fact most simply and with the
minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply
say that thought goes on.
Four Characters in Consciousness. — How does it go on ?
We notice immediately four important characters in the
process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chap-
ter to treat in a general way :
1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal con-
sciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness states are always
changing,
3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.
4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the ex-
clusion of others, and welcomes or rejects — chooses from
among them, in a word — all the while.
In considering these four points successively, we shall
have to plunge in medias res as regards our nomencla-
ture and use psychological terms which can only be ade-
quately defined in later chapters of the book. But every
one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is
only in a rough way that we are now to take them. This
chapter is like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his
canvas, in which no niceties appear.
When I say every ' state ' or ' thought ' is part of a personal
consciousness, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms
in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks
us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the
most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 153
confront in the next chapter; liere a pvoliminary word will
euttioe.
In this room — this lectnre-room, say — tliere are a multi-
tnde of thoughts, yours ami mine, some of wliich cohere
mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself
and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-
together. Tliey are neither: no one of them is separate,
but each belongs with certain others and with none beside.
Mv thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your
thought witli your otlier thoughts. Whether anywhere in
the room tliere be a mere thought, which is nobody's
thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no
experience of its like. The only states of consciousness
tliat we naturally deal with are found in personal con-
sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and
you's.
Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.
There is no giving or bartering between them. No thouglit
even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per-
sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation,
irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele-
mentary psychic fact were not thouglit or this thought or
that thought, but my thought, every thought being otvned.
Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor simi-
larity of quality and content are al)le to fuse thoughts
together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging
to different personal minds. The breaches between such
thoughts are the most absolute breaches in luvture. Every
one will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence
of something corresponding to the term ' personal mind' is
all tliat is insisted on, without any particular view of its
nature being implied. On these terms the personal self
rather than the thought might l)e treated as the immediate
datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not
'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and *I feel.'
No psychology, at any rate, can question the ejistence of
personal selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to
154 PSTCHOLOGT.
be connected are tvhaf we mean by personal selves. The
worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of
ihese selves as to rob them of their worth.
Consciousness is in constant change. I do not mean by
ihis to say that no one state of mind has any duration —
even if true, that would be hard to establish. What I wish
to lay stress on is this, that no state once gone can recur and
be identical ivitli ivliat it was before. Now we are seeing,
now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollect-
ing, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a
hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately
engaged. But all these are complex states, it may be said,
produced by combination of simpler ones; — do not the
simpler ones follow a different law ? Are not the sensa-
tions which we get from the same object, for examj^le,
always the same ? Does not the same piano-key, struck
with the same force, make us hear in the same way ? Does
not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the
same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the
same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put
our nose to the same flask of cologne ? It seems a piece of
metaj)hysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet
a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof
that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily
sensation tivice.
What is got twice is the same object. We hear the same
note over and over again; we see the same quality of green,
or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the
same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract,
physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe
in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our
thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that
our ' ideas ' of them are the same ideas. When we come,
some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see
how inveterate is our habit of simply using our sensible
impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to the recogni-
tion of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grasa
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 155
out of the window now looks to me of the same green in
the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would luive to
paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yel-
low, to give its real sensational effect. We take no heed,
as a rule, of the different way in which the same things
look and sound and smell at different distances and under
different circumstances. The sameness of the fJiings is
what we are concerned to ascertain; and any sensations
that assure us of that will probably be considered in a
rough way to be the same with each other. This is what
makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of
different sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the
fact. The entire history of what is called Sensation is a
commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensible
qualities received apart are exactly alike. "What appeals to
our attention far more than the absolute quality of an im-
pression is its ratio to whatever other impressions we may
have at the same time. AVhen everything is dark a some-
what less dark sensation makes us see an object white.
Helmholtz calculates that the white mar])le painted in a
picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is,
when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times
brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.
Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly
learned ; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect con-
siderations. These make us believe that our sensibility is
altering all the time, so that the same oljject cannot easily
give us the same sensation over again. We feel tilings
differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry
or full, fresh or tired ; differently at night and in the morn-
ing, ditTcrently in summer ami in winter; and above all,
differently in cliildhood, manhood, and old age And yet
we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world,
with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible
things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is
shown best by the difference of our emotion about the
things from one age to another, or wlien we are in dif-
156 PSYCHOLOGY.
ferent organic moods. What was bright -and exciting
becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song ia
tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.
To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, fol-
lowing the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always
undergoing an essential change, must be added another
presumption, based on what must happen in the brain.
Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For
an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the
second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly
speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodi-
fied feeling an impossibility; for to every brain-modifica-
tion, however small, we suppose that there must corre-
spond a change of equal amount in the consciousness
which the brain subserves.
But if the assumption of ' simple sensations ' recurring
in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how
much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in
the larger masses of our thought!
For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of
mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have
of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears
a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same
fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of
it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different
angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in
which it last appeared. And the thought by which we
cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought
suffused with the consciousness of al] that dim context.
Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in
our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how
we ever could have opined as we did last month about a
certain matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that
state of mind, we know not how. P'rom one year to an-
other we see -hings in new lights. What was unreal has
growrr real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends
we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows;
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSJSESS. 157
the women once so divine, tlie stars, the woods, and the
waters, liuw now so dull and coniniou! — the young girls
that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distin-
guisliable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for
the books, what wan there to find so mysteriously sigjiifi-
cant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight ? Instead
of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work;
and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of
common goods.
1 am sure that this concrete and total manner of regard-
ing the mind's changes is the only true numner, difticult
as it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems
obscure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance.
Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no
two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the propo-
sition we started to prove. The proposition is more
important theoretically than it at first sight seems. For
it makes it already impossil)le for us to follow obediently
in the footprints of either the Lockian or the Ilerljartian
school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence
in Germany and among ourselves. No doubt it is often
convenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic
sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness
as if they were all built out of unchanging simjjle ideas
which 'pass and turn again.' It is convenient often to
treat curves as if they were composed of small straight
lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids.
But in the one case as in the other we must never forget
that we are talking symbolically, and that there is noth-
ing in nature to answer to our words. A ])n-vi(iitenthi
exist in fj 'â– Idva^ vliich inakea it.s ajijiearanre Ix'/orc tite
fodtUijIits of consciousness at periodical intervals is as
ni>/t/iolo(/ical an entit>/ as the Jack of Spades.
Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly
continuous. I can only ilcdnc 'cotitiuuous ' as that which
is without l)icacii, crack, or division. The only breaches
that can well bo conceiveil to occur witiiin tbc limits of a
158 PSYCHOLOay.
single mind would either be interruptions, h'm^-gaps dur-
ing which the consciousness went out; or they would be
breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what
followed had no connection whatever with what went
before. The proposition that consciousness feels continu-
ous, means two things:
a. That even where there is a time-gap the conscious-
ness after it feels as if it belonged together with the con-
sciousness before it, as another part of the same self;
h. That the changes from one moment to another in the
quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.
The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken
first.
a. When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and
recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them
mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one
of the two streams of thought which were broken by the
sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in
the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly
buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth;
so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and
never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's
thought in turn is as httle liable to go astray. The past
thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter
alone. He may have a knowledge, and a correct one too,
of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank
into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge
from that which he has of his own last states. He remern-
hers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's. Re-
membrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused
with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere
conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and
intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought
also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is
mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the
same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine.
What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in
themselves be will have to be matter for future consider-
ation. Kut whatever past states appear with those quali-
ties must be admitted to receive the greeting of the pres-
ent nu-ntal state, to be owned by it, and accepted as
belonging together with it in a common self. This com-
munity of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain,
and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of
the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with cer-
tain chosen portions of the past.
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped
up in bits. Such words as 'chain ' or 'train' do not de
scribe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It
is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream ' are
the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. Jn
talking of it hereafter, let ns call it the stream (f thomjlit,
of coiiscioasness, or of subjective life.
b. But now there appears, even within the limits of the
eame self, and between thoughts all of which alike have
this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing
and separateness among the parts, of which this statement
eeems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are
produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the suc-
cessive segments of the stream of thought. If the words
'chain' and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how
came such words to be used at all ? Does not a loud
explosion rend the consciousness upon which it a1)rn))tly
breaks, in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the
thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and
continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is
not {\\\\w\(iT pare, but thnnder-breaking-upon-silence-aTid-
contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective
thunder, coming in this way, is cpiite different from wliat
it w(nild be wore the thunder a continuation of pre\ ioua
thunder. 1'he thunder itself we belieee to abolish ainl
exclude the silence; but iho feeling of the thunder is also
a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would bo ditli-
cult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of m.in a
160 PSTCHOLOOY.
I'eeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling
of anything that went before.
'Substantive' and 'Transitive' States of Mind. — When
we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our
consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of
its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be an alternation of
flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses
this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and
every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are
usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort,
whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind
for an indefinite time, and contemplated without chang-
ing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations,
static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between
the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative
rest.
Let us call the resting-places the ' substa7itive parts,' and
the places of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream of
thought. It then appears that our thinking tends at all
times towards some other substantive part than the one
from which it has just been dislodged. And we may say
that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from
one substantive 3onclusion to another.
Now it is very diflficult, introspectively, to see the tran-
sitive 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 he reached, it
so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses
and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut
a thought across in the middle and get a look at its sec-
tion, and he will see how difficult the introspective obsei-
vation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought
is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the
conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is
nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to
be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand
THE 8TREAM OF COIiSCIOUS^^ESS. 161
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 particular meaning in the sentence quite
evaporated. 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. And the challenge to pro-
duce these transitive states of consciousness, which is sure
to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who
contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's treat-
ment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to
point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he
argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to
make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.
The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful.
If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's
stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all
schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and
the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the
stream. Now the blunder has historically worked in two
ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to Sensa-
tionalism. Unable to lay their hands on any substantive
feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations and
forms of connection between the sensible things of the
world, finding no named mental states mirroring such re
lations, tiiey have for the most part denied that any such
states exist; and many of them, like Hume, have gone on
to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as
well as in it. Simi»le substantive ' ideas/ sensations and
their copies, juxtajxtsed like dominoes in a game, but really
separate-, evcrytbing else verlial illusion, — such is tiie up-
shot of tliirt view. The JnleUectualisls, on the other hand,
unable to give up the reality of relations extra menfem, but
equally unal)le to point to any distinct substantive feelings
in which they were known, have made the same admission
162 PSYCHOLOGY.
that such feelings do not exist. But they nave drawn an
opposite conclusion. The relations must be known, they
say, in something that is no feeling, no mental 'state,'
continuous and consubstantial with the subjective tissue
out of which sensations and other substantive conditions
of consciousness are made. They must be known by
something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an
actus 2)urus of Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written
with capitals and considered to mean something unutter-
ably superior to any passing perishing fact of sensibility
whatever.
But from our point of view both Intellectualists and
Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as
feelings at all, then so surely as relations hetioeen objects
exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feel-
ings exist to ivTiicli these relations are Jcnoiun. There is
not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adver-
bial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in
human speech, that does not express some shading or
other of relation which we at some moment actually feel
to exist between the larger objects of our thouglit. If
we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear
revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of
consciousness that matches each of them by an inward
coloring of its own. In either case the relations are num-
berless, and no existing language is capable of doing jus-
tice to all their shades.
We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feel-
ing of hut, and a feeling of hy, quite as readily as we say
a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so
inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the exist-
ence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost
refuses to lend itself to any other use. Consider once
again the analogy of the brain. We believe the brain to
be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state
of change — the change afi'ecting every part. The pulses
of change are doubtless more violent in one place than in
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOrSNEHS. 163
another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than at
tliat. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate,