The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
The reason why this fact is so strangely garbled in the books seems to
be what on an earlier page (see p. 196 ff.) I called the psychologist's
fallacy. We have the inveterate habit, whenever we try introspectively
to describe one of our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in
itself and talking of something else. We describe the things that
appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts _about_ those
things--as if these and the original thought were the same. If, for
example, the thought be 'the pack of cards is on the table,' we say,
"Well, isn't it a thought of the pack of cards? Isn't it of the cards
as included in the pack? Isn't it of the table? And of the legs of
the table as well? The table has legs--how can you think the table
without virtually thinking its legs? Hasn't our thought then, all these
parts--one part for the pack and another for the table? And within the
pack-part a part for each card, as within the table-part a part for
each leg? And isn't each of these parts an idea? And can our thought,
then, be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each answering to
some element of what it knows?"
Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thought taken as an
example is, in the first place, not of 'a pack of cards.' It is of
'the-pack-of-cards-is-on-the-table,' an entirely different subjective
phenomenon, whose Object implies the pack, and every one of the cards
in it, but whose conscious constitution bears very little resemblance
to that of the thought of the pack _per se_. What a thought _is_,
and what it may be developed into, or explained to stand for, and be
equivalent to, are two things, not one.[251]
An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter the phrase _the
pack of cards is on the table_ will, I hope, make this clear, and may
at the same time condense into a concrete example a good deal of what
has gone before.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.--The Stream of Consciousness.]
It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal line in Fig.
29 represent time. Every part of it will then stand for a fraction,
every point for an instant, of the time. Of course the thought has
_time-parts_. The part 2-3 of it, though continuous with 1-2, is yet a
different part from 1-2. Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot
take any one of them so short that it will not after some fashion or
other be a thought of the whole object 'the pack of cards is on the
table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of
them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in
a unitary undivided way. This is what I mean by denying that in the
thought any parts can be found corresponding to the object's parts.
Time-parts are not such parts.
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