William James: The Stream

Six dialogues in the psychology of a mind describing itself

A course on the thought of William James.

Psychology

What you will learn

State what happened in April 1870 — the Renouvier definition, and the resolution to make free will's first act the belief in free will — and why it matters that this preceded the psychology.
Correct the fairy-tale version: the diary was a hinge, not a cure; recovery was a spiral of years, through work and marriage, with relapses.
See the seed of the whole tier in the diary itself: habit ('grain on grain of wilful choice'), attention (sustaining a thought), and belief as something one can act on before one can prove it.
State the five characters of the stream — personal, ever-changing, sensibly continuous, about things beyond itself, selective — and why 'It is nothing jointed; it flows' overturns the train-of-ideas picture.
Distinguish substantive from transitive parts, and use the fringe to explain what the forgotten-name gap and the thunder-breaking-on-silence show.
Correct two standing misreadings: the blooming-buzzing-confusion line (order blooms from within; no Kantian machinery imposes it) and the claim that introspection alone proved the stream flows.
State the physical basis of habit — plasticity; pathways deepened by passage — and its two great effects: habit simplifies and makes accurate our movements, and diminishes the conscious attention they require.
Apply the maxims: launch with strong initiative, permit no exception until the habit is rooted, seize the first opportunity to act on every resolution.

The Man Who Chose to Believe in Free Will — Where this psychology came from: a young man's collapse, a diary entry that staked everything on an unprovable act of will, and a recovery slow enough to be honest about.
The Stream of Thought — The founding observation of the whole psychology: thought is not a procession of separate ideas but a continuous, personal, selective stream — and the most important parts of it are the ones the old…
Habit: The Fly-Wheel — The most practical chapter I ever wrote: the nervous system's plasticity makes repetition into structure, structure into character, and character into fate — for good and for evil, and never to be…
Attention and Will — The hinge of the psychology: attention is the mind's choosing agency, the will's essential achievement is to hold a difficult idea fast — and whatever freedom we have lives in that holding.
What Is an Emotion? — The most famous reversal in psychology: the bodily changes follow directly on the perception, and our feeling of those changes as they occur IS the emotion — with the subtraction test as its evidence…
The Self and Its Selves — The most puzzling puzzle in psychology: the me that is everything a man can call his — material, social, spiritual — and the I that knows it; with the strange discovery, at the chapter's edge, of…

The Principles of Psychology (1890) — my chief work — twelve years in the writing, two volumes, both the textbook of the new science and a philosophy of mind; nearly everything in this tier lives there.
Psychology: Briefer Course (1892) — the one-volume condensation students called 'Jimmy' (the Principles was 'James') — the same doctrines, cut to the classroom.
Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) — my lectures to schoolteachers — the psychology turned practical: habit, attention, interest, and the conduct of life.
What Is an Emotion? (1884) — the article in Mind where I first argued that the bodily changes ARE the emotion — the theory the world came to call James-Lange.
The Letters of William James (1920) — my correspondence and diaries, published by my son Henry after my death — the crisis of 1870 is recorded there in my own hand.

the stream of consciousness, habit, selective attention

Part of the Simposeum course library.