There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the continuous flow of thoughts and emotions that shape our inner experiences.
William James captures the essence of human consciousness by describing it as a dynamic stream composed of various elements such as knowledge, emotions, desires, and deliberation. This perspective suggests that our inner life is not static but in constant motion, influencing how we perceive and interact with the world around us.
In practice
In a lecture about psychology, you can use this quote to discuss the nature of human consciousness.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.
To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.
Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.
O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy.
In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
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