This chapter could easily have been our first chapter. Consciousness after all is the foundational concept in William James’s psychology. It is central to everything that he discussed in The Principles of Psychology. It is the first and last concept in his conceptual pantheon. And yet he had to acknowledge that important psychological phenomena, like habitual behaviors, develop to the point that they take place without consciousness. As cerebral circuits are formed and strengthened in the course of repeated actions, consciousness deserts the reflexive instigation of action since, James argued, it can “no longer be of use” (PP 1107). And besides previously recognized examples of unconscious habitual behavior, a host of other mental phenomena that occur without consciousness were coming to light, in both clinical and experimental settings, as James worked on his Principles during the 1880s. At the same time as Sigmund Freud and others, he realized that these phenomena defied and exceeded the traditional limits of psychology.
Perhaps that is why he defined psychology in the Principles as “the Science of Mental Life” rather than “the science of Consciousness” (15). In any case, the distinctive view of non-conscious psychological phenomena that James was developing reflected his initial tendency and later preference to call many of these phenomena subconscious, transliminal, or transmarginal, i.e., below or beyond the margin or threshold of consciousness, rather than unconscious per se. His innovative inclusion of a wide variety of previously overlooked non-conscious phenomena within his psychology and his attempts to formulate their nature and significance is what warrants the placement of this chapter after the discussion of more traditional psychological topics. What is consciousness, and how and for what purpose it exists, are not the only questions we need to address in this chapter. We also need to consider how we are to understand and explain psychological phenomena that do not exhibit typical forms of consciousness. James’s discussion of both sets of questions made his Principles truly groundbreaking, profoundly influential not only upon the emergence of scientific/academic psychology but also upon the development of applied/clinical psychology.
“Consciousness” is the functional equivalent of “mind” in James’s work, despite the inconvenient existence of apparently non-conscious mental phenomena. Without consciousness, there would be no Jamesian psychology – no experience to think about, no awareness to write about, and no interest (on our part) to hear or read what others have thought or written about it. In one way or another, it underlies all the psychological phenomena that he described and explained. In 1884, James addressed the nature and function of consciousness in an article “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (OSO), which was essentially a first draft of his classic chapter on “The Stream of Thought” (Ch. 9) in The Principles of Psychology. His previous articles, starting in 1878, had challenged psychological orthodoxy in various ways and offered dramatically fresh approaches to some old philosophical and psychological problems, but none of them bore so directly upon the very core of traditional psychological thought. With this article, the ongoing emergence of a distinctly Jamesian psychology was fully apparent. This psychology, based on careful observations of the experience and characteristics of consciousness, was presented by James as an antidote for the “immense tracts of our inner life” – and here he meant significant aspects of our conscious inner life – that “are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities” (OSO 143).
As presented six years later in his more fully developed chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” this antidote took the form of a phenomenology of consciousness. James’s perceptive and detailed description of consciousness in this chapter richly deserves the fame it has attained. Often cited and quoted, it continues to be lauded by many individuals and disciplines as one of the fundamental statements of the modern understanding of consciousness. Its defining features are its broad conception of consciousness and its focused treatments of five fundamental aspects of it.
First, we will review James’s broad conception of consciousness. As prologue, we have already seen that for him the terms “thought” and “feeling” can have virtually identical meaning, especially when they are used, as he often used them, “in a wider sense than usual” (PP 186). We have seen, too, that he was leery of offering definitions and using terms in any rigorously specified manner that suggested an unwarranted precision of knowledge, exceeding what had been firmly established at the time that he wrote. So, while he conceived “consciousness” typically as equivalent to the broader notions of “thought” and “feeling,” there were times when he used it to encompass “thought” and “feeling” in the narrower sense. And further demonstrating his refusal to be consistent, he entitled his classic chapter on consciousness “The Stream of Thought” and went on to stipulate the five characteristics of “thought,” while two years later, in the Briefer Course version of his Principles, he rechristened this fundamental chapter “The Stream of Consciousness.” (This is the title by which his treatment is now typically known, perhaps partly because of its use in describing the stream-of-consciousness literary style adopted by many modernist writers, including his brother Henry and his student Gertrude Stein. See PBC Ch. 11 for this abbreviated version of his chapter.) Of most concern to us, however, is that James’s chapter and discussion in Principles is widely and correctly regarded as his basic treatment of “consciousness,” despite his use of the term “thought.”
Further illustrating his terminological flexibility, James began this chapter referring to “our study of the mind from within,” then mentioned “consciousness” as the chapter’s concern, and finally asserted that “the only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself,” all within the first paragraph. “The mind from within” = “consciousness” = “thinking itself.” Having equated all three modes of expression, he went on to say that “the first fact for us…as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on” (219). And to elaborate, he emphasized that
I use the word thinking…for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. 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.
(220)
Thought – i.e., consciousness – goes on. That is the foundational fact of experience. And what does this fact entail? “From our natal day,” James wrote, consciousness is “a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” of which we are immediately aware (219). That’s all he felt he could say without going beyond what was ‘given’ in experience. No definition, in his estimation, can take the place of this “minimum of assumption.” An acceptance of this fact, not a description of it, is psychology’s starting point.
But why does consciousness, starting from this minimally and commonly ascertained fact, exist? James had already addressed this topic in preceding chapters, revealing himself to be a committed, albeit creative Darwinian who believed that organs and their functions evolve for the sake of survival. (One form that James’s creativity took was his insistence that survival is but one of the objectives a person could have. People do, after all, sometimes prefer other values to mere survival, as he pointed out in VRE 232–233. See also Leary 2009.) In discussing “The Scope of Psychology” (Ch. 1), he offered examples before stipulating that “the pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are…the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality,” which is to say, of consciousness (21). Adopting this “criterion” to “circumscribe the subject-matter of this work,” he added that “no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind” (23). Later, in his rejection of “The Automaton-Theory” (the title and topic of Ch. 5), James elaborated his views on the function or purpose of consciousness. (Some of the following rehearses matters treated above under “Mind and Body,” but further elaboration is warranted in the context of this chapter.) Consciousness, James argued, is not a mere “epiphenomenon”; instead, it is efficacious; it makes a difference in the life of any creature that possesses it. Referring to human consciousness in particular, he noted that it attends one’s experiences and actions, and he averred that it was “quite inconceivable” to him that it “should have nothing to do with a business [experience and action] which it so faithfully attends” (140). Despite metaphysical and scientific claims to the contrary, he insisted, “we ought to continue to talk in psychology as if consciousness had causal efficacy,” especially since “the particulars of the distribution of consciousness [across species], so far as we know them, point to its being efficacious” (141). Specifically,
consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom…From this point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that it helps him in some way in the struggle, just as they do. But it cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and influencing the course of his bodily history.
(141–142)
We can conjecture how “consciousness might help him,” James said, in relation to “defects” in the “organs” in which “consciousness is most developed.” This statement harkened back to his earlier review of the cerebral correlates of consciousness in “The Scope of Psychology,” which had led to the conclusion, “universally admitted nowadays,” that “the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations” (18).
With this fact in mind, James revealed in the following chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2) just what the happy “defect” is that makes consciousness so valuable: As the brain has evolved and become more and more complex, it has become more and more “unstable” and “indeterminate” in its actions. In lower creatures, incoming stimuli lead automatically, in a reflexive and determinate manner, to stereotypic responses. But “one of the purposes for which it [the more highly evolved cortex] exists is the production of new paths,” which open up new possibilities – different paths to different motor discharges – so that currents do not necessarily run down previously organized paths, but may be directed to new ones, and thus to new ends. This increased flexibility, resulting from the brain’s “plastic powers,” explains the greater adaptability of the human species (78). And in this situation, in which genuine alternatives become very real possibilities, and the actions prompted by the flow of currents through the circuitry of the hemispheres are no longer predetermined, it is easy to imagine why consciousness has evolved. In a word, it is the means by which the flow of currents can be inhibited, delayed, and redirected, just as our subjective experience suggests that it is. (Anticipating Freud, James asserted that “the entire drift of recent physiological and pathological speculation is towards enthroning inhibition as an ever-present and indispensable condition of orderly activity.” But taking a different tack than Freud, he continued that “we shall see how great is its importance, in the chapter on the Will,” by which he meant conscious will or choice. See 76.) Though he admitted that we have no idea how consciousness interacts with the brain, he observed that the interaction is a matter of daily experience and that the psychic factors in that interaction (including interest-driven attention, as we shall see) can be specified. This is what makes consciousness so significant, and why it has evolved. (See 177–179 in which James refused to conjecture about how the patent “connection between mind and brain” occurs: “Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever,” than pretend to know what we do not, he advised on 179. “All that psychology can do [in light of this “great mystery”] is to seek to determine what the several brain-processes are,” he added on 649.)
Going beyond the fact of the mind-brain connection, James noted that without consciousness survival or non-survival would not be a subjective concern. It would only be an objective circumstance describable from outside by some other creature who possessed consciousness. It could not be conceived by, nor would it be a motivating factor for, an unconscious organism. With the addition of consciousness, however, survival becomes a vital, deeply personal matter: It “ceases to be a mere hypothesis.” Instead, “real ends appear for the first time…upon the world’s stage” – ends (including survival) for which humans in particular, with their highly evolved forms of consciousness, can and do strive. Thus,
every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not.
(144)
So, in sum, the “instable brain” has become “an instrument of possibilities,” and consciousness, assuming that it is “endowed with causal efficacy,” can now be seen as the means of reinforcing “favorable possibilities” and repressing “the unfavorable or indifferent ones.” And indeed, if consciousness actually does have “the teleological function we suppose,” we would expect exactly what we see: that consciousness “is only intense when nerve-processes are hesitant” and that it “sinks to a minimum” when action is “automatic” or “habitual.” “Nothing could be more fitting” if consciousness matters in the way James had indicated, and “nothing [could be] more meaningless, if not” (144–145). So the reasonable conclusion, as James memorably put it, is that the evolutionary function of consciousness is to increase the “efficiency” of the brain by “loading its dice,” which it does by placing its finger on (i.e., attending to) the alternatives that better serve the goals of the individual, whatever they may be, while ignoring the others (143).
James went on to offer several additional arguments in his opposition to the “automaton-theory” that denied causal efficacy to consciousness, but we can let matters lie, as he did, with his summary conclusion that “I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstructions [to the contrary] not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesitation in using the language of common-sense throughout this book” (147). That language includes “choice” and “will” as well as “consciousness” and “thought.” James’s psychological explanation of the former two (as we shall see in a later chapter) would be as innovative as his psychological description of the latter two, which were really one and the same, as we have seen.
James’s classic description of thought or consciousness in his “The Stream of Thought” chapter revolves around five general characteristics. At least as experienced by humans, he claimed, thought or consciousness tends to be personal, variable, continuous, object-oriented, and selective. We will consider each characteristic, one at a time.
(1) Consciousness is personal: “Every ‘thought’ is part of a personal consciousness,” James wrote. In other words, “thought tends to personal form” (220). One consequence is that “my thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts” (220–221). This observation presaged James’s comment, at the end of the chapter, that “each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place,” that is, we divide it into that which is experienced as me or mine and all the rest that is not me or mine (278). Our consciousness is literally what defines us, producing a line between the subjective and objective dimensions of our experience: dimensions that he would address in considerable detail in the following chapter on “The Consciousness of Self” (Ch. 10) and a later chapter on “The Perception of ‘Things’” (Ch. 19).
The individualized, personal nature of consciousness illustrates what James called “the law” of “absolute insulation” and “irreducible pluralism” of all the consciousnesses in the world (221), which was associated not only with his pragmatism but also with his views about the ultimate ontological dignity and privileged epistemological position of each and every human being (see BHB for a particularly effective expression of these views). In the context of this particular chapter of Principles, however, he was more concerned to emphasize the simpler, but significant argument that “the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’” (221). Even here, however, in discussing this most fundamental fact of psychology, James pointed toward complications created by “those facts of sub-conscious personality, automatic writing, etc.” which he had mentioned in the previous chapter (on “The Relations of Minds to Other Things”) and would discuss in more detail in later chapters (on “The Consciousness of Self” and “Hypnotism”). We will defer discussion of these complications, and of other topics related to what James called “secondary selves,” to later in this chapter. The crucial point to be made here is simply that consciousness as we experience it is always personal, whether it belongs to a typical “primary self” or a more elusive “secondary self.”
(2) Consciousness is variable: Indeed, it is “in constant change” (224). That is why James spoke of mental life as streaming. He didn’t mean that mental states have no stability or duration at all, but that they are never completely static and that “no state once gone can [ever] recur and be identical with what it was before” (224). This was an important and far from common claim at that time, especially in light of the traditional “theory of ideas,” according to which mental life is composed of “simple ideas” that come and go from consciousness, essentially in the form of unchanging “mental atoms or molecules.” “What is got twice” when a mental state seems to recur, James said, “is the same OBJECT,” not the exact same subjective experience of that object (225); no two experiences can be precisely alike. Sensations, to take the most elementary contributors to consciousness, are simply “subjective facts” that we use “as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal” (225). So we see grass as green even when its color is actually sensationally different, as when it is in shade as opposed to full sunlight (226). Despite this, “we never doubt that our feelings [conscious states] reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it” (225).
James went on to connect the variability of mental states to necessarily variable conditions of 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 unmodified feeling an impossibility.
(227)
So, James concluded,
when the identical fact [object] recurs [in our experience], 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 all that dim context.
(227)
Just as he had introduced the intentional or object-oriented nature of consciousness, which he would treat more fully as the fourth characteristic of consciousness, now he introduced the relational aspect that he would discuss in greater detail as consciousness’s third characteristic, namely, the fact that:
(3) Consciousness is continuous: It does not appear “chopped up in bits” (233). Rather, it flows “without breach, crack, or division” (231), so that its contents do not stand alone but are always related to one another. Even when there are apparent interruptions, time-gaps, or changes in its quality, as when someone is distracted or asleep, consciousness exhibits continuity. Past thoughts, as James put it, are “appropriated” by the present self. Peter “remembers his own [past] states [as his own], whilst he only conceives Paul’s.” In addition, Peter’s past states are felt as his own because of their distinctive “warmth and intimacy.” Mere time-gaps “cannot break” this sense “in twain,” which is “why a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past” (232–233). They are all his.
Continuity is also apparent in “feelings of relation” between one moment or aspect of consciousness and another, and these feelings of relation are not secondary but rather primary, inherently defining features of conscious experience, even when we are not fully or focally conscious of them. James famously illustrated this point by pointing to the experience of hearing thunder: “What we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (234).
James differentiated what is related from how it is related by specifying the “substantive” and “transitive” aspects of conscious experience. The substantive aspects, he said, are moments of relative stability in the stream of consciousness, whereas the transitive parts are the fleeting connections between them. Using a now-well-known metaphor, he compared “the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” to “a bird’s life” that “seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings” (233, 236). The perchings are the relatively stable moments (typically taking the form of sensorial and perceptual images or, when thinking linguistically, nouns, verbs, and adjectives), whereas the flights are the fleeting transitions (exemplified by conjunctions, prepositions, and their sensorial and perceptual equivalents). So, if we try to articulate the transitive aspects of conscious experience, “we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold,” James reflected. “Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone” (238). (As attentive readers may have begun to notice, this section is repeating some things said in the earlier chapter on “Perception and Conception,” but they are so central to understanding James’s views on consciousness that this repetition-with-expansion is warranted in the author’s estimation.)
The old associationist psychologists not only solidified the substantive parts of consciousness – the momentary perchings – into static “ideas,” they also failed to acknowledge the original, from-the-start connections between them. Instead, they explained the connections in a post hoc manner, as the results of laws of association. (James allowed for the process of association, as we have seen, but only after the selective dissociation of aspects of consciousness from the ongoing, unified stream of it. At the start, before this dissociation, there is just a seamless, continuous flow of water in the stream, not separate “pailsful, spoonsful, quarterpotsful, barrelsful” of water that need somehow to be joined together, as he graphically put it on 246.) Though he was himself a master of introspective observation, James was sympathetic with the problem faced by prior philosophers and psychologists: “It is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are” (236). And in a lengthy passage that the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr later mentioned as a possible influence on his development of the complementarity principle governing the observation of particles and waves (see Holton 1988, 121–126), James wrote:
If they [the “transitive parts” of the stream of consciousness] are but flights to a conclusion [from one substantive moment of thought to another and another, etc.], 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 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 the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation 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 caught in the warm hand is no longer a flake 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.
(236–237)
How the darkness looks – how previously overlooked aspects of mental life are to be seen – was a central concern of James’s analysis of consciousness, leading to a lengthy consideration of feelings of tendency, the periphery of consciousness, and the relation between feelings in the periphery to the psychological phenomenon of meaning. (His extensive discussion of these topics made his treatment of continuity the longest section, by far, in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought”; hence the lengthy treatment here.)
“Feelings of tendency,” James began, had been “as much unrecognized by the traditional sensationalist and intellectualist philosophies of mind” as “feelings of relation” (241). To illustrate what he meant when he spoke of such feelings, James asked his readers to recall what it is like to try to remember a forgotten name. “The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active.” We sense “a sort of wraith of the name” that is “beckoning us in a given direction.” Even when we fail to get all the way there, we nonetheless have “a sense of our closeness” to the name, until we finally get there. (He admitted that this sense of closeness wanes at times, but added that the waning too is felt.) In underscoring his point, he emphasized that “the feeling of an absence [of the desired word] is toto coelo other than the absence of a feeling” (243). Indeed, there is often “an intense feeling,” and beyond that, “the rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it” (244). There is, in short, a felt tendency toward the correct word, which is far from random. (This directional drift in the flow of consciousness makes the metaphor of a “stream” all the more apt.) To further illustrate the feeling of tendency in our mental life – its tendency toward or its intentionality, as it would later be called – he asked:
How comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he utters it?
(245)
After offering these and other examples, and observing that these phenomena sometimes entail feelings that are “so vague that we are unable to name them at all,” he announced his intention to push vigorously for “the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life.” Then, gathering all the vague phenomena he had been discussing into a single category under the banner of “the halo of felt relations,” he suggested that words like “psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe” might serve as alternative designations for this halo, and proceeded to discuss its important role in psychological dynamics (246–249).
He began this discussion reverting to his previously used distinction between knowledge-about and acquaintance-with (see our earlier chapter on “Perception and Conception”). “Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations,” he wrote, while “acquaintance with it” is limited to “the bare impression which it makes.” Just as a psychologist aims at fully articulated knowledge about consciousness (which demands analysis, or dissociation, and subsequent synthesis, or association), most of us are only vaguely acquainted, “in the penumbral nascent way,” with a ‘fringe’ of unarticulated affinities about it” (250). This fringe or halo includes a “scheme” of relations that is crucial for arriving at the conclusions of our thoughts – whether these conclusions be forgotten words, the endings of sentences, or the meaning of perceived utterances. The phenomenon of reaching conclusions, when we aren’t pursuing logical thought based on more analytic knowledge-about, is an outcome of felt relations, including feelings of tendency, within the “fringe” surrounding states of consciousness. (And when we already have knowledge about something or are used to experiencing things together, with associations previously made after personal interest had directed the selection of things-to-be-associated, some of that knowledge and experience recedes to the fringe that “suffuses” our consciousness and thence directs us toward conclusions. In appending this qualification, I am integrating points drawn from our earlier considerations of association in “Habit and Thought” and “Cognition and Emotion,” which supplement James’s more focused discussion in “The Stream of Thought.”)
“The important thing about a train of thought,” James asserted, “is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of the thought.” And he added: “Usually this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve.” Its significance is shown by the fact that once we have reached a conclusion, guided onward by relations operating from the “fringe” of consciousness, all the “other members” of our train of thought typically fade from memory. To exemplify this point, James observed how “the practical upshot of [reading] a book…remains with us, though we may not recall one of its sentences” (250–251).
In coming to a conclusion, it is not typically any single word or image that determines the outcome. “The ‘meaning’ of a word…in a sentence,” for instance, “may be quite different from its meaning when taken statically or without context” – or in a different context. The “static meaning” of a word or image is “concrete”; the “dynamic meaning” has to do with its “felt suitability or unfitness to the [total] context and conclusion” (255). Similarly, according to James, the path or means to a conclusion, whether through these words, those words, or entirely different kinds of imagery, isn’t as important as the conclusion reached, which marks the end-point of a particular sequence in consciousness. “The feeling of relation” – in this case, the felt sense of aptness or coherence between ‘premises’ and conclusion – “may be the same in very different systems of imagery” (260). In the end what matters is the “feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought” (251). So one might say that what James called the continuity of thought could also be called its conclusivity: Consciousness tends to move toward conclusions, however momentary such “halting-places” in consciousness may be (259). These brief respites represent instances in which “words and images” are connected and “fringed” in a meaningful, coherent way (262) – a way that allows for harmony rather than discord; or as James puts it elsewhere (913–951), a way that provides a “perception of reality” that accords with all that is ‘on our mind’ at a given instant in the ever-continuous flow of consciousness. Our mental life, in other words, is not just provoked by sense; it aims at making sense, over and over and over again.
(4) Consciousness is object-oriented: It “always appears to deal with objects independent of itself” (220), which is to say, “it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing” (262). In pointing this out, James was anxious to distinguish his realistic view from that of “absolute idealism,” which was popular at the time that he wrote. Idealists, he noted, are not concerned about whether or not there is an “extra-mental duplicate” for thoughts of this or that thing. Common sense, however, assumes that “my thought is cognitive of an outer reality” precisely because I can have many different thoughts, at different times, all of which refer to one and the same thing (262). And of course other individuals have thoughts of that same thing too. “Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances,” James asserted, is “the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought,” adding in a footnote that “if but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private hallucination,” but “if more than one [sees it], we begin to think it may be a real external presence” (262). In addition, James emphasized that we do not come slowly or eventually to objective knowledge; rather, as we have discussed before, our knowledge begins as objective and only over time do we learn to distinguish or abstract aspects according to our subjective interests. Like Freud after him, James argued that experience equals reality for infants, with everything objectively connected and nothing yet subjectively discriminated: no me and it, just me-and-it together. At first, “a mind…only knows the things that appear before it.” Later it also “knows that it knows them” and does so in its own particular way. (See 263 and 657, and Freud 1930/1961, Ch. 1. For James’s criticism of the idealist view as articulated by Kant – the view “that the reflective consciousness of the self [self-awareness] is essential to [i.e., a prerequisite of] the cognitive function of thought” – see PP 264–265.)
All of this accords with James’s initial statement, in the Preface to Principles, that his psychology would assume “(1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know” (6). In the context of this chapter, however, James went on to discuss “the proper use of the term Object [of knowledge] in Psychology” (265). Implicitly referring back to his discussion of “perchings” and “flights,” of the substantive and transitive aspects of consciousness, he argued that “the Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less” (265). Here he was reasserting his claim, which distinguished his view from that of other empiricists as well as idealists, that consciousness is holistic prior to the forging of additional connections by empirical laws of association and independent of intellectual connections of the sort attributed by idealists to an independent ego. Consciousness deals with objects-in-the-context-of-immediate-experience, including all the felt relations, tendencies, and old (already made) associations in the fringe of consciousness. In short, we know independent objects but we do not know them independently of our own personal relations to them through our stream of thought. James’s direct realism, discussed in our chapter on “Perception and Conception,” was qualified by the fact that knowing is always personal, changing, and embedded within a continuing stream of consciousness that is inherently relational. In essence, James was refusing to make any absolute separation between what is ‘ideal’ and ‘real,’ or more simply, between the subjective and objective. His approach to objects of knowledge was expressed memorably twelve years later, when he wrote:
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part…The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass…A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs – such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts.
This, he said, is what constitutes “a full fact” (VRE 393). In espousing this view he was for all practical purposes advocating his own distinctive form of ‘ideal-realism,’ a philosophical approach represented in German thought by Hermann Lotze, with whom James was quite familiar (see Woodward 2015, 364–365 and 378–379).
(5) Consciousness is selective: It “is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.” Observing that “the phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are…patent examples of this choosing activity,” James expanded the range of reference by noting that “few of us are aware how incessantly it [selectivity] is at work in operations not ordinarily called by these names [selective attention and deliberative will]. Accentuation and Emphasis,” in fact, “are present in every perception we have.” Even if we wanted, we would “find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions” (273). He illustrated his point by describing the subjective grouping of the rhythmic noises of a clock into clusters of two, with one member of each paired “tick-tock” receiving more emphasis in perception than the other, even though the ticks and tocks are equally spaced in time and exactly the same in sensational intensity. (This example was used subsequently by others to illustrate a “Gestalt pattern of perception” due to selective attention.)
It is notable how many sparkling and compelling sentences were written by James to describe the ubiquity and significance of the selectivity of the mind. It is a fundamental tenet of his psychology. Much rests upon it. In particular, it underlies his view of the active rather than passive nature of mental life; it provides the means of explaining the individuality of psychological phenomena; and it allows a role for human willfulness within a naturalistic account of mind and body.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the importance of mental selectivity to James more than his presentation of it as a function at work on every level of mental life, from the bottom clear up to the top. At the bottom, of course, is sensation, about which he asked:
What are our very senses themselves but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. It thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for which objectively there seems no valid ground.
(273)
Thus it is that from “an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade” (274). And connecting all of this to his earlier discussion of the object-oriented nature of consciousness, he cited Helmholtz’s claim, with which he agreed, that “we notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things” (274). Accepting signs for something is what allows us to see a moving dot on the horizon as a friend we are expecting. Signs, like concepts, can be exchanged while the objects of our knowledge remain the same.
From among the sensations we have thus selectively received, “the mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modified by the conditions of the moment.” So “my table-top is named square, after but one of an infinite number of retinal sensations which it yields,” namely, “the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular to its centre.” All the other sensations, just as actual, are “of two acute and two obtuse angles.” These are relegated to the status of mere “perspective views.” Similarly, what we take to be “the real sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by,” and “the real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom,” etc., etc. (274–275). Besides recognizing in these observations the sensibility of a former artist-painter, we can also see the reflective psychologist and philosopher who is aware of the contingencies involved in identifying “the genuine objectivity of the thing” as contrasted with “what we call the subjective sensations it may yield…at any given moment” (275). This shows how “the mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest.” The upshot is that “perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all the present sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant of absent ones [like the dot on the horizon]; and out of all the absent associates which these suggest, we again pick out a very few [e.g., a more detailed image of our friend up-close] to stand for the objective reality par excellence.” James concluded that “we could have no more exquisite example of selective industry” (275).
Even so, he proceeded to give more examples, including a wonderful tale of four men who tour Europe together only to return with very different memories. James’s conclusion was that “each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby” (275–276). Consideration of examples like this led him to speak of consciousness as “a theatre of simultaneous possibilities” and to compare the mind to a sculptor: The mind “works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.” Just as one sculptor will “extricate” one statue from the stone and a different sculptor will produce a different one, so will two minds create different understandings out of common experiences:
Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them.
(277)
With a nod to the comparative psychology of consciousness, James punctuated this passage by exclaiming, “How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!” (277).
Indeed. But selectivity does not end with sensation and perception at the level shared by other species. While only some sensations lead to perceptions, only some perceptions lead to conceptions. And of the many concepts available to us, we are continually choosing some over others. In fact, “reasoning is but another form of the selective activity of the mind” (276), as we have seen, and beyond that, selection is involved in aesthetics and morals, areas representing the higher reaches of human consciousness (276–277). Some perceptions, which is to say, some things, are selected as more appealing, more pleasing, more attractive to us than others, while some acts are seen as morally preferable to others. And drawing on his own past reflections on preferable outcomes, James argued that “the problem” in “critical ethical moments” is “less what act” a person should “now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become” (277). Selectivity, in sum, helps to define one’s character as well as one’s experience. It operates all the way up and down the line.
In turn, mental selectivity is driven by attention, which is directed by the interests of the conscious individual. Attention and interest are so closely tied, in James’s estimation, that he sometimes equated them (see, e.g., 304). Whether prompted by biological urges for self-preservation, aesthetic preferences with no bearing on survival, moral objectives that put one in harm’s way, or something else, interest is a sine qua non for James. Though he rarely specified the nature of particular interests or speculated on whence they came in his generalized discussions of the matter (see, e.g., 970), he treated them as crucial givens and assumed that they will vary across individuals, so that – as with those men who toured Europe – individuated experiences and different outcomes will occur because of them.
Of course, not all interests vary: “The human race as a whole,” partly under the pressure of evolution, has agreed on many things that “it shall notice and name” (277). And one interest, in particular, is common to all: the interest in oneself. As we have already noted, every individual engages in “one great splitting of the whole universe into two,” namely, into the part that includes “me or mine” and the part that includes everything else; in short, into the “me” and the “not-me” (278). (James was speaking here of normal individuals who have grown past infancy.) This observation provided a nice segue, in Principles, from his “Stream of Thought” chapter to the next chapter on “The Consciousness of Self,” but in the context of our present concerns, it invites consideration of the extension of consciousness beyond the typically recognized margins of the self or me, into the realm of the unconscious or what James preferred to call subconsciousness.
Consciousness is the sole topic of an entire chapter (Ch. 9) of The Principles of Psychology, as we have seen, and it is discussed in multiple ways and contexts throughout this classic text. Neither unconsciousness nor subconsciousness is accorded its own chapter. However, each is noted occasionally, discussed briefly here and there, and treated in a more sustained manner in parts of various chapters. Unconsciousness, so called, is treated most notably in sections entitled “Can States of Mind be Unconscious?” and “Do Unconscious Mental States Exist?” within Ch. 6 on “The Mind-Stuff Theory” (165–166 and 166–177) and in a section entitled “Are We Ever Wholly Unconscious?” within Ch. 8 on “The Relations of Minds to Other Things” (197–200). Meanwhile, the evidence for subconsciousness, as James conceived it, is displayed in a section on “‘Unconsciousness’ in Hysterics” within Ch. 8 on “The Relations of Minds to Other Things” (200–210), in a section on “The Mutations of the Self” within Ch. 10 on “The Consciousness of Self” (352–378), and throughout much of Ch. 27, which treats the methods and results of “Hypnosis” in considerable detail. In essence, this latter chapter – the last psychologically substantive chapter of Principles – serves as a promissory note, alerting readers to recent discoveries and related matters that still needed (in 1890) to be more fully explored and understood. (The next and final chapter of Principles is devoted to important, but primarily philosophical reflections on “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience.”)
A source of confusion and misunderstanding for many commentators on James’s views regarding unconsciousness and subconsciousness is the fact that he criticized extant notions of the former while applauding recent observations of the latter. To some, any phenomenon falling outside the typical range of consciousness seemed to warrant assignment to the realm of the unconscious. But ever mindful of the dangers of linguistic practice (recall his warnings about “the Misleading Influence of Speech,” discussed in the third chapter of this book), James was hesitant to allow any single term to cover a variety of very different phenomena, especially if the term was offered as explanatory rather than merely descriptive. The danger, as he put it, was that this allowed “believing what one likes in psychology” and turned “what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies” (166).
In making this charge, James was thinking not only of the multiple, distinct, and sometimes contradictory uses of the terms “unconscious” and “unconsciousness” but also of the then-popular advocacy of “the unconscious” as the root of all mental and even non-mental life by the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann (see Janaway 2010 and Gardner 2010). “Hartmann fairly boxes the compass of the universe with the principle of unconscious thought,” James remarked. “For him there is no namable thing that does not exemplify it.” And “the same is true of Schopenhauer, in whom the mythology reaches its climax” (171). Perhaps without the excesses embodied in their thought, James would have found some practical use for the concept of unconsciousness. But as it was, he thought it better to avoid the term as much as possible, especially in its reified form as “the unconscious,” a hypostatized thing that could not be directly observed. So when he occasionally spoke of some phenomenon being “unconscious,” he generally meant simply to indicate that it had occurred without a typical form of consciousness.
More to the point, James believed that various phenomena describable as unconscious could be explained in specific, empirically verifiable ways, by referring to insufficient nerve-activity, reconceptualization, inattention, lack of memory, well-established associative links, and automatic or habituated brain-processes operating along already-laid-down brain-tracts. So, although he granted that we are often not conscious of events that occur or objects that exist within our immediate sensory environment, and acknowledged that we sometimes arrive at rational conclusions and perform reasonable acts without reliance upon conscious thought, he felt that these and other such phenomena have entirely natural, “non-mythological” explanations. For instance, in his extensive critical review of the notion of “unconscious mental states” (166–177), he admitted the existence of sensory phenomena that do not exhibit the level of excitation required for consciousness, but those sensory phenomena, he insisted, are not thereby equivalent to “unconscious perceptions” a la the petites perceptions of G. W. Leibniz. (Leibniz’s conjectured “monads,” which purportedly combine to form conscious experience, provide a rationalist example, parallel to the empiricists’ atom-like “ideas,” of “the mind-stuff theory” that James vehemently opposed. As we have seen, James did not believe that conscious experience is generated by the conjoining of these or any other kinds of “mental stuff.” It comes whole and entire, or it comes not at all.) So when sensory events – “nerve-affections” – occur at quantitative levels below the “necessary condition” for perception, James said, there is simply no perception at all (166–167). Later research has demonstrated slight effects of subliminal stimulation, thus seeming to validate the notion of unconscious perception (see, e.g., Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and Smith 2005), but James would respond that sensory processes insufficient for consciousness nonetheless have physical effects and create physiological conditions – not perceptions – that could well affect subsequent behavior. (In fact, he said this explicitly on 169.) In any case, much of the research along this line involves shortening the time of perception rather than lowering the intensity of stimulation, so that it is more relevant to an examination of James’s views on primary or short-term memory, which elicits no later recall though it may have an effect, James said, on “the transition of our thinking in a vital way” and even at times “decide our action irrevocably” (606).
Other supposed instances of unconscious mental life discussed by James included the alleged discovery of a feeling of which we were previously unaware, as when “we suddenly find ourselves…in love with a person whom we imagined we only liked” (172). The hypothesis is that the feeling of being in love was there all the time, unconsciously. But the actual feeling that we had in the past was simply what it was, James claimed; there wasn’t also or instead an “unconscious feeling.” The issue is how we construed our feeling in the past and how we construe it now: how it was and is “classified and understood.” As James put it: “When I decide that I have, without knowing it, been for several weeks in love, I am simply giving a name to a state which previously I have not named [in this way], but which was fully conscious.” In addition, when one looks back and remembers something, the new experience of remembering necessarily includes a different fringe of “relations to what went before or after it in the stream of thought,” so that “the later state of mind” is surely a different condition, not a duplicate of the earlier state of mind. Thus, “the earlier and the later ideas [or feelings] preserve their own several substantive identities as so many several successive states of mind. To believe the contrary,” James observed, “would make any definite science of psychology impossible” (175).
Similarly, when someone does not notice something, like each of those four men traveling together in Europe, it isn’t because he or she has observed and then excluded different aspects from conscious experience. Instead, interest has directed that person’s attention to disparate things, while inattention has accounted for the lack of consciousness of other things, even things that might have registered in the brain. Also, as previously referenced, things only fleetingly noticed will reside for only a very brief while in what James called “primary memory,” hence failing to make a sufficient neurological impression for long-term memory, or “memory proper” (606–610). Many “unconscious” phenomena, James believed, can be explained in similar ways as the result of a lack of attention and memory.
James also believed that association – the establishment of links between different aspects of experience – can account for seemingly unconscious mental processes, like those often thought to involve “unconscious inference.” Whether with regard to perception or action, apparently rational conclusions (e.g., that the dot on the horizon is actually the friend we are expecting) or reasonable actions (e.g., that in this particular circumstance, this particular response is appropriate) are explicable as instances of what James preferred to designate “immediate inference,” which has a counterpart in habituation and its neural correlates (see 111–114, 755–756, and 953–954). Indeed, “simple cerebral association,” in the form of an established “brain-tract,” can account for “the whole work of coupling A with C, without the idea B being aroused at all, whether consciously or ‘unconsciously,’” James said (168, 170), so that there is no actual reasoning or step-by-step inference involved. And finally, instinctive behavior that occurs without consciousness often “makes sense” – often seems to show the operation of intelligence – even though it is triggered by the rote actions of the nervous system, “mechanically discharged by stimuli to the senses” (170). So this too involves no mysterious working of unconscious mental processes. In sum, James argued that many conclusions and actions come about as the result of automated processes, leaving no need to invoke consciousness or unconsciousness. Unconsciousness simply describes the attendant lack of consciousness, not some essential feature of these phenomena. Interestingly, two of the leading neuroscientists of our time have named the connection of complex operations to non-conscious routines “the Jamesian scenario” in tribute to James’s insights regarding automaticity (Edelman and Tononi 2000, 205).
We may question whether criticisms and explanations like these can account for all instances of traditionally conceived unconscious phenomena and wonder if, in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s observations and theories as well as more recent advances in cognitive and brain sciences (summarized by Kihlstrom 2009), James would now accept the notion of unconscious mental processes, at least in some carefully defined situations. While we cannot know for certain, it seems likely that he would feel that at least some of his caveats and explanations warrant continued consideration, as has been argued by a scholar who lauded James’s “characteristic prescience” in these regards (Shamdasani 2010, 289). And it is only fair to add that contemporary research on “fast thinking,” the kind done without explicit consciousness, is consistent with James’s view that automated mechanisms are in play in lieu of sometimes hypothesized unconscious cogitation (Kahneman 2011). In fact, even fully apparent cognitive processing is discussed by many contemporary cognitive psychologists without reference to consciousness much less to some consequential form of unconsciousness (Kihlstrom 1999, 173). Finally, it should be recalled that Freud himself thought of “primary process thinking” – the work of the unconscious – as a dynamic interplay of motivational forces that have nothing to do with traditional concepts of mentation. What James opposed, in particular, was something different: the notion that thinking could be done unconsciously. Or perhaps more aptly put, he opposed the notion that the mind could operate without consciousness, which he considered to be the functional equivalent of mind.
AND YET… Even if many of the phenomena typically labeled “unconscious” could be assigned to causes other than unconsciousness itself, James readily admitted – even insisted – that there is a range of other phenomena, then coming forcefully to his attention, that raise important questions about non-conscious experience. These phenomena, revealed in particular through the ongoing clinical and experimental observations of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, the French physician-psychologist Pierre Janet, and the French psychologist Alfred Binet, complicated the picture of consciousness that James presented in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought.” These observations dealt largely but not entirely with hysterics who seemed completely unaware of certain sensations and feelings, yet were able through various indirect means (without conscious awareness on their part) to indicate that these sensations and feelings had in fact occurred and had been registered in their memories, although only within what was then, for the first time, identified as “secondary consciousness” in contrast to normal “primary consciousness” (203). After reviewing examples of such “anaesthesia” and of the ways in which apparently unconscious sensations and feelings could be brought to light by means of hypnosis, automatic writing, and other techniques, James concluded that “in certain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other” (204). As a result, even when mental events do not appear within the typical field of consciousness, they do appear – they are experienced – in a conscious way, as James had insisted mental events had to be, albeit within their own “dissociated” or “split-off” fragment of mental life. This discovery had led the French investigators, and now James, to speak of “co-consciousness,” “double consciousness,” and – the term James came to use in particular – “sub-consciousness.”
As James summarized the matter, using the metaphor of higher and lower self-consciousness: “What the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of, and vice versa” (204). Such ignorance (along with the doubled consciousness that made it possible) can be eliminated at times by means of hypnosis, James noted: Through post-hypnotic suggestion, “the secondary personage” can be made to “give up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part may be,” so that “the normal self…regains possession,” quite literally, of its senses and muscles. Thus, depending upon its prior deficit, the normal self once again “sees, feels, or is able to move” (204–205). (Hypnosis was used for this therapeutic purpose by Freud until he switched to his well-known “free association” technique for elucidating and treating hysteric and other symptoms. The classic work on the development of the psychodynamic therapeutic tradition, which gives ample credit to the contributions of James’s and Freud’s French predecessors, is Ellenberger 1970. Klein 1977, however, is more reliable than Ellenberger regarding James’s views on the unconscious and subconsciousness.)
James’s own exploration of hypnosis, automatic writing, and the like supplemented what he read and led him to make the assertion – surprising since it came from someone who had emphasized the unity of consciousness and the importance of introspection in psychology – that
we must never take a person’s testimony, however sincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive that no feeling has been there. It may have been there as part of the consciousness of a ‘secondary personage,’ of whose experiences the primary one whom we are consulting can naturally give no account.
(208)
It is noteworthy that James was not pointing here toward feelings on the fringe of typical consciousness that are hard to grasp and express, nor was he referring only to the introspective testimony given by hysterics and other atypical individuals. Rather, he was referring to a separate realm of consciousness and to the consequent unawareness within primary consciousness of certain aspects of experience that might occur within anyone. (Like Freud, he assumed that the principles governing abnormal or exceptional behavior are likely to be the same as those governing normal or average functioning.) Still, as he freely admitted, “how far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousnesses may exist in each of us is a problem,” which is to say, an as-yet unresolved question (207).
Pierre Janet himself, James acknowledged, held “that it [the dissociation or splitting of consciousness] is only possible where there is abnormal weakness, and consequently a defect of unifying or co-ordinating power” (207). Cases of the sort that Janet had in mind fell among those that James reviewed in the section on “The Mutations of the Self” in his chapter on “The Consciousness of Self” (352–378). Just after this section James speculated about the neurological foundation of split selves, concluding with the simple observation that “the same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting; but by what modifications in its action, or whether ultra-cerebral conditions may intervene, are questions which cannot now be answered” (379).
The mental phenomena that James considered when mulling over the nature of subconsciousness came not only from the clinical and experimental investigations of neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists; they also came from the reports of psychical researchers who were exploring such topics as trance states, memory under hypnosis, hallucinatory apparitions, thought-transference or telepathy, hyperaesthesia, and the communications of mediums. (James was particularly interested in the investigations of the British psychical researchers F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney.) This led him to adopt some of the language of psychical research in his references to “subliminal,” “transliminal,” and “extra-marginal” consciousness. All these terms, drawn from the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart and Gustav Theodor Fechner, pointed toward mental phenomena below the margin, threshold, or boundary of consciousness. James’s use of this terminology and his citations of research by Myers and Gurney occur nowhere near as frequently within Principles as within his lectures and publications in the years after Principles. This underscores the fact that, as of 1890, he had not yet fully explored or integrated the possibilities and implications of psychical-research-related phenomena into his psychology. He had, however, already accepted Gurney’s argument, supported by evidence from automatic writing, that “secondary consciousness” is a self-consciousness, thus reflecting a “secondary self,” as well as Gurney’s corroboration of the possibility of multiple dissociated consciousnesses, and hence even more than one alternative self, within a single mind or body (see 206 and 379).
Perhaps I should add, since nineteenth-century psychical research and its twentieth-century incarnation as parapsychology were controversial and remain highly suspect in scientific circles, that James was never fully persuaded by the spiritualistic claims of psychical research, though he was open to its questions and concerns, and more than willing to take from it whatever seemed fact-based or conceptually useful. By the turn of the century, as discussed in a later chapter, he had come to believe even more confidently that there was something significant in some of the phenomena explored by psychical researchers as well as those investigated by neurologists, physicians, and psychologists like Charcot, Janet, and Binet. The major problem for James in 1890 wasn’t whether or not such unusual mental states exist, but how best to perceive and conceive them, regardless of their designation as “co-conscious,” “subliminal,” “dissociated,” “subconscious,” or even “unconscious.” The answer, he confessed, was “not easy” to determine (209, 1207). After all, how exactly does “a part of consciousness…sever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be”? And how do subliminal phenomena factor into our mental life? Given the current state of knowledge, James decided, it was “on the whole…best to abstain from a conclusion. The science of the near future will doubtless answer this question more wisely than we can now” (210).
By placing his chapter on “Hypnosis” right before the concluding chapter of Principles, James clearly intended to set an agenda for future investigations into the phenomena he discussed under the rubric of “subconsciousness.” Pointing to one particular phenomenon in an earlier chapter, he had said that “I am persuaded that a serious study of…trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology” (375). As it turned out, however, James was unsuccessful in attracting more than a few others to investigate this topic or subconsciousness in general. As a result, the study of non-conscious mental phenomena was soon reduced within scientific psychology to research on learning and habit-formation, while the larger questions about non-conscious phenomena were relegated almost exclusively to the practical considerations of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
It was only after the Second World War that scientific researchers in the United States began once again to study hypnosis and associated matters in a sustained manner. (There were isolated exceptions before this time, exemplified by Hull 1933, but no continuous explorations.) Ernest R. Hilgard (1977) was notable for taking up the phenomenon of dissociation that had figured prominently in James’s consideration of subconsciousness. He and others validated James’s interest and many of his conclusions but not much has come of their work as psychology has been dominated by concerns about behavior, cognition, and neurology. In fact, even consciousness qua consciousness has been studied more by neuroscientists than by psychologists over the past half century (as documented by Dalton and Baars 2004). (A notable exception has been the research of Thomas Natsoulas, a psychologist whose work picks up on James’s discussion of consciousness. See, e.g., Natsoulas 2015.) And it may well be that the study of unconsciousness qua unconsciousness has also been pursued more by neuroscientists than by psychologists. Interestingly, two major neuroscientists, Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, have depicted the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness in ways that parallel James’s depiction, using the homologous word “splintered” (rather than James’s “split-off”) to characterize the “core” of neural functioning associated with unconscious memories, intentions, and expectations in contrast to “a dominant core” of functions correlated with the stream of consciousness (Edelman and Tononi 2000, Ch. 14). As they readily admit, their “strategy” for understanding mental life – non-conscious as well as conscious – expands upon James’s “prescient” ideas (18). Meanwhile, the neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio (2010) has also acknowledged “the writings of William James as an anchor for my thinking” (8), giving an account of consciousness and its relation to unconsciousness that resonates with James’s even as it takes full advantage of the incredible advances in neurology since 1890 and reaches conclusions (e.g., on 290) that contradict James’s contention that thinking must be conscious.
A similarly respectful demur has been voiced by Bernard J. Baars (1997), though only after he emphasized that “by wide consent the foremost work on human mental process, even today, is William James’s Principles of Psychology.” In particular, he commended James’s “inspired dialogue on the major topics of psychology,” noted that “on many of these topics James’s thinking is fully up to date,” and admitted the “embarrassing but true” fact that “much of the time he is still ahead of the scientific curve.” Despite these accolades, however, he asserted that Principles “contains a crucial flaw” in arguing that the mind is “limited to conscious processes alone” (15–16). In a similar way, many others (such as Oliver Sacks) have borrowed insights from James, even as they use more recent discoveries to modify or reject some of his claims and conjectures.
In sum, James has been and remains broadly influential with regard to the study of consciousness, even though some of his arguments, especially those dealing with unconsciousness, have been discarded with the passage of time. Clearly, James’s critique of the term “unconsciousness,” unlike his descriptions of consciousness and his considerations of phenomena occurring within segmented realms of mental life, has had no obvious long-term effect. Not even those who acknowledge his inspiration and guidance with regard to non-conscious mental phenomena have chosen to use his favored “subconsciousness” in place of “unconsciousness.”
Eugene Taylor has written about “two centers of gravity” in The Principles of Psychology, one involving the psychology of consciousness and the other involving the psychology of subconsciousness (Taylor 1996, 34, 141); and indeed we have seen that there is in fact an ironic and somewhat uneasy relationship between James’s treatment of consciousness as unitary and his treatment of non-conscious mental states as belonging to split-off or separated realms of consciousness. Nonetheless, it was only in the 1890s and early 1900s, after he had published Principles, that James invested more significance in the subconscious or subliminal aspects of mental life, thus adding considerable weight to that other center of gravity in his work. It was only then that transliminal phenomena came to serve a major explanatory role in his 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States and in his 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience. (More on this later.) In 1890, although he fully realized that discoveries associated with non-conscious mental states had opened a new and important domain for psychological science, he was not yet prepared to articulate the broader significance of these states. Nor did he think that a work on scientific as opposed to applied psychology was “the proper place to speak” of their important “therapeutic or forensic bearings” (1214). So he left these matters, both theoretical and practical, without any final summation. And for the time being, so must we.