Stream of Consciousness
With his concept of stream of consciousness, James opposed those who were busy searching for the elements of thought. In the first place, said James, consciousness is personal. It reflects the experiences of an individual, and therefore, it is foolhardy to search for elements common to all minds. Second, conscious- ness is continuous and cannot be divided up for analysis:
Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section. … The rush of the thought is so head- long 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 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 pronounc- ing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the
“chain” or “train” do not describe 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. In talking of it here- after, let us call it the stream of thought, of con- sciousness, or of subjective life.
Although James first mentioned stream of con- sciousness in his 1884 article “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Holland (1986) notes that George Henry Lewes used the term four years earlier in his Problems of Life and Mind (1880).
