The Stream of Consciousness: I. William James's Pulses

Abstract

It is argued here that William James's famous stream of consciousness, as he addressed it in The Principles of Psychology, is not after all analogous to a stream or river of water, but rather it consists of a succession of discrete instances or states of consciousness. Already in 1890, James had implicitly arrived at his later explicit conception of consciousness as made up of individual “drops” or “pulses.” These are temporally adjacent each one to the next one; they have nothing else between them except for possible time gaps or interruptions of consciousness, the frequency of which James was not in a position to estimate. In the present article, a case is made for the discrete structure of consciousness, according to James in The Principles, by discussing two main topics: a) the relation that James postulated between consciousness and the underlying brain process; and b) his understanding of how we are aware directly of our own instances of consciousness.