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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Views
Melt
Brain
Unbroken
Like
Continuous
Stream
Properly
Streams
Changes
Protracted
Consciousness
Dissolving

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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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What holds attention determines action.
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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