Quote

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.

William James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
System
Complexes
Study
Grown
Shows
Complex
Steering
Might
Nervous
Regulate
Sake
Organ
Expect
Distribution
Exactly
Added
Consciousness
Organs

More quotes by William James

Image
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
Image
To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
Image
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
William James
Image
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
William James
Image
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
Image
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
Image
The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
Image
Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James
Image
Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in it stains the ancient mass but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
William James
Image
Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
William James
Image
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
William James
Image
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
Image
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
Image
I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
Image
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James
Image
The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James
Image
The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
Image
Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
William James
Image
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
Image
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James