Personal consciousness is the mind’s recognition of self; and as the self changes with every added experience, so personal consciousness is modified.
Stream of thought is a term James has brought into common usage to illustrate the fact, already stressed, that thinking, as we know it, is never static, is never one thing, one percept, one concept, one judgment; but is a lot of these all together, just beginning to be or just beginning to change into something else. We never know a concept, for instance, except as it is a part of our entire consciousness, related to all the rest; just as we do not know the drop of water in the brook as it flows with the stream. We can take up one on our finger-tips, however, and separate it from all the rest. But analyzed in the laboratory, this drop will contain all the elements that a pint or gallon or a barrel of the same water contains. The drop is what it is because the stream has a certain composition. We only have a brook as drops of rain combine to make it, but we also have only the drops as we separate them from the steam.
Imagination is the combining by the mind, in a new way, things already known.
This may be either into fantastic groupings divorced from reality, or into new, possible, rational groupings not yet experienced. So imagination is of two kinds, the fantastic and the constructive. Fantastic imagination, or fantasy, gives us gnomes, fairies, giants, and flying horses, and all the delights of fairy tales. Constructive imagination is the basis for invention, for literature, and the arts and sciences.
The word thinking, defined early in this chapter, is broadly used to denote the sum of all the intellectual faculties. Thinking is really the stream of thought.
CHAPTER VI
THE NORMAL MIND (Continued)
Instinct
We have found that the mind’s chief end is action, of itself, or of its body. But what are its incentives to action?
We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional life, living in an affective, or feeling environment, leading a pleasure-pain existence, from the first. He acts as desire indicates. But from the very moment of his birth he performs actions with which he cannot as yet have a sense-memory connection, because he is doing them for the first time. How can he know how to respond to stimuli from the very beginning?