William James on Morality

James's The Principles of Psychology, Chapters IX & X are one chapter appearing as-if two. James used Chapter IX, "The Stream of Thought," to lay the groundwork for Chapter X, which he entitled "The Consciousness of Self." (Chapter III of William James on the Stream of Consciousness explained his history-making discovery of the only adequate way to describe the nature of passing or ongoing thought itself.) But, though he broke the chapters in two, Chapter X further developed his treatment of thought itself and then announced at the chapter's end that the only thinking and attitude-adopting 'self' he would recognize in The Principles was itself a thought! "The I which knows . . . is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. . . If the passing thought is the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond." (PP I:400⎯01) Contrary to appearances, therefore, those two chapters are really one chapter made to appear as two. The only reality he commits to in either chapter is passing or evolving thought and its dazzling, much-at-once complexity Consider a few of the telling details. Chapter IX begins with "We now begin our study of the mind from within." James quickly explains that, instead of starting with sensation, he will begin with thought, even though (like Descartes) he will use "thought" for every kind of consciousness. He immediately listed five characters of thought. (When he abridged Chapter IX for the Briefer Course, he dropped the fourth, viz., "It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.") On page four of Chapter IX, he wrote that ". . . to whatever further analysis we may subject that form of personal self-hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves" (PP I:227). At the end Chapter IX, he drew his brilliant word-picture of the way each of us, from within, draws a line between me and not-me.