to build up a mind out of isolated sensations. But was this expedient
really thinkable? For if all 'sensations' or qualities are separate
entities, how can the addition of more 'distinct existences' of the same
sort really bind them together? If in 'the cat is upon the wall,' 'upon'
is a distinct entity which has to relate 'cat' and 'wall,' what is to
connect 'cat' with 'upon' and 'upon' with 'wall'? The atomizing method
carried to its logical extreme demands that not only 'sensations' but
also 'thoughts' should be essentially disconnected, and then, of course,
_no_ thinking can cohere.

Psychology, then, had worked itself to a breakdown by accepting the
'sensationalistic' analysis offered by Hume, and dragged philosophy with
it. Yet the escape was as easy as the egg of Columbus to the insight of
genius. William James had merely to invert the problem. Instead of
assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the
presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all
experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely
to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that
experience was initially a continuum. Once this is pointed out, the fact
is obvious. The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is
afterwards possible to single out as 'sensations,' but it presents them
also as connected by 'relations.' Moreover, the 'sensations' or
'qualities' and their 'relations' exhibit the immediate indiscerptible
unity of a fluid rather than a succession of flashes. Temporal and
spatial relations with all the connections they sustain are perceived
just as directly as what we come to distinguish as the 'things' in them.
'Consciousness,' James insists, 'does not appear to itself chopped up in
bits,' and 'we ought to say a feeling of _and_, a feeling of _if_, a
feeling of _but_, and a feeling of _by_, quite as readily as we say a
feeling of _blue_ or a feeling of _cold_. All things in experience