ABSTRACT
Mentality is consciousness, and consciousness is personal. The complex and ever-changing unity of the mind, its active character, its issuing in attention and will, the pragmatic grounds of the selective viewpoints taken on its totality, are all indications of the fundamental importance of personal consciousness for James’s psychology. The self has been conceived as a soul, a substantial, immaterial, simple individual agent of thought. A rationale for this conception are the “unintelligibilities” that threaten the view that the “mind-stuff”, the elements which compose our mental states, can compound with itself, without the action of some separate entity. The constituents of the empirical self and of its consciousness are not limited to internal thoughts or feelings, or even to brain states, but include items of the body and in the physical and social environments. The material Self is the complex of what people are related to by ownership and authorship.
