parts of a
rural landscape, and without the sharp distinctions which exist between
the concepts 'cat,' 'upon,' 'wall.' These ideas were _meant_ to
disconnect 'the cat' in thought from the site it sat upon. Thought,
then, has _made_ the 'atomism' it professed to find. It has only to
unmake it, and to allow the distinctions it held apart to merge again
into the stream of change.

All Hume's problems, therefore, are unreal, and those of his apriorist
critics are doubly removed from reality. The whole conception of
philosophy as aiming at uniting disjointed data in a higher synthesis
runs counter to the real movement, which aims at the analysis of a given
whole. The real question about causation is not how events can be
connected causally, but why are certain antecedents preferred and
dissected out and entitled 'causes.' So the 'self' is not one
(undiscoverable) item imagined to keep in order a host of other such
items. Any given moment of a consciousness is just the mass of its
'sensations,' but these are consciously the heirs of its history and
connected with a past which is remembered. No Transcendental Ego could
do more to support the process of experience than is achieved by 'a
stream of consciousness which carries its own past along.' Here, then,
is the straight way James desiderated, a critical philosophy which goes,
not 'through' the complexities of Kantism, but leaves them on one side
as superfluous 'curios.'

But there remains an even more important deduction from the new
psychology. Hume had been convicted of error in selecting those elements
of the flux which served his purpose and neglecting the rest. But this
mistake might reveal the important fact that all analysis was a choice,
and inspired by volitions. A mind that analyses cannot but be _active_
in handling its experience. It manipulates it to serve its ends. It
emphasizes only those portions of the flux which seem to it important.
In a better and fairer analysis than Hume's these features will persist.
It, too, would be a product of selection, of a selection depending on
its maker's preferences. As James showed, the distinction between
'dreams' and 'realities,' between 'things' and 'illusions,' results only
from the differential values we attach to the parts of the flux
according as they seem important or interesting to us or not. The
volitional contribution is all-pervasive in our thinking. And once this
volitional interference with 'pure perception'