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“[Every] idea is, after all, the experience of a self who is conscious. Even when, as students of the mere idea, we have neglected the self and taken no notice of it, yet all the time we have been dimly conscious of it as underlying all our feelings. In other words, we have realized that a perception, an imagination or an emotion does not exist independently, but that it is my perception, your imagination or his emotion. As James says: “Every ‘state’ or ‘thought’ is part of a personal consciousness….In this lecture room,…there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mind….They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together….My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses,…selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s.” This means that besides realizing my conscious experiences, or feelings, I am also conscious of my conscious self, as in a sense including, but not as identical with, the perceptions, the emotions or the thoughts of any given moment.” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 151)
“What, now, is this intimate consciousness of self which underlies and includes, though it does not consist in, the moment-by-moment ideas and experiences? What, in other words, do I mean by the ‘I’ which is conscious or has experiences?” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 151)
“The self underlying the conscious experiences…is not a single, lonely self, but a self related to a group of selves. Every self is, in other words, a social self, that is, a self in inextricable relation with many other selves, “a chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not.” I, who read this paragraph, for instance, simply cannot be conscious of my own self except as related in the most varying ways to a vast number of other people.” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 152)
“Experiences may be contrasted as they refer to unparticularized selves, that is, to any or all selves, or as they refer to definite and particular selves. In perceiving, for instance, I am vaguely conscious that other people might see what I am seeing, but in hating I do not hate anybody in general, but some very special and definite person or persons.” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 154)
“The term ‘element’ is…almost always used of what we have called the structural elements, sensational, attributive, and relational.” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 151)
“A psychology which considers only psychic events or consciousnesses is, therefore a causal science; whereas psychology, in so far as it studies selves in their relations; does not treat its facts as causally related to each other, because, strictly speaking, only phenomena in time are causally connected, and selves are, to say the least, not primarily regarded as realities in time. Anybody may verify this by his introspection. One thinks of one’s body as beginning and ending at distinct moments; one thinks of one’s ideas and feelings as occurring yesterday or to-day—at a quarter of twelve or half-past three; but one does not primarily regard oneself as ‘in time,’ and one, therefore does not think of selves in causal relations to each other. They are related, of course, by virtue of the imperiousness, the demands, the acknowledgements, and the adoptions which make up, as we have seen, the very nature of a self; but these relations are not the causal ones which connect ideas.” (Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, 154-155)