One of the many of Professor James’s important contributions to psychology is his demonstration of the fact that “the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind.”[1] He goes on to state that the essence is that which is so important for my interests that, comparatively, other properties may be omitted. Now, in our recognition of our own activity, we are, of course, first conscious (consciousness, as explicit, and immediate interest being one and the same) of that phase of our activity which most interests us. When other parts of the activity force themselves upon consciousness, they seem, to some extent, to be accidental, because lying outside of that which we have conceived as the activity. We thus come to divide our activity into parts–one the factor which permanently interests us, the other that in which our interest varies from time to time. The factor of enduring interest comes to be thought of as a sort of fixed permanent core, which is the reality, but which may, from time to time, go through more or less external changes, or which may assume new, but more or less transitory operations–these further changes and operations corresponding, of course, to those phases of the activity in which our interest is shifting. In the act of vision, for example, the thing that seems nearest us, that which claims continuously our attention, is the eye itself. We thus come to abstract the eye from all special acts of seeing; we make the eye the essential thing in sight, and conceive of the circumstances of vision as indeed circumstances; as more or less accidental concomitants of the permanent eye. Of course, there is no such thing as the eye in general; in reality, the actual fact is always an act of seeing, and the ‘circumstances’ are just as ‘necessary’ and ‘essential’ parts of the activity as is the eye itself. Or more truly, there is no such thing as this ‘eye’; there is only the seeing. Nevertheless, our continuing interest being in the eye, we cannot surrender our abstraction; we only add to it another one–that of certain ‘conditions of exercise’ as also necessary
- ↑ James, Psychology, Vol. II, p. 335.
