“Feelings of tendency”

This is taken from William James “Stream of Thought” chapter. In it he argues that we have often ignored the “transitive” parts of the the stream of our thing and placed undue emphasis on the “substantive” parts.

By doing so, he suggests, we have tended to confuse ” …the thoughts themselves … and the things of which they are aware.” In these circumstances he argues that

… ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without, but they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted as feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all.