The italicized passage below is part of a well-known passage in William James's Principles of Psychology. He is discussing the idea of consciousness as mental chemistry, whereby ideas considered as atoms, or as specks of mind dust, can be said to combine into larger compounds, complicated systems of thought and conclusion. To the believers in such a mental chemistry, the brain is a sort of petri dish where these combinations take place, but the brain doesn't make the connections, it simply allows them. The underlying system of thought, which owed something to Leibniz' monadology, was expounded in earnest by some now mostly forgotten figures such as Adolf Fick and Hippolyte Taine. James credits (?) Fick with being the first to argue clearly that (in James' paraphrase) "bits of mind-stuff [grow] into distinctly sensible feelings," and perhaps by extension into the whole of a mind. So James comes to express in the following striking manner, why this idea seems...