Editing Stream of consciousness (section)

== Origin of term ==
[[Alexander Bain (philosopher)|Alexander Bain]] used the term in 1855 in the first edition of ''The Senses and the Intellect'', when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness–on the same cerebral highway–enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense".<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=iJgu5v1CJ8gC London: J. W. Parker, 1855, p.359.]</ref> But the term is commonly credited to [[William James]] who used it in 1890 in his ''[[The Principles of Psychology]]:'' "consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life"''.<ref>(I, pp.239–43) quoted in Randall Stevenson, ''Modernist Fiction: An Introduction''. (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky, 1992), p. 39.</ref>''

The term was first applied in a literary context in ''The Egoist'', April 1918, by [[May Sinclair]], in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence ''Pilgrimage''. Richardson, however, described the term as a "lamentably ill-chosen metaphor".<ref>"Novels", ''Life and Letters'', 56, March 1948, p. 189.</ref><ref>May Sinclair, 'The Novels of Dorothy Richardson', ''The Egoist'', Vol. 5, No. 4, (April 1908), pp. 57–58.</ref>