The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as ‘I’ can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ‘Me,’ and appropriate to these the rest. This Me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the transcendental Ego, viewed as ‘out of time.’ It is a thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind.
William James, defining the ‘I,’ the part of the self that knows, thinks, observes, what he says is actually just “the passing state of consciousness itself.”

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