[1]When James first introduced "sciousness" he held back from proposing it as a possible prime reality in The Principles of Psychology, warning that it "traverse[s] common sense.
Whenever I try to become sensible of thinking activity as such, what I catch is some bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or head, or throat, or nose.
"[4] James had founded a new school of philosophy, called "radical empiricism," and nondual sciousness was its starting point.
In a book about James he wrote: ...while most philosophers conceive ... [a] primordial state, the origin of all psychic life, as a purely subjective state from which subsequent evolution draws forth (no one knows how) the idea of a non-self and the representation of an exterior world, for James, on the contrary, these primordial facts, these pure experiences are entirely objective, simple phenomena of 'sciousness' and not of 'consciousness.'
This means that he holds that the distinction between self and non-self, implied in the word 'consciousness,' from which we are in a normal state unable to free ourselves, is not primary, but results from a conceptual sorting and classifying of the primitive experiences.
As psychologist Benny Shanon observed recently: Most pertinent ... is William James with his notion of sciousness which comes in contrast to consciousness.