In my analysis of the second series of Scientific Romances we saw how Hinton began to explore the significance of four-dimensional consciousness for the individual subject. In particular, the narrator in An Unfinished Communication experiences four-dimensional consciousness as something that is continually developing and changing over time. Although it was latent in the first series of Scientific Romances, in the second series and the years that followed, the model Hinton was developing positions consciousness as a continual process of realization of higher and higher dimensions of being. He made this view explicit in a letter to William James in 1897:

It is not surprising, then, that Hinton was interested in James's work. James was also trying to construct a new model of consciousness and he was aware of the limitations of using language to describe a process of consciousness that would always exceed itself. He called his model of consciousness ‘conjunctive’ (it ‘flows’ in a ‘stream’ as opposed to moving in discontinuous ‘units’ like a ‘train’): it was a ‘reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life’. Here James was foregrounding the transitory, ‘dumb or anonymous psychic states’ that contemporary psychological theory had suppressed. To focus on these transitory states is to undertake a dynamic and creative project, because ‘every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition’.