The previous two chapters have followed the first two legs of James's journey to find a cozy personal world with which he could establish an intimate communion because it would answer back to his deepest inner feelings and emotions. It began with his attempt to be intimate with himself through an introspective analysis of what made him one and the same self from one time to another. Next, he attempted to be intimate with others – be it man, beast, nature, or God – through a special type of I–Thou experience that partially unified him with their inner conscious life. To achieve this sort of mystical intimacy James found it necessary to conquer his Promethean self, in the process creating a deep unresolved aporia.

This chapter will explore the third and final leg of his journey in which James cultivates a backyard mysticism based on the Bergsonian conceptless intuition of the temporal flux. Whereas his religious mysticism was based on an effort to I–Thou other selves, most importantly supernatural ones, backyard mysticism is directed at the most mundane sort of individuals – the contents of our ordinary sense experience of the temporal flux – but it sees them in a new, mystical way as mushing together in just the way that successive conscious states of a person do, which, it will be recalled, served as the basis for self-identity over time. Thus, what we find upon introspecting our own consciousness is the way in which things, in general, are in the world.