 Although references to philosophers in the pragmatist tradition, such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead are scattered through Schutz’s writings, it was to William James that he devoted his first full-length essay after arriving in the United States. Briefly alluding to the methodological differences between Husserl and James, he emphasized two points where the “great masters” converged: the stream of thought and the theory of fringes. Both thinkers stressed that personal consciousness involves no multiplicity of elements needing to be reunited, but rather a unity from which one separates out components, and they each examined the modifications that reflection introduces into the lived stream, converting an “I” into a “Me” or uncovering the workings of intentionality. Further, Husserl’s idea that the kernel of meaning distinguishing an object stood out against the unthematized network of relationships that makes up its horizon paralleled James’s belief that topics have their “fringes.” Such fringes connect a topic with other experiences, such that, for instance, one does not hear merely “thunder,” but “thunder-breaking-in-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.” Similarly, the Jamesian idea about grasping as a unity what must be learned through a many-stepped processes, such as the Pythagorean theorem, could be translated into the Husserlian terminology regarding the monothetical grasping of polythetic processes. Likewise, James’s discussion of focusing on an object within a broader topic resembled Husserl’s view that one could discern a noema, that is, a perspectival aspect through which a thing constituted of many such aspects presented itself.