  Bundle theorists tend to take phenomenal contents as the primary elements in their bundle. Thus the problem is how to relate, say, the visual field to the auditory field, producing a ‘unity of apperception’, that is, a total experience that seems to be presented to a single subject. Seeing the problem in this way has obvious Humean roots. This atomistic conception of the problem becomes less natural if one tries to accommodate other kinds of mental activity and contents. How are acts of conceptualising, attending to or willing with respect to, such perceptual contents to be conceived? These kinds of mental acts seem to be less naturally treated as atomic elements in a bundle, bound by a passive unity of apperception. William James (1890, vol. 1, 336–41) attempts to answer these problems. He claims to introspect in himself a ‘pulse of thought’ for each present moment, which he calls ‘the Thought’ and which is the ‘vehicle of the judgement of identity’ and the ‘vehicle of choice as well as of cognition’. These ‘pulses’ are united over time because each ‘appropriates’ the past Thoughts and ‘makes us say “as sure as I exist, those past facts were part of myself”. James attributes to these Thoughts acts of judging, attending, willing etc, and this may seem incoherent in the absence of a genuine subject. But there is also a tendency to treat many if not all aspects of agency as mere awareness of bodily actions or tendencies, which moves one back towards a more normal Humean position. Whether James’ position really improves on Hume’s, or merely mystifies it, is still a moot point. (But see Sprigge (1993), 84–97, for an excellent, sympathetic discussion.)