Among the philosophers and psychologists, who, at the end of the nineteenth-century, started to challenge the theories of classical British empiricism, William James holds a preeminent place. In the school of classical British empiricism, that general conception of consciousness was prevalent which Hume had established when he compared the mind to a "kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."