哈佛大学和德国佛雷堡大学的毕业生James Harvey Robinson（1863—1936）担任哥伦比亚大学历史教授25年。作为新社会研究学院的联合创始人，他将历史研究视为帮助公民了解自己、社区以及“人类的问题和前景”的一种方式

罗宾逊在其著作《塑造中的心灵》（1921年）中的著名散文《论各种思维》中，运用分类法传达了他的论文，其中大部分是这样的“我们在重要问题上的信念……是该词正确意义上的纯粹偏见。我们不是自己形成的。在那篇文章中，罗宾逊定义了思维和最令人愉快的思维类型，即幻想，或思想的自由联想。他还详细剖析了观察和合理化。

关于“论各种思维”

在《论各种思维》一书中，罗宾逊说：“过去，诗人对智力进行了最真实、最深刻的观察，而在近代，故事作家也对智力进行了最真实、最深刻的观察。”，这些艺术家必须磨练他们的观察力，以便能够准确地记录或再现页面上的生活和广泛的人类情感。罗宾逊还认为，哲学家们不具备完成这项任务的能力，因为他们经常表现出“……对人类生活的怪异无知，并建立了精心设计、气势磅礴、但与实际人类事务毫不相干的体系。”换句话说，他们中的许多人未能理解普通人的思维过程是如何运作的，将对思维的研究与对情感生活的研究分离开来，留下了一个无法反映现实世界的视角。

他指出，“以前的哲学家认为心灵只与有意识的思维有关。”然而，这一观点的缺陷在于，它没有考虑到潜意识中发生的事情，也没有考虑到来自身体和身体外部的影响我们的思想和情绪的输入。

"The insufficient elimination of the foul and decaying products of digestion may plunge us into a deep melancholy, whereas a few whiffs of nitrous oxide may exalt us to the seventh heaven of supernal knowledge and godlike complacency. And vice versa, a sudden word or thought may cause our heart to jump, check our breathing, or make our knees as water. There is a whole new literature growing up which studies the effects of our bodily secretions and our muscular tensions and their relation to our emotions and our thinking."

他还讨论了人们所有的经历，这些经历对他们有影响，但他们忘记了，这是因为大脑每天都在做过滤的工作，以及那些习惯性的事情，以至于我们在习惯了它们之后甚至不去想它们。

“我们对思考的思考不够，”他写道，“我们的困惑大多是当前对思考的幻想造成的。”

他继续说：

"The first thing that we notice is that our thought moves with such incredible rapidity that it is almost impossible to arrest any specimen of it long enough to have a look at it. When we are offered a penny for our thoughts we always find that we have recently had so many things in mind that we can easily make a selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On inspection, we shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of a great part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us to reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this must be true of everyone. We do not, of course, know what goes on in other people's heads. They tell us very little and we tell them very little....We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are."

“幻想”

在《心灵的遐想》一节中，罗宾逊讨论了意识流，在他那个时代，意识流受到西格蒙德·弗洛伊德及其同时代人在心理学学术界的审视。他再次批评哲学家们没有把这种思维作为重要的考虑因素：“这就是为什么[老哲学家]的推测如此不真实，而且往往毫无价值。”他继续说：

"[Reverie] is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our ideas to take their own course and this course is determined by our hopes and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment or frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and resentments. There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves....[T]here can be no doubt that our reveries form the chief index to our fundamental character. They are a reflection of our nature as modified by often bidden and forgotten experiences."

他将幻想与实际思维进行了对比，比如每天不断做出琐碎的决定，从写信或不写信，决定买什么，坐地铁或公共汽车。他说，决策“比遐想更困难、更费力，我们讨厌当我们疲惫不堪或沉浸在一个意气相投的遐想中时必须‘下定决心’。应该注意的是，权衡一个决策并不一定会增加我们的知识，尽管我们在做出决策之前可能会寻求进一步的信息。”