The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

William James coined the phrase while developing his account of perception and attention in early psychology. In discussing how experience is organized, he contrasts the adult’s structured, selective awareness with the infant’s initial sensory inundation. The line appears in his major synthesis of the field, written at a moment when psychology was separating from philosophy and emphasizing empirical description of mental life. James uses the infant as a vivid thought experiment: before habits, concepts, and learned distinctions carve the world into objects, the stream of sensation would be experienced as an undifferentiated mass. The image helped popularize his broader claim that attention and learning actively shape what we take to be “reality.”

The “blooming, buzzing confusion” metaphor captures James’s view that raw sensation is not automatically organized into discrete things; order is achieved through selection, interpretation, and habit. The baby’s simultaneous assault by multiple senses suggests a world initially given as a single, overwhelming field rather than a set of named objects. The quote therefore underlines a central Jamesian theme: consciousness is not a passive mirror but an active process that carves meaningful patterns from a continuous flux. It also implies that what feels like a stable, articulated world is partly an achievement of development—built through attention, memory, and learned categories—rather than a simple imprint of external reality.

“one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (often quoted without the preceding clause about the senses)
“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” (common full form)