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Page 6
In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions that
come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed that in
no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of
consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution
which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany our brain states,
and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences
and education. But, if we ask just _how_ the brain conditions them, we
have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just
how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most
abstract, general, and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we
should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which
reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy,
our words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
truth is that we really _do not know_ the answers to the problems on the
explanatory level, even though in some directions of inquiry there may
be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall
therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This
state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there
was no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
_We have thus fields of consciousness_,--that is the first general fact;
and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always
complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the objects around
us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things,
feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and
other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in
every variety of permutation and combination.
In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different
classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree,
though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very
shifting. One state will seem to be composed of hardly anything but
sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around the
sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe
of thought or will, and around the memory some margin or penumbra of
emotion or sensation.
In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that
is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although you are also
thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensations of my
face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. The
sensations are the _centre_ or _focus_, the thoughts and feelings the
_margin_, of your actually present conscious field.
On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have
become the focus of your mental attention even while I am
speaking,--your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture; and,
in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not
absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there
a very faint and marginal place.
Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with
your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even
while I speak.
The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we owe to
Mr. Lloyd Morgan, require, I think, no further explanation. The
distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are the first
technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.
* * * * *
In the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the process
by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts
of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Sometimes the focus remains
but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus
alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus and margin change places.
Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can
seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part,
each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that
from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields
similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of
sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.
Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be,
it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of
conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking
to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact
and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.
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