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.