The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesplained the shifting of men’s centres of personal energy within themand the lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomenaas partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thoughtand will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incubation andmaturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life. When ripe,the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak ofthe subconscious region, in which such processes of flowering mayoccur, in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret that my limits oftime here force me to be so short.The expression “field of consciousness” has but recently come intovogue in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mentallife which figured most was the single “idea,” supposed to be a definitelyoutlined thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first,to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state,the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to thethought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossible tooutline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre ofinterest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentivelyconscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable.Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields.Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see massesof truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divinerather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoterregions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to beabout to perceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness,illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, andwe find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.Different individuals present constitutional differences in thismatter of width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are menwith habitually vast fields of mental vision, in which a wholeprogramme of future operations will appear dotted out at once, therays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance. In commonpeople there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic.They stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point topoint, and often stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousnessis a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought211