The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof the future, and with the present narrowed down to some onesimple emotion or sensation of the body.The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates isthe indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is thematter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helpsboth to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement ofour attention. It lies around us like a “magnetic field,” inside ofwhich our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the presentphase of consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past storeof memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in;and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledgesthat constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it.So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and whatis only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is alwayshard to say of certain mental elements whether we are consciousof them or not.The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracingthe marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, thatall the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal,inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field” of the moment,all dim and impossible to assign as the latter’s outline may be; and,second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely nonexistent.and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall whatI said in my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as youmay recollect, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomenacould not know the facts as we now know them. My first dutynow is to tell you what I meant by such a statement.I cannot but think that the most important step forward that hasoccurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science isthe discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least,there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with itsusual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of aset of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginaland outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet mustbe classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presenceby unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step for-212